I remember Gloria working at a department store. In one episode she was fired for getting pregnant. IIRC the department store rehired to work in their maternity department to avoid a boycott.
Ret-con: Rob moved while Laura was in the hospital. Since women stayed for like 10 days back then, it’s possible.
I love that you (like me) know which street the Petries lived on.
mmm
Is there a single episode of McHale’s Navy the would pass today?
I find the vast majority of these picks have way overrated present day society’s forward-thinking/sensitivity.
Hogan’s Heroes. Fun and goofy Nazis! Laid back POW camp! 1965.
The weirdest thing about it, as often noted, is that all of the German characters were in fact Jews (one of whom had been beaten by the Gestapo) and that the actor playing LeBeau, the token Frenchman, had in fact spent time in a POW camp.
The real question is … will the world ever be ready for Heil Honey I’m Home! ?
Professor Google says it was British sitcom, cancelled after one show. Sounds ghastly.
And then Charlie’s mother Evelyn had a one-night stand with Bill, not knowing he used to be Jill. The scene where Bill goes out on the balcony with Evelyn and explains his situation out of earshot, while Alan, Charlie and Berta watch from inside, is hysterical. It ends up with Evelyn fainting.
The more you think about it, Hogan’s Heroes is an amazing success. It aired only 20 years after the end of the war. With the exception of children and teens the majority of the audience actually lived during the war, many having fought in it. You would think that would make it unwatchable.
Even today, 50 years after the show premiered it’s still very popular. It’s been a solid hour block, weeknights at 10:00 (EST) on METV for years.
People at the time didn’t think Hogan’s Heroes would work either. Bob Crane didn’t want to star in the show unless they did a table-read of a script in front of WW2 veterans to get their approval, and even after the show got a favorable response from them there was a letter-writing campaign against the show by some other veterans.
And I love that notfrommensa (like me) has noticed and been bugged by that discrepancy! 
That reminds me that when I first drove out to the address to look at the house I was thinking of buying (and I did eventually buy it, living here for 15+ years) and read the street number, #704, I immediately thought, “Hey, that’s the same as the Bunkers, #704 Hauser St.”
There was a similar Night Court episode where lothario Dan Feilding meets up with a former classmate who has transitioned from male to female. Of course he has issues with it and to add to it, they cast a blond bombshell for the part.
Dan overreacts and can’t believe that his best bud is now a woman. At some point, he grabs a friend and says “Can you believe that she used to be a man?”
The friend’s answer was “so?”
Which is a very nice and progressive point, especially for 80s TV, I think. I believe most of the jokes were at Dan’s expense but I think the actor who played her was a bit of a stretch.
I have to defend this episode a little bit even though it’s one of those very clumsy early season episodes. The crew take the impregnation of Troi very seriously and considered it a violation of her rights. There’s also a scene where they discuss if they should abort the pregnancy and Troi objects wanting to keep it. Picard treats Troi’s decision as law and any talk of abortion is stopped then and there. Even Worf, who considered the pregnancy a potential security risk, respects her choice and doesn’t object.
The Seinfeld episode “The Puerto Rican Day” is usually omitted from the rotation in reruns, Kramer accidentally lighting then stomping on a Puerto Rican flag. Though actually that was controversial right then. I see Wiki says it ‘started to appear’ in 2002 but I’ve never seen it only read about it, and I’ve seen every other episode.
“All in the Family” is a very dated show all around. I don’t see it as that relevant to give shows which were very much of their time and just point out they don’t work anymore. Especially a ‘message’ show like that. But it’s even true of Western TV series’ of the 50’s-60’s. They show them on classic TV channels but nobody would make a Western like that now, clear good and bad guys, the good guys win, in the some of the old ones there are even bad Indians against good white guys. Nobody would present a vision of the Old West like that today, even like the later of those shows (‘Bonanza’ often tried to be PC, for its time, as it progressed into the 60’s). The vision would be like ‘Deadwood’, or they wouldn’t make a Western TV show. And besides ‘Deadwood’ they basically haven’t (or a few lesser shows, ‘Hell on Wheels’ for example, with a basically similar vision).
I saw an episode of “Wanted, Dead or Alive” where Steve McQueen rode up to a house and tied his horse up to a black jockey figure out in front of the house. That immediately brought me up and out of the story.
There was an episode of “Daniel Boone” on MeTV the other day that was just outrageously ridiculous in their treatment of Indians. Kentucky Indians living in teepees was just the beginning of it. The whole Indian culture was just laughable.
For all this TNG Federation talk about 'how advanced we are now"…you will very shortly see Jack mincing about in the new Will and Grace…and it occured to me today, for the stupid flack Leslie Jones got (of all people) for her acting in Ghostbusters…Ernie Hudson mostly avoided those tropes in the original Ghostbusters. And that was over thirty years ago.
An episode from the second season of the original “Hawaii Five-O” called “Bored, She Hung Herself” has never been rebroadcast or released on video apparently because a woman tried it, apparently a form of yoga, and died.
Girls in their mid-teens dating men a decade older was actually not that uncommon when I was that age. No, the families generally didn’t approve, and the relationships almost always ended very badly. However, it generally wasn’t illegal.
A decade or two before that, these couples often got married, and not necessarily because she was pregnant. :eek: