Tag: sitcom

Season 1 Episode 21: Career Decision

On By InMyBackyardIn Season 11 Comment

I don’t know how to tell you this so I’m going to come right out and say it: this is another in a series of less-than-entertaining episodes. In my opinion, Season One has taken a real turn for the worse since episode 18 and I am none too pleased. I’m sorry you have to suffer with me but, then again, at least we’re together?

This episode is another dog’s breakfast of plot lines the most significant of which involves Maggie and Jason grappling with career decisions (as the title so clearly implies). The long and the short of it is: Maggie’s got a front page story in the local paper and she is so grateful that Jason moved his practice back home so her career could shine. But then an old colleague comes by to offer Jason a job heading the psychiatry department in his old hospital and now we have what I like to call a conundrum. Who gets to pursue their career? Only time will tell.

What viewers will endure is about fifteen minutes worth of Jason making pro-con lists and debating whether to tackle career conversations with Maggie with integrity or selfish desires to escape the house every day. Maggie will wrestle with pressure to support her husband while still maintaining her own career. Viewers will wonder why someone needs to be at home with the kids after school when Mike and Carol are both old enough to take care of Ben for a couple hours. Alas, clearly Maggie and Jason are implicitly opposed to latchkey kids.  Personally, I loved the couple hours of perceived absolute freedom between when I got off school and my parents came home from work. I got to watch Much Music (the Canadian equivalent of MTV) and eat snacks I probably shouldn’t have been eating. That’s a big win for an 11 year old. Once again, I digress.

For a brief moment, it seems that Jason will be spared having to compromise on his career. Maggie gets lambasted for a typo in an article. Her editor is a bit of a hothead and seems to think that putting the wrong initial in someone’s name is the end of the world, and then Maggie somehow determines the best way to deal with this work mishap is to simply quit.  She talks to Jason about it, and he does the unthinkable: he takes the low road and quasi-manipulates Maggie into thinking quitting might just be the right choice. This is a rarely seen path for Jason and it does not suit him well.

What ensues is a classic sitcom misunderstanding in which Jason thinks Maggie has gone to work to quit, but Maggie has really gone to work to tell her editor she’s the shit. Jason storms in to try to stop her from quitting and Maggie tells him in no uncertain terms that was not her plan and we all have a good laugh. In the end, Maggie gets to keep her career and Jason has to give up his job…but not really, because he’s still gainfully employed.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, Carol, Mike and Ben all pretty much have nothing going on in this episode.

At the end of this episode, I’m left wondering:

  • Aren’t there fact checkers for newspaper stories to make sure minor typos like that don’t happen? As I write this, I suspect maybe not at a Long Island community paper…
  • Really, couldn’t both Maggie and Jason have had their dream careers? I’m living proof that latchkey kids turn out just fine.
  • What is happening at the tail end of season 1? The episodes are getting painful to watch.

Season 1 Episode 9: Carol’s Crush

On By InMyBackyardIn Season 12 Comments

Brace yourself for another Carol storyline! This time around, Jeff’s in town for law school interviews, and he’s staying with the Seavers. Who’s Jeff? Jeff is the son of old family friends, and the Seavers haven’t seen him in years, so they’re all pretty excited. And then when he shows up, well, there are some fireworks for Carol. It’s a puppy-love-at-first-sight moment, wherein she opens the door for Jeff and he opens the door to her heart.

Carol’s crush is obvious to Maggie and Jason, and they think it’s simply adorable. Neither seems to appreciate the tenderness of a young girl’s heart and, thus, the ripe opportunity for some serious heartbreak by episode’s end. The Seavers spend the evening playing trivial pursuit, and Carol is thrilled when Jeff selects her as his partner, interpreting it as a sign of his growing love for her. Oh, Carol. Can’t you see it’s only because you know the answers to everything? It’s too late. Carol is smitten.

The next day, the whole family is getting ready to go to Ben’s football game. That is, everyone except for Carol, who has an airtight excuse for staying home which is to “watch her banana bread cool”. For a smart girl, I expect better white lies.  Carol’s real plan is to stay back hoping for some quality one-on-one time with Jeff.  This works out beyond perfectly when Jeff’s friend calls to bail on going to a Gershwin review in Manhattan, and Jeff invites Carol to go with him instead. Carol cannot see that Jeff is simply being polite. The puppy-love plot thickens.

Carol gets herself ready for a night on the town, channelling her finest lady of the 80s look (i.e. thick belt and shoulder pads).  It’s a bold look for Carol and, finally, Maggie and Jason start to see potential for heartbreak because Carol is clearly in date mode and Jeff is clearly not and maybe they shouldn’t have been so “look-how-cute-Carol’s-crush is” about this situation. Still, neither parent intervenes nor attempts to moderate Carol’s expectations for the evening, and so she and Jeff are left to their own devices.

At first, it seems the evening is off to a fantastic start. The Gershwin review was just as thrilling as anticipated, and Carol is in heaven because now they are having a fancy dinner together. This is all working out perfectly.

Until Leslie walks in. Ugh. Leslie.

Who’s Leslie, you might ask? Well, we know very little of Leslie, except that she is clearly Jeff’s age, which is already several legs up on Carol, and she also has obviously been romantically involved with Jeff in the past and whatever flame existed is not yet dead. We also know that Leslie is a little bit condescending because she talks to Carol like she’s a five year old.  But the real soul-crushing moment occurs when Jeff introduces Carol as the sister he’s never had. Whomp. Jeff, come on. Carol is crestfallen and she certainly doesn’t hide it, which really puts a damper on the rest of the evening.  The only positive outcome here is that Jeff finally realizes that Carol has a crush on him.

The next day, Carol tries to do some damage control by showing Jeff she don’t need him…or perhaps she is merely trying to make Jeff jealous. Regardless of motive, she drags her poor friend Richie into the mix, parading him around the living room as the one and only boy in her life. If Carol’s plan is, in fact, to spark jealousy in Jeff, the problem with this plan is threefold:

  1. Richie is not someone who’s likely to incite jealousy in anyone.
  2. Jeff is 23 and Carol is 14 so no matter how jealous Jeff might actually get, any romantic relationship between the two of them would actually be illegal in the state of New York.
  3. Poor Richie actually loves Carol so this plan is simultaneously his dream and nightmare, and poor Carol is exploiting this love intentionally which just strikes me as a million times worse than Jeff’s completely unintentional exploitation of Carol’s crush on him.

Maggie and Jason can see that things have really gone off the rails so they try to smooth out all the hard feelings before Jeff leaves town.  They (finally) remind Carol that Jeff is considerably older and that they’re just not the right age for each other. Then they really work the empathy/’we’ve-all-been-there’ angle hard, sharing their own experiences of making fools of themselves in the name of love.  This boosts Carol’s mood enough that she wants to make things right with Jeff, which really does prove Carol is the most mature 14 year-old ever because I would have been far too mortified by my behaviour to ever have looked Jeff in the face again.

Enough about me, Carol and Jeff have a nice heart to heart on the front porch and leave on good terms, but not before they have an awkward exchange in which Jeff says if they were both fourteen he’d be a lovesick puppy, and then Carol says “imagine the fun we’d have if we were both 23.” Is that…appropriate?

At the end of today’s episode, I’m left wondering:

  • Would two 23-year old dudes reuniting in New York really go see a Gershwin review together as their big night out on the town?  
  • Jeff was in town for two nights and brought one large suitcase, a smaller carry on and a tennis racket. Does this seem excessive to anyone else?
  • Do people really climb in/out of second story windows in real life as much as they do in TV? This extends beyond this episode, where Carol makes Richie exit the Seaver house out her window, to a plethora of other television shows in which bedroom windows are used to enter/exit a house. Is this a case of art imitating life or television writers inventing a creative plot device?

Season 1 Episode 8: Slice of Life

On By InMyBackyardIn Season 11 Comment

This episode is what I like to call a little bit of a hot mess. In trying to give everyone a storyline, none of the stories fit together in any meaningful way. The Seavers didn’t feel like a family in this episode, as much as a collection of people doing their own thing but in the same general vicinity. Perhaps this is what the episode’s title (‘slice of life’) is meant to capture. Maybe this whole episode is meant to be a commentary on the fact a slice of life is increasingly becoming disconnected, a caution against the separateness that is infringing on the American family? Then again, perhaps I’m reaching for thematic depth that doesn’t exist in 80s sitcoms and this episode really is just a bit of a dog’s breakfast in the plot department.

Let’s get to it. I’m organizing this episode review by characters because none of the storylines were connected anyway.

Ben and Carol

Ben is hell-bent on getting into the world record book due to some sort of existential crisis that has him concerned with establishing his immortality. That kid sure vacillates between acting his age and showing a depth of thinking that terrifies me as an adult. At any rate, Carol is fascinated by his desire for immortality and so she’s fiercely committed to helping him find obscure ways to break world records, all of which I find extremely annoying but none of which work. However, Ben and Carol’s efforts aren’t entirely for naught because trying all these different things in one day was enough to break the world record for most attempts to break world records in a day. Also, I did not enjoy this storyline.

Mike

Mike is hell bent on taking karate lessons, which he does not currently take but for which he seems to already own a uniform (which I just learned from Google is called a karategi. Look how Growing Pains is helping me learn!). Jason and Maggie are pretty quick to recognize Mike has zero desire for the spiritual and disciplinary aspects of karate, and 100 percent desire for a girl in the class.

In typical Mike fashion, he’s taken the liberty of assuming his parents will say agree to pay for classes, so he’s already made plans to walk to karate class with the girl with whom he’s so smitten. But when she shows up at the door to meet him, Mike’s afraid it will undo all his (ineffective) efforts to convince his parents he’s truly into karate for the love of the practice. So he tosses the girl in the closet and proceeds to ramble on to his dad about how of course he’s not really into karate just for the girl because she’s really just an “elephant woman” and other similarly offensive labels. Well, karate class girl is not taking any of that, plus she’s been actually taking karate classes, so she busts out of the closet and proceeds to karate chop Mike’s ass. Mike definitely had this coming, and thankfully this ass-kicking is the end of this storyline.

Maggie and Jason

This is the real storyline of the episode, if you ask me, because it deals with legitimate questions of how we view honesty in relationships.  You see, Jason is experimenting with a compatibility test that he might use with clients in his practice and Maggie is super keen for the two of them to take it. I don’t know about you, but this seems fraught with disaster.  

Soon, the test results are in and Jason and Maggie are, in fact, compatible! But just when you think they’ve dodged a relationship landmine, they start digging into where they disagreed on different questions. Well, this is where things get interesting because Jason has answered that he might keep things from his spouse, and Maggie is not at all even remotely cool with this. She is pro “total honesty” and cannot believe that Jason isn’t.

 This kicks off one of those conversations that you know isn’t a good idea in a relationship, the kind where each person starts to share examples of things they’ve kept from the other person but only to protect that person from being hurt. Well, Jason shares that he ran into an ex recently and Maggie proves exactly why Jason might want to keep things from her because she completely overreacts to what sounded like a total chance meeting in a public space that lasted for minutes. Yikes.

Jason then has to work his psychiatry magic to rectify this situation, which basically involves tricking Maggie into admitting that she, too, has kept things from Jason (which she has). So now we’ve established that neither of them really have been walking the “total honesty” road, and perhaps that road is best left un-travelled.  At the end of the day, they clearly know they love each other and only want to avoid unnecessarily hurting each other and, really, isn’t that all any of us want?  I love Maggie and Jason. Sigh.

At the end of this episode, I’m left wondering:

  • Is Ben’s vocabulary off the charts strong? He uses the word ‘indisposed’. How does a kid that young know what indisposed means?
  • Does a record actually exist for most attempt in a day to break a world record? Also, surely even in the 80s this would have required some form of independent verification?
  • Is Jason a math savant? One of Ben’s early world record attempts was to stay in the shower for 374 hours. Jason immediately calculates that would be two weeks. I mean, he didn’t even take a few seconds to come up with that. I am pretty good at mental math, but that was some seriously fast computing.
  • Why did I want Ben to get a storyline so badly? So far any storylines he’s had are not at all interesting to me, although I know that 40-year old women were certainly not the show’s primary demographic.

Season 1 Episode 3: Jealousy

On By InMyBackyardIn Season 1Leave a comment

Yet another episode kicks off with the backstory narration (the exact same one as the pilot and second episodes). Really, 80s sitcom viewers? I know we couldn’t binge watch back in the day, but surely the concept behind Growing Pains was not so complicated nor progressive that we couldn’t figure it out on our own just from watching!

In this episode, Maggie has a lead on a big story about contaminated water and it’s really taking her time away from Jason and he really doesn’t like it. And he really, really doesn’t like Maggie’s partner on the story, because he’s a man, and calls Maggie “Mags”, and all of this seems very threatening to Jason despite the fact that he and Maggie can otherwise not keep their hands off each other.  At any rate, Maggie’s working relationship with Fred is really throwing Jason off his game.

Maggie, of course, notices that Jason is jealous and confronts him about it…or, rather, laughs at him about it. In my experience, laughing at someone’s darker emotions almost never helps, and this time is no different. Spurred by his jealousy, Jason decides it’s a good idea to go to Maggie’s office in person and late at night, just to “ask her what Ben should do for his science project”. Even the kids know this isn’t cool and try to talk him out of it, but there’s no stopping the Jason Seaver jealousy freight train.

Karma has a funny way of rearing its head, though. Jason shows up at Maggie’s office, but instead of walking in like a normal person, he decides to creep along the glass like an intruder. Of course, Maggie and Fred then assume he is an intruder, perhaps one of the contaminated water goons, and Fred kicks the door open into Jason’s face.

Maggie and Jason then hash it out in her office (the first time this season an issue is not resolved in the Seaver family kitchen!). It turns out Maggie spent 15 years being jealous of Jason going to work in his “sexy psychiatrist sweaters” and so she has little time or patience for Jason’s jealousy. I think this was her attempt at empathy, but for me it fell a bit flat.  Jason, being a psychiatrist and all, quickly levels up his self-awareness and sees how he’s been overreacting.  Within minutes, all is well in the Seaver’s marriage once again.

At the end of this episode I’m left wondering:

  • Seriously, when will Ben or Carol get a meaningful storyline? Ben had a pretty weak science project storyline in this one, but Carol had nothing at all. To be fair, Mike’s storyline in this one is pretty marginal as well, so I suppose it was at least equitable amongst the kids this time around.
  • Is Fred a 1980s silver fox? I wouldn’t have thought so, but Jason was so jealous that I’m questioning my understanding of the 1980s male aesthetic. Fred did have a Tom Selleck kind of mustache going on…
  • Is there such a thing as a sexy psychiatrist sweater?
  • What happened with Maggie’s story? I kind of wanted to know whether they blew the roof off the story and caught the jerks poisoning the water, but we are left hanging. I know, I know, it’s a sitcom and the newspaper story was entirely secondary but honestly it was one of the most interesting things going on.  

Season 1 Episode 1: Pilot

To be honest, I don’t think I ever really liked Growing Pains’ first season, so I was sort of dreading these first 22 episodes. In perhaps a case of lowered expectations making reality better than it is, the pilot episode wasn’t nearly as bad as I remembered.

Before we really get started, can we just take a moment to respect the Growing Pains theme song? I mean, it’s still pretty catchy, and it was performed by legitimate singers. It might actually be the best part of the episode, and is most definitely the most nostalgic part of the show for me.

Right off the bat, I’m struck by the episode’s first minute, which is essentially a narrated backstory. Maggie’s gone back to work after 15 years, and Jason has transplanted his psychiatric practice into the home so he can be there to support the kids. This kind of protracted context-setting would never fly in today’s television. Spending precious moments just explaining the Seaver family dynamic would surely alienate today’s viewers. Besides, the premise is just not that complicated.

Here’s the gist of the episode: We kick off at breakfast time in the Seaver kitchen, where Jason and Maggie are ultra frisky in front of their kids about which I am not sure how I feel. On the one hand, it’s a little off-putting to me watching as an adult. On the other hand, maybe they’re actually setting a good example for their kids about healthy emotional expression, and the fact that passion doesn’t need to fade in marriages. Either way, I am most definitely giving this 100% too much deep thought.

Here’s what we’re working with in this episode: Ben is sad because his mom has gone back to work and he misses having her at home. Carol isn’t really doing much of anything. Mike wants to go to an under 20 club, delightfully named ‘House of Sweat’, and his mom doesn’t want him to go.  Mike pleads his case (he needs more freedom) and Jason caves (after Mike commits to giving him more responsibility in exchange for freedom). This seems like it will somehow go wrong.

And it does.

Mike is, in fact, not ready for responsibility because he winds up in jail after side-swiping a police car in the House of Sweat parking lot. This is further complicated by the fact that he doesn’t actually have a driver’s license.  My own take is that Mike was actually kind of being responsible because his friend was drunk and therefore unable to drive . It’s just unclear to me how his friend became quite so intoxicated at an under 20 club. Tiny, insignificant detail.

Jason, predictably, is none too pleased with Mike’s irresponsibility.  But the ever-so-slight plot twist is that Jason is actually more upset with himself because he really wants to have a trusting and open relationship with his son and he feels that’s been violated. Whoa. That’s actually pretty deep for 80s sitcom fare. They work it all out, though, and in the kitchen, which based on this episode is where the Seavers spend approximately 95% of their time.

The episode then ends on a totally bizarre note (in my opinion) because Jason is attempting to show his son that he still has moments where he does ‘dumb stuff’ by MOONING HIM. Thankfully it’s Maggie who walks into the kitchen because I am not sure how I feel about a father mooning his son.

At the end of this pilot, I’m left wondering:

  • Was Jason really mad that Mike violated his trust or was it actually because Mike’s arrest interfered with his champagne-and-satin-sheets plans with Maggie that night?
  • Was Growing Pains more religious than I remember? Maggie references original sin, which I can’t imagine cropping up in casual sitcom conversations these days.
  • Do kids get grounded anymore? Mike was grounded for two months and, maybe because I was never really grounded, this seems both excessive and nearly impossible to actually enforce.
  • Are holding cells actually located right in the middle of police stations? Are they always full of heavily tattooed but relatively harmless men who gruffly ask the newcomer “what are you in for?”
  • Is it all appropriate to even attempt to moon your own kid?
  • Are Maggie and Jason too racy for family sitcoms? Do they need to tone it down in front of their kids?
  • Is the Growing Pains theme song just really the best television theme song ever? Forget this question. I already know the answer, and it is a resounding yes.

So many questions left answered. Thankfully we have another 21 episodes this season to wade through these and other questions. The journey is just beginning my friends.

 

On By InMyBackyardIn Season 11 Comment