And of course, on TV and in movies, giving birth takes roughly half an hour. “My water broke! The baby will be here any minute!”
Regular cast member promises they can deliver a C-list celebrity to appear at a local function, but of course they can’t and hilaritiy ensues, then when they confess they failed C-list celebrity arrives to save the day. (Alice alone had two of these episodes- once with Joel Grey and again with Robert Goulet, while the most famous is Marcia & Davy Jones; Gimme a Break did this with Andy Gibb [who at the time would have appeared at a White Castle opening for food as his career was that desperate] and later with Sammy Davis Jr.).
Didn’t Alice also have one with Art Carney?
As for the dating of the handicapped scenario, they did it right in The Rockford Files. Jim dated the blind lawyer, Beth Davenport, for a while and she remained as a recurring character.
Haj
Was there some kind of rule that I’m missing? Why hasn’t anyone mentioned anything about Saved by the Bell yet? About half of the shows have to be worse than any other ones mentioned here.
The ABSOLUTE worst has to be Jessie on caffiene pills because she doesn’t want to make a bad grade. She starts singing “I’m so excited” but then she burts into tears and says “i’m so confused!”
Absolute worst sitcom plot ever.
That Saved by the Bell episode is really funny if you’re stoned. Not that I would know or anything…
**Sampiro **mentioned it on page one and I referenced it too.
It was “I’m so scared”, by the way. I grew up on that show and still love Tiffani Amber Thiessen a decade later.
In the spirit of the season 
I’d like to nominate all the sitcoms (Cosby, Roseanne) that depict middle class Americans throwing the most elaborate Halloween parties imaginable. Attn. Hollywood: Most people don’t have a $25,000 budget for their parties or in-house set and lighting directors. Then you have every person in the room donning an elaborate, imaginative, cool Halloween costume. Get real.
I was just at a Halloween party last night and let me give sitcom writers a reality check: for every really cool costume, there are a dozen lame-ass ones.
“Time pornography” – I love this concept. Reminds me of another that I came up with – “food porn,” i.e., most cooking shows.
Well, if I had ever caught my sister masturbating the tenor of our subsequent relationship would depend on whether or not I had a camera handy at the time. And Internet access. And how much money she had.
I quit watching the show because of this episode. It made me angry that she would act like a 13 year old and play boy-girl spin the bottle because of peer pressure, then not even have a 13-year-old’s sense of integrity to follow through when it’s your turn. And then to have the nerve to congratulate herself for being too mature and sophisticated to need to kiss someone just to be cool!? What a spineless, hipocritical twerp. It made it too painful to keep watching. A woman like that, with so little character, should never be allowed to have sex with Ron Livingston in any reality.
There have also been babies born with, miraculously, no umbilical cord or afterbirth; whoever ends up having to deliver it (never the father or a qualified medical professional) just picks it up, wraps it up and hands it to the mother.
What about Alex Keaton’s therapy bill? Having to deliver your own mother’s baby is about 10,000 times worse than seeing your sister masturbating for three seconds.
Not to mention that the baby seems to be about 15 pounds.
I gotta vote for most every Sex and the City episode. These women were dating like crazy, having sex with pretty much every man around, but when a guy expressed interest in anything kinkier than missionary, the women were always mortified (with the exception of Samantha, who would always LOVE the deviance, whatever it was). Boring cookie cutter sexuality.
I still have watched pretty much every episode of the damn show. I have no idea why.
ZJ
Well, most “new-borns” in birth scenes seem to be at least 2 or 3 months old, for obvious reasons: although I think they should at least paint them mauve and douse them in bloody slime for added realism.
There was a show called “Small Wonder” about a robot girl who was adopted by some couple. One episode, Robot Girl finds a liquor bottle and gets drunk, just in time for someone from the adoption agency to come by and wonder what kind of household they were running. Oh, the adoption agency doesn’t know the girl was a robot. This show was weird and creepy on numerous levels.
“Fresh Prince of Bel Air” did the “I’m getting ribbed for dancing a fat chick” episode. The “fat chick” was played by the young Queen Latifia.
“Fresh Prince” also did a pregnancy test episode where Hillary described how the test worked. When her mother and aunts looked at her with stunned faces, she said “Oh, grown up.”
All of these things about TV babies are definitely true, but the super-fast births actually do affect the plot. A lot of shows have had the elevator episode or episode where a character goes into labor and can’t get to the hospital within ten minutes, which causes utter panic.
The thing about newborns being clean and a couple months old is that there are ***STRICT ** * laws in Hollywood when it comes to children and infants being on-screen, including the length of time allowed and what kind of makeup they’re allowed to wear. Why do you think twins so often portray small children?
While I’m sure laziness is part of the reason you don’t seem more realistic newborns, legality is the key factor.
Among them, the worst child actress in the history of film. I babysat three small children when this show was on and the scenes in which the girl was “dismembered” (her dad would disassemble her for one reason or another) literally gave them nightmares.