I’m not angry enough to make a Pit thread about this, but when I read the thread about worst series closers and saw the twentieth or so reiteration of this:
I decided to put my response in its own thread, since no one ever seems to see it when I respond w/quote.
Murphy’s son, Avery (yes, he did have a name. And she knew who the father was, too, before anyone claims that), was regularly referred to and regularly appeared after being born. One entire episode centered around Murphy leaving him at the studio while she searched for a last-minute replacement for an interview that had been cancelled. He served as a Freudian psychiatrist as other characters voiced their problems to him. Another episode, a season finale, had to do with Avery’s first-birthday party, and Murphy’s inablity to get back to DC on time.
There were plenty of scenes that had Murphy coming home to her townhouse and finding Eldin tending to Avery. She brought Avery with her to the voting booth for the '92 elections. She also brought him, along with Eldin, to the Olympics in Lillehammer. Even when he didn’t appear, he was still acknowledged, as when Frank gave a dinner party and everyone prepared their excuses to leave early: hers was that she had to get home and relieve Eldin, who had some obligation. She was devastated when Avery’s favorite baby food was discontinued. And in the last season, when she had cancer, he became a fully functional character, accepting and dealing with her illness.
I don’t know why people keep claiming that “the kid was never seen again until he popped up again in the last season.” Just because it didn’t stop being a show about a news reporter and become a show about a mom? That would have been the real travesty. As it was, they worked the character into the show quite skillfully, TYVM. I can’t help thinking that people who claim otherwise weren’t regular viewers, and as such, aren’t qualified to make that claim.
Nice try. Robert Pastorelli left the show in 1994, four years before the series ended. Eldin’s mom, played by Anne Meara, took over his nanny position.
I didn’t say anything about this Robert Pastorelli person (whoever he is), I was talking about Eldin. Don’t you know the difference between T.V. and real life?
I was talking about real life when Eldin and his mom sold Avery for drug money, skipped off to Mexico, rode the dragon for a while until Eldin died and his mom turned to prostitution.
When Murphy recovered Avery, she got Chuck Cunningham as the new babysitter.
Jeez, maybe you should stop watching so much T.V. and read the paper once in a while.
Calm down. The simple fact is 99% of the time sitcoms treat a baby as a sight gag not as another character. In fact though even if it was treated as a character people will still think it isn’t on screen enough.
Usually however the baby is used pretty rarely (perhaps every other show or less) people assume that after a baby is introduced it should be in every single show for a large portion of the time. This is of course silly and doesn’t work in a sitcom or really any show. Babies don’t do much besides cry, defacate, and cause people to get all teary eyed. Once you run through all that and maybe a couple of babysitter episodes there’s simply no more jokes/scenes. So stick a cradle in the corner or make the kid suddendly be a toddler. Either way people will bitch about the non-existant baby.
Bah. Even “COPY CON” allowed you to use the backspace key before you pressed Enter at the end of a line.
Real real men plugged a tape player into the cassette tape port on the back of the original IBM PC, and played a Chuck Mangione cassette while fiddling with the volume control at just the right moments to have the 1’s and 0’s come out the way they want.
There’s the standard episode showing the montage of nannies or babysitters being interviewed as you see each undesirable type (the disciplinarian, the drug addict, the ditz, etc.) until the last one, who is as good and sweet as Mary Poppins.
I stick by my opnion that the pregnancy was used as a Plot Point, and the kid pretty much shunted off to one side afterward–and yes, I watched every goddam episode.
Till Miles and Corky got married, and I said, “oh, the hell with this cap.”
