Besides the aforementioned The Graduate, there’s The Last Picture Show (Timothy Bottoms and Cloris Leachman), Cocktail (Tom Cruise + Sugar Momma), Unfaithful (Diane Lane and Olivier Martinez), and presumably American Pie (Eddie Kaye Thomas and Jennifer “MILF” Coolidge).
Not that older-woman-younger-man situations are particularly common, but they aren’t unknown.
IMO, the most discordant marital relationship ever displayed on a sitcom had to be Niles & Daphne on Frasier. Sure, Daphne was supposed to be a bit dim, but couldn’t the rest of the characters on that show see that Niles was gay? And not just gay, but ragingly, fabulously, queenily, femmy gay?
This was even more obvious considering that the show even had running jokes about Gil, the food critic at the radio station, being the only person who didn’t realize he was gay. I kept expecting just once for someone to say “Who does that Gil guy think he’s kidding? Why he’s almost as flamboyant as your brother Frasier. Say, wouldn’t they make a cute couple?”
So… I have a chance with her, then?
There was an episode of Frasier where a gay man mistakes Frasier and Niles for gay. I’ve always thought they played up the gay stereotype on purpose–then deliberately made both chartacters straight as a kind of satire on sterotypes.
Oh, I don’t know. Carol and Mike Brady were both physically compatible airheads. It’s only of late that the standard sitcom combo is a hot wife with a dud husband. Besides Raymond and King of Queens, you have Bill and Judy Miller in “Still Standing” and Greg and Kim Warner in “Yes Dear”. That seems to be the “formula” in sitcoms right now. When something works, everyone copies it.
I never could see what Wilma saw in Fred Flintstone. She was good looking, smart, relatively intelligent, polite. Fred was none of those things. In addition, he couldn’t have been that great a provider. She only had that one dress in all the years of the show.
Not a sitcom, but meant to be funny- Tom and his wife from Tom Goes to the Mayor might fit, but Tom as a hunk? Only when the actor is in drag as the “Married News Team.”
Larry from Perfect Strangers and his beautiful blonde stewardess girlfriend, Jennifer. He didn’t even have a personality to reccomend him-he was a cheap-ass, narrow-minded, bad-tempered little prick.
Now that we’re off marriages, howbout one almost/-marriage: Carol Vecsey and Dennis Martino from Ed. An utterly lovely, somewhat fickle and superficial at times, but basically sweet girl-next-door type dumps her lovable long-time sweetie for a hard-eyed, cynical, alcoholic career bureaucrat fifteen years her senior with the personality of a spitting cobra.
Thank Og she left him waiting at the altar.
But Gil wasn’t gay; he was married to the never-seen “Deb” (who I believe worked as a mechanic). Actor Edward Hibbert, though, apparently is gay, as is actor Dan Butler, who played the ultramacho Bob “Bulldog” Briscoe. My sense of irony would have been tickled if Hibbert turned out to be entirely straight, in stark contrast to the stereotypical characters he and Butler played.
Oh, well…
Harold and Maude likely represents the largest age gap between a romantic film couple (not counting stories involving immortal or near-immortal characters), played by But Cort (then 23) and Ruth Gordon (then 75).