“South Park” - I know they graduated to the next grade once.
The Simpsons characters have never aged, yet still celebrate holidays like Christmas and Holloween every year.
King of the Hill’s characters age one year for every two on the air.
Just popping in to say I misread the thread title as “Short thespians in TV series” and I was going to offer Michael J. Fox and Danny DeVito. [/hijack]
That exact thing happened on Family Ties, too. They had that fourth kid, Andy, and he was a baby for one season and then the next season he was about six years old.
Fresh Prince ditto. Nicky went from newborn to five in one season
The quick-aging infant phenomenon sounds to me like a device on the part of the writers to avoid a lot of episodes with a character that doesn’t really do anything. The infant carries with all sorts of pregnancy, parenthood and family storylines and the jump to 5 or 6 allows for the precocious child storylines. Also, I don’t think a lot of shows stay on the air long enough to age kids at any reasonable pace.
It’s also to avoid a really difficult actor–they don’t call them the ‘terrible twos’ for no reason.
The Simpson’s have pulled off a lot of weird stuff: Apu’s litter was born, walking and talking while Maggie stayed a perpetual 1 year old.
Heh.
Of course, there are exceptions. For example, DC is soon jumping the continuities of all its books ahead by one year. Then they’re releasing a weekly series called 52*, in which the events of the missing year are revealed, one week at a time.
The show Duet did the “kid grows up fast” bit, though with some justification: The baby was born at the end of one season, and the next season began five years later had passed.
Flying Blind – a vastly underrated comedy best known for the first starring role for Tea Leoni – did some interesting things. It went week by week, pretty much following the time the show was broadcast. Then, on the final episode, the final scene was captioned “Six months later,” putting the events in the future and making it a science fiction show (by some definitions).