Three's Company: Jack Be Quick

Something's gotta give.

Three's Company: Jack Be Quick
ABC
September 27, 1983
Sitcom
DVD
B

In its seventh season, 3'sC was still #6, but here in the eighth season it dropped out of the Top Thirty.  And remember how I had all those shows I was juggling in the '78-79 season?  This is pretty much it for '83-84.

So what happened?  The short answer is The A-Team, but that doesn't explain the so-called Death of the Sitcom.  We need to go back a few years, to the tumultuous second half of the '70s, when TV shows were being cancelled left and right.  Not just sitcoms, but that's what this blog is primarily interested in.  At some point-- '84, '85?-- we looked around the landscape and the only '70s sitcom still around was the under-rated, and very specifically demographically popular, Facts of Life.  Shows from 1980 to 1983 came and went, some of them good shows that never found a home, like Bosom Buddies and Square Pegs.

It wasn't that I was only watching Three's Company in 1983.  In fact, 1982 saw the premieres of Cheers, Family Ties, and Newhart.  And I liked them all better in their first few seasons.  By the time they left the air during or just after the George Bush, Sr. administration, I was tired of all of them.  So, no, I didn't buy them on DVD, although we will be examining the last episode of Newhart for obvious reasons.  (I might also have Family Ties's finale on VHS, taped for historical purposes.)  As the '80s wore on, there would be fewer shows I'd embrace, and overwhelmingly they would be ones I discovered on cable, either in reruns or as cable originals.

And it was in either '82 or '83 that the sitcom was declared dead as a format, like Westerns, and it wasn't coming back.  Then in '84, yes, Cosby happened.  But things were different now.  The A-Team went up against Three's Company (and later Three's a Crowd) and it became Top Ten viewing.  Even a Three's Company loyalist like me missed an episode or two in the final season.  (Which would give me a whole different perspective on the conclusion, which I'll discuss when we get there.)

All this background is to explain not only why this final season of 3'sC is going to get a disproportionate amount of attention (as will the first half of the run of Who's the Boss? immediately afterwards), but also why this episode is both so good and yet so sad.

In this Staretski & Rips story, Joanna Kerns returns, this time as Cheryl, a sophisticated, successful journalist.  (Maggie Seaver would also be a reporter, a couple years later on Growing Pains.)  On the surface, we're back to the sex farce we started with six and a half years ago, as she wants her boyfriend Jack to father her child out of wedlock.  But even at the time, I was struck by the relatively conservative reaction Jack has, arguably more conservative than when he thought Janet wanted a stranger to father her child and Jack wished she'd at least asked him.  He makes a heartfelt speech about the importance of a father in a child's life.  And there's nothing wrong with this, but I do have to point out that this is not the same "jiggle show" that had the proto-Moral-Majority up in arms in the Soap days.


And yet, as with the David-mustache episode, there are some interesting things going on just below the surface.  For one thing, there is a scene where Jack is in his underpants, a shirt, and tie and he wants Terri to hem his trousers.  Larry walks in as Jack gets dressed and of course misunderstands.  But Terri goes with it, letting Larry think that something might've happened.  None of the previous blondes would've done this.  (Some versions of Janet might've.)  And then of course there's the Janet-telling-Jack-to-do-the-right-thing scene, when she thinks Jack already got Cheryl pregnant and is abandoning her.  Both Janet and Terri think the right thing to do would be to marry her, but of course Jack thinks Janet wants him to get Cheryl pregnant.  So there are strains that are consistent with the show as a whole but yet ones that are, well, showing the strain of adapting to a relatively more conservative time, while still keeping the farce going.  And of course, the biggest joke on Three's Company is that, even in the earliest episodes, almost no one got laid.  They just talked about it a lot.

About the still at the top, when Cheryl asks Jack to father her child, he's so surprised that the champagne pops in a way that would make Frank Tashlin proud.  It's the sort of racy-for-the-'50s gag that I still didn't get at 15 (I was both a very savvy and a very naive youngster), but now symbolizes to me tensions on the show that weren't just sexual.

Because there's the other thing about Season Eight.  With only John Ritter aware that the producers wanted to Robin's-Nest-ify Jack Tripper, there's also the subtext of open auditions for the role Mary Cadorette would win.  Kerns would've arguably been a fascinating choice, no offense to Cadorette, but it may be that she's too together for Jack, in the same way that Loni Anderson couldn't have plausibly played Chrissy Snow and had trouble paying the rent.

We'll see where the twenty remaining episodes take us, but this is definitely an interesting starting point.