“One Day At A Time”, whose premise would never have happened in reality (meaning no way the two teenage daughters would’ve left their comfortable middle class home where their life was and uproot it to move with their flaky, confused feminist mother to a cramped apartment in a seedy part of a city).”
According to the premise of the show, she just got divorced (the ex-husband would make a few appearances) which is why she moved and obviously the teenaged daughters moved with her because being underaged teens, they had no choice in the matter.
They weren’t toddlers, though. They were old enough (I believe 15 and 16) that a judge would’ve taken into consideration their wishes. Normal teen girls, as they were, would never have left a middle-class home where they had lived all their life, with an emotionally and financially stable father, to go off with the nutty and shockingly irresponsible and immature mother, whose only real reason for divorcing the dad was to “find herself” and her lost 20s. Even a left-leaning judge at the time would’ve awarded full custody to the dad.
I watched the show as a kid and didn’t think much of it, but watching it later on as an adult, I realized how flawed and absurd the premise was. A responsible mother would’ve had the girls stay with the dad in a safer environment. Teen girls ripped away from their home would’ve become viscerally resentful of the mother, run away, gotten into drugs/drinking, underage sex, et al. They ignored those likely realities as long-term problems, or barely touched upon them. Hell, the eldest girl in reality had enormous problems with drugs due to her personal dysfunctional family life, now THAT was a realistic end result of how someone would’ve ended up in the environment the tv show portrayed.