Transcript for Episode 39: Gimme a Break's Gay Evening
This is the transcript for the installment of the show in which we discuss the Gimme a Break episode “The Chief’s Gay Evening.” If you’d rather listen to Glen and Drew than read what they say, click here. The transcript was provided by Sarah Neal, whose skills we recommend wholeheartedly.
Chief: How the hell can you be gay?
Officer Jerry: How the hell can you be Polish?
[audience laughter]
Chief: Because my grandparents came from Poland, but even if yours came from San Francisco that’s still no excuse.
[audience laughs]
Officer Jerry: Carl, I don’t need an excuse to be what I am.
Chief: Boy, I don’t have enough trouble wondering about some nut beating women up in the laundromats? Now I got to worry if one of my cops will be directing traffic in a tutu.
[audience laughs]
[“Intro (Gimmie a Break)” performed by Jackpot L. Money plays]
Drew: Hello and welcome to Gayest Episode Ever, the podcast where we talk about the LGBT-focused episodes of classic sitcoms, which is to say the very special episodes that also happen to be very queer episodes. I’m Drew Mackie.
Glen: That’s correct, and I am Glen Lakin.
Drew: You are. And in case that intro did not tip you off—and it might not, because some people might not actually remember this show—today we are talking about Gimme a Break!.
Glen: Which intro are you going to use? Or which intro did you use?
Drew: Which intro song you mean?
Glen: Yeah.
Drew: Oh. I don’t know, because we could use the one from this era (which is appropriate for the episode) or the new one (which I think happened the next year).
Glen: Yeah. Both are good. One is better. I’m not going to say which one.
Drew: Okay. Great. Gimme a Break!, if you don’t know, was a sitcom starring Nell Carter that ran for six seasons on NBC for one hundred thirty episodes from October 29, 1981, to May 12, 1987. Glen, what was your experience with this show?
Glen: Oh, my goodness. I watched it a bunch. It was on in syndication while it was still on real time, and I pretty much watched it most afternoons. I loved the Addy episodes—Addy being Nell’s best friend.
Drew: Played by Telma Hopkins (a.k.a. Aunt Rachel).
Glen: And—I don’t know. I don’t think I ever grasped what the actual concept of the show was. I just thought that Nell was their housekeeper.
Drew: It’s very hard to figure that out.
Glen: Yeah. And after watching the episode that we’re going to talk about today I went and watched the Season Three episode called "The Flashback," which sort of clears up what the whole situation is.
Drew: When we get to the part where I explain the basic concept of the show, please explain that to me because I would like to know.
Glen: But yeah, I was a big fan of the show. I have very vivid memories of particular episodes, like when Katie is in a band and she shows Nell the outfit she’s going to wear and it’s gold chains and I was like, “Oh her nipples would show through that," like, that was a very early prepubescent thought of mine. And I remember when Jonathan Silverman joined the cast and I was like, “He’s cute and funny.”
Drew: I had no idea that he was on the show until I read the Wikipedia page for it. I don’t remember that. I remember that character sort of. I don’t remember him at all. Jonathan Silverman, by the way, is The Single Guy.
Glen: He’s so much more Drew. He’s also in Girls Just Want to Have Fun.
Drew: And Weekend at Bernie’s. He’s a triple threat.
Glen: Yes, and he's also in Caddyshack II.
Drew: Oh. I did not know that.
Glen: I would love to talk about Caddyshack II sometime.
Drew: That is our bonus Patreon. Every episode’s about Caddyshack II.
Glen: And, of course, Joey Lawrence has a place in all of our hearts. I didn’t realize that he showed up actually earlier in the series than I had thought.
Drew: I thought he showed up right at the end when it moves to New York randomly, and that is not true.
Glen: Nope. Showed up Season 3.
Drew: Okay. So I remember loving this show and I remember loving Nell Carter, and I think I was not watching it in syndication because I don’t remember Chief at all as a character—and by the way, the episode we’re talking about is "The Chief’s Gay Evening," which is the seventh episode of Season 2, which aired November 13, 1982, when I was about five and a half months old, so I did not see it on first airing. I’m not sure what to call it. We might just call it "Chief’s Gay Evening" because the title actually matches our naming style.
Glen: Yep. That’s what the episode is about.
Drew: But I don’t remember the chief. I don’t remember the oldest daughter. I kind of remember the younger two daughters—the middle daughter is the one who marries Jonathan Silverman, right?
Glen: Correct.
Drew: And then the youngest daughter is—
Glen: Samantha.
Drew: Samantha grows up—like, she stops being like a little tomboy, right?
Glen: Yes.
Drew: Okay. I mostly just remember, I think, the last season, which is in New York where there are two Lawrence brothers and Rosie O’Donnell, which is weird.
Glen: Yeah. That’s not the best season.
Drew: No, but it’s weird that most of my memory was based on this. I actually had to do a lot more research than I thought I would have to do to figure out who all these people are. In case you don’t know, Gimme a Break! had Nell Carter playing Nell Harper, who moves in with the Kan—
Glen: Kanisky.
Drew: —Kanisky Family, thank you.
Glen: They’re Polish, Drew.
Drew: That was established in this episode very clearly. Kazinsky could also be Polish, for the record. [She moves in] to fulfill a promise to a friend who was dying of cancer that she would become the family’s housekeeper? Is that accurate?
Glen: Yes.
Drew: Okay. That’s a weird—
In the flashback episode, I believe Sharon is the mother’s name. Her and Nell are old friends from Chicago and Nell moves to—or is performing a show in the town where Sharon, or close to where Sharon is living with Chief.
Drew: It’s like Lawnberg or Green Lawn or something. It’s actually unclear where in California it’s supposed to be, but it’s California.
Glen: Yeah, it’s California—and they start hanging out and reminiscing and Sharon tells Nell, “Oh, why don’t you just stay with us until you figure out what your next gig is, while you're getting on your feet?” And when Nell gets an offer to perform in Bakersfield or some lame place—sorry Bakersfield. I think you were just ranked worst city in California to live.
Drew: Sounds right. Prove me wrong, Bakersfield.
Glen: Sharon tells Nell that she is dying and that one of the reasons she had Nell stay with them was to see how Nell would be with her children—which is sort of fucked up—and Sharon is very, “Carl is a great father in many ways, but he cannot raise these children. He will just yell at them. That’s all he knows.”
Drew: Accurate.
Glen: And in watching this episode it sort of became clear to me that I don’t actually remember any romantic interests for either Nell or Addy and this relationship with Sharon made me realize that why I kind of clung to Nell and Addy was kind of a lesbian relationship.
Drew: We’re going to get to that.
Glen: Oh, good.
Drew: It’s interesting that you bring that up for something that we’ll get to in probably the next seven or eight minutes.
Glen: Oh, perfect.
Drew: So at no point in the series do they ever play up the idea of a romance between Nell and Carl, correct?
Glen: No.
Drew: Okay. It’s just super weird that the—
Glen: It was played as a joke in a flashback episode.
Drew: What do you mean?
Glen: I mean one of the way Nell distracts Carl from getting mad at Sharon for something is by talking about how hot he was in his boxer briefs when they first met.
Drew: Oh, interesting.
Glen: It was just a joke.
Drew: Okay. So it’s weird that she is the housekeeper and she’s referred to as such (at least in the descriptions I read) because the situation you’re describing, you’d be like, “Oh. This is at least a caretaker or a guardian.” I don’t like it that they call her "the housekeeper," even though she is doing housework—and apparently she’s bad at it, which is the joke in the opening that she vacuums up—
Glen: She vacuums up the goldfish. I, as a child, found that hilarious to no end.
Drew: Had not thought about that until I watched it this time. I was like, “Oh, right.”
Glen: I think about it all the time. But you’re right it’s very much just—I was going to say Modern Family. It’s very much an unconventional family structure but it was a family, and she is playing the mother role and is sort of the established mother for these children, so it’s weird. You wouldn’t call a stepmom a housekeeper and you wouldn’t call a foster mom a housekeeper.
Drew: Right. She basically is a stepmom, but they never decide to make them love interests for each other, which is sort of weird in that—I mean, I guess they would make a terrible couple.
Glen: Oh, my god yes. And that’s part of the concept of the show. It's two people who have different views who don’t like each other who are forced to raise children together.
Drew: That’s also kind of the premise of Who’s the Boss, which also made those two people a couple.
Glen: Right. Well, they’re both very attractive.
Drew: They are. Okay. So Dolph Sweet plays the widower Chief Carl Kanisky, and the three daughters are Katie, Julie, and Sam played by Kari Michaelson, Lauri Hendler, and Lara Jill Miller—who are fairly minor characters in this episode. I was unable to find out if this show was made specifically for Nell Carter or if it was an existing idea that they wrote the character to match her natural personality, but very clearly, she is Nell Harper there’s very little—yeah. Duh.
Glen: Yeah. Nell Harper is a semi-accomplished singer/performer, as is Nell Carter.
Drew: Nell Carter is a fascinating character and I thought I knew stuff about her but until I did some research—she is a mess of contradictions neatly summed up by a post on the World of Wonder website, which is a blog, basically, that describes her as “Black, Southern, Jewish, Lesbian, Right-Wing Conservative. Carter was a giant talent in a tiny (4-foot 11 inch), if expansive frame.”
Glen: "If expansive" is a lovely euphemism.
Drew: She’s a very curvy lady, and that is going to be important shortly. But I guess, in general, I was surprised. Watching this I was worried that she would be denuded of any sort of sexiness—and you’re right, I don’t remember her having a love interest on the show. However, there was a sensuality to her presence and the way she speaks lines—there’s a flirtatiousness to it that you see multiple times in the episode. Maybe it’s just when she talks to men who aren’t Chief, which she gets the opportunity to do here, but she’s not asexual.
Glen: Yeah. She’s not sexless. It’s just romance wasn’t necessarily ever a driving through-line of the series.
Drew: Which is interesting, which again we will get to shortly. Over the course of her career, including at the beginning of the show, she battled a cocaine addiction that she credited her very good friend Liza Minnelli with helping her get over. So those people were friends in real life. Imagine what it would be like to be at a party with Nell Carter and Liza Minnelli—on cocaine.
Glen: I already imagine that in my free time, and I will continue to do so.
Drew: She’s in Hair. She sings the song, White Boys.
Nell Carter: White boys are so pretty/Skin as smooth as milk/White boys are so pretty/Hair like Chinese silk
Drew: I have seen Hair and did not put it together that the woman who looks kind of like Nell Carter and sings just like Nell Carter is Nell Carter. And she was a Broadway person. She had a lot of success on Broadway and was actually going to play Effie in Dreamgirls. She would have originated the role but left it to do TV. I honestly can’t say what the better decision might have been.
Glen: Oh, TV.
Drew: I mean, Broadway people who listen to this show are going to be very annoyed that I don’t know the name of the woman—is it Jennifer Holiday? I think it’s Jennifer Holiday? I don’t know for sure. I don’t know Broadway. She was nominated for a Golden Globe and an Emmy for Gimme a Break!, and after it ended she eventually joined the cast of Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper—which should be a good thing, but it was the season they kicked off Dawnn Lewis and replaced her with that annoying mom with Raven-Symoné.
Glen: Oh.
Drew: Yeah. It just wasn’t good. And Nell Carter played the principle so she was like, an authority figure. No.
Glen: There’s nothing between Gimme a Break! and Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper?
Drew: She was acting in other stuff and I think she made a few appearances on Brotherly Love because of the connection with the Lawrence brothers. Apparently, she maintained good relationships with all the child actors on the show—
Glen: That makes me feel good.
Drew: —though not all the adult actors.
Glen: Oh, no.
Drew: Yeah. She died in 2003 at only 54 years old, and even though it’s been a long time since I’ve seen her on video, when I saw her I realized, “Oh, my gosh. I miss Nell Carter.” I didn’t really realize that until I saw her again—like, how much I liked her as a kid. I also forget that she’s dead and I’m like, “Oh, that’s right. She died.” It makes me sad every time I think about it.
Glen: Yeah.
Drew: Arguably she was not straight. She was married to two men. At the time she died, she was in a 15-year relationship with a woman who took custody of her children.
Glen: Oh.
Drew: And I have no idea if that was happening at this point in Nell’s life, but that is where her life went. She never officially came out as anything—she probably didn’t want to, and her surviving partner is a very private person. I could not even find a picture of her online. Now I have to talk about something that is probably something that we probably shouldn’t be able to comment on—
Glen: Oh, good.
Drew: —but we're going to carefully tread around it. It was my concern going into this—how much she was a "mammy" character.
Glen: Okay.
Drew: So I was listening to You Must Remember This, the Hollywood podcast that has recently come back, and they’re doing a season all about Song of the South. The second episode of the series was about Hattie McDaniel who was nominated for and won an Oscar for her role playing Mammy in Gone with the Wind and who after that Oscar win had trouble finding big roles and ended up playing lesser roles that a lot of people said were mammies, including in Song of the South, which Karina Longworth described as “a thankless role." If you’re wondering why Hattie McDaniel would have taken this role relatively soon after Gone with the Wind, this is the reason: She had trouble finding other roles. So I was looking around to see what kind of essays have been written about Nell Carter’s character on this show and almost across the board a lot of people think that she is a mammy character.
Glen: Oh, no.
Drew: Oh, yeah.
Glen: For listeners who aren’t aware—because they’ve never looked us up—Drew and I are both cis-white men.
Drew: Yes. Do we need to explain what a "mammy" is?
Glen: Yes. Probably.
Drew: Okay. So a mammy is a character type that shows up in movies, TV, books and is a woman who is not given a lot of agency. She’s Black. She’s usually not a slave because it’s usually post-Civil War, but she continues to live with white families and work for white families, and she doesn’t seem to have a life outside of working for these people. And she doesn’t seem to exist for many other reasons other than dutifully working because she likes to work, and it’s offensive. Hattie McDaniel did play roles that were kind of subverting that, and in some ways Mammy in Gone with the Wind was supposed to subvert that, but it’s not something that apparently translated to the final product as well as they would have wanted.
Glen: I mean from that description alone—again, not from a place of actually being able to argue one way or another if the character was offensive, I do think a large part of the show was Nell’s outside life, although, again, nothing about her relationships stuck out to me. I remember vividly her friend circle—Addy primarily—and I remember the episodes where they explored her past and past friendships and past jobs and even her church life. We’ll probably talk about the blackface episode, but Nell was portrayed as not just a member of the community, but an important member of the community. I feel like people who came into the house (Carl’s coworkers, almost always cis-white men) paid her respect or treated her with friendship from what I remember.
Drew: In this episode someone meets her for the first time and assumes that she is Carl’s wife, actually.
Glen: Yeah.
Drew: And that’s treated as a joke, sort of, but not in that offensive of a way. I’m inclined to agree with you based on my memory of the show. This is the only episode I rewatched, so I couldn’t give you details. I thought the best way to handle this would be like, “Look at what Black writers are saying about the show and this is how they saw it.” They have an insight that we don’t. There’s a woman named Bebe Moore who in 1983, wrote an article for the Washington Post where she said:
“Gimme a Break!, the primetime sitcom portraying the ups and downs of a gruff police chief, his three giggly teenage daughters, and his comical housekeeper has long been on my list of IQ destroyers—watch three times and you’ll begin all sentences with “duh.” But after my six-year-old begged and pleaded one night, we would up in front of the tube," blah, blah, blah. “Enter Nell Carter, the Black housekeeper, and a whole lotta' woman by anyone’s standards. Carter placed her considerable girth on the edge of the bed and predictably it crashed to the floor. My daughter and the studio audience whooped with laughter. I groaned. My child is slim on historical perspective, but I was born in the Golden age of television and I know a mammy when I see one. And that is what Nell Carter is portraying.”
There are a few articles that are like this, and some people actually talk about liking the show growing up and then realizing after the fact that she was a mammy character. However, I did love both Nells—Nell Harper and Nell Carter—and I don’t quite know what to make of the idea that this might have been offensive to people back in the day.
Glen: Yeah. I’m not arguing that it may not have been offensive to viewership then and now. I just never thought of that character type applying to main characters because it seemed to be something that applied to someone who was there only to service the main character and Nell is the main character.
Drew: True.
Glen: Now, Nell’s there as a mother and "housekeeper" to make the lives of those she’s caring for easier, but I never saw her role as being supportive of the other costars. The spotlight was always hers.
Drew: That’s how I feel about it, too. I thought of her as a mom who just wasn’t a biological mom, but it is an interesting thing. And just running parallel with Song of the South, Hattie McDaniel was also a singer and a songwriter and had a creative life that was rich offscreen, and a lot of people thought that she was being reduced to that role in movies, and some of the essays I read said the same thing about Nell Carter, where that you wouldn’t know she was such a Broadway talent—but she does sing a lot on the show.
Glen: Yes. She does.
Drew: Like, a lot a lot.
Glen: They come up with many opportunities for her to sing.
Drew: She clearly was like, “Hey. You guys need to keep thinking of reasons why my character has to sing.” In an episode I watched that I’m going to mention a little bit later, she sing a rendition of "Georgia" and it’s really good—to Rosie O’Donnell. Yeah. I don’t necessarily feel in this episode—just based on this episode—that she was any sassier or quippier than any of the daughters were. It’s just '80s sitcom dialogue where everyone’s being snappy and doing gentle jabs at each other.
Glen: Well, she’s gone for the center chunk of this episode. In past episodes, she is given more sassy lines, but never to my memory to the point of sacrificing character for that line.
Drew: Mine either. Then there’s the blackface episode.
Glen: Yes.
Drew: Okay. So do you remember why Joey Lawrence wears blackface?
Glen: Yes. This is Joey Lawrence’s first season. This is third season.
Drew: And by the way, he’s a foster kid who gets taken in by the Kazinskys—Kaniskys. I’m sorry, I’m bad with that.
Glen: And so Samantha, the youngest daughter and previous baby of the family is feeling very threatened by him, and Nell stops her from going to a concert or a date—she stops her from doing something, and to get back at Nell she convinces Joey, who’s going to be performing at Nell’s church that what Nell would find really endearing is if Joey dressed up in blackface and performed in blackface at the church.
Drew: So yeah. The scene I saw is with—
Glen: The aftermath.
Nell: Don’t you dare eat cottage cheese while I’m yelling at you.
[audience laughs]
Samantha: What’s the matter? Didn’t all your church friends love cute little Joey?
Nell: This has nothing to do with Joey! This is between you and me.
Samantha: No, it’s not! All you care about is Joey—Joey’s report card, Joey’s song, Joey’s this—
Nell: You are being a baby!
Samantha: I’m not your baby anymore—he is!
Nell: Don’t you dare start crying on me. I never thought that I would live to see the day when you would use the word "nigger."
Samantha: Nell, that’s horrible! I would never say that!
Nell: Well, you might as well have, because that’s what you did by putting Joey in blackface. You offended me and a lot of other decent Black people.
Drew: Again, I didn’t remember exactly what the tone of this show was. It could have been like Full House level superficial, but I would actually place it more along the original One Day at a Time or verging on All in the Family sometimes—especially in this episode. It has some real All in the Family moments.
Glen: Or even like Family Ties where they had their serious episodes.
Drew: They deal with shit. They’re not pretending like bad stuff doesn’t exist like Full House does. They actually deal with stuff. I was taken aback by her speech, which I thought was very well delivered, and it was weird hearing a tidy condemnation of blackface that would have aired in 1984, I think. I don’t think I saw that episode back in the day, and I didn’t know that happened, and I was impressed that it did that. I was impressed that they took the opportunity to not only explain why blackface is inappropriate, but to put those words in the mouth of Nell.
Glen: Yeah, and because this is a gay podcast talking about gay things, it also is something that—obviously, homophobia and racism are different, but both are forms of bigotry, and I thought Nell had an interesting point that it’s so easy for our allies to go to that place when they have a disagreement with us. When a straight person is arguing with their gay friend they throw out "faggot," and as much progress as we make, in many ways it’s still too easy for people who don’t know prejudice, because they’re not a minority of any kind to just go at that very easy soft spot.
Drew: True. And by the way if any of this discussion of racial representation in ‘80s sitcoms is out of line, please tell us. We are two white guys trying our best to understand something. If there’s something we missed, we would love to know. Please tell us.
Glen: At us. Tweet at us.
Drew: Tweet at Glen, yes. The show changed a lot over the seasons, most importantly with Joey Lawrence being added in Season 3 and—
Glen: Moving to New York in Season 6.
Drew: And—
Glen: Chief dying.
Drew: So Chief dies in real life—those poor girls—and then the girls one by one are phased out of the show. They all get married off I think, and then they move to New York. Telma Hopkins plays Addy, and Addy goes with her, and Chief’s dad also goes with her to New York—for reasons I don’t think are explained.
Glen: Yeah. He sells the house while Nell is in New York sorting out Joey Lawrence’s situation with his with his real father and brother. Grandpa sells the house and then moves to New York.
Drew: Matthew Lawrence also joins the show, playing Joey Lawrence’s character’s little brother, and then there’s Rosetta LeNoire, who played Grandmother Winslow on Family Matters. She plays Nell’s mother, which is nice because that means that Telma Hopkins and Rosetta LeNoire liked each other enough to work together twice. Telma Hopkins is not in this episode—and I’m really sorry, but I have to talk about why I think Telma Hopkins is cool.
Glen: That’s fine. She’s a recurring character, not main cast until later seasons.
Drew: Right, but she’s there from the beginning as Nell’s good friend, and she’s contrasted with Nell. She has a Ph.D. in something.
Glen: Yeah.
Drew: What is she?
Glen: I forget. But she has a Ph.D. Actually, reading her character bio, she’s a big deal.
Drew: So Nell’s the artsy one and she’s the one who’s an academic.
Glen: Yeah.
Drew: Telma Hopkins has had a really cool career. You might have noticed that she was in Dead to Me on Netflix earlier this year. She played one of the women in the grieving support group and, by the way, she looks amazing. Her career on TV goes back to Bosom Buddies where she’s one of the girls. Maybe one day we can find a way to work a Bosom Buddies episode into this and we can talk about Telma Hopkins again.
Glen: Yeah. I mean. I feel like any episode of Bosom Buddies might touch on something we’d want to talk about.
Drew: I haven’t seen it in forever. Since it was in syndication, I thought it was a show for kids, because it was on at maybe four o’clock in the afternoon, so why would that be an adult show? She was originally a backup singer. She is one of the singers in the theme to Shaft, the one that says—
Shaft: You see this cat Shaft is a bad mother
Backup Singer: Shut your mouth!
Shaft: But I’m talkin’ about Shaft
Backup Singer: Then we can dig it
She eventually became part of Dawn as in Tony Orlando & Dawn. It’s confusing because you might think Dawn is a person, but she’s actually two people—the other one being Joyce Vincent Wilson. The funny thing about Tony Orlando & Dawn is that their first hit single is called "Candida"—
Whoa my, Candida/We could make it together
Drew: —which is the name for the yeast that gives you a yeast infection, but in the song "Candida" is the name of a pretty girl. I don’t know if they knew that. I mean that had to mean yeast infection back then, but I guess no one told them, which in their favor I guess that means they probably didn’t get a lot of yeast infections.
Glen: Undiagnosed.
Drew: And then they did "Knock Three Times" on the ceiling and "Tie a Yellow Ribbon." I think a lot of people think they might be cheese and camp, but they do a cover medley of "Imagine Me and You and You and Me ("Happy Together") and "Runaway," that '50s song, and it is sort of amazing.
Yeah, Yeah (Ah-ah-ah)/I was walkin’ in the rain (Ah-ah-ah, in the rain)/In the park and I feel a pain (Ah-ah-ah)
Drew: And I don’t remember her ever singing on Family Matters. Did she?
Glen: I think she may have. I want to say a Christmas episode.
Drew: That might make sense. I remember the episode with Dawn—
Glen: I know she sang on Gimme a Break!
Drew: I don’t remember that.
Glen: One of their other friends comes to town or they go to where they’re from, and the three of them sing a lovely little number.
Drew: I’ll have to look it up. I wonder how Nell felt about having another singer on the show.
Glen: I don’t know. I was worried that you were going to tell me they hated each other—oh, dear.
Drew: Also, before I abandon this entirely, do you know that Telma Hopkins is in the first three Trancers movies playing the same role?
Glen: The first few what?
Drew: Trancers? Trancers. You know that series—T-R-A-N-C-E-R—where people can—
Glen: Oh, yeah.
Drew: She’s in those.
Glen: Oh!
Drew: Isn’t that weird? I had seen those movies and didn’t realize that Aunt Rachel was in them, and that seemed important to me. So in the last season of the show Rosie O’Donnell joins the cast as their neighbor in the New York building they live in. Her name is Maggie or something. Apparently, they really did not get along. This is something I have no evidence of. I haven’t had an interview where they said directly that they hated each other, but that is the prevailing sentiment on DataLounge—which is the worst place to go for celebrity gossip ever because it’s a bunch of mean gay people just saying the worst things about celebrities. Rosie O’Donnell has said in interviews that Nell was not nice to her, that Nell would only address her as her character’s name, though other people said that that’s what Nell did to everyone for the benefit of the kids who were in the cast.
Glen: Well, also Nell’s character name was her name.
Drew: So maybe that’s just what she thought [laughs]. The beef does not seem to be anything to do with both Rosie and Nell being gay, if we’re going to call Nell Carter gay—which I guess I am right now. But also, according to some people, she was maybe a little jealous when she thought Telma Hopkins' character got too many laugh lines, but that’s a normal sitcom thing. So they didn’t hate each other, but that is something I had read. Also, I can’t really believe most of what I read on DataLounge. Also, if most of the information about the beef comes from Rosie O’Donnell, you have to acknowledge that Rosie O’Donnell herself is probably not the easiest person to work with in the world.
Glen: What?! Tell that to Dan Aykroyd.
Drew: [laughs] I heard that Donald Trump doesn’t even like her. Can you believe that?
Glen: What?! No!
Drew: There is this episode I watched because I thought it might be another gay episode, and it’s interesting. Joey Lawrence has a crush on Rosie O’Donnell’s character—
Glen: Okay.
Drew: —and her husband visits, and he’s hostile toward the husband who’s visiting New York—because they’re from Georgia? I don’t really understand what’s going on here. The husband wants to take her back to Georgia, and she’s like, “No, I want to stay in New York.” And then Rosie’s boss comes over to talk about how he’s going through a divorce, and he gets really upset because he thinks that this very good-looking dentist boss of his wife is having an affair with her and tries to take her back to Georgia to prevent her from having an affair with this handsome guy, and then the doctor speaks with Nell offscreen and then Nell delivers the news, “We don’t have to worry about it. Turns out he’s gay.” And—
Glen: Laugh line.
Drew: No.
Glen: No?
Drew: No. It’s not treated as a laugh line and the way it’s introduced—this is 1987 maybe, at the latest. It’s treated as no big deal. No one’s surprised that there’s a gay person. It takes place in New York at this point, but it’s not a "very special episode." The gayness of this person on what is essentially a family show is treated as no big deal, and that is crazy because we don’t really see that kind of dynamic on other shows that we would have grown up with. It took a while to get there.
Glen: How handsome was he?
Drew: Extremely handsome. I’ll show you a picture of him.
Glen: Great.
Drew: You could look him up on IMDb. He’s still decent looking today. The episode we're talking about however—which does not have a handsome dentist in it—aired on a Saturday as part of an all-new schedule that included Diff’rent Strokes, Silver Spoons, and in the 9:30 time slot Love, Sidney. Have we talked about that? I can’t remember if we’ve talked about that.
Glen: I feel like we maybe did.
Drew: Tony Randall and Swoosie Kurtz. It was the one that started out as a TV movie about an older gay man living a single life in New York and they adapted it into a sitcom—and then the network made him go back in the closet, so he just never talked about his sexuality. Yeah. Two seasons. Tony Randall, also.
Glen: So we’re going to watch it?
Drew: We should watch it one day. Most of it's online and young Swoosie Kurtz is almost enough to make me interested. I think it has a good rest of the supporting cast, but—
Glen: That lineup before is stellar.
Drew: I know. I would have stayed home on a Saturday night. I would stay home on a Saturday night now to watch those four episodes back-to-back-to-back, which you could probably do on YouTube if you want to.
Glen: So if you’re hoping for Drew to come to your Saturday night bar thing or birthday party, it’s not going to happen.
Drew: No. I’m watching old sitcoms on YouTube. I’ll even splice in old commercials from back in the time so it seems realistic—I would actually do that. I would do that. That would be fun.
Glen: So much fun.
Drew: I'm not going to do that. I don’t think Gimme a Break! ever made it into the Top 20 for the season the entire six seasons it was on TV. I guess there were a few shows that were like that where they were just never hits but were dependable enough that they got five or six seasons.
Glen: Small Wonder [laughs].
Drew: Well, no. I think that was always—was that always in syndication?
Glen: Yeah. It was always in syndication, I believe.
Drew: So it wasn’t even in—
Glen: I don’t think so.
I couldn’t find Nielsen ratings for this airing, but I did find an article from the week this aired where this apparently very stupid TV writer talking about how NBC shows weren’t doing well and how they better really try to pull it together if they want to get renewed next season, and the shows they named as being in trouble are Taxi, Silver Spoons, Knight Rider, Cheers, and Family Ties.
[laughter]
Drew: So stupid.
Glen: Immediately fired.
Drew: Also, heads up—if I sound gross it’s because I’m still fighting off an illness, which is also the reason that this—
Glen: Throat haunting.
Drew: What’s that?
Glen: Throat haunting.
Drew: I mean, that’s a good way to describe it actually. The ghost occasionally comes out and then flies back in before I can close my mouth again, and that’s why if you’re a Patreon person you’re not getting the Patreon episode as early as you normally would. I apologize.
Glen: Drew apologizes. I do not. I have done nothing wrong.
Drew: I said I apologize. I didn’t say you apologize. This episode was directed by Linda Day, a pioneering female director who specialized in sitcoms, mostly Soap, WKRP in Cincinnati, and the pilot to Married…with Children as well as newer stuff like Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Clueless (the series). The story’s by Elliot Stern and Michael Mount. The teleplay is by Chip and Doug Keyes, who are brothers. Chip went on to be the showrunner for Valerie’s Family/The Hogan Family. Can you explain to me the difference between "story" and "teleplay"?
Glen: Yeah. Feature films have that too, sometimes. Someone comes up with a story or even writes the treatment that's not necessarily writing the action and dialogue. I actually wonder if this episode started off as a stage play. Maybe that’s where those credits come from.
Drew: It does have that feeling of a two-act play with a break in the middle, like All in the Family. I thought that too.
Glen: It could also just be writers in the writers room came up with the story but didn’t actually sit down to write it. It was assigned to someone else. There’s various reasons why a story credit and a teleplay or screenplay credit would be different.
Drew: This episode won an award from GLAAD, which would have been one of the early awards GLAAD would have ever given out, but I tried to find information about it online and it’s just not really online. But good job Gimme a Break! We’re not giving anything away. I think we were both impressed by how this episode handles the portrayal of gay people.
Glen: It might be my favorite episode that we’ve watched.
Drew: It might. There’s one whole scene that I’ll be tempted to put in here in its entirety.
Glen: But do not.
Drew: No—because we’ll get sued. Hey, Glen—even though we haven’t gotten to the actual episode we’re talking about yet, you know what I think we’re already ready for?
Glen: Diet Coke—no. Pumpkin spice latté?
Drew: I mean, we can go get that later. No—commercial, not for—
Glen: Pumpkin spice lattés.
Drew: —or Diet Coke. Please sponsor us, Diet Coke.
Glen: They have lots of money.
Drew: [whispers] They have lots of money.
[theme music plays]
[Gayest Episode Ever promotes A Love Bizarre’s Feast of the Beloved Dead event and featured artist, Devin Wesley]
[an old promo for NBC Wednesday nights plays]
[Drew and Glen promote Gayest Episode Ever's Patreon]
[“Gimmie a Break” performed by Nell Carter plays]
Drew: Okay, we’re back.
Glen: From what?
Drew: The dead.
Glen: Oh, no.
Drew: Mm-hmm.
Glen: That explains a lot.
Drew: Mmm-hmm. Explains the smell. Okay. So scene one opens with Katie, who is too stupid to understand juice from concentrate.
Katie: Add three cans of water. It doesn’t even say what size cans.
[audience laughs]
Julie: What about the one in your hand?
Katie: Oh! That can! Shouldn’t I rinse it out first?
Nell: Oh baby, give me that can.
[audience laughs]
Glen: She is learning to cook to get boys to like her, and in this instance she is cooking or preparing food for her father to take on a stakeout. I have a reach-around for this scene.
Drew: Oh, do you?
Glen: I do. Katie is struggling at performing a very gendered task—because women should be good at cooking. I think this episode in a lot of ways is about masculinity and the expectations we put on men, so they are opening with the expectations we put on a woman, although in this case it’s played for comedic affect.
Drew: It’s worth also noting that of the three girls, Katie is the most—she’s like the cute blonde one and probably the most feminine one. Middle girl’s the smart one and then youngest one is like the spunky baby sister. By the way, at the time this episode aired she was dating Andy Gibb from the Bee Gees.
Glen: Oh. Good for her.
Drew: I keep forgetting their names so I’m just going to refer to them as "pretty daughter," "smart daughter," "tomboy daughter"—if that’s okay?
Glen: It’s Katie, Julie, Samantha.
Drew: I won't remember that.
Glen: Just say "blonde," "glasses," "baby."
Drew: So then Nell enters—and again, says me, my argument in favor of the fact that she’s not denuded of her sensuality and sexuality is that she’s dressed like she’s going out. She is dressed beautifully, and she’s dressed to accentuate her curves in the best possible way. She’s not dressed like a housekeeper and I’m wondering, like, “Wait. Is she performing later? Why is she dressed like that?” She’s dressed very nicely. It might just be Nell Carter being like, “I want to wear nice clothes all the time.”
Glen: I think where sometimes disconnect is happening is that first season did play up the housekeeper aspect more. It was more about her not being good at housekeeping, wearing aprons, cooking, things like that, and I think later seasons she becomes more comfortable in her role as head of the family.
Drew: I mean, especially after Chief dies.
Glen: Yeah.
Drew: And then also she gets that—some of the jokes almost remind me of the show within a show on BoJack Horseman. Is it called "Horsing Around"?
Glen: Yeah. I think so.
Drew: Okay. It kind of reminds of that, like it’s that idea of an '80s sitcom. But then Katie talks about “Oh, boys like a girl who knows how to cook.”
Katie: Now, I have to learn to do these things myself. All my friends say the way to get a guy is to really know how to cook.
Nell: I know honey, but they weren’t talking about food.
[audience laughs]
Drew: I guess you could say that’s sassy, but it’s also allowing her—like, it’s a little—not sexier, but sex is closer to the surface than it is on a lot of other shows that would have been airing after the show.
Glen: Yeah. It’s not sexless. It’s not neutered.
Drew: Right.
Glen: But I think it’s also one of the things they'd want to play up because I think the central purpose for Nell being there is that Chief is not able to connect with three daughters in that way. It’s very specifically three daughters and not two boys and a girl. The reason that Sharon (Chief’s dead wife) pleaded with Nell to stay is because these girls needed—maybe not a mother necessarily, but someone with a feminine side who could relate to girls in ways that a very straight-laced police chief could not.
Drew: We can call him Archie Bunker-esque, which he very much is. This is actually where he enters into the scene.
Glen: So they’re trying to capture a man who is robbing and possibly assaulting women as they leave a laundromat and so the chief is planning to go to a motel room across the street from the laundromat with his two partners, or two other officers—one senior, one junior—and one of them is planning to dress up like a woman. They also borrow Nell’s actual dirty laundry as a prop.
Drew: Might as well get washed while they’re doing it. Okay.
Glen: I will say they aren’t very good at the stakeout.
Drew: No. No. I would say that they seem like they’re fairly bad cops. Does this imply that they just don’t have any women on the force?
Glen: Kind of.
Drew: Yeah. I was wondering about that. It’s 1982. There have to be some—maybe. This is a small city. But there have to be female law enforcement officers.
Glen: Yeah. Well, I mean it's like, “What, no women?”
Drew: Or maybe they just don’t trust the women in a position where they might get assaulted—but they’re cops so it shouldn’t matter. They should know how to handle the situation. Enter Officer Tom Baxter, who is the one who thinks he’s being introduced to the chief’s wife. He’s the younger one. He’s attractive?
Glen: Kind of handsome. They play him off as the comedic character. My initial thought was like, “Oh. Another semi-handsome, funny, gay character for us.”
Drew: Okay. I thought he was going to be the gay guy too, because—and maybe this is just clever misdirection on the writer’s part. But the joke is he thinks Nell’s the chief’s wife and they’re like, “Oh. We’re not married.” And he’s like, “Oh. I got it. Don’t worry. Mum’s the word,” as if he’s the guy who’s good at keeping secrets, and I’m like, “Oh. He’s the gay guy,” and that’s not where it goes.
Glen: Yeah. He absolutely delivered banter like a one-off gay character on an '80s sitcom would.
Drew: So again, points in favor of the fact that the writers maybe knew what they were doing when they wrote this episode. He is played by Frank Bonner, who played the loudmouth jerk guy on WKRP in Cincinnati.
Glen: Oh, yeah.
Drew: It’s one of the first things he did after it. He also played the parish priest on Just the Ten of Us and when The Facts of Life goes to Paris and Natalie meets that writer who’s an alcoholic and hasn’t written another book—that’s him.
Glen: Well-rounded IMDb profile.
Drew: Like, very firmly ensconced in our childhood memory of TV. So then there’s Officer Jerry, who is a double to Chief. They’re both paunchy, about the same age. Both kind of look like Carl Malden, which is—
Glen: Imposing. Imposing figures if you are a woman or a child.
Drew: Imposing potatoes is what they are.
Glen: Yes.
Drew: He’s played by Eugene Roche, who played Pinky Peterson on All in the Family and also had recurring roles on Night Court, Webster, and Soap. For the purposes of this discussion it is notable that he was one of the main characters on The Corner Bar, which was a show he was on with Anne Meara, who is Jerry Stiller’s deceased wife, which was the first American TV show to ever have a recurring gay character, who is played by Vincent Schiavelli. He’s a tall, creepy-looking character actor. His name was Peter Panama and if you saw a picture of Peter Schiavelli, you’d be like, “Oh, that guy. I’ve seen him on everything ever.” Just an interesting looking character actor. And I looked up who he was married to. He was married to—do you remember that episode of Cheers with—
Glen: Yes.
Drew: —Coach’s daughter?
Glen: Yes.
Drew: Her.
Glen: Oh.
Drew: Coach’s daughter who was also on Maniac. Yeah. Allyce Beasley. So I think we’re at the stakeout now after that, right?
Glen: Yeah. Jerry and Carl are reminiscing over their 20 years of stakeouts.
Drew: And Baxter is very—he doesn’t look terrible, but he’s not used to walking in heels or wearing women’s clothes. I’m sure any trans person that watches old sitcoms will cringe the moment a man is wearing a dress for comedic value, but the joke is not merely that a man is in a dress. The joke is that 1) he is clumsy in heels and can’t really walk properly, and 2) he has to adjust his wire and the wire is in his bra, so it puts the chief and Baxter in a position where they’re being very intimate with each other and it makes them both uncomfortable. I guess there’s probably a reason that someone might be offended by the humor in this, but at the very least they go deeper than, “A man’s wearing a dress! Can you believe it?”
Glen: Right, although that is the baseline of the joke.
Officer Jerry: Here comes Baxter.
Chief: How’s he look from a distance?
Officer Jerry: Like a woman.
[audience laughs]
Officer Jerry: A woman who’s used to spending a lot of time alone.
Drew: So then there’s the gay joke [laughs].
Glen: Oh, boy.
Chief: You know it’s hard to believe that there are weirdos who actually enjoy dressing up like that.
Officer Jerry: You mean transvestites?
Chief: I don’t care where they come from.
[audience laughs]
Chief: They’re all a bunch of sickos. You know, speaking of sickos, that reminds me of a good joke Smitty told me [laughs]. It seems this pansy goes into this bar, right? And he’s got this big, vicious-looking Doberman Pinscher on a leash. So he perambulates up to the bar and he says to the bartender [affecting effeminate voice], “I’ll have a Shirley Temple.”
[audience laughs]
Chief: Well, the bar tender takes one look at this fruit loop and says, “No way. We don’t serve your kind.” So the poof says [affecting effeminate voice], “Well, you'd better because if you don’t I’m going to sic my vicious dog Killer on you. So give me my Shirley Temple or else!” And the bartender says, “I already told you we don’t serve your kind.” So the homo rips the choke collar off this humongous Doberman and says, [affecting effeminate, high-pitched voice], “Sic him, Killer.”
[audience laughs]
Chief: And the Doberman goes over the bar, pins the bartender against the mirror and goes [affecting effeminate voice] “Bowsee wowsee!”
[audience laughs at length]
Chief: [laughs] That Smitty! I don’t know where he gets them [laughs].
[audience continues to laugh]
Chief: Well? Don’t you—don't you get it? [affecting effeminate voice] "Bowsee wowsee!"
[audience laughs]
Chief: The guy’s dog is a pansy, too!
Glen: Boy, does Chief go all out for the performance of this joke. I feel like his portrayal of a gay man walking into a bar has more range than Chief was ever allowed. I’m talking lisp, hand gestures—
Drew: You don’t see men who are this level of sissy in real life very often, and a great many gay men are not that. But it made it hard to understand what a gay person was, exactly, because that’s the only thing I thought it was.
Glen: Yeah. That just, gay was effeminate.
Drew: Over-the-top, performatively effeminate—and then also kind of being confused about stuff and being like, “Well, I’m not that, so I don’t think I’m gay because that’s what gay is, and that doesn’t make sense for me.”
Glen: And I was that, so I was like, “Oh, god. I’m gay.”
Drew: You went into bars and asked for Shirley Temples in that fashion?
Glen: Mm-hmm, and my dog was gay. Spoiler for the punchline of the joke—the dog is gay.
Drew: I think we’ll have cut it in by this point. I don’t think anyone listening to this podcast would think that, but gay dog owners frequently have heterosexual dogs. My dog likes older female dogs. That’s his thing. Not gay. I’m fine with it.
Glen: But he’s also very into balls.
Drew: I wrote that it’s like when you hear an Indian accent by someone like Hank Azaria or whoever, and then you put it together with what actual Indian Americans sound like and you’re like, “Oh, that’s actually not what it really sounds like. That’s like a weird fake idea of what that thing sounds like that someone made up in their head and just becomes a thing on TV. Fortunately, that is one of the very issues this program is about to address.
Glen: Jerry counters this horrible joke with a Polish joke.
Officer Jerry: That’s very funny, Carl. Did you hear the one about the Polack who broke his neck raking leaves? He fell out of a tree.
[audience laughs]
Officer Jerry: Or why don’t the Polack’s have a hockey team? They forgot the formula for ice.
[audience laughs]
Officer Jerry: Do you know the Polish word for airplane—[grunts].
[audience laughs]
Glen: I am fifty percent Polish and the punchline of most Polish jokes are "Oh, you’re stupid." That’s it.
Drew: Did I tell you that it turns out that I’m Polish, too? But it turns out that the part of the family we thought was German is actually Polish because—
Glen: That’s me, too.
Drew: Oh.
Glen: Yeah—because I used to think I was 25 percent German and 25 percent Polish, but it turns out that my grandpa was just lying.
Drew: So did both of our grandparents make that lie in the brief window between the two world wars when it was preferable to be German than Polish?
Glen: Yeah. I absolutely do not understand that.
Drew: Also, I don’t know how far back it is, but my female ancestor who was Polish, her last name was Morasky. I was like, “Yeah, that doesn’t sound German. That sounds Polish.” It seems like she should have changed her name if she didn’t want to sound like she was Polish.
Glen: Oh, we did change our name.
Drew: Oh.
Glen: We dropped off the "-zinsky."
Drew: Were you Lakinsky?
Glen: No. That’s my dad’s side of the family.
Drew: Oh. Your Polish ancestors were apparently smarter than mine.
Glen: Anyway. Carl, who is Polish, says—
Officer Jerry: What’s the matter Carl? Don’t you think that funny? Why aren't you laughing?
Chief: Well, of course not. I’m Polish!
[audience laughs]
Officer Jerry: That’s why I don’t like gay jokes.
[audience laughs, then slowly realizes the implication and reacts with ooohs]
Chief: Because you’re Polish?
[audience laughs uproariously]
Officer Jerry: No, Carl. I’m gay.
Before the commercial there’s the audience reaction which is a few seconds long and you can hear it evolving where it’s like, “Ha-ha,” then “Oh!” and then, “Oh?”—like a sly “Oh, I know what’s going on.” And you can literally hear people figuring out the joke as they’re reacting to it in real time, which is weird, and it’s not a reaction I think I’ve ever heard on a sitcom before.
[replays audience's realization that Officer Jerry is gay]
Glen: Yeah. It wasn’t necessarily the usual, “I’m gay—ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!"
Drew: And it wasn’t horrified gasps, it was—I don’t really know how to—
Glen: People were more reacting to the cleverness of his comeback than the revelation that he’s gay.
Drew: Okay. That makes sense. Well, it will be on the clip anyway. If you guys have an interpretation of what you think the audience reaction, is please tell me.
Glen: If you are a canned laughter-ologist, please at us.
Drew: Or if you were in the studio audience for this, please tell us how homophobic they were. So they come back from commercial, and Carl’s still—no.
Glen: Carl tries to change the subject.
Drew: I was going to say, they come back from commercial and Jerry’s still gay, it turns out. But yeah, Chief does try to talk—
Glen: He offers Jerry pickles—which I don’t think they play up for a joke.
Drew: No. I thought about that, too. He does goes through the contents of the picnic basket that Julie—Julie? Is that her name?
Glen: Katie.
Glen: —Katie made for them, and just as he’s being surprised that this person that he’s worked with for years and who doesn’t seem gay is gay. Katie feminine though she is, has made a terrible lunch with disgusting coffee that tastes like—turpentine?
Glen: Yeah. This is a meaty scene.
Drew: Basically, after the "Lady, I think you dropped your panties" joke.
Chief: Let’s get a test on Baxter.
Baxter: Lady? Lady, come back! I think you dropped your panties.
[audience laughs]
Drew: Which again is racier than I would have expected for this show. Yeah. How the hell can you be gay? How the hell can you be Polish?
Chief: How the hell can you be gay?
Officer Jerry: How the hell can you be Polish?
[audience laughs]
Chief: Because my grandparents came from Poland! But even if yours came from San Francisco, that’s still no excuse.
[audience laughs uproariously]
Officer Jerry: Carl, I don’t need an excuse to be what I am.
Glen: The scene is just full of kind of jokes followed by actual poignant statements.
Drew: Mm-hmm. Again, I couldn’t find if any of the people who were responsible for this episode were gay in any way, but it’s pretty well-written. They have a jump on—I think the first episode we did where we talked about a gay character who is comfortable with who they are, who doesn’t feel ashamed or embarrassed and has to let the straight people catch up to who they are is that Golden Girls episode. This preceded that.
Drew: Also the All in the Family.
Glen: Oh, yeah. Okay. That one came earlier. I forgot about that episode. This is not a coming-out narrative for him.
Glen: It's not coming out.
Drew: He’s very comfortable with who he is. He’s waiting for Chief to catch up.
Glen: Yeah.
Drew: Yeah, which is very important. Again, this is 1982.
Glen: Yeah. And as they cover in the scene, he had a wife who’s now and ex-wife.
Chief: But Jerry, you’ve got a kid.
Officer Jerry: So?
Chief: So you must have been with a woman at least once.
Officer Jerry: Yeah. I was married, I had a kid. The marriage was a big mistake—the kid wasn’t.
Chief: You know what I bet? You had trouble in bed—if you know what I mean—and you jumped to the wrong conclusions. Jerry, sometimes the romance just goes out of a relationship.
Glen: This is a very well-rounded gay character and it’s not necessarily—he doesn’t seem like he’s in the closet.
Drew: No.
Glen: Like, people just don’t know that part of his life necessarily, but he seems like someone who has an active, gay, sex life. He doesn’t seem, as you said, troubled by it. This is not something he is struggling with.
Officer Jerry: I’m gay, Carl! I like being gay, I’m happy being gay—I’m a gay gay!
Chief: That’s impossible! Jerry, how the hell can I have a gay detective working for me?
Officer Jerry: I do my job well.
Glen: Yeah. Carl tries to run through the list of problems being a gay cop.
Chief: Why can’t you have a normal man’s problems like a hernia or flat feet or constipation?
[audience laughs]
Chief: Suppose you have to bust some gay guy?
Officer Jerry: What do you think—instead of reading him his rights, I’ll send him a candy gram?
[audience laughs]
Chief: Jerry, suppose somebody finds out. Suppose the public found out that the long arm of the law has a limp wrist.
Officer Jerry: One more crack like that and you’ll find out how limp my fist is.
Glen: Jerry turns it on him making Carl paranoid that there are other gay cops on the force. Carl has to go through and sort of question—
Drew: Everybody.
Glen: Yeah, everybody—like the "masculinity" of the people on his force.
Drew: And it’s wrapped up very neatly with Jerry being like—
Chief: Well, come on Jerry. I got a right to know.
Officer Jerry: You know who it could be?
Chief: Who?
Officer Jerry: An older guy, keeps to himself, not very happy. You never see him out with a woman.
Chief: Well, who? What’s his name?
Officer Jerry: Kanisky. Carl Kanisky, and you’re lucky I don’t hit men of the opposite sex.
Drew: And he’s like, “Oh, fuck. You may be gay now!"
Glen: Yeah, and that’s where I think this episode goes from being a good episode to a great episode because it turns Carl’s discomfort with a gay friend and coworker into a crisis of masculinity, and it sort of goes in depth into Carl’s character in a way that—I don’t know. Again, I don’t remember the show too well, but I don’t know that it would have done that in another context or another episode. And it’s a good one. He’s a good actor.
Drew: They’re both doing a great job, and I think maybe we get to see some acting from Chief that we might not in other episodes. Yeah. So he has that line where he says—
Chief: You know, I may be prejudiced, bigoted, and-and-and-and—and old fashioned, but—
Officer Jerry: Don’t stop. You’re on a roll.
Chief: But you’ve got to admit that there’s something about gay people that’s—different.
Officer Jerry: Like what?
Chief: From normal people.
Officer Jerry: Oh. You mean like Adolph Hitler? Charlie Manson? Son of Sam? What the hell have you got against gays? You know what you are? You’re a homophobe.
Chief: A what?
Officer Jerry: It means homophobia—an unnatural fear of homosexuals.
Chief: Well, there’s nothing that’s seems so unnatural to me about that! What seems unnatural to me is a bunch of grown men holding hands at some Judy Garland film festival.
[audience laughs]
Officer Jerry: Forget it. Forget it! You’re never going to change. I give up.
Glen: Carl goes into a story from his childhood.
Chief: During the war my father was overseas, so my ma and us kids we moved in with our Uncle Joey. Uncle Joey was a bricklayer. One of those strong, silent, iron-fisted types. You know what I mean?
Officer Jerry: Yeah. Dukes of Hazard without the sparkling wit.
[audience laughs]
Chief: Anyway as a kid, I wasn’t the warm, open, loving guy that I am today.
Officer Jerry: No kidding.
[audience laughs]
Chief: As a matter of fact I was a little shy. See, I had this stammer, and the other kids used to kid me because of it. Well, there was this one English teacher named Mr. Lamet. He kind of took a shine to me and afternoons I’d stay after school and he’d work with me—reading out loud. Then, after a while, the stutter practically disappeared. Anyway, one night Uncle Joey comes home real late, shouting about how the cops had busted Mr. Lamet—in some gay bar.
Officer Jerry: Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
Chief: So, next day at school, they said that Mr. Lamet had the flu. Well, all the kids snickered and laughed. Everybody knew. You can’t keep a secret like that in a small town. I never saw Mr. Lamet after that.
Officer Jerry: He moved out of town?
Chief: No. He crashed his car into a tree. Uncle Joey wouldn’t let me go to the funeral. He said that if anybody saw me, the whole town would think that me and Mr. Lamet were boyfriends or something. Anyway, I didn’t go. Maybe I was afraid that people would talk too. I don’t know.
Glen: It really was about, I think, Carl’s own insecurities—that this man he was close to in his youth that could have been one model for him, he was suddenly told that’s not what a man is. Being sensitive, connecting with a child—that is not the model of masculinity you need to live by. The uncle who raised him, we know, beat that into him. And this is sort of the basis of the series, too—that Carl’s inability to be sensitive with his daughters is the entire reason why Nell was brought into his life.
Drew: Right.
Glen: And so this is his character flaw. Showing emotions is what he can’t do because he was trained not to.
Drew: Did you think the way he talked about Uncle Joey being this paragon of manliness, this big strong guy, stoic, quiet, closed off—did you think it was going to be true that Uncle Joey was also gay? Because I thought for some reason it might go there, but it didn’t end up going there. It ends with the teacher who helped him get over his stuttering problem died in a car accident and Uncle Joey doesn’t let him go to the funeral, and then Uncle Joey for undisclosed reasons dies like a man—
Glen: Yeah. "We didn’t hug. We didn’t kiss. He just closed his eyes and went."
Drew: For some reason, in my head I imagined Uncle Joey was gay. I don’t know why.
Glen: Full House?
Drew: Not even their uncle.
Glen: It could be—and that’s the thing. Carl was presented with two models in his life: Uncle Joey, who doesn’t show emotions; and this teacher who does and is punished for it.
Drew: And he clearly patterns himself after—
Glen: But yeah—I mean, both could be gay. Both Uncle Joey and this other teacher.
Drew: He finishes telling the story and Jerry says, “Thank you for telling me that story.” And Carl’s like, “Why are you thanking me?” And Jerry’s reading of the story is that Carl acknowledges that Uncle Joey was wrong. He should have gone to the funeral of the man who helped him be better about himself. Carl does not see it that way. He thinks Uncle Joey was right, which is really—again that’s an interesting little turn where he still doesn’t quite get it at this point. It takes a little bit more for him to get it, which happens in a minute.
Glen: Yeah, and that’s where I think this episode can sort of apply to the crisis of masculinity that we’re all dealing with today. When men vocalize their weaknesses they see them as strengths, and it’s only from the outside that we’re like, “Oh. That quality you’re super proud of is actually really fucked up.”
Drew: Yeah, okay. I get what you’re saying. It’s really hard to talk about. Acknowledging your weaknesses should be a strength; thinking your weaknesses are strengths is a weakness—if that makes sense. Like, the closed-off man can’t see his weaknesses are weaknesses, and the enlightened man will acknowledge that he has these weaknesses and will work to make them better.
Glen: Yeah. Like, Carl literally runs to the bathroom to hide the fact that he is crying and gets locked in the bathroom.
Drew: Which is what happens exactly next. Then over the wire that's been going the entire time that’s been monitoring Agent Baxter—
Glen: Again, they’re not very good cops in this episode.
Drew: The confrontation’s already happening with this guy that’s been robbing women in laundromats and Carl can’t go, so Jerry grabs his gun and runs in and the camera just pans to the speaker.
Baxter: Alright, now. Take it easy. My money’s right there in the purse. Just point that thing somewhere else.
Officer Jerry: Carl! Carl, that psycho’s making his move.
Chief: [struggles to escape bathroom]
[audience laughs]
Chief: Jerry?
Baxter: Look, Mister. I gave you the money. That’s all there is. Now, take it easy. Don’t get crazy with that gun.
Officer Jerry: Alright, police! Police officer! Alright, just move slowly, buddy, and drop that piece. I’m warning you!
Baxter: Look out! He’s gonna—
[gunshots]
Glen: Yeah. They play it like Jerry’s dead, and I was going to be very disappointed with this episode.
Drew: I thought so, too. It's the same thing like with the blackface conversation in that just not being aware of exactly where the show went, it kind of caught me by surprise.
Glen: Yeah. Spoiler alert! Jerry’s not dead. He’s just in the hospital recovering from being shot.
Drew: Chief explains this to Nell. He comes back to the house. It’s like four in the morning, and she’s woken up by him coming back so late. She asks what happened, and he explains all this.
Nell: So how did your stakeout go?
Chief: Well, we got the guy—but Jerry took a bullet.
Nell: Is he alright?
Chief: Yeah, I think so. He lost a lot of blood, but his condition is stable.
Nell: Boy, sounds like you had a close call tonight.
Chief: Who me? I was lock in the bathroom [laughs].
Nell: Say what?
[audience laughs]
Chief: I was locked in the bathroom.
Nell: Oh, yeah? Well, I guess that’s about the best place to be when bullets start flying. Yeah.
[audience laughs]
Chief: That Jerry is one hell of a guy.
Nell: It takes one to know one.
[audience laughs with increasing enthusiasm]
Chief: I wish you hadn’t put it—
[audience continues laughing]
Chief: —exactly like that.
Nell: What?
[audience laughs and applauds]
Glen: Which she means as a compliment, but in the context of Jerry being gay it’s played for a laugh.
Drew: But the interesting thing is—beyond Nell Carter eventually being in a relationship with a woman, it's interesting that she is the one who’s delivering that line that gives an extra bit of smack to it. End of episode.
Glen: Yeah.
Drew: Two quick acts. It’s basically three scenes and that’s it, and I was really impressed.
Glen: Yeah. The scene in the motel room stakeout after the commercial break is just a very good bit of dramatic writing.
Drew: I can see why you think that it might be something that was adapted from a play. That would have been a decent play, actually. I feel weird going back to that essay from the Washington Post I read where the woman writing it thought that this was a stupid show. I guess, compared to other things, this might have been lighter—but she had no idea how much stupider sitcoms were going to get. Like, if she saw Perfect Strangers she would have vomited in her own face. I feel like I want to stick up for Gimme a Break! and be like, “Actually, they did more stuff than you possibly would have guessed.”
Glen: Yeah. And again, this is second season. Maybe they were feeling a little bit more comfortable with their modest success or the fact that they got a second season, so maybe they were taking more swings, bigger swings—who knows. It’s a good episode. And the blackface episode in Season 3.
Drew: Do you remember Maid for Each Other? It was a TV movie that I think, maybe, it was supposed to be stand-alone—I don’t know. But it starred Nell Carter and Dinah Manoff from Empty Nest.
Glen: Oh!
Drew: And they have to pretend to be maids because they’re on the run from the mob.
Glen: Ah. The mob shows up in so many plots.
Drew: Yeah. I was delighted that Dinah Manoff and Nell Carter were starring in a TV movie together. That was a point of viewing for me. Also, she sang the theme song, "Maid for Each Other." If I can find it, I will cut it in.
[“Maid for Each Other” performed by Nell Carter plays]
Drew: I miss Nell Carter. I don’t know if you watched it, but did you see her performance of "Never Had a Friend Like Me" at the Oscars? Oh, my god she is so good.
Glen: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Drew: If you just think of Nell Carter as being the principal from Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper, you would not realize that in whatever the year the Oscars had Aladdin nominated for stuff, they had to find a way to make that song get played, and Nell Carter sings the part of the Genie, and she does such a good job. She’s not doing Robin Williams. She’s making her own thing, and she’s kind of a bawdy, sexy genie—but it’s really fucking good.
Glen: But why couldn’t Robin Williams just sing it?
Drew: Because he’s not—[laughs]. Because he’s not Nell Carter.
Glen: Okay.
Drew: That’s the thing about Nell Carter—just her being on stage, there’s something about her physical presence that is—she’s the star.
Glen: Yeah. She has star quality.
Drew: Yeah. Yeah, I’m sad she died. Glen, if people want to share their memories of Nell Carter with you, what should they tweet at?
Glen: You can find me on Twitter @IWriteWrongs—that is "write" with a "W"—and I don’t know if Instagram is the best venue for sharing your Nell Carter thoughts and memories—
Drew: It is.
Glen: I’m on Instagram @BrosQuartz, and Inktober is over, so there’ll be slightly less Lego content.
Drew: You can find me on Twitter @DrewGMackie—M-A-C-K-I-E—or you can just tweet at this podcast @GayestEpisode in general, although I’m the one who answers it so you’re basically just tweeting at me. But if you have messages for Glen, I’ll probably send them to him. Please listen to all our previous episodes at gayestepisodeever.com. If you happened to enjoy this podcast on one of the many podcast playing apps that are out there please give us a rate and review, which is helpful for all the reasons you’ve heard on every podcast ever. We have a Patreon—
Glen: Yay!
Drew: Yay! If you want to support this show, please go to Patreon.com/gayestepisodeever. Give us a buck. You’ll get all these episodes a week early—again, except for this week. I apologize for the delay. We’re going to have kind of a mini-episode next week, and then I’m going to be off. We’re going to be dark for a whole week because I’m going to be out of the country, but then we will come back and finish out the year with a few more regular episodes, which you will get early. I promise you.
Glen: Me?
Drew: You’ll get them early.
Glen: Oh.
Drew: Yeah.
Glen: I don’t want them early. I don’t listen to them.
Drew: Listen to them twice.
Glen: Nope.
Drew: Okay. Our logo was designed by Rob Wilson. Look at his stuff at robwilsonwork.com. And this is a TableCakes podcast. TableCakes is a Los Angeles based podcast network. You can listen to all the TableCakes shows by going to TableCakes.com. Glen, before we finish this episode, I need to ask you—which is your favorite Lawrence brother and why?
Glen: The middle one.
Drew: Because he’s the cutest?
Glen: Yes.
Drew: Yeah. I am going to pick Joey, even though we engaged in a very awkward interview at one point in our lives, but he’s very attractive as a guy with a shaved head.
Glen: Yes.
Drew: And I have to give him guts—for his hair being the primary attractions he had, he was willing to lose that and keep going, and he looks really good without it. So I say, “Good for you, Joey. Good for you.”
Glen: You guys should kiss.
Drew: He’s very attractive. I think that might have been one of the reasons that interview was so bad, because I was looking right at him and it’s kind of hard to reconcile—
Glen: How handsome he is?
Drew: Yeah. So yeah. Joey Lawrence, hit us up. We’ll put you on the show.
Glen: Hit Drew up.
Drew: Yeah. Podcast over.
Glen: Bye forever.
[“Runaway/Happy Together” performed by Tony Orlando & Dawn plays]
Katherine: A TableCakes production.