Shazbat! I was going to mention that!
heavy sigh feelings of inadequacy
I’ll be in my armoire.
While I don’t disagree with you that the story arc was not Cheers’ best moment, there was, iirc, some reason for what they did. Kirstie Alley was in fact pregnant, and the plan was to write her real-life pregnancy into the story of the show (a la Carla), rather than to hide her behind ferns and the bar (a la Diane). Unfortunately, Alley had a miscarriage, and the plans were abandoned, leading to the weird but also understandable result of it never really being addressed again.
One subset of pregancy stories is “having a baby on the elevator” I can think of three shows that did that. “All in the Family”, “Benson”, and “Night Court”
When Lauren Lane became pregnant while filming the Nanny, she did a hilarious scene where she goes into Maxwell’s offices and talks about how she watched an episode of Seinfeld where Elaine is about 24 months pregnant and they try to hide it with big coats and props. Then she turns and she is visibly pregnant, under a huge coat and purse. She picks up a plant on the way out and says “this needs watering,” holding it over her pregnancy.
For those she didn’t get the idea, she comes in saying “This just came back from the framers. Where do you want to hang it?” It’s a post from the real Broadway show Baby.
Obligatory clip
When Roseanne’s Laurie Metcalf got pregnant, they wrote the pregnancy into her character Jackie’s story line. There was a marvelous scene where she shows Rosanne her nine month’s pregnant body
Jackie: How is this going to come out of that?
Roseanne: Well, these have been coming out of those for centuries.
Community had a student give birth where most viewers weren’t even aware she was pregnant, because the story evolved in a series of background shots over a number of episodes. The scenes are compiled at: Abed Delivers a Baby on Community (Update) - YouTube
To summarize, the school holds an STD Awareness Fair, (Fortune cookie: “You will get AIDS! [reverse] Unless you go to the STD fair”), and at the end of the episode, the Dean makes a frantic intercom announcement: “Don’t use the condoms!” 10 months later, in the background of an indoor scene, Abed is seen talking to a very pregnant woman, followed by an outdoor scene where he is being chased, for unknown reasons, by the father. Still later, again in the background, we see Abed comforting the woman in the cafeteria as she goes into labor. Finally, we see Abed in the parking lot helping deliver the baby, with the woman in the back of a hatchback, followed by the proud parents admiring their newborn.
None of these events is directly mentioned in the show, although when one of the main characters later gives birth, Abed notes he has had previous experience with deliveries.
+1
I was VERY annoyed when Roz got knocked up on ‘Frasier’. Her constant fear and whining and ambivalence made me want to slap her and drag her ass off to an adoption agency. She had no business getting pregnant and becoming a mother, she would make a craptastic mother. Different on TV when you have comical buddies to support you and help out. (frankly, I don’t remember how that pregnancy panned out.)
Laurie on The Walking Dead was the most unfortunate pregnant woman in the history of TV. She got pregnant during the zombie apocalypse and was shunned by Rick (the asshole) because she was another big burden and it might have been Shane’s baby. She went into labor in the prison in a cell with her son and Maggie, while the gates were down letting zombies flood the place (with a blaring alarm going off nonstop). Since she had had a C-section, the birth was going wrong (see: bloody hands). She decided Maggie should cut the baby out of her, gave Carl a pep talk, and told Maggie: do it. (see: more blood). SCREAMING! … cut to end, Maggie carrying the baby out into the yard, crying. Rick totally losing it. And Carl had to go back inside and dispatch his dead mother so she wouldn’t rise as a zombie.
If we can veer one sec into film - “The Cooler” had a pregnancy thing that didn’t quite workout.
It gets worse. It didn’t really come off very well as aired, but after Carl took care of her, a zombie came in and ate her corpse and was sitting in there bloated from eating her when Rick later returned to the room.
:eek: zombies eat corpses? probably still-warm fresh and tasty ones. Poor Laurie indeed!
It wasn’t a sitcom, but Alien Nation has, hands down, the most memorable pregnancy storyline ever.
Dick Van Dyke says they had problems getting the network to approve it because they felt it was demeaning to the black couple. They argued that is was the white couple, specifically the father, who looked foolish, although they had another ending in reserve just in case. The studio audience was one of initial shock, long enough for Carl Reiner to say to Van Dyke that we didn’t know if the the audience would accept it. Then the audience broke into uproarious laughter for 20 minutes.
The Showtime series Episodes had a secondary character pregnant this last season. She never told anyone in the office that she was pregnant, so the whole storyline was after she left the room all the other characters discussed how she has to be pregnant, and how to get her to tell them she was.
Christine Sullivan’s pregnancy on Night Court is one that I thought was handled well. But even better (though it’s just a single two-episode story) is the one where the Night Court staff (and some friends) have to help deliver a bunch of babies in the courtroom in a hurricane.
One of the best follow-ups from that was when Kwan-Lee Robinson was giving birth in a later season, the only available doctor at the hospital was a podiatrist, who was not handling the situation well. He asked the assembled cast, “Well, excuse me, but who do you know that isn’t an obstetrician has had experience delivering babies?” and they all raised their hands, to which he replied, “Are you some kind of cult?”