Female living alone is terrified of a mouse or other minor disturbance and has to call a male to come in and deal with it, regardless of the hour, weather, distance between them, etc.
Two sides of the same coin: A woman spends a whole episode sure that a man isn’t interested in her, and then he comes on strong as soon as the situation of the week is resolved. OR said woman is sure the man is going to eventually come on strong but never does, much to her astonishment.
On another topic:
I saw an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show the other day where Rob and Laura were trying to fix their new neighbor (a handsome, suave, cultured lawyer) up with one of two women (Sally Rogers or Laura’s sophisticated cousin Donna).
The lawyer likes them both but is not interested in a serious relationship. No surprise there, but we eventually learn he’s been married three times and physically abused each of his wives.
Talk about turning a trope on its head! This was pretty strong material for a sitcom in 1963 (and probably today too).
One of the interesting things is that when The Simpsons was created (and, to a lesser extent, when The Big Lebowski was made), bowling was still seen as a “proper” sport by the average person.
Nowadays IME it tends to be more of a social event; a group of friends go to the bowling alley (which might even deliberately be cultivating a sort of nightclub/trendy bar vibe), have some drinks, eat some food, see who can knock over the most pins - but they’re not playing it as a serious “commitment” sport like football, netball, tennis, etc.
I also think it’s a good example of how one of the challenges The Simpsons faces is that it was created as a sort of parody-homage of that middle-class 1980s/1990s existence (and sitcoms about same) that just doesn’t really exist quite like that anymore.
Are kids nowadays cowed by a strict authoritarian principal? It’s been a long time since I’ve watched an episode, but I’m guessing the chalk cloud cleaning of erasers would be something kids would scratch their heads about.
Wow, I’d forgotten how weird that episode was (I just re-watched it). It wasn’t that long ago that wife-beaters weren’t universally seen as criminals.
While Rob and Laura were clearly repulsed when they learned about the guy, the script seemed to be trying to make him redeemable, by showing him facing up to his problem and seeing a psychiatrist for it.
That was another trope of the era, that people shouldn’t be afraid to get therapy for their problems. I remember another DVDS episode where Rob and Laura see Jerry in a restaurant with an attractive woman and assume he’s having an affair. In fact, the woman is a marriage counselor. Jerry and Millie are having difficulties on money matters–she’s overly tight, raising the roof when Jerry, a successful dentist, buys himself a pair of sweat socks.
Rob’s summary when he learns the truth: “Boy Jerry, so you’re just having marital problems! I thought you were having… marital problems!”
It was a weird episode. The fact that he was a wife-beater is almost incidental to the story. The bulk of the episode is about the competition between Rob and Laura as to which of them is a better matchmaker for the guy. The fact that he hits people he loves comes in at the end as the “explanation” for why he didn’t choose either Sally or Laura’s cousin. I think the writers could have chosen another reason that wouldn’t have been so cringey.
It’s not like the episode accepts or justifies domestic violence, exactly. Everybody in the episode, including the neighbor himself, recognizes it as unacceptable behavior. But it does treat the topic a bit too lightly for modern tastes.
I think the conventional resolution would have been “I like them both so much, I can’t choose between them. So, being a happy bachelor, I’m going to date them both!” That’s what I was expecting, and why I was so shocked when he turned out to be a wife-beater.
Lou Grant, while not a wife-beater, faced a situation where he was torn between two women in an episode of MTM. Mary’s sage advice was “Well, why not date them both?” I guess in that respect, things hadn’t changed much between 1963 and 1976.
To be fair, there were reverse examples like the wife with the frying pan, Maggie and Jiggs, “she’s gonna murder me” where female on male violence was treated in the same manner.
For that matter, Sgt. Snorkel pounding Beetle Bailey into a pulp.
I can’t think of any female on female examples, there must have been some.
It’s treated as a personal failing rather than a criminal matter, which makes it seem weird today. Rob and Laura treat him like someone who just used a racial slur, but promises to do better, rather than wondering why he’s not in jail.
I don’t know when it changed, but for many years sergeants in the US Army could enforce discipline by taking an unruly private “behind the barracks” and beating the crap out of him. If the private was foolish enough to complain, officers would invariably side with the sergeant.
I suspect this practice continues today in a number of armies around the world, unfortunately.
MTM had a story like that too. The guy was Phyllis’s cousin. She didn’t know he was gay and was afraid he’d fallen for Rhoda after they started going out together.
I should add that there was once a common trope in sitcoms to make it appear to the neighbors that a husband had hit his wife, which results in the neighbors thinking badly of the husbsnd, but not calling the police (in fact, in an early episode of the Dick Van Dyke show, jerry and Millie thought Rob had hit Laura in the nose)
Here’s one I don’t think’s been mentioned: sitcom protagonists collaborating to write a song. It may be in response to a contest, or to one of the characters having a contact in show business who could get their song heard by show biz bigwigs.
Invariably, neither partner has ever written a song before, or has any musical ability, beyond what’s needed to be portrayed working on the song, pounding it out on the piano with a pencil behind the ear.
Felix and Oscar did this once on The Odd Couple, in the episode where Oscar dates Jaye P. Morgan. The song was called, “Happy, and Peppy, and Bursting with Love”.
Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton did this at least twice. The first was in a “lost episode”. Another was on Jackie Gleason’s 1960s variety show, and was entered in a songwriting contest, which won the four of them a vacation to Hollywood and a meeting with Bing Crosby. The song was called “Love on a Bus”.
A recent SDMB thread on crooked franchises speculated that such scams prey on a myth many Americans believe: that anyone can step up and operate a business, despite no knowledge or experience. This seems related to the idea behind the aforementioned amateur songwriting episodes (and more common 50-60 years ago): “Everyone’s got that one hit song in them!”
This idea seems to have been replaced by karaoke: Today, everyone can sing one song great. Not.
If you read the whole sad story of Gygax, TSR and D&D, you will see that even a genius at one thing does not make a successful President of an international business.
I have faint memories indicating that Felix had written a song before this episode (“Let’s Hit Hitler Where He Lives”?) And of couse Oscar’s participation was inadvertent- it just happened that phrases from his latest column (about a boxing match) were useful as lyrics - but Oscar wasn’t trying to help.