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When Good Shows Go Bad: Growing Pains

posted 11 years ago by TMC-4
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http://www.wewantinsanity.com/am2/publish/Peter_Dawson/When_Good_Shows _Go_Bad_Growing_Pains.shtml

Been a while since I've covered an ABC show. Not really any specific reason, just it seems like NBC and CBS has a lot more memorably low-hanging fruit worth talking about. Considering that recent stats show ABC in the position NBC was in not too long ago that may not change for a while if ABC keeps doing bone-headed moves like putting one of your most hyped TV series that you could put literally almost anywhere on your schedule and get viewers up against freaking NCIS (I'm not the biggest fan of Marvel's Agents of SHIELD but seriously, what the hell). So lets go back in time and look at a classic family sitcom that went completely tits up...

The History:

By the mid-1980s family sitcoms were all the rage, and the world didn't know that Neal Marlons and Carol Black were about to launch the first of three sitcoms for ABC (the others were two little shows called The Wonder Years and Ellen): Growing Pains. Mike Sullivan and Steve Marshall (both of WKRP in Cincinnati and Gloria) would executive produce Marlons and Black went to focus on their next show. Growing Pains ran for 7 seasons on ABC and was followed up with two reunion movies, one in 2000 and another in 2004. At its peak Growing Pains was the eighth most-watched program on American television, managing to pull in roughly twenty million viewers on average during its peak during the second and third seasons. While Family Ties and Growing Pains seem pretty much cut from the same mold there is no real evidence that the latter was meant to capitalize on the former.

The Show:

Dr. Jason Seaver (fairly-uknown at the time outside of Canada Alan Thicke, father of idiot Robin Thicke) is a stay at home psychiatrist, and thus the one who spends the most time with his kids. Jason's wife Maggie (Joanna Kerns) works as a reporter. The three children are Mike (Kirk Cameron), Carol (Tracey Gold) and Ben (Jeremy Miller). Chrissy Seaver (eventually Ashley Johnson after being played by various child actors) was born later on. The family dynamic was an early focus with eyes on the parents but like many other sitcoms focus eventually fell on the children, in particular Mike. In the final season Mike effectively adopted Luke (Leonardo DiCaprio), a street kid, and tried to help turn his life around. The show was known for both defying the progression of time and playing with it, such as when Chrissy seemed to age about six years with the passage of time not entirely recognized (not the first time a sitcom has done this either).

[–] TMC-4 10 years ago

http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/showthread.php?t=13818

[–] TMC-4 9 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20061216023130/http://jumptheshark.com/g/growingpains.htm

I can't pin down an exact "time of jumping". I think the show began to show signs of a jump around the last part of the fourth season, so maybe I should just say 1989. There were so many little things that contributed to the jump. I'll try to take them in chronological order: First, the "Coach Lubbock gets fired" two-parter. They made this sound like a "very special" episode, as all the students stage a sit-in to protest his dismissal, and the Seavers get arrested for civil disobedience as Maggie reports the whole thing on her stupid local newscast. All this junk just to get a bad spin-off on the air? Definitely the first jump, although I believe it happened in season 3. Second, the kids getting older. Once Mike and Carol graduated from high school, the show soon lost the good supporting characters like Boner (who had least had that Army gig, and his father, Walter (Chekov) Koenig's Star Trek money to live off of) and Principal DeWitt(who had that second job as Larry and Balki's boss at the newspaper on Perfect Strangers) After that, Carol went from being "brainy" to being "misunderstood" with no self-esteem-or comedic potential. Tracey Gold's personal problems also started at this time, although their effects on the show happened later. Mike had several bad character developments, which I'll get to later. Then, there was a "death" episode, as they killed off Maggie's father, Ed (Gordon Jump) in a really maudlin story line where he found out he had cancer, visited a couple of times to settle his affairs, then had an off-camera death that triggered a classic psychological response from Maggie(shock, denial, grief, acceptance). I'm not sure if this happened before or after Chrissie's birth, but it was just another sign of them trying to make the show more "serious", instead of the whacky humor that was typical of the first couple of seasons. Another serious jump, occuring around the time I specified at the beginning, was the incredibly lame storyline about Jason's mom(Jane Powell) meeting a new boyfriend,(Robert Rockwell),marrying him, and causing a lot of tension with Jason. No matter how hard they tried, they just couldn't make those old geezers funny. Even the recurring guest appearences by '50s has-been singer Jerry Vale(who just happened to be an old friend of theirs, and just happened to sing at their wedding) were too contrived to be funny. All this crud tied in with Mike almost marrying that stupid bimbo who played the baby-sitter.I remember everybody was taking a cruise someplace, and Mike's engagement was the cliff-hanger ending. I didn't even realize that she got fired from the show for being in Playboy. I don't know how they explained it on the show, other than an abrupt cancellation of the wedding. At least getting rid of her useless character was a semi-good move. This left Mike free for a while, but he would eventually meet and fall in love with Kate(who just happened to be played by Kirk Cameron's real-life girlfriend). Bad move. Kate was totally uninteresting, and just too touchy-feely. Some of the so-called "romantic" moments between them are worse than the "Joanie and Chachi" stuff that killed Happy Days. By this time, Jeremy Miller had lost the battle with puberty(once Ben could no longer let off that ear-splitting high-pitched wail, it was too late to save him). Thus, they aged Chrissie into the annoyingly super-cute (not really) Ashley Johnson. After that, Mike became a teacher (say whaaaat?) and found Leonardo DiCaprio in the closet (on the show, I mean;-). I didn't really mind Luke, although it seems like they were trying to make him into another Ben. Then, for whatever reason, they wrote Luke out of the show midway through the season, so he could be reunited with his hick truck driving father. I guess Leo jumped out of the truck when it got to Hollywood, and the rest is history! By the final season, it was past time to end the show. Jason and Maggie's bantering became more predictable, with him still losing every argument to her By the final season, everybody was pretty much going through the motions. Even Mike's insults to Carol weren't funny any more. Tracey Gold's personal problems kept her out of about half the shows in the last year. The Giant Rabbit episode didn't help, either. At least they had one more funny episode for Ben, where he dreams he's in a martial-arts movie, complete with chessy production values, silly dialogue, and bad dubbing. And, at least they managed to do a good final episode. They shouldn't have bothered with that recent reunion movie, especially since they didn't reveal the ending(Maggie running for Congress, and Election Day coming up) in a blatant attempt to leave room for a sequel. At least Ashley Johnson looks OK now that she's grown up a little.