You’re right. From Wikia’s Fandom:
- The Thumdermans* handled this by having super-growth being one of the baby’s powers.
Yes, the Cub is watching a lot of Nickledeon shows. Why do you ask?
To be fair, Ernie was an added kid too!
The original 3 sons were Mike, Robbie and Chip.
Ernie had appeared in a couple episodes the prior season as Chip’s friend. When oldest brother Mike left the show, they needed a third son, so they came up with the premise that Ernie was a foster child living with neighbors, the neighbors had to move or something, and Steve and family adopted Ernie instead because they already knew and loved him.
I remember the social services people wouldn’t place Ernie with them at first because there was no mother in the home, until it was pointed out that Bub (or Uncle Charlie by then?) acted as the mother figure.
I know all this thanks to Nick at Night - The Mike-to-Ernie switch happened before I was old enough to watch the show when it was on broadcast.
Both characters, Andy Keaton and Alexander Rozhenko, were played by the same actor, Brian Bonsall.
The Cosby Show added an older child (Sabrina le Beauf), who wasn’t mentioned at all until well into the first season.
We always wondered if it was a last-minute decision to cover their tails because Cosby said “we have 5 kids” when clearly they were only showing 4.
I suspect they planned it all along, though it seemed clumsy.
Actually, in the pilot episode, Clair asked, “Why did we have four children?” and Cliff responded, “Because we didn’t want five.”
… blinks slowly…
That’s an, uh, an interesting pairing.
IMHO…yes and no. Dawn on Buffy The Vampire Slayer seemed to be intentionally spoofing the usual tropes (e.g. She Was Always There From The Beginning, even though she actually wasn’t), at least when the story arc revolved around her being this extradimensional object given human form to hide her from the Big Bad. But once that arc was done, the writers didn’t seem to know what to do with her, and so they fell right into the standard Cousin Oliver traps.
In an extreme case, Diane was shown in face only, looking up from a floor heating duct. I forget how she got there; it’s probably a plot they’d prefer to forget.
Barbara was way too old for the sixties to have a daughter Dodie’s age.
Quite a few. The afore mentioned My Three Sons thrived after the addition of Ernie. I Love Lucy did fine, as did The Dick Van Dyke show. Bewitched did well after adding a child, then after adding a second one. There’s probably more that I don’t remember.
72 posts it took to mention William, Mulder and Scully’s kid from The X-Files?
Loyal viewers of the show knew there was no WAY the writers (all young and male, seemingly) could successfully write a baby into a show about rogue FBI agents fighting an oncoming alien invasion, and their fears were richly realized. Chris Carter’s complete cluelessness in how to handle William continued to the very end when the confused writers, at a loss in coming up with a way to resolve the dilemma in an emotionally satisfying way, just decided to ship him off to some unsuspecting farmers in Montana.
Good job, everyone. Good fucking job.
Huh? Beverly Garland (Barbara) was born in October 1926 and Dawn Lyn (Dodie) was born in January 1963. Dodie was supposed to be 5 since they joined the show in the fall of 1969. Not sure about Barbara’s age but it is probably close to Garland’s real age.
My mother was 36 when she gave birth to her last child and when I was 17, one of my classmates, who already had a 19 year old sister, got a baby sister when his parents had another child.
Worst child addition ever has to be the 10 year old daughter Maddie of Ally McBeal in season 5 because of a mix up with the eggs she stored at a coinic.
The Dick Van Dyke Show never added a kid, Richie was there from the beginning. There was an episode showing his birth, but that was a flashback.
For all the hatred that Scrappy Doo gets, and it is deserved, as Mark Evanier, who wrote the first Scrappy episode, points out, Scrappy accomplished what he was intended to accomplish. Namely, he got Scooby Doo renewed for a few more seasons, after it had been on the verge of cancellation. In that sense, he “worked.”
Arguably “I Love Lucy” added a child in name only - Little Ricky appeared in very, very few episodes and was rarely a major plot element.
In the case of Bewitched: adding a child was more of an expect-able thing, given that the show featured a young, newly-married couple - i.e. kids happen. They were added fairly reasonably, not jump-the-shark’ed in like Seven or Cousin Oliver.
Assuming you can call a 20 year old a new kid, adding Ronnie Burns to the “George Burns and Gracie Allen Show” helped, or at least didn’t hurt. Ronnie had appeared a few times before (as did his sister Sandra, both were adopted children by George and Gracie) sometims as himself, other times as different characters. But in season 6 which had the Burns and their friends the Mortons living in a hotel in New York City, Ronnie joined the cast full time as as aspiring serious actor embarrassed by his father’s vaudeville routines (Sandra did not like acting and only appeared in a few bit roles). The following year everyone moved back to Beverly Hills and Ronnie was now a girl chasing college student. The wiki bio on Ronnie says his addition was popular with younger viewers.
I couldn’t stand Brian Bonsall (“Bonsall the Tonsil”).
Not to mention the flashback episode dealing with Richie’s middle name, Rosebud (acronym for Robert Oscar Sam Edward Benjamin Ulysses David. I’m so ashamed of myself for remembering that).
As with Little Ricky on I Love Lucy, it’s interesting to note that in both cases, the child was not onscreen all that much. Relatively few episodes had them as major players. The kids were definitely not central to the show, unlike many others of the era. I wonder if there’s a correlation between those child actors doing better in life than actors who were stars of their respective shows (Father Knows Best, Diff’rent Strokes, and so on).
/hijack
Only Fools and Horses went downhill when they added wives and kids
Unless the story doesn’t work with the child being older, there’s no reason they shouldn’t do this. A sitcom isn’t an attempt to realistically portray fake lives in documentary form. There’s no good reason they should subject this to continuity rules.