They were Sitcom Dads. They went to an office and sat at a desk, and carried important papers into an important meeting, where they’d get interrupted because Cute Kid #2 got into trouble at school.
Come to think of it, only a couple of Sitcom Dads had a life outside the nuclear family. I remember watching Darrin on Bewitched get yelled at by his boss and thinking “You never see this happen to the dads on Dennis the Menace or Ozzie ‘n’ Harriet or Father Knows Best or My Three Sons…”
Because, like Ward Cleaver, most TV dads just left the house and no one, not even June, knew where they went.
Well, the entire Newhart show was literally a dream.
(Btw, this is my most hated plot device. I’ve ranted about this here before, but omg do I hate this. I would have been pissed if I were a Newhart fan, just livid. And I hated, hated, HATED this Buffy episode.)
Right up until the day I retired, my wife asked me, “what exactly do you DO for a living?” This included times when I worked from home and she could actually see me doing it.
Howard had a hardware store,
Dobie’s dad had a grocery store,
Rob Petrie was funny, for money,
Riley worked at an airplane factory,
Gomez lived of investments and didn’t have to leave home,
Herman did something bluecollarish,
Ricky played the drums (even when the script made more sense when George worked at a bank).
Vision added up numbers.
Mike architected
Fred Savage’s Dad got yelled at…
Let’s not forget ‘The Deadly Dolls’, an episode of ‘Voyage to the bottom of the sea’ in which the villain of the week, played by Vincent Price, threatens to take over the sub with the help of some evil, supernatural dolls or puppets that have somehow come to life. I can never understand why anyone wrote this episode or why the production team gave it the greenlight. It doesn’t make sense on any level and doesn’t fit with the rest of the series in any way. And you can watch it all online:
I actually buy the ‘stockbroker’ explanation as it does explain my episode- a licensed sales agent and his office assistant, even a teen, can be relatively ‘realistic’ for the period.
The later episodes of Due South had some real WTF? moments. Benton would do things like reappear on a moving train long after having been thrown off. When asked “How did you…?” he’d reply “That’s not important!” and get on with the show.
I think the most bizarre moments came in the final episode. He stripped some wires on a radio and stuck them in his ears to receive messages, and then persuaded his partner to jump with him out of an airplane without parachutes (“Don’t worry, this is Canada. The snow will cushion our landing.”)
