(Mis)remembering Sitcoms, Volume 2
So, not much has changed since I last spoke to you on Monday, at least in terms of the Black Lives Matter protests sweeping the world. I needed the brief distraction of writing this newsletter, and I hope you can all enjoy the brief distraction of reading it, but please continue to stay informed and support the protests and protesters any way you can, be it by joining them, donating, supporting behind the scenes, or simply educating yourself and others on topics like systemic racism and police abolition. Here’s a list of resources that’s an excellent place to start. Keep taking care of yourselves and each other. And if you simply don’t have the energy for my little newsletter right now, I 100% understand.
Back in April I released a newsletter about “(Mis)remembering Sitcoms,” my half-remembered takes and fun facts about some of the “classic” sitcoms I grew up on. I hope you enjoyed it, because today it’s time for Volume 2! I’ve returned to fill you in on another eighteen sitcoms, and have also dropped several embarrassing childhood anecdotes about myself, so if you’re not into one, I hope you’re into the other. I really enjoyed hearing your feedback last time, so please feel free to leave a comment and let me know your half-shapen childhood thoughts about any of these shows, or any other ones!
Everybody Loves Raymond
I was still in high school when the last few seasons of Raymond aired, and it was a bit of a family tradition for my mom and I to watch the new episode together every Monday night (obviously I was a popular kid growing up). Maybe it’s just the family bonding, but I have a lot of fond memories of those episodes. There were some legitimate gems. The episode where Marie buys a statue that looks like a giant vagina but nobody will tell her why they’re so weirded out by it; the episode where one of Ray’s twins writes a story about “The Angry Family” which every character assumes is about their family, sparking massive conflict and landing all the adults in a family counseling session, only to find out in the end that it’s based off the twin’s favorite TV show; Robert being so happy about the news of his parents moving away that he lifts Amy on top of a refrigerator; Frank becoming livid when Robert accuses him of being in a loveless marriage. Yet, when I caught a few episodes of Raymond last year, I was blown away by how mean-spirited it was. Raymond especially seemed to actively hate pretty much everybody in his own family.
It may have pissed me off a bit.
Raymond is also the perpetrator of one of my greatest sitcom pet peeves: the soundproof adjoining room. Almost every episode, while the characters were in the living room, one would pull another aside into the kitchen to have a private discussion. Yet, the two rooms are barely six feet apart and there’s no door between them, just a massive open doorway. In the one episode where Robert lifts Amy on top of the refrigerator, they spend a good five minutes loudly celebrating Frank and Marie’s impending move in the kitchen, dancing, singing, yelling, swinging each other around, as Frank and Marie sit six feet away on the sofa in the living room, within ear-shot and eye-shot, completely oblivious. What, is the kitchen in a pocket dimension or something? I realize it’s just a sitcom trope, but it’s one that drives me mad.
The Drew Carey Show
Mimi terrified me as a kid. I don’t mean running out of the room screaming kind of fear, but more of a deep, unsettling dread that just washed over me. She was a very strange-looking woman playing a very strange, aggressive character on a show I really only knew anything about because of commercials, so I didn’t understand what her deal was at all, which only made it worse. I hated when the commercials would come on. Nowadays she just looks like she’s doing low-key Android 19 cosplay.
Home Improvement
To this day, if I make an outlandish joke or a suggestion my dad doesn’t like, he’ll respond with “I don’t think so, Tim.” That’s how much this show permeated our daily life growing up.
The Flintstones
“Eh, it’s a livin’!” So, the animals acting as the Flintstones’ appliances are apparently paid for their work. Do the Flintstones pay each one of these appliances individually? Perhaps all the appliance animals belong to some sort of union or rental agency who collects a monthly fee from each family and then pays the individual animals working for them? Do the appliance animals live in the Flintstones’ house 24/7, or go home at night? If it’s the former, why do they need wages? Are they sending their salaries home to support their families or something? Should I really be thinking so hard about this? Why’s all this smoke coming out of my ears?
Also, that theme song: all-timer, right? It’s the opening moment that really gets me, that rollicking trumpet blast and rising theme over that low, steady drumbeat. It’s a lot of fun.
Fun fact: in its original airings, The Flintstones actually had an entirely different theme song for its first two seasons. “Meet the Flintstones” wasn’t used until the third season, and when the show went into syndication they just started using it for the entire series. In recent years, Boomerang and METV have restored the original theme for those first two seasons, though, given the fact that “Meet the Flintstones” is a much better theme, that’s honestly kind of a bummer.
Happy Days
The difference between Happy Days when it began and Happy Days by its end is night and day. The show began as a sweet and simple, even gentle, nostalgic look back at being a (white) teenager in the 1950s. It taught lessons and I believe was even filmed single-camera in its first season to feel more intimate. Then Fonzie was introduced, and slowly took over more and more until the series essentially became a live-action cartoon where Fonzie jumped over sharks on his motorcycle. The change was gradual, but you can draw a pretty clear line between the show’s two eras: when Scott Baio’s Chachi joined the main cast. In fact, Nick-at-Nite even noticed this trend, running a poll with their viewers to determine whether they preferred the show “Chachinated” (episodes with Chachi) or “Non-Chachinated” (episodes without).
That stunt sticks out in my memory because, one day in fourth grade, while this promotion was airing on Nick, I was walking through the school hallway to go home for the day and thought I overheard two kids discussing “Chachinated.” I said, far too loud “I prefer Chachinated!” and then instantly felt stupid and never broke my stride, kept walking, and never turned around to see if the kids noticed or if they were even talking about Happy Days at all.
Obviously I was a popular kid at school.
Laverne and Shirley
I always liked this one a lot more than Happy Days, the show it spun-off from. The two leads had a good chemistry, the “L” sown onto all of Laverne’s outfits is definitely something I would have done as a kid if allowed, and Lenny and Squiggy were a lot of fun (at least as a kid; I think my dad hated them, so I’m not sure if that opinion holds up). One of the more interesting things about Laverne and Shirley is the weird turns it took late in its run as the series started to run out of steam. First, Laverne and Shirley joined the army in what was meant to be a new direction but ended up being a brief story line instead, but which inspired an animated spin-off where they did stay in the army and were commanded by an anthropomorphic pig. Next the entire cast uprooted and moved from Milwaukee to California, where they spent the final three seasons, though most of the changes were surface-level (but I certainly missed that iconic underground Milwaukee apartment of theirs). In the final season, Shirley’s actress, Cindy Williams, quit after the producers demanded that the pregnant Williams work on her delivery date. So most of the final season of Laverne and Shirley was…just Laverne.
This theme song is trying so hard to be wacky, but watching Laverne without Shirley here — and listening to the song proclaim “we’re gonna make our dreams come true” as Laverne goes on alone — just feels wrong and sad. Can you believe the producers wanted to keep the show going for another season after this?
Get Smart/Inspector Gadget:
So…these are essentially the same show, right? Even right down to the fact that Don Adams plays both Maxwell Smart and Inspector Gadget, which was something I did not pick up on when I was younger (because I was an idiot). Maybe they should have tried the same thing when both series got film remakes/reboots years later? Would Matthew Broderick have made a better Maxwell Smart, or Steve Carell a better Inspector Gadget? (No question, it’s Carell.)
The Monkees
I would watch The Monkees for hours at a time as a kid, but my fondest memory of it is the theme song, which I’m pretty sure I walked around singing in public on multiple occasions. I recently caught a few episodes of it as an adult and was struck by its duality, how on the one hand it’s extremely sixties — clearly part of the psychedelic generation — yet on the other it’s also extremely modern, with a break-neck, ADHD-addled pace, non-sequiturs, and fourth-wall breaking meta-humor. I can see why it was only a cult hit at the time. Sadly, watching one episode as an adult was charming; watching two was exhausting.
Revisiting The Monkees did help me realize that at least one or two aspects of the show had buried themselves deep in my subconscious, becoming a part of my core personality even if I didn’t realize it. For example, Michael Nesmith absolutely became a big influence on my fashion sense and especially the way I wore/wear my hair. He’s not the full explanation behind my sideburns, but at least 50% of the explanation for sure.
The Partridge Family
I always thought this show had too many characters. Looking back, a main cast of seven isn’t many at all, but I think what had me confused was the balance. Despite a multi-generational cast that featured at least one, maybe two teen pop-star idols, the clear star and focus of 95% of the show’s plots was Danny Bonaduce. If you didn’t like Danny, the show was kind of a wash. You want a story about the singing teenagers? Or maybe you were like me as a kid and wondered what the deal was with the family’s youngest children? Sorry, here’s an episode about Danny trying to cheat people in a business negotiation instead. I could never figure Danny’s character out; despite being a child character, I think he was specifically designed to appeal to adults watching the show. Do kids ever find other kid characters who act like adults funny? I certainly didn’t. It probably also didn’t help that I kept getting thrown off by the massive similarity between Danny Bonaduce and Nickeledeon’s own Danny Tamberelli, who was about the same age as Partridge-era Bonaduce at the time.
Here’s a fun fact I just discovered: Bonaduce’s two children are named Count and Countess. As far as I can tell, those are their actual first names and not official titles (they go by their middle names, bless their hearts).
Taxi
I didn’t watch much of Taxi growing up and didn’t get much when I did, because it was more adult oriented, and when I say that I don’t necessarily mean sexual or risque content, just that (like, say, M*A*S*H*) it was oriented towards adults. But the one thing I remember clear as day about Taxi was an episode my mom had on that eventually led to a sex scene of some sort between Danny Devito and Rhea Perlman’s characters. My mom was complaining about it (but still watching it, for some reason?) and my sweet, innocent response was “well, it’s okay because they’re married.” Note that I didn’t mean their characters were married, I meant because Devito and Perlman were married in real life, so it was cool if they filmed a sex scene with each other (which makes me think that perhaps child me thought sex scenes on TV were real?).
Clearly, standards and practices needed to hire kid me.
That Girl
This one is best known for the iconic opening sequences, where characters will randomly be talking about something, then point off screen, and the camera would cut to a shot of Marlo Thomas’ titular character’s face as the character says “that girl!” accompanied by the words appearing on the screen beneath her face. I can’t tell you anything else about this show, but I’ll always remember that bit. It strikes me as a pretty clever running gag, and a good way to introduce the plot of the episode before bringing it all back to the star. It feels like an older, far more wholesome version of Always Sunny’s title card gags. I also have to wonder if perhaps it’s a small inspiration on New Girl’s original theme song (“Who’s that girl? Who’s that girl? It’s Jess!”)
The Love Boat/Fantasy Island
A while back, while my parents were watching an episode of one of these shows (I truly don’t remember which one, nor, honestly, care), I wondered out loud if the two shows had ever crossed over. I even proposed a format, that the first episode would be the guest stars on the Love Boat, and in episode two it drops them off at Fantasy Island to finish the story. My parents thought it was silly, but I looked it up and not only was there a real Love Boat/Fantasy Island crossover, but that’s the exact format it followed.
ABC, hire me.
The Golden Palace
So most of us know The Golden Girls, right? It’s a particular favorite of mine for sure, but did you know that once the series ended with Bea Arthur’s departure after seven seasons, it was revived as The Golden Palace? The series found Blanche, Rose, and Sophia buying and running a hotel, and attempted to combine the typical romantic/social Girls plots with stories about the characters struggling to manage a run-down hotel and please guests, which was a weird combination. It also roped in Don Cheadle and Cheech Marin, of all people, as the rest of the hotel staff. It only lasted one season, probably unsurprisingly.
While Palace was mostly treated as a curiosity for years, in the late 2000s Lifetime would air it essentially as Golden Girls’ eight season in their rotation, so I saw a decent chunk of the series, and my biggest complaint is that Palace made Golden Girls a lot sadder in retrospect. Rose’s long-term boyfriend Miles is revealed to be a total cad and quickly disposed of. Dorothy returns for a two-part story only to find that she’s essentially been replaced, and that Sophia now chooses Rose and Blanche over her. The episode ends on this really heartbreaking shot of Dorothy watching the other three working together and walking away with a sad look on her face. I feel like this script was working through some behind-the-scenes aggression against Bea Arthur, which isn’t the happiest thing to see on-screen. After the series was cancelled, Sophia became a recurring character on Golden Girls spin-off Empty Nest, where she’s revealed to have returned to Shady Pines Nursing Home. Whatever happened to Blanche, Rose, and their hotel was never revealed. But these aren’t the fates I like to imagine for any of these characters. The four are still roommates for all of eternity in my mind.
The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer
Perhaps, like I did, you thought that The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer, the supposed sitcom about a former slave who becomes Abraham Lincoln’s valet, was just a bad joke from that one episode of Clerks: The Animated Series. Sadly, I am here to inform you that this was a real sitcom that aired on UPN, was decried and protested against by multiple African American protest groups, including the NAACP, and was cancelled after four episodes (which, sadly, is two more episodes than Clerks: The Animated Series got). I’ve never seen a single episode and never plan to, but man, what a truly bad idea.
Roseanne
My mom recently told me that, when I was young, I would get really upset whenever Roseanne came on and run for the remote to change the channel. My parents had never told me anything about the show; it was all my idea. I just did not like it. I get that the show was rather progressive for the time and, probably deservedly, has its fans, but given everything that’s happened with Roseanne Barr and the reboot over the last few years, I think little me had the right idea from the start.
Family Matters
Considering that the entire original premise of this show was the importance of family, it was sad to watch the Winslow family dwindle and fade away one by one as Steve Urkel placed more and more of a stranglehold on the series. Many fans are aware of how the youngest Winslow daughter, Judy, just disappeared one day with no acknowledgment, but a season or two later the same thing happened to Aunt Rachel. In the middle of the series Grandma Winslow got remarried, but despite her groom being a recurring character for quite some time before the wedding, he was almost never seen again afterwards, and Grandma eventually disappeared as well. Next it was Little Richie (and to add insult to injury, he was essentially replaced by a character named 3-J, a streetwise orphan Steve took under his wing). Finally, in the middle of the final season — after the series had already been cancelled by ABC and picked up for one final season by CBS, mind you — the actress playing Harriet gets sick of it and quits. This was finally a family member whose absence they couldn’t just ignore, and they had to recast the role.
This is all sad enough, but there’s two things here that add insult to injury. 1. When non-family regular cast members, such as Eddie’s friend Waldo, left the series, they got full episodes about their send offs. When a Winslow was written off, the show never acknowledged it and then pretended like they never existed. 2. Family Matters was originally Harriet’s show! This isn’t well-known today, but Family Matters is actually a spin-off of Perfect Strangers — Harriet Winslow was a recurring character for several seasons of Strangers before being given her own series. Clearly, Jo Marie Payton wasn’t too happy with what “her” series eventually evolved into.
Full House/Fuller House
Okay, so, I’m not proud of this, but I watched SO MUCH Full House growing up. It was such a dumb, dumb show and I just ate it up. I could here and describe to you the way the cast changes, the different layouts of the house as people shift their rooms around, their different jobs, the plot of probably almost any episode, I’m almost paralyzed by what to talk about here and my anger at my own brain over the fact that it has retained so much of this information. Um…I first heard about the Counting Crows from an episode where the three girls are fighting over tickets to one of their concerts. Or here’s a bit of trivia: Uncle Jesse’s last name was Cochran in the first couple of seasons (before they changed it to Katsopolis for the rest of the series), and his mother and father were in almost every episode of I believe the second season as recurring characters before vanishing without so much of a mention, never to be seen again.
I did watch the pilot — and just the pilot — of Fuller House out of sheer painful curiosity, and it was truly awful. One very small, very dumb thing bothered me a lot — apparently the father, Danny, remarried, because a female character appeared with him during the party at the end with the episode, but I think she had all of one line, I don’t know if her name was even spoken on screen, and whenever the family would gather to discuss something she wasn’t a part of it. I don’t know, maybe she got a bigger role as the series went along, I honestly don’t care, but it really rubbed me the wrong way.
Step by Step
I think that, if my “(Mis)Remembering Sitcoms” series has taught us anything, it’s that the weirdest little things about shows tend to dig themselves into my subconscious and become a part of my personality. Take Step By Step, a fairly unremarkable offering on ABC’s TGIF line-up. I actually remember a lot about this one, but there’s one particular gag that affected me for years.
The plot is that sisters Dana and Karen get jobs as waitresses at this Hooters rip-off, and are tired of being harassed by the customers, including step-brother JT and his friend Rich. So, they turn the tables with a bet and have JT and Rich work their shifts for a day, and they end up being harassed by the restaurant’s female customers, including one who purposely drops her silverware on the floor, then pinches JT’s butt when he bends over to pick it up. I got the feminist message, but I also didn’t bend over to pick things up off the ground again for literal years. I always kneeled instead. I don’t know why! Was I afraid people would pinch my butt? Did I just think it was the more proper way to do it because the other way was associated with the sexist restaurant? I really don’t know. But it stuck for a really, really long time.
I suppose I truly am just the sum total of every TV show I’ve ever watched.
ABOUT
“Do You Know What I Love the Most?” is a newsletter from Spencer Irwin. Spencer is an enthusiast and writer from Newark, Delaware, who likes punk rock, comic books, working out, breakfast, and most of all, stories. His previous work appeared on Retcon Punch, One Week One Band, and Crisis on Infinite Chords, and he can be found on Twitter at @ThatSpenceGuy. If you like this newsletter, please subscribe and share with your friends!