An amazing night of pro-life sitcoms (vanity)

My overactive mind | 9/24/03 | Jessica

[jocon307]

I will try my very best to keep this short, and barring that, coherent!

I watched the first of the the last three original episodes of "8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter" tonight, and I am sadder than ever that John Ritter has gone to his reward. But I have a new enthusiasm for the show continuing, because I am amazed at the message that was made an explicit part of the story tonight.

The Parents (John Ritter & Katy Sagal, and I'm sorry but I do not know the characters' names) think that the wife may be pregnant, an obviously unexpected event. Now, even though it is to be expected (or at least hoped) that on a "family hour" sitcom abortion would not even be hinted at, which it wasn't, they were of course somewhat overwhelmed and discombobulated by the prospect of having another baby, with all their other kids so close to grown.

But they had these two lovely bits, which involved (I think) the parents of the daughter's boyfriend, who had stumbled on a rather fraught "family conference" concerning the potential "blessed event", and had basically had the door slammed in their faces!

The husband sought out John Ritter at his job, and the wife sought out Katy Sagal at hers, and each went on at some length about what good parents they were, and how much they loved each other, and no matter how much they felt overwhelmed at the prospect of another child, they would handle it just fine. Their neighbors had faith in that (plus they wanted their cake pan back!) I'll grant that it veered a little close to a "teaching moment", but it was so positively done, and it's such a rare good message to get from TV, that I really wanted to publicly praise it.

I included adoption in my keywords because this neighbor couple also revealed to our leading Parents that all their own five children were adopted. Amazingly, there was no scoffing at this concept either!

Of course, I have no way of knowing if John Ritter was the driving force behind this positivism, if it was all him, they'll only ruin it if they try and go on without him. But it may well be that there is a production team behind this that seeks to portray good values as normal, which, as we on FR all know, is very "avant-garde" today. If that is the case, I hope they carry on and carry the day. I have some hope for this in that the fellow who plays Ritter's boss on the show is a regular columnist on "theweeklystandard.com" his remembrance of Ritter is worth checking out, either here on FR, where I saw it posted, or on the Standard's website.

[jocon307]

Now, this is a TV sitcom, about life with teenagers, and it is by intention silly and pokes fun at all characters. There were also some parts in this (and all) episodes that many here might understandably consider racy. But I loved this show tonight, I loved they way they wrote these positive affirmations of parenthood into the show. And I hope this vanity post is coherent enough so that those who read it will understand enough of the plot to get my meaning!