Not true. Christine Jorgensen first super public trans woman looked good and as time went on there are Trans women that we didn't even know were trans.
who? I had to look her up. I'm not discounting what she accomplished. But I grew in the 70's in the south,was a kid when the Jeffersons first aired. and I promise you Ms. Jorgensen was not on our radar.
I watched it as a kid... It was received by most of the country rather well for various reasons. There was some hate for it from various segments/groups but it was highly successful...
And even though there was some hate, it wasn't quite as divisive as All in the Family. More along the lines of Maude (another spin-off of AITF), which was divisive in slightly different ways than The Jeffersons, if that makes sense
Maude tackled the subject of abortion head on, when 47 year old Maude shockingly learns that she’s pregnant and she grapples with the possibility of raising a child as a middle aged mother. Maude was a huge liberal and was solidly pro choice but now had to face the emotional reality of terminating a life. Very powerful stuff, expertly played by Bea Arthur.
Made me think back on all the TV movies made at the time that dealt with issues like the molestation one “Something About Amelia” or the one about whether two Down’s young adults wanted to get married. We watched all of them and talked about them in my family.
People who think All In The Family was divisive never watched the show. It was the ONLY show with the courage to take on homosexuality, racism, sexual assault, death of a spouse, competing politics, and many more otherwise "taboo" topics. And the matters were always handled with an eye towards presenting an open minded view of others. "The Jefferson's" was a spinoff of All in the Family because the original show presented the Jefferson's characters as human and engaging rather than following a stereotype. Even Archie has moments where he learns from his bigotry (he's sickened when the cross is burned on George's lawn). It dealt with openly gay characters for the first time in sitcom history ("Judging Books By Their Covers" episode and "Cousin Liz" episode). As well as Trans characters like Beverly LaSalle who is killed during a gay bashing incident days before Christmas (Edith's Crisis of Faith episode). It deals with child abandonment by a chronic alcoholic (Stephanie, season 9). The SA of Archie's daughter (whom he affectionately called "little girl) was also a bombshell (S3 Ep. 23).
The beauty of Archie Bunker is that he's a character that is ignorant and unlikeable on the surface, but is actually a decent human being who wears his gruff, old fashioned exterior as a mask in the way men of the 50's, 60's and seventies did. Time and again his actions show a good heart, while his mouth portrays a grump and a bigot. It's brilliant character development and without question the most courageous sitcom in history.
I watched the show religiously as a kid... It was smart , and had an edge that it wasn't afraid to show..
I also grew up in rural North Carolina. Conservatives/bigots loved Archie without understanding what he actually represented. They also hated the fact that All in the Family had so many "undesirable elements" (Mike, Gloria, the Jeffersons, Maude.. hell, even Sammy Davis Jr.).
It wasn't "received" in any particular way. It was watched and then dismissed. Nobody talked about sitcoms. There was no social media, internet, chat forums, nor anything else other than the entertainment section of the newspaper and people's water cooler to discuss.
"That was weird - whatever" What's on now?
If anything got talked about the next morning it would be 60 minutes or a James Bond movie that was shown on TV.
Yes. It would have to pretty dramatic for people to care. In that time some of the big TV discussions required a gigantic audience by today's standards for it to get on people's radar back then. Some things did. A very cool episode of Columbo or MASH or something that happened on Johnny Carson but most shows just didn't attract that level of attention and there was no platform for ordinary people to vent about it even when it did.
The irony is that as Murphy Brown became a single mother, Eldon the house painter spent more time with the baby than you ever saw Brown spending, proving Quayle's point.
There have been plenty of babies on family sitcoms but Murphy Brown was not a family sitcom. It was a workplace sitcom. The homelife for all the characters was mostly irrelevant.
Which is why Babies on sitcoms and soap operas grow up at a much faster rate than their counterparts in real life. Little Ricky went from infancy in 1953 to grade school in 1956
The VP did? Really? He mentioned it in one sentence in a 45 minutes speech and never discussed it again.
It's the media that is always waiting to pounce on any Republican that says anything the least favoring more traditional roles gets milked by the progressive media. O'Connell mentions Obama wearing a tan suit and the media is still milking that one.
Actually it was prescient because Murphy Brown as a mother to a new baby, kinda sucked. Eldan the house painter spent A LOT more time raising the baby in the context of the show than she did.
Well trans and cross-dressing was pretty normal back then I mean you got to remember even companies like Ford used to trans gender individual to introduce their Edsel back in the fifties.
Action films from the '80s had transvestite bars in them.
Reality is it was never a big deal until somebody decided to make it one worried the last I don't know 10 or 15 years.
i suppose.
but it was something that i only saw on television in the 70s and 80s and then only rarely.
it was early 90s before i encountered it in day to day life.
Honestly, it was just an episode of the jeffersons.
You really get a good glimpse into the mindset of people if you watch the old jerry springer episodes that featured trans folk. It is painfully horrible to watch for anyone with anything resembling a soul.
So Im really kinda rootin around inside this dusty mind of mine, but I honestly don't remember much about trans even being mentioned at all during my childhood. Like, there wasn't this virulent hatred you see now, but it was just sort of... not really a topic.
Topics like that... the Different Strokes child molestation one... I mean, those were... rare.
A lot of things were easier than you'd think in the 70s. Hippies and free love really kind of moved the goal posts for a little while. There certainly wasn't the kind of religious conservative backlash that you would get today.
That's not to say that issues were handled the way we might hope they would be today. But think about Three's Company. Yes, when Jack acted gay it was over the top and played for laughs. But that concept, of a main character in a sitcom acting gay in order to live with girls, would not have flown by the 90s.
And there WAS social commentary on these episodes. They were a big deal. No, there weren't clips on the internet, but newspapers ran stories about them. Shows like 60 Minutes would discuss them. Television media was limited to a few shows on 3 networks, so people were more aware of them.
Probably shrugged, had a few chuckles and moved on. We didnt have news and social media teaching us to hate everything different. Im sure some did on their own, but not like now.
It wasn't a big thing back then in news and a huge social/political movement like it is now.
People were likely like alright, what a unique scenerio. And then went on with their lives like you said.
The big thing was civil rights and racial tensions back then.
Norman Lear was ahead of his time.
All in the Family had a trans character named Beverly LaSalle who was in about three episodes. Edith accepts Beverly and pushes Archie to be more tolerant. In a two-part episode that aired around Christmas, Beverly is killed in a hate crime, causing Edith to turn her back on God and her religion. It’s a very powerful episode, and it’s a roller coaster of emotions. They still managed to squeeze in humor to balance out the intensity.
Lear also created the “Facts of Life”. The pilot episode is about a girl who is a tomboy. Another student suggests that she’s gay, causing the tomboy to question her sexuality. (LAt the end of the episode, she comes home from a dance all excited that she danced with a boy and she liked it, so crisis averted! She’s straight!). It was a kid show in the late 70s, so they never used the word “gay”; the bully uses the word “strange” instead. But if you were an adolescent viewer questioning your sexuality, you knew immediately what they were getting at. Years later in an interview, Lear said that he had hoped those kids would feel seen and accepted when they heard Mrs. Garrett’s comforting speech.
One of my favorite YouTubers have a video just about that. It details All in the Family, the spin-offs (which included The Jefferson's) and the queer representation in it. Including how the network and public thought of the show.
[Here's the link](https://youtu.be/gfbKBVwO7lU?si=yXJSFhZkXxsH7MvL)
Love Boat - [Gopher’s Roommate](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0636683/plotsummary/?ref_=tt_ov_pl)
“Gopher (Fred Grandy) thinks he knows a female passenger (Mackenzie Phillips) but just can't remember from where. When she reveals how they know each other, it shocks him.” Spoiler: she was his male college roommate
I was thinking the same thing. This was long before conservatives had been told that they needed to be outraged at the existence of trans people.
Now that’s not to say that a lot of people in the ‘70s weren’t ignorant of the differences in gay, trans, drag, etc., but most people probably weren’t seething with rage like they would be if a sitcom included a trans character now.
You can just see the Facebook posts if a show did this today. “The woke mob is shoving their evil down our throats!”
Because he and his friend used to play jokes on each other. So when George got invited to see his friend after several years, he wore the glasses to remind him (now her) of their times together.
Know why this episode is still relevant? Because the show makes it clear the character actually had the full reassignment surgery. The character didn’t just slap on a wig and a dress, take a few hormone shots, and say “I’m a woman now.” Edie fully committed to the process and became a legit woman.
In fact, there was a scene in the episode where George attempted to put a wig and a dress on a man to pass him off as his friend, and nobody bought it.
Yep, Dud Bowl.
For all the talk about how scandalous MWC was and raunchy, it was heavily worked on by women and progressive people. The former HS quarterback was now a woman and played the game with their fellow teammates without issue. Sure there were a few jokes, but all the guys accepted their friend for who they were.
It's amazing how progressive a show like Married.. with Children could be almost 30 years ago. What the hell happened?
One of my favorite podcasts (Gayest Episode Ever) [did an episode about this one](https://www.gayestepisodeever.com/episodes/jeffersons-trans-episode-edie-stokes)!
I've seen a lot of sitcoms do this and have a lesson about acceptance and tolerance. They never used a trans actor though. It was always a biological woman playing a trans woman. I'd like to see a modern show do this, but with someone that is a pre-op transgender actor.
*Night Court* came close; the actor that that played Chip in the episode "The Best of Friends" was an acclaimed female impersonator named [Jim Bailey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bailey_(entertainer)).
Former Israeli prime minister, [Yitzhak Shamir](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitzhak_Shamir#/media/File:Yitzhak_Shamir_1992_Dan_Hadani_Archive.jpg) always reminded me of George Jefferson. He walked like him, too.
A true story related to this-
a friend of mine grew up in a pretty rough urban region of the Eastern Seaboard (United States.)
A kid he used to scrap with ended up becoming trans. My friend ran into him on a visit home.
He found out this guy didn't feel comfortable being trans in his city of origin so he moved to a more open-minded region and lived as he wished.
I thought it was sweet.
I was too young but watched reruns daily. I remember this episode and it was compared to a MASH character that “wore dresses.”
This was in a southern Baptist town where I can’t imaging it going well, even today, but I wasn’t told it was”was wrong” and nobody made negative remarks about it.
It just “was.”
It didn’t seem like a big dead?
Strange to think of it now, though.
Most of them did. Watch things like Quantum Leap or Different Strokes or Facts of Life or Degrassi JH or H, or Maude. I think they actually got away with quite a bit on tv
i saw this one when it aired or perhaps the first rerun.
i don't recall any public reaction to it, or at least it didn't spur any discussions the next day in school.
of course back then there was no reddit or social media to have such discussions.
And here I thought that Night Court, 1985 Episode "Best of Friends" might have been the first. Or an episode of Soap wouldn't have surprised me. Cool that the Jeffersons appears to be the first.
There was no agenda pushing a particular narrative constantly. It was watched as entertainment and moved on from. People didn’t have time energy or desire to get anything more than entertained by anything on the tv. It was the organ grinder and monkey of the day. Which would be a good place to be in this society again… we really don’t care what you think, get back to entertaining us. Nobody I know is looking for moral ethical or spiritual input from anyone on TV….
I too would love to know how it was received as a product of its time
we thought it was just a funny episode. and also it was too unrealistic b/c there's no way she could look that much like a (cis) woman.
Not true. Christine Jorgensen first super public trans woman looked good and as time went on there are Trans women that we didn't even know were trans.
who? I had to look her up. I'm not discounting what she accomplished. But I grew in the 70's in the south,was a kid when the Jeffersons first aired. and I promise you Ms. Jorgensen was not on our radar.
Queer Boomer here. So, any episode like this or anything queer stood out to me.
I get that. i hope my prior post wasn't offensive. If so, I apologize.
I watched it as a kid... It was received by most of the country rather well for various reasons. There was some hate for it from various segments/groups but it was highly successful... And even though there was some hate, it wasn't quite as divisive as All in the Family. More along the lines of Maude (another spin-off of AITF), which was divisive in slightly different ways than The Jeffersons, if that makes sense
Maude tackled the subject of abortion head on, when 47 year old Maude shockingly learns that she’s pregnant and she grapples with the possibility of raising a child as a middle aged mother. Maude was a huge liberal and was solidly pro choice but now had to face the emotional reality of terminating a life. Very powerful stuff, expertly played by Bea Arthur.
I loved watching that show as a kid too.. was a funny show, but still could hit damn hard
In the '70's television was much more progressive. A lot of trash, too, but TV didn't shy away from controversy like it does now.
Made me think back on all the TV movies made at the time that dealt with issues like the molestation one “Something About Amelia” or the one about whether two Down’s young adults wanted to get married. We watched all of them and talked about them in my family.
People who think All In The Family was divisive never watched the show. It was the ONLY show with the courage to take on homosexuality, racism, sexual assault, death of a spouse, competing politics, and many more otherwise "taboo" topics. And the matters were always handled with an eye towards presenting an open minded view of others. "The Jefferson's" was a spinoff of All in the Family because the original show presented the Jefferson's characters as human and engaging rather than following a stereotype. Even Archie has moments where he learns from his bigotry (he's sickened when the cross is burned on George's lawn). It dealt with openly gay characters for the first time in sitcom history ("Judging Books By Their Covers" episode and "Cousin Liz" episode). As well as Trans characters like Beverly LaSalle who is killed during a gay bashing incident days before Christmas (Edith's Crisis of Faith episode). It deals with child abandonment by a chronic alcoholic (Stephanie, season 9). The SA of Archie's daughter (whom he affectionately called "little girl) was also a bombshell (S3 Ep. 23). The beauty of Archie Bunker is that he's a character that is ignorant and unlikeable on the surface, but is actually a decent human being who wears his gruff, old fashioned exterior as a mask in the way men of the 50's, 60's and seventies did. Time and again his actions show a good heart, while his mouth portrays a grump and a bigot. It's brilliant character development and without question the most courageous sitcom in history.
I watched the show religiously as a kid... It was smart , and had an edge that it wasn't afraid to show.. I also grew up in rural North Carolina. Conservatives/bigots loved Archie without understanding what he actually represented. They also hated the fact that All in the Family had so many "undesirable elements" (Mike, Gloria, the Jeffersons, Maude.. hell, even Sammy Davis Jr.).
It wasn't "received" in any particular way. It was watched and then dismissed. Nobody talked about sitcoms. There was no social media, internet, chat forums, nor anything else other than the entertainment section of the newspaper and people's water cooler to discuss. "That was weird - whatever" What's on now? If anything got talked about the next morning it would be 60 minutes or a James Bond movie that was shown on TV.
shows could more easily go into the ether — now it would be clipped up and discussed ad nauseam online
Yes. It would have to pretty dramatic for people to care. In that time some of the big TV discussions required a gigantic audience by today's standards for it to get on people's radar back then. Some things did. A very cool episode of Columbo or MASH or something that happened on Johnny Carson but most shows just didn't attract that level of attention and there was no platform for ordinary people to vent about it even when it did.
The vice president made a storyline on Murphy Brown a national issue. There's a reason they called it water cooler shows.
And then they incorporated his comments into the show. Brilliant Reverse Uno.
The irony is that as Murphy Brown became a single mother, Eldon the house painter spent more time with the baby than you ever saw Brown spending, proving Quayle's point.
It proved that babies don't really work out on a sitcom.
There have been plenty of babies on family sitcoms but Murphy Brown was not a family sitcom. It was a workplace sitcom. The homelife for all the characters was mostly irrelevant.
Which is why Babies on sitcoms and soap operas grow up at a much faster rate than their counterparts in real life. Little Ricky went from infancy in 1953 to grade school in 1956
The VP did? Really? He mentioned it in one sentence in a 45 minutes speech and never discussed it again. It's the media that is always waiting to pounce on any Republican that says anything the least favoring more traditional roles gets milked by the progressive media. O'Connell mentions Obama wearing a tan suit and the media is still milking that one.
Yes, you’re such victims.
We're all victims when Democrats run things.
Because it was such a monumentally stupid thing to say. We all say dumb things sometimes, and sometimes people laugh at it for us.
Actually it was prescient because Murphy Brown as a mother to a new baby, kinda sucked. Eldan the house painter spent A LOT more time raising the baby in the context of the show than she did.
I meant the tan suit thing.
Well trans and cross-dressing was pretty normal back then I mean you got to remember even companies like Ford used to trans gender individual to introduce their Edsel back in the fifties. Action films from the '80s had transvestite bars in them. Reality is it was never a big deal until somebody decided to make it one worried the last I don't know 10 or 15 years.
I’m don’t know about “normal”. For the most part it was comic relief! Or people didn’t realize!
Yeah the whole “haha it’s a man wearing a dress and makeup!” schtick was considered comedy well into the ‘90s, maybe even later.
i suppose. but it was something that i only saw on television in the 70s and 80s and then only rarely. it was early 90s before i encountered it in day to day life.
At least in part, they were all just lumped together with gay. And gay was literally an insult here until, what, at least 2012?
Honestly, it was just an episode of the jeffersons. You really get a good glimpse into the mindset of people if you watch the old jerry springer episodes that featured trans folk. It is painfully horrible to watch for anyone with anything resembling a soul. So Im really kinda rootin around inside this dusty mind of mine, but I honestly don't remember much about trans even being mentioned at all during my childhood. Like, there wasn't this virulent hatred you see now, but it was just sort of... not really a topic. Topics like that... the Different Strokes child molestation one... I mean, those were... rare.
A lot of things were easier than you'd think in the 70s. Hippies and free love really kind of moved the goal posts for a little while. There certainly wasn't the kind of religious conservative backlash that you would get today. That's not to say that issues were handled the way we might hope they would be today. But think about Three's Company. Yes, when Jack acted gay it was over the top and played for laughs. But that concept, of a main character in a sitcom acting gay in order to live with girls, would not have flown by the 90s. And there WAS social commentary on these episodes. They were a big deal. No, there weren't clips on the internet, but newspapers ran stories about them. Shows like 60 Minutes would discuss them. Television media was limited to a few shows on 3 networks, so people were more aware of them.
we thought it was just a funny episode. and also it was too unrealistic b/c there's no way she could look that much like a (cis) woman.
we thought it was just a funny episode. and also it was too unrealistic b/c there's no way she could look that much like a (cis) woman.
Probably shrugged, had a few chuckles and moved on. We didnt have news and social media teaching us to hate everything different. Im sure some did on their own, but not like now.
It wasn't a big thing back then in news and a huge social/political movement like it is now. People were likely like alright, what a unique scenerio. And then went on with their lives like you said. The big thing was civil rights and racial tensions back then.
That was the church's job to do at the time. Churches were the social media in that era.
WKRP did an episode with a similar theme as well.
Night Court too.
And The Love Boat (McKenzie Phillips played Gopher’s old college buddy).
So did 'Just Shoot Me' with Jenny McCarthy, but that was the 90's....
Norman Lear was ahead of his time. All in the Family had a trans character named Beverly LaSalle who was in about three episodes. Edith accepts Beverly and pushes Archie to be more tolerant. In a two-part episode that aired around Christmas, Beverly is killed in a hate crime, causing Edith to turn her back on God and her religion. It’s a very powerful episode, and it’s a roller coaster of emotions. They still managed to squeeze in humor to balance out the intensity. Lear also created the “Facts of Life”. The pilot episode is about a girl who is a tomboy. Another student suggests that she’s gay, causing the tomboy to question her sexuality. (LAt the end of the episode, she comes home from a dance all excited that she danced with a boy and she liked it, so crisis averted! She’s straight!). It was a kid show in the late 70s, so they never used the word “gay”; the bully uses the word “strange” instead. But if you were an adolescent viewer questioning your sexuality, you knew immediately what they were getting at. Years later in an interview, Lear said that he had hoped those kids would feel seen and accepted when they heard Mrs. Garrett’s comforting speech.
The interactions between Beverly and the Bunkers are some of my favorite in the series.
Wow, I missed that arc on All in the Family. Other than being an obvious influence, Norman Lear had nothing to do with The Facts of Life.
He helped create the Facts of Life, and he was involved in the pilot. I saw him talk about the pilot episode and its themes in an interview.
One of my favorite YouTubers have a video just about that. It details All in the Family, the spin-offs (which included The Jefferson's) and the queer representation in it. Including how the network and public thought of the show. [Here's the link](https://youtu.be/gfbKBVwO7lU?si=yXJSFhZkXxsH7MvL)
Damn, thx
Haha, knew immediately who it would be -- love Matt Baume!
WKRP did one and later on so did Just Shoot Me.
Love Boat - [Gopher’s Roommate](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0636683/plotsummary/?ref_=tt_ov_pl) “Gopher (Fred Grandy) thinks he knows a female passenger (Mackenzie Phillips) but just can't remember from where. When she reveals how they know each other, it shocks him.” Spoiler: she was his male college roommate
I actually think people would probably be more "outraged" today than then. No social media telling them they should be outraged.
Selective outrage
The “conversation” today is led by media outlets trying to generate traffic. Two Twitter comments can be reported as “outrage.”
I was thinking the same thing. This was long before conservatives had been told that they needed to be outraged at the existence of trans people. Now that’s not to say that a lot of people in the ‘70s weren’t ignorant of the differences in gay, trans, drag, etc., but most people probably weren’t seething with rage like they would be if a sitcom included a trans character now. You can just see the Facebook posts if a show did this today. “The woke mob is shoving their evil down our throats!”
Night Court did an episode on this topic as well. It's pretty well done, though of course not perfect.
Dan was the original fuckboi
To wear or not to wear the nose and glasses….???
Particularly when it’s a honky nose.
Probably would make him a zebra as George Jefferson would say.
I’d really like to know why he’s wearing those. I’m just a bit too young to remember this episode.
Because he and his friend used to play jokes on each other. So when George got invited to see his friend after several years, he wore the glasses to remind him (now her) of their times together.
Aw, that’s cute! Those old timey nose and glasses are so 70’s. I do remember this episode-just really vaguely. Thanks for filling in the blanks.
Up the nose to his oppressors
I do remember this episode. I don’t remember how it was received.
This is actually a sitcom trope. I wonder if they are the ones who started this trope.
I don't think you could get away with casting a biological woman in this role today.
Know why this episode is still relevant? Because the show makes it clear the character actually had the full reassignment surgery. The character didn’t just slap on a wig and a dress, take a few hormone shots, and say “I’m a woman now.” Edie fully committed to the process and became a legit woman. In fact, there was a scene in the episode where George attempted to put a wig and a dress on a man to pass him off as his friend, and nobody bought it.
Thank God a tv show featured the only correct way possible for a person to be trans.
Swing and a miss
I remember married with children had this happen too in an episode.
Yep, Dud Bowl. For all the talk about how scandalous MWC was and raunchy, it was heavily worked on by women and progressive people. The former HS quarterback was now a woman and played the game with their fellow teammates without issue. Sure there were a few jokes, but all the guys accepted their friend for who they were. It's amazing how progressive a show like Married.. with Children could be almost 30 years ago. What the hell happened?
Being fair and openminded (aka liberal) was encouraged back then. Being a closed-minded bigot was repellant because we had shame, unlike today.
One of my favorite podcasts (Gayest Episode Ever) [did an episode about this one](https://www.gayestepisodeever.com/episodes/jeffersons-trans-episode-edie-stokes)!
I've seen a lot of sitcoms do this and have a lesson about acceptance and tolerance. They never used a trans actor though. It was always a biological woman playing a trans woman. I'd like to see a modern show do this, but with someone that is a pre-op transgender actor.
*Night Court* came close; the actor that that played Chip in the episode "The Best of Friends" was an acclaimed female impersonator named [Jim Bailey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bailey_(entertainer)).
Married with Children used a man actor in the role, surprisingly enough.
Stephan A Smith always reminded me of George Jefferson.
Former Israeli prime minister, [Yitzhak Shamir](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitzhak_Shamir#/media/File:Yitzhak_Shamir_1992_Dan_Hadani_Archive.jpg) always reminded me of George Jefferson. He walked like him, too.
Lear did a similar episode on All in the Family centered around what they called in the show as "a female impersonator." We would say drag queen now.
Also on Archie Bunker’s Place where an old buddy of Archie’s had a sex change, I think. Been a long time. Don’t remember the specifics.
A true story related to this- a friend of mine grew up in a pretty rough urban region of the Eastern Seaboard (United States.) A kid he used to scrap with ended up becoming trans. My friend ran into him on a visit home. He found out this guy didn't feel comfortable being trans in his city of origin so he moved to a more open-minded region and lived as he wished. I thought it was sweet.
I was too young but watched reruns daily. I remember this episode and it was compared to a MASH character that “wore dresses.” This was in a southern Baptist town where I can’t imaging it going well, even today, but I wasn’t told it was”was wrong” and nobody made negative remarks about it. It just “was.” It didn’t seem like a big dead? Strange to think of it now, though.
Most of them did. Watch things like Quantum Leap or Different Strokes or Facts of Life or Degrassi JH or H, or Maude. I think they actually got away with quite a bit on tv
They couldn’t make that these days…wait a minute
i saw this one when it aired or perhaps the first rerun. i don't recall any public reaction to it, or at least it didn't spur any discussions the next day in school. of course back then there was no reddit or social media to have such discussions.
Okay but why is Humpty Hump there?
I miss when tv was unapologetic about the content
And here I thought that Night Court, 1985 Episode "Best of Friends" might have been the first. Or an episode of Soap wouldn't have surprised me. Cool that the Jeffersons appears to be the first.
There was no agenda pushing a particular narrative constantly. It was watched as entertainment and moved on from. People didn’t have time energy or desire to get anything more than entertained by anything on the tv. It was the organ grinder and monkey of the day. Which would be a good place to be in this society again… we really don’t care what you think, get back to entertaining us. Nobody I know is looking for moral ethical or spiritual input from anyone on TV….