What's With All the Orphans in 80s Sitcoms?

Gayest Episode Ever

Society & Culture, Tv & Film

4.8 • 568 Ratings

🗓️ 26 February 2025

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you grew up watching TV in the 80s, you may have noticed that there was a preponderance of… if not shows about orphans specifically then similar shows where the care of children was entrusted to people who weren't their parents and maybe didn't know how to raise kids. We're talking Diff'rent Strokes, Rags to Riches, Punky Brewster, Webster and Gimme a Break, but also The Facts of Life, Charles in Charge, My Two Dads, Full House, My Sister Sam, Silver Spoons, The Hogan Family and more. Sure, a lot of factors could explain these absent parents, but what if we told you there was a single patient zero for this whole trend? Because Drew thinks there is one, and its history stretches back to the 19th century.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Now the world don't move to the beat of just one drum
0:05.0	When you go from back to rich and all your wishes
0:11.0	Every time I turn around
0:18.0	I see the girl who turns my world around
0:22.2	Then can you
0:24.7	You made me leap without taking a look
0:28.2	Ooh
0:28.7	It takes different strokes to move the world
0:32.7	Hello and welcome to gayest episode ever
0:36.8	The podcast where we discuss the LGBT Episodes of Classics that, but not this week. Oh no, what are we doing? Talking about straight sitcoms? Yes, yes. There's going to be nothing really gay about this particular episode for reasons I want. Well, other than us. Well, I mean, we make everything gay. I'm Drew Mackey. I'm Glenn Lakin. Glenn, what TV show are we talking about this week? I have no idea. I may have some idea. Did you not do the, you didn't do the, you didn't want. Don't play this game with me because I will just have a panic attack. So we're not talking about any one episode in general. We're going to be talking about TV history because as much as we use, we discuss gay storylines on sitcoms, but I don't know if people have noticed, but this is a TV history podcast through a gay lens. I remember a while ago, someone was like, I don't like it when you don't discuss like the current events that were going on around the time the episode aired. And I was like, well, we've done 250 episodes. It's a fairly compact timeline. And there's
1:27.8	not always like a new event to tie to what we're talking about. Sometimes we're just talking
1:32.2	about the TV history of it. Oh, they meant like current events of today. Like I do. No, like the
1:37.1	gay history timeline. And it's like, well, like some of these are the same week. There's not,
1:42.2	there's not necessarily a new event. Right. No, today we are discussing what's with all the orphans and 80s sitcoms? What's with all the orphans? What's with all of them? There's too many. Is the answer Reagan? No. Oh. I know. I was happy to blame him. I mean, we're going to talk about several presidents in this conversation, but the answer is not right.
2:02.1	Okay.
2:02.6	I think what's all the... I mean, we're going to talk about several presidents in this conversation, but the answer is not right.
2:02.1	Okay.
2:02.6	I think what's all the orphans and 80s sitcoms is going to be the title of this episode, but I think
2:07.7	the not so SEO friendly thing we're investigating is what's with the preponderance of kids in 80s
2:14.7	TV being raised by someone other than their biological parents?
2:17.7	Because there was a trend in the 80s to show just that kids who were missing one or both parents
2:22.1	and who were instead being raised by someone who was not equipped for the job.
	...

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