What I don’t believe is that Mr. Roper, who was old fashioned enough to not let unmarried people of the opposite sex live in his building, would let a gay man live in his building at all.
It seems his moral outrage at unmarried people having sex (or threesomes) would be dwarfed by his moral outrage at homosexuality.
No, Roper overheard Chrissy and Janet goin’ at it all the time. But he would misunderstand and just assume they were hanging pictures or something.
Well, yeah—that was the point of my OP. Maybe GQ would have been a better place for it, because all I’m asking is whether there was actually some significant number of people in the 1970s who were morally outraged at unmarried heterosexuals of opposite sex living together, but not at homosexuality in general. Does anyone here actually know such a person who holds this view, or at least held it in the 1970s?
I wonder if the ‘idea’ of a gay-acting character really comes from a British comedy tradition of the time – we had many comedy TV shows, films and even TV presenters with suggestively gay/high camp characters*, although it is never explicitly stated that they are (they just do a lot of flirting and good dressing). The fact that he isn’t actually gay would pass the moral outrage test for the audience of the time and I imagine George’s ‘real-life’ reaction to a gay man is simply ignored for comic effect.
(*Larry Grayson, Kenneth Williams in the Carry on Films, Mr Humphries in Are You Being Served, ‘Gloria’ in It Ain’t Arf Hot Mum, etc)
The 1976 comedy Snip, starring David Brenner and Leslie Ann Warren, was cancelled at the last minute and never aired in the US, reportedly beause one of the main characters was openly gay.
It was okay to pretend to be gay, but not to actually be gay. Weird.
That’s just cold.
I figure that it was due to it being the “swinging 70s”. A man and two women living together didn’t just mean premarital sex, it meant ORGIES OMG WTF BBQ.
I didn’t see that episode, but it sounds like they were parodying the last Newhart show. If so, that was funny to the max.
Heartbreaking, too.
Well, you could look at it this way. Mr Ropper is more worried about the “souls” of those two nice young girls, (did he know them well before Jack showed up?) than he is of Jacks soul. He can either convince them to not live in sin or let them live in sin. If a gay man moves in they certainly aren’t nearly as likely in his mind to do much sinning. Jacks sinning? Well, he’s just gay and fucked afterlife wise. Keep the women folk safe and let God sort the rest out. I don’t think its TOO much of a stretch to believe some men of that era would be looking out for “the best interests” of nice young girls and not be too concerned about some random guy.
You could also use the angle that while he ain’t pro homo he has a certain pervy interest in having one around and seeing how they operate. Plus i think Mrs Ropper liked Jack and maybe even herself had that pervy angle. So Mrs Ropper was putting pressure on Mr Ropper to let Jack stay. Hell, now that I think about it, wasn’t Mrs Ropper often doing some serious flirtting with Jack? Hell, if you are going to have a fling with a much younger male tenant, a gay man that strayed a bit would be the perfect candidate right?
Anyhow, this is way more believable than warp drives, transporters, wormholes, and teenage vampire killers 
Damn, now I am thinking of Don Knotts and John Ritter and have something in my eye…but I bet that credit scene was funny…anybody got a link?
I don’t know - Jerry Van Dyke wasn’t that ugly and his mother the car wasn’t that hot.
That depends; was John Ritter’s character in the bed with him? If so, they were more likely parodying Three’s Company – my memory is hazy as to whether Mr. Furley ever woke up in Jack’s bed, but Mr. Roper certainly did.
That’s what I was thinking. Mr. Roper wasn’t particularly homophobic, but he’s more than a little sexist in a paternalistic fashion. Guys, in his view, are basically all sluts. Girls are innocent and helpless. Letting a straight guy live with two girls, he’s going to end up corrupting them, getting them pregnant, infecting them with VDs, and then abandoning them, because guys are scum, and that’s what they do. Except gay guys, who are exactly the same, except they only do it to other guys, so that’s okay, if gross.
I think Mr. Roper woke up in bed with Mr. Furley. Perfect.
I haven’t seen an episode of Three’s Company in close to 30 years but didn’t either Mr. Roper or Mr. Furley used to always call Jack Tripper “Twinkletoes”?
Isn’t a gay man sometimes called a “Twink”?
Was this offensive to gay guys?
Finally did anyone else think that the actress who played Terri, (who was the replacement character for Suzanne Sommer’s role as Chrissy) was way, WAY hotter than SS was?
I don’t think Roper was particularly religious- wasn’t ever stated anyway. I think he just didn’t want his apartments to have a reputation as a “shack up” place.
Norman Fell had played an almost identical character in The Graduate incidentally: he’s a landlord who doesn’t want to rent to anybody who’s a hippie or having weird sex or into drugs, etc…
There was an episode of It’s Garry Shandling’s Show that had a Graduate premise and Garry put out word that he needed either Dustin Hoffman or Anne Bancroft to come advise him. Dustin and Anne didn’t show up but Norman Fell did. After Garry tells him “Oh, I think I see where you’re confused, you were the landlord on Three’s Company, but I’m talking about The Graduate” Norman puts in a VHS tape that’s wound to his scene in the movie.
Twink’s slang for a particular type of gay guy- very boyish, hairless body, slim, etc… Zac Efron or Kurt from GLEE would be twinks, but Jack wouldn’t be.
It was. I was in the pre-gay stage myself so I personally wasn’t offended but I remember gay rights groups protesting the show because of the stereotypes. Tony Randall starred in a TV movie during the same era called Sidney Shorr in which he was a gay man who takes in a pregnant woman and raises her kid; the show became a short lived TV series in which they essentially neutered Sidney’s character to just be an asexual old fussbudget (or, as it’s known in TV, Felix Unger) with only an occasional reference to him being gay. He said in an interview at the time that he hated the show because he had very high hopes it would be groundbreaking in the gay exposure (and it would have been) but instead “it was just another Three’s Company”.
As mentioned I’m gay, but if my opinion counts I certainly thought so. Of course I’ve never liked Suzanne Somers- she looks cheap. I actually thought Janet was much cuter. (A friend of mine ran into Joyce Dewitt on the street in NYC when he was on vacation a couple of years ago and gushed over her; he said she was super sweet and glad to pose for pictures and the like.)
I thought the most unrealistic premise on this show was the Suzanne Somers was hot. The premise of the show was that any woman willing to appear on camera without a bra under her blouse was ipso facto hot.
Similar thing with Loni Anderson on WKRP. Not that her character Jennifer didn’t look good, but I don’t think every man who lived in or passed through Cincinatti would be drooling over her the way they were.
Agree 100% with all of this, and I will throw in the the huge hype over Farrah Fawcett never made any sense to me either, especially with Jaclyn Smith clearly being one of the most stunning women in television history…
(Kate Jackson was also much better looking than Farrah was, although not close to being in Jaclyn Smith’s league)