When Normal Sitcoms Get Weird

There are, to make a very broad generalization, two kinds of sitcoms -- those that engage in a silliness bordering on (and sometimes all together crossing the border of) outright fantasy, and those that try to ground themselves in reality and find their humor through familiarity, making audiences think, "it's funny because it's true!" Not much of a fan of sitcoms in general, the few that I do like tend to fall into that latter category. Yet and still, every once in a while, the "realistic" sitcoms try to experiment with the other style -- and when they do, the results are sometimes brilliant, sometimes insane (and not in a good way), and always, always confusing as all get-out, leaving viewers wondering, "what the heck did I just watch?"

Here is a list of the most memorable "huh-whaaa?" episodes from otherwise normal and sane sitcoms of the eighties:

1. The Cosby Show -- Dr. Huxtable is abducted by the Muppets. If you want a sitcom grounded in reality, you don't have to go much further than The Cosby Show, whose very first episode became famous for the scene in which Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable (Bill Cosby) uses Monopoly money to teach his son about the realities of living on your own without a proper education. And for the vast, vast majority of its run, The Cosby Show stayed true to this agenda, finding humor in truth about family dynamics. But season six treated us to not one, but two episodes that were entirely dream sequences, allowing the writers to explore bizarre concepts that their realistic format otherwise would never allow. In the first of these "it was only a dream" episodes, alien spores caused men to become pregnant. A wacky concept to be sure, but thematically, it actually made more than a little sense; the main character of the show is, after all, an OB/GYN physician, and so The Cosby Show frequently found ways to poke fun at the concept of pregnancy; and since another theme running throughout the series is the differences between men and women, a humorous exploration of how men might react to the challenges of pregnancy, and how women would respond to becoming the helplessly expectant "other" parent, is actually a logical combination of these two themes.

But, believe it or not, the "men get pregnant" episode actually comes in second place for the most wild, out-there Cosby Show episode. At least that episode took one crazy premise and ran with it. Just a few episodes later, we were treated to yet another episode taking place entirely inside Cliff's nightmare, and this one is even more of a doozy. The aptly titled episode "Cliff's Nightmare" follows Cliff's adventures wandering his house trying to find someone to help save his wife, who is dangling out the window and hanging on for dear life, but doesn't trust Cliff to try to save her by himself. Neither Claire nor Cliff comment on the bizarre post-apocalyptic background that we see behind Claire out the window.

Cliff searches the house for help, and he keeps running into relatives who have been re-cast as either bureaucrats or military officers, none of whom seem interested in helping him. In the climax, Cliff is forced at cannon-point to deliver an alien baby on the stage of the Muppet Theater, with Gonzo the Great as both assisting physician and master of ceremonies, and two old men -- Statler and Cosby himself -- heckling his progress from the balcony, as an audience of Muppet monsters cheered him on.

Bizarrely, Cliff later encounters another group of Muppets hiding in the fridge -- in the epilogue set after he has supposedly woken up from his dream!

2. Day by Day -- The son wakes up to find himself in the wrong sitcom. Day by Day was a thoroughly forgettable sitcom, notable in history for two reasons, and two reasons only: It featured later sitcom star and Emmy winner Julia Louis-Dreyfus in a supporting role, and it had an episode that crossed over with the infinitely more popular Brady Bunch. In the crossover episode, slacker son Ross Harper turns out to be a fan of the Brady Bunch TV show, because, he reasons, the Bradys always were able to solve their problems within thirty minutes (the running time of an episode). The next morning, he wakes up to find himself living the life of Chuck Brady, the "long lost" Brady son. After sending most of the episode as Chuck, and thinking that he likes being a Brady more than a Harper, Ross is dismayed to find that, yes, all of the Bradys' problems are solved within thirty minutes -- but they're also doomed to repeat those same problems again and again, due to the curse of re-runs.

More than a decade after The Brady Bunch went off the air, the original cast reunited to reprise their characters here, giving Day by Day its one and only non-Seinfeldian reason to be remembered.

3. Family Ties -- For one episode, a feel-good TV comedy turns into a dramatic theater production. If you look up the title "My Name is Alex" on the Internet, you'll find that memories of this episode of Family Ties are sharply divided, some fondly remembering it as a powerful, lingering dramatic work, others dismissing it as pretentious schmaltz. Regardless of which way you feel about it, "A, My Name is Alex" is certainly a curve-ball for regular viewers of the show. After Alex P. Keaton's friend dies in a car crash, Alex wanders around a bare stage, talking to a mostly off-screen therapist (and therefore also talking to his audience) about how the tragedy makes Alex reflect on his own life. Occasionally, a spotlight will show up on the stage, highlighting a familiar character or setting from the show, but it's mostly a one-man show starring Michael J. Fox, as he paces back and forth on the stage, telling his stage audience/ TV audience/ therapist (and ooo, wait a minute, doesn't that make us his collective therapist?) about his thoughts in a series of extended monologues.

4. Growing Pains -- One of the kids learns the truth that his entire life is a TV show. The Growing Pains episode "Meet the Seavers" has a set-up remarkably similar to Day by Day's "A Very Brady Episode": One of the familiar family kids laments that life for TV characters are so much simpler than real life, and then he wakes up to find his reality radically altered. But whereas Day by Day chose to use that premise to revive a beloved TV show from yesteryear, the Growing Pains writers decided to go in a completely different direction, and completely deconstruct their own show.

Ben Seaver (played by child actor Jeremy Miller) wakes up one morning to discover that his house is just a TV set and his "family" are just actors playing the roles of his relatives. They all think that Ben is a child actor named Jeremy Miller, and can't understand why, from their perspective, he's confusing the fictional show with reality. Most memorable scene: Ben goes to "Dad" for advice, and finds Alan Thicke, as himself, on the phone with his agent, arrogantly demanding more screen time than other B-list celebrities for some minor TV event. (Say what you will about Thicke as an actor, but he could do comedically clueless arrogance better than anyone.)

Years later, the action show Supernatural would do an episode called "The French Mistake," in which brothers Dean and Sam Winchester -- played by actors Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki -- find themselves in an alternate universe, where their lives are just a TV show, and everyone mistakes them for actors Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki. (Humorously, Sam has trouble pronouncing the actor's real last name.) Critics and fans alike called "The French Mistake" brilliant, and it sort of was -- but Growing Pains did it first.

5. Roseanne -- The cast temporarily switches roles with the cast from Gilligan's Island. I'm told that the last season of Roseanne really went off the rails, but that's the one season I've never watched. All I know is that Roseanne was indeed a show very grounded in reality. From the family's constant struggle to stay out of poverty and unemployment, to over-weight, unattractive parents (now common in sitcoms, but back then unheard of), to unsentimental treatment of "Important" issues previous sitcoms had always treated as nearly sacred, to wisecracks that sounded less like TV writers' lines and more like throw-away insults you might actually hear around the house, Roseanne knew how to capture the lives of struggling middle-class families. It's no coincidence that the early seasons of Roseanne were co-produced and co-written by some of the same people who brought us the Huxtables in The Cosby Show, for even though the Connors and the Huxtables were worlds apart in persona and personality, they were remarkably similar in their complete and thorough believability.

The season seven finale probably caused an equal amount of belly laughs and head scratching, as the familiar Roseanne characters get stranded on a desert island and find themselves falling into the personas of the characters from Gilligan's Island. Many aspects of the casting were truly inspired: The crass, nasal, overweight Roseanne Barr was so wildly miscast as the classy, husky-voiced, voluptuous Ginger Grant, that you knew it was Roseanne and her fellow writers winking an eye at the audience. Conversely, John Goodman was an obviously perfect choice to play the Skipper, while Laurie Metcalf, best known as Roseanne's sister Jackie, turned out to be surprisingly adept in the role of Gilligan. The writers also had fun with admitting that not every character had an equivalent: Roseanne and Dan became Ginger and the Skipper, but supporting character David was still just David, and thus the only character aware that everything was wrong in this alternate reality.

Arguably the best joke, though, was during the closing credits sequence, in which the original cast of Gilligan's Island showed up to reverse the tribute: Bob Denver playing it perfectly straight even in drag as Jackie, Tina Louise playing Roseanne, the elderly Russell "the Professor" Johnson playing Roseanne's teenage son-in-law -- hilarious!

6. 227 -- The characters get locked in a room with Pee-wee Herman. 227, based on a Christine Houston play about a trio of women whose friendship thrives in the inner city, regularly dealt with such themes as class struggle and poverty, and friendship and neighborhood dynamics. It was still a comedy, though, finding humor through the usual sitcom methods of misunderstandings and wisecracks.

Mary and Lester, the African-American couple forming the heart of the neighborhood, were very good people who made the best of every circumstance. For example, in the episode "Toyland," it comes to their attention that children in the hospital often don't have toys to play with, so they decide to go to the toy store and purchase toys for the poor hospital children. There, they are taken hostage by a thief, who locks them up in the store room. Crime on the streets -- hardly an out-of-place theme for 227 (even if it does give us pause to consider the possible racial stereotyping going on, equalling"African-American community" with "crime on the street").

The weirdo aspect is, the thief's other hostage is Pee-wee Herman. I don't mean actor Paul Reubens playing a different character, I mean wacky, borderline insane children's show character Pee-wee Herman. Being locked up in a creepy warehouse by an armed criminal is bad. Being locked up in the same room all day with Pee-Wee? That's gotta be so much worse.

In an odd clash of tones, the 227 characters are fully aware of their dire circumstances, and try to figure their way out of the situation using rationality, while Pee-wee, blissfully indifferent toward any danger, capers about like a child high on sugar. At one point, the regular characters try to escape by setting off the fire alarm, but when they hold their one match up to the smoke detector, Pee-wee blows it out, gleefully explaining, "safety first, only you can prevent forest fires!" Okay, he's a children's show host who's been gorged on TV catch-phrases, so it makes perfect sense for him to do that, in a way. But what's he doing in a show like this in the first place?

Granted, even Pee-wee Herman showing up in a sitcom about life in the inner city probably can't compare with a doctor being forced to perform an operation on stage while alien monster Muppets look on and an elderly doppelganger heckles you from the balcony. But it's still pretty weird.