Transcript for Episode 25: Mr. Roper Has a Gay Awakening

This is the transcript for the installment of the show in which we discuss the Three’s Company episode “Strange Bedfellows.” 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.

Jack:  Mr. Roper? Mr. Roper? [knocks] 

[audience laughs] 

Mr. Roper:  Helen, you wouldn't believe what a nightmare I just had.  

[audience laughs]

Jack:  Mr. Roper, wake up! Come on, wake up. Hey!

Mr. Roper:  Oh, my god. What have you done with Helen? 

[audience laughs]

Jack:  Mr. Roper—

Mr. Roper:  What are you doing here?

Jack:  This is my bed!

Mr. Roper:  Oh, my god. 

[audience laughs and audience applauds] 

Mr. Roper:  How did you get me up here? 

Jack:  You had a lot to drink last night. You must have passed out.

Mr. Roper:  I never pass out.

Jack:  Then what are you doing in my bed? 

Mr. Roper:  I must have passed out. 

[audience laughs]

Jack:  Let's see, the last thing I remember—I was doing the hustle with—

Mr. Roper:  This is awful.

Jack:  What?

Mr. Roper:  My being in bed with you and you being a—uh—

Jack:  Tinkerbell? 

[audience laughs and applauds]

["Come and Knock on Our Door" performed by Ray Charles and Julia Rinker Miller plays] 

Glen:  Hello, and welcome to Gayest Episode Ever, the podcast where we look at LGBT-themed episodes of classic sitcoms—that is to say the very special something-something. Drew could not get the intro right, so I just said part of it.

Drew:  Thanks, Glen. I'm just going to run with it. I'm Drew Mackie.

Glen:  I'm Glen Lakin.

Drew:  And if that intro did not tip you off, today we are talking about Three's Company, specifically the episode "Strange Bedfellows" or, as we're going to call it, "Mr. Roper has a Gay Awakening."

Glen:  Literally. 

Drew:  Literally. This episode originally aired October 4, 1977, and it involved Jack Tripper—played by John Ritter—not tricking Mr. Roper into thinking he spent the night with him but a hilarious, confusing set of circumstances make Mr. Roper think he might have had sex with Jack—I guess? 

Glen:  There is a very Three's Company misunderstanding in this episode.

Drew:  Yes. Yes. It's Three's Company, so it would make sense. This is the show that Glen has watched more than I have. Glen, what is your experience with Three's Company? 

Glen:  Oh, I have lots of experiences with Three's Company. I think this, along with I Love Lucy, is the show that I watched most growing up. And obviously, this being a little more current than I Love Lucy, I thought it gave me a better understanding of social interactions. And I think—looking back on it, I modeled a lot of my childhood mannerisms on Jack Tripper, which is probably not a great thing since he was pretending to be a gay man. If you're not familiar with Three's Company, that is actually the premise of the show: A single man, in order to live with two single women, has to convince his landlord that he is a homosexual man because somehow in the late '70s that was more socially acceptable than opposite genders living together.

Drew:  Yeah. You'd think if the Ropers were so conservative, they would have just told the faggot to get the fuck out of their apartment complex and make another woman live there anyway. Right? 

Glen:  I think that was the pilot that they didn't go with. 

Drew:  [laughs] Very, very different show. 

Glen:  Three's Company was also the first TV show that gave me an understanding of TV as an industry, only because I think it had the most dramatic—or at least soap operatic—behind-the-scenes of any sitcom that I had been aware of at the time with Suzanne Somers somewhat combative behind the scenes with her coworkers, things like that. And also because of the episode where Lucille Ball comes in and gives a retrospective.

Drew:  Wait. What are you talking about? 

Glen:  There's an episode of Three's Company where Lucille Ball enters the set and talks about what Three's Company has meant to sitcoms.

Drew:  Within the run of Three's Company?

Glen:  Yeah, because Jack Tripper-slash-John Ritter walks in halfway through, I think.

John:  What are you doing here?

Lucille:  I'm talking about Three's Company.

John:  Oh. Oh, oh! Oh.

Lucille:  And looking at some of the very funny things you people did.

John:  Well, thank you on behalf of the entire company. Thank you.

Lucille:  And I was talking about what makes for good comedy.

[audience laughs]

John:  Oh, yeah. My philosophy of the principle elements that go into the making of a good comedy—

Lucille:  John, I don't think I have time for this.

[audience laughs]

John:  Huh?

Lucille:  What's one word that you think best describes Three's Company?

John:  One word?

Lucille:  One word. 

John:  Classy.

[audience laughs] 

Glen:  And I think it was in the Lucille Ball episode, and it was Lucille Ball herself who points out that his name is Jack Tripper and he's clumsy.

Drew:  He is clumsy. That's true. I did not know that existed until right now, so I'm going to say that it's certainly true that you've seen more episodes of the show than I have. I feel like it was a very successful show. It was a very popular show, and it maybe did do something to shape a lot of the sitcoms that were popular current shows when we were actual teens, like the Friends and all those sexy young people shows. It's weird that a show would take the time within its run to talk about how important it is, when it's such a ditzy, silly sort of farcical romp show. You know? 

Glen:  Yeah. But I think that's—it wasn't part of its charm, but it was definitely aware of its popularity and that's part of what led to all the drama is that it went to their heads in some way. And not necessarily the actors' heads, the studio execs. They didn't necessarily know how to handle the hit they had on their hands. That's why the Ropers were given a spinoff, perhaps too soon and reluctantly. They didn't want a spinoff. They wanted to stay on Three's Company. It was sort of a cultural phenomenon when it came out because it wasn't a family show or a workplace comedy. It was just these three roommates. 

Drew:  Yeah. I'm trying to put context around it for myself, and the most I could actually come up with is that it was probably the first TV show I ever saw that depicted Southern California lifestyle in a way that I knew this took place in basically Los Angeles. And then when I moved here, I lived on the West Side, and it was terrible and not fun at all. I did not ride a bike on the beach every day with my friends. No.

Glen:  Oh, no. And you didn't fall in the sand after looking at sexy ladies?

Drew:  I probably did fall in the sand for other reasons because I am also clumsy. 

Glen:  It was a progressive show overall for the time in its depictions of sex—not just for the three single roommates, but also the Ropers were very open about their sex life or lack thereof. Mrs. Roper is a very horny older lady.

Drew:  She wants it so bad but she's not getting it.

Glen:  Nope. She really wants it. And I had forgotten—it's touched on in this episode, but I had forgotten that she wanted Jack to bone her. I remember that she was in on the secret.

Drew:  So very quickly she was told that Jack was not gay, right? 

Glen:  Yeah, because she's very progressive. She is more free-spirited than her husband.

Drew:  Why's she married to Stan?

Glen:  Why is anyone married to anyone? I don't know.

Drew:  TV has taught us that people get married to not have sex and quietly hate each other. So, yeah. The show was very progressive. Also, it was one of the few shows that would have been on in syndication in the afternoon or early evening where the word "gay" was spoken not infrequently. It comes up more than once. Even though you could easily watch this show and not know that the premise was Jack pretending to be gay because it didn't come up that often, but it comes up often enough. And in this episode they say the word "gay" several times, and it might have been the first TV show that I ever heard say the word "gay," even if I maybe didn't understand what they were talking about. 

Glen:  I think my understanding of it when I watched it was—definitely the Tinkerbell and Twinkle-Toes and all the euphemisms they came up with, and I think this show gave me the understanding that being gay just meant that you didn't like women sexually and that Jack just wasn't interested in his roommates, not necessarily that that would be because he is pretending to like men.

Drew:  Mm-hmm. That makes sense because he doesn't ever really pretend that. 

Glen:  Right, and as like a young gay boy before you actually hit puberty and have sexual thoughts, that is what being gay sort of is or how it's thrust upon you. 

Drew:  Yeah. That's the extent that you can really go with it because you don't understand anything beyond that.

Glen:  Yeah. You're just someone who sometimes—as a young gay boy, I enjoyed the company of my female friends more than my male friends, and so when I looked at Three's Company I was like, "Oh. Well, he's like me. He's hanging out with two women as opposed to living with Larry."

Drew:  Do you know what this show is in relation to you and my friendship—your friendship and mine—our friendship—that's how I'm going to say that—our friendship?

Glen:  Yes.

Drew:  This is why we're friends. So I posted on Tumblr back in the day this article that was on Pajiba written on the 10th anniversary of John Ritter's death. Dustin Rowles is a writer there. He wrote this article about how Three's Company Was his first exposure to what it was to be gay, and when his own father came out he didn't have any problems with it because his only frame of reference was Jack Tripper. And Jack is pretending to be gay, but he's such a likeable, charming person that he couldn't imagine how anyone would have a problem with someone being gay because being gay is like being Jack Tripper. That's how we became friends though. Someone tweeted that out and you ended up on my Tumblr and then you read my blog and we became email friends.

Glen:  Mm-hmm. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. That was a long time ago. 

Glen:  Yeah. It was on my birthday, whatever year that was.

Drew:  It was. Yeah. You sent me an email about—

Glen:  I'd just broken up and I was going to Palm Springs with some friends, but half of them had to cancel. It was a fine but overall kind of depressing experience. Sorry Andrew, if you're listening to this. You were there. It was okay. You didn't want to get in the pool. I was just in the pool looking at geese, and this old couple was kissing.

Drew:  Geese?

Glen:  Geese.

Drew:  Why were geese in the pool?

Glen:  I don't know.

Drew:  That doesn't seem sanitary. Yeah. I received that email while I was seeing an outdoor concert by Paul McCartney with my friend Stephanie, if that dates this conversation at all.

Glen:  Paul McCartney's dead.

Drew:  Paul McCartney is not dead.

Glen:  Whatever.

Drew:  No. He's famously not dead. Yes. So in case you don't know anything about Three's Company and haven't gathered enough from what we said, the show revolves around Jack Tripper who's sharing a Santa Monica apartment with Chrissy Snow and—what the fuck is Janet's last name? Well, Janet probably has a last name. We haven't even mentioned Joyce DeWitt yet, which is a bummer, but that's—

Glen:  I mean, I was going to talk about her a lot. 

Drew:  Well, it's taken this long to get to the fact that there is a third roommate. Her name is Janet.

Glen:  Well, we didn't really mention—I did mention Suzanne Somers. 

Drew:  Yeah, we did. Their landlords are the Ropers. Over the course of the show, there's a lot of cast changes, [but it's] kind of the same thing no matter what. Do you know the history about this show and its British counterpart?

Glen:  I knew it was based on a British show.

Drew:  It's actually really weird. You can watch episodes of it online right now.

Glen:  It's called like Man of the House or something.

Drew:  Man of the House, and it revolves on Robin Tripp, who poses as gay to share a flat with Chrissy and Jo, and their meddling landlords are Mildred and George Roper. The weird thing is, beyond—Oh. Also, he has a playboy friend named Larry—no, Jerry. They changed a letter for that.

Glen:  Well, they changed two letters for that. 

Drew:  They changed a phoneme for that. The show weirdly stayed very close to the source material in that on the British show Man of the House, the Ropers did actually get their own spinoff much like the Ropers did. And then after the Jack—Tripper? Jack Tripper?

Glen:  That's his name.

Drew:  After the Jack Tripper character moves out of the house, he got a sequel series of him and his—

Glen:  Three's Company Two.

Drew:  It was called Robin's Nest. So Robin's Nest—Three's a Crowd.

Glen:  Oh, that's right. Three's a Crowd.

Drew:  So Robin's Nest is very close to—when they came to making up the sequel series for Three's Company, they looked to the source material again and patterned it after what the original got. Also, they got a feature movie. All the cast is in a movie together called—I think it's just called Man of the House. But it was a movie. What a weird time that a sitcom would get a feature-length film. 

Glen:  I would like to watch that.

Drew:  So when you watch the British series it just feels like an alien experience because you're like, "I recognize what's happening, but everyone's different," and it's kind of like a déjà vu. It's very strange. The theme song to Three's Company—not the other one because I don't know that one—was composed by Joe Raposo who also composed the theme song to Sesame Street, which I can kind of hear.

Glen:  Huh. Basically the same show. 

Drew:  Yeah. It is sung by a man name Ray Charles who is not Ray Charles, and the balls of this person to like, "My name is Ray Charles and I'm a singer." [That's] just going to disappoint a lot of people. 

Glen:  Couldn't he just go by Raymond?

Drew:  Apparently not. The episode we're talking about was the fourth of the second season. The show had been a mid-season replacement in the first season and just proved to be a big hit. This particular airing was the seventh most watched show of that week, pulling in 17.4 million viewers. Aired at 9:00 on a Tuesday in the block included Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, and Soap, which is kind of awesome. And it was the third most watched TV show of that season, behind Happy Days but ahead of 60 Minutes, the number one show being Laverne & Shirley. Overall, the show ran for eight seasons on ABC, 132 episodes, 132 hilarious misunderstandings.

Glen:  Does that count the sequel series?

Drew:  No.

Glen:  Oh. Really? 

Drew:  No. 

Glen:  How long did Three's a Crowd last?

Drew:  I think only one season. The Ropers lasted for two seasons. Jessica Walter was a character on Three's a Crowd and Jeffrey Tambor was a character on The Ropers.

Glen:  Yeah. He's just been sort of "of an age" for a very long time. 

Drew:  I'm just going to try to mention Jessica Walter on every episode of this show. I can usually find a way to do it.  I don't think I have anything more. I guess we can just get into it. Oh, no! I have something else. 

Glen:  Don't yell at me.

Drew:  Two things: one of them hilarious and short; one of them personal and will take a minute to get through, and you've probably heard it before. 

Glen:  Oh, Jesus.

Drew:  Have you seen the episode where you can see John Ritter's scrotum? [laughs]

Glen:  Yes.

Drew:  There's an episode that aired in the last season where he's wearing very short shorts, and he kind of splays his legs and for a second you can see a flash of his scrotum.

Glen:  You have told me about this before as well.

Drew:  I just watched the clip today. You can totally see it. And someone watching Nick at Nite finally spotted it and called Nick at Nite, and Nick at Nite had to issue an apology that acknowledged that "Yes.  We're sorry that you could briefly see John Ritter's scrotum in this episode," but kind of [cashed in 00:14:43] the fact that, like, "We didn't make this show. It's aired many times before and no one ever noticed until now, so not a big deal."

Glen:  I was going to talk about this in the episode, but John Ritter's very attractive, and his wardrobe by today's standards is also—for a gay man—very attractive. I would wear anything he wore in this episode.

Drew:  Mm-hmm. I can't pull off those shorts in public. That takes—

Glen:  Well, no. I don't want you to wear the shorts that get you arrested.

Drew:  [laughs] That show your scrotum?

Glen:  Yeah. I'm not asking you to show your scrotum, but I'm just staying that I don't know if I processed at the time that he was an attractive man.

Drew:  No. I think he's more attractive now. I didn't really realize I liked men when I first watched this show back in the day, but there is something about him now that I find very attractive. I told you there's the episode of Mary Tyler Moore where the anchorman and Georgette get married and John Ritter plays the minister. But it's a last-minute marriage, and they call him in from playing tennis so he's wearing white tennis shorts and a tennis sweater, and that was probably the—I was like, "Oh, my god. Oh. Oh, goodness. He's very attractive." Yeah. I have another association with John Ritter, and I think it's a really good story and you're going to have to fucking sit through it, 'kay?  

Glen:  Let me just get a drink. Okay. Go ahead.

Drew:  So John Ritter died very close to the same time that Johnny Cash died. I remember being home from college for spring break, and I went go to see my grandma. We were talking about Johnny Cash because country music is a fairly significant thing in my family, and my grandma was like, "Oh, and that other young man died." I was like, "Oh. Oh, John Ritter. Yeah." And she was like, "Yeah. He was really nice." I was like, "Mm-hmm. What?" And she's like, "Well, he made a movie. They filmed it in San Juan," which is like the small boutiquey town right next to the town where I grew up, where the mission is—the mission from Vertigo. "They filmed the movie there, and he had to play a horseback rider who got thrown from a horse and gets paralyzed, and they filmed a bunch of scenes where my family had some of their horses. They needed crowd scenes, so they had us sit in the stands and act like, 'Okay now he's been thrown off so make a face like, 'Ooh, that looks really bad.' So they had everyone act."  And I'm like, "Oh! That's crazy. No one's ever mentioned the story to me." "Well, your mom was there." I'm like, "Nope. Didn't hear this until now." And then she goes on to say, "The costar was this woman who didn't do her lines very well, so they had to call her mother in and her mother had to come and kind of yell at her to get her lines right and then she finally got the lines right." I was like, "Who are you—why would her mother come in?" She [said], "Well, her mother was famous, too." I was like, "Who are you talking about?" She's like, "I can't remember her name, but she was in that movie about monsters." And I was like—and then she put her hands over her ears, and I was like, "Oh! Carrie Fisher?" She was miming the Princess Leia buns, so I was like, "Carrie Fisher?" She's like, "Yes, Carrie Fisher and then her mother"—Debbie Reynolds. "Debbie Reynolds, had to come in and yell at her daughter until she got all her lines right, and then she finally did. And then she came out and said a few things, and she was very nice too." And I was just like, "I kind of can't believe this story happened." You can see the movie in full on YouTube. It's called Leave Yesterday Behind, and it is in fact very much that, filmed partially in San Juan Bautista. And when I asked my mom about it—because my parents have a history of interacting with people I think are cool and then not telling me about it until it's way too late to be passed off casually—[she] very much so downplayed it and didn't seem that it was a big deal that they met John Ritter and Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds and—they're basically extras in the movie, but are in a movie. 

Glen:  My takeaway from this story is that you're a horse girl.

Drew:  [laughs] No. I hate horses. They're all bitey and clompy. My family is horse people—not centaurs, but people who ride horses. But I've always hated horses, which is maybe why this story didn't come up around be beforehand. I think another good take away is that my grandma's summary of Star Wars is "that movie about monsters," which is how an 80-year-old woman would regard that movie.

Glen:  Yeah. 

Drew:  Yeah.

Glen:  Okay. So we open on this episode of Three's Company—

Drew:  [sighs in disappointment over Glen's failure to enthuse] 

Glen:  —with Chrissy and Janet packing to go to San Diego for the night for a bridal shower. Jack comes in wanting them to sew a button on his pants, and then he keeps lamenting that no one's going to take care of him because they're going away for the night. 

Drew:  Gender roles! Do you notice that Janet is spritzing her plants? And that is the most Janet activity you could possibly do?

Glen:  Oh, yeah. I often tried to recreate her opening, like in the theme song when she's watering plants and accidently waters—

Drew:  Jack?

Glen:  —Chrissy Snow's back. I remember whenever my brother and I would have—our main chore in the summer was watering plants, and I more than once made him lay down on the ground so I could pretend to be Janet. Anyway—

Drew:  My story was better. You rushed my story at the end, but I think my story was better.

Glen:  I didn't rush your story at the end. I just started yawning.

Drew:  The show is very much hitting you over the head with—there are very clear gender roles for the way these people interact with each other.

Glen:  But my reach around has nothing to do with the button on the pants.

Drew:  Oh. Please tell me.

Glen:  I have two reach arounds for this scene. The first one is Chrissy is struggling to close her suitcase.

Janet:  You see, Jack, the problem is you can't close the bag on the sofa. It should be sitting on a firm surface.

Jack:  A firm—you're trying to tell me how to pack? I've done more traveling. I went—

Janet:  Here you go.

Chrissy:  Hey, it works! You are smart Janet.

Janet:  Thank you. Of course, Jack could have taken care of it, too, if we'd given him a couple of weeks.

[audience laughs]

Glen:  To which I relate to: If you're not on firm ground with who you are, your mess becomes everyone else's problem. It just spills out, and people can see everything.

Drew:  That's fair. That's what happens to Mr. Roper in this episode. Okay. Is the other reach around related to something else?

Glen:  Yeah, but it's later in the scene when Mrs. Roper comes in to lend the girls her automatic camera.

Drew:  Which looks like a thin piece of metal when she originally brings it in. It looks like an iPad or something. I'm like, "What? I don't." I've never seen a camera that looks quite like that. 

Glen:  Well, there was a time travel aspect to this show.

Drew:  [laughs] I mean, I wish there were. I did not realize until I looked her up that Audra Lindley, who plays Mrs. Roper, is the benevolent matriarch of the Wilderness Girls in Troop Beverly Hills.

Glen:  Yes.

Drew:  That's her! I didn't realize that. And then she also plays Phoebe's grandmother on Friends—didn't realize that—and she plays Cybill's mother on Cybill. 

Glen:  Really?

Drew:  Which totally makes sense. She totally looks like she could be—she's less brassy-blonde when she's not wearing that Mrs. Roper hair.

Glen:  Can we find the gay episode of Cybill so we can talk about Cybill?

Drew:  You've got to fucking find Cybill online. Because it's CBS, I've never seen an episode of Cybill, and it's very hard to find. But Christine Baranski's there so it has to be pretty gay, right?

Glen:  Yeah. Yeah. has to be. 

Drew:  Yeah. I would love to. Mrs. Roper comes in and she complains about her sex life because that's her thing.

Glen:  What she does. Yeah. 

Drew:  Are we supposed to interpret her as being unattractive or not? Because she is actually quite beautiful. She's just wearing—is that a muumuu or a caftan? I don't know what to call that. And she has—

Glen:  Caftan—because there was just a whole challenge about it on RuPaul's Drag Race. Remember, they reference Mrs. Roper?

Drew:  I wasn't paying attention. You know how I feel about this season.

Glen:  Oh. No. She's not, but it's the same thing with Married… with Children. Al won't have sex with Peg Bundy, even though Katey Sagal is a knockout.

Drew:  She really is. 

Glen:  Gorgeous on every level in any getup you put her in whether she looks like she's going to curb stomp you or just ignore you or flick a cigarette at your face—like, gorgeous—but unloved and untouched by Al. And so I think—yeah. I think she is not played off as ugly, but she is—I'm not saying she's past her prime, but that is the sort of impression the show wants you to have when compared to—

Drew:  Chrissy.

Glen:  —Chrissy and Janet. But the show also plays Janet off as kind of plain even though Janet's gorgeous. It's just when you in the context of the times put her next to Suzanne Somers—

Drew:  Right, because Janet is smart and cute, and Sue—Susie?—Chrissy is beautiful and idiotic, and that somehow is more appealing to men, I guess?

Glen:  But this is sort of in the sweet spot of the show because this is early second season. So Chrissy is not yet reached peak stupid for laughs. She has a couple lines in here that point to her being a little dim.

Drew:  Right, but she's not too dumb to live yet. 

Glen:  Yeah. And they haven't yet—she hasn't adopted that snorty laugh yet. And Janet's so cute in this season, before she gets that weird haircut and they overdo eye makeup and—they just gave her a look. She's much more like understated here and just—I don't know.

Drew:  She's like the girl next door.

Glen:  I don't know. Suddenly, this is a show with two gay men talk about how cute sitcom characters are.

Drew:  We're going to talk about John Ritter plenty.

Glen:  So I just think that this is a very nice spot for this show for us to look at because it's very hard—they were an unexpected hit first season. You think about Cheers—also an unexpected hit, and then the second season was just a masterpiece. 

Drew:  I want to see line charts showing the ups and downs of Chrissy's intelligence but played against Homer's or Fry from Futurama [to] be like, "When did they get too stupid to still be alive?" But I guess Chrissy left the show, so that was her way of dealing with that. I enjoy Mrs. Roper's backstory.

Mrs. Roper:  You know, all of this takes me back to the parties I used to go to when I was a girl.

Chrissy:  Did you have a bridal shower, Mrs. Roper? 

Mrs. Roper:  Oh, sure. Well, not exactly a shower. It was more of a drizzle. 

[audience laughs] 

Mrs. Roper:  But that was Mary Milligan's fault.

Chrissy:  Mary Milligan?

Mrs. Roper:  Yeah. You see, Stanley was her boyfriend until I took him away from her.

Chrissy:  Oh. Did she make a scene? 

Mrs. Roper:  No. As a matter of fact, all through the shower she never stopped laughing.

[audience laughs]

Glen:  Because the backstory being that Mrs. Roper stole her current husband from her friend who was dating him at the time, and it was apparently a great relief to her.

Drew:  We should refer to everyone who has a spouse as "This is their current spouse."

Glen:  You probably have more married friends than I do. So anyway, Mrs. Roper is lending the camera and Jack offers to show them how it works by taking their picture. 

Drew:  Do you have a reach around for this lengthy scene that I found to be kind of pointless?

Glen:  Yes! Yes. I was setting up the reach around because Jack is trying to set up the picture with great orchestrations and ends up failing because he's trying to direct a perfect, casual, happy moment. And so the reach around here is: If you try to orchestrate your happy moments, you will actually spoil them.

Drew:  That makes sense. He does not take the picture because there's actually no film in the camera—that's how unable he was to actualize this vision of perfection—and the girls are off. Jack is bemoaning how lonely he's going to be, and then smash cut to a sexy young—

Glen: Star wipe!

Drew:  [laughs] A sexy young-people party. It opens on this guy playing the conga drum, who actually is very attractive.

Glen:  I was going to talk about several of the people at this party who are very attractive that got—that bearded guy who's just in the background of every shot? 

Drew:  Right. And then the guy who appears to be gay, also very attractive. But that woman who's wearing the blue outfit that kind of looks like a superhero outfit?

Glen:  Mm-hmm. 

Drew:  There's a lot of bare midriffs happening, and I think that's a look we don't really have so much anymore. I don't know if that's good or bad, but yeah. That woman in blue is beautiful. And then there's Celise—Cerise—What's her name? Celise—who is a waitress at The Regal Beagle, which is a bar and not a restaurant right?

Glen:  They serve bar food, too, I think.

Drew:  That's a local hangout that they have on the show. The way she's introduced, I'm like, "Oh. She's probably like a semi-occurring regular on the show." 

['70s funk music plays] 

Celise:  Hey, Jack! you sure know how to throw a party.

Jack:  Oh, Celise! It's so nice to see you having fun. In fact it's nice to see you doing anything.

[audience laughs] 

Celise:  [laughs] Where do you keep your glasses?

Jack:  Hey! What are you doing, waiting on people at The Regal Beagle? Look, this is a party! I want you to relax, and I will serve you for a change.

[doorbell rings]

Celise:  But I have everything I need.

Jack:  Oh, that's true. That's true. That's really true. 

[audience laughs]

Drew:  Has never appeared before or since. This is the only episode she appears in. She's, like, a flirty friend of Jack's and she is played by Karen Smith-Bercovici—I don't know how to pronounce her last name—who has not acted since 1990, but she is very active in Hollywood. She has written the following Hallmark Channel original movies: All of My Heart, Love by Chance, December Bride, Love You Like Christmas, The Heart of Us, All of My Heart: Inn Love—I-N-N because they work at an inn—

Glen:  [gasps!]

Drew:  Yeah—All of My Heart: The Wedding, Christmas at Grand Valley, and most recently Just Add Romance. 

Glen:  There [was] a tone in your voice when you read those titles. And the way you're grinning like an idiot right now, I feel like it's not paying proper respect to that genre of TV movie-slash-film. And if you had watched The Princess Switch with me, you might have some respect.

Drew:  You know how I feel about Vanessa "Fudgens," and also—they're not my thing, but just by the titles I'm like, "That is exactly the title it should have." Like Inn Love, I-N-N. I know exactly who this is marketed at. I know exactly who's watching this movie. I'm glad that she tapped into a lucrative market and has written seven movies in the past few years. 

Glen:  Yeah. She has more credits than me. That's all I'm saying.

Drew:  For now.

Glen:  Anyway. Yeah. She is treated like a recurring character or at least like a season-long extra—a featured extra—and it's weird that she is not.

Drew:  She looks like she should be, or she could be one of Laurie Strode's friends in Halloween, basically, the way she's dressed. And I don't normally have this reaction to actresses on screen, but they were very clearly like, "We're going to emphasize your boobs. Everyone's going to notice that you have giant boobs." 

Glen:  I mean, Jack's eyeline this entire scene is just looking at her chest. It's very uncomfortable.

Drew:  Yes. Right. Because he's not gay.

Glen:  No, he is not. So, yeah. It's a good ol' time until knock-knock-knock—Mr. Roper has come to the door to complain about the noise. Jack sort of solves the situation by inviting Mr. Roper in for a drink, and Mr. Roper is enticed by the ladies at the party. The woman in blue that you mentioned earlier was then—Jack whispers instructions to her ear to lead Mr. Roper away, but not before Mr. Roper has some choice comments for a scarf wielding man in the room.

Drew:  So he's dancing, and the way he's dancing is he has a scarf held in both hands and he's, like, rubbing his butt on it, and that is his dance.

Glen:  Which that's how kids dry after a shower.

Drew:  That's how kids at a wedding would dance, and Mr. Roper's like, "That's gay."

['70s funk music plays] 

Mr. Roper:  Is that a friend of yours?

Jack:  He's—no, but he's a nice guy.

Mr. Roper:  Oh, that's a nice one. That's a beauty.

[audience laughs] 

Mr. Roper:  Listen. Why don't you guys do something quiet at night, like do each other's hair or something?

[audience laughs]

Drew:  I don't know if he's actually gay or just drunk. I don't know how we're supposed to interpret that. But I do like that Mr. Roper implies that he's gay, and Jack's response is, "He's actually a great guy," which is a very small thing, but if that guy is supposed to be gay then the implication here is that Jack doesn't care and he's fine having this gay guy rub his butt on a scarf at a party—like, it doesn't bother him at all. That's very progressive of Jack. 

Glen:  Yeah. You could have picked any of the men and had Mr. Roper said, "Oh, that's the gay one." And that's the thing. I think that Jack is an incredibly likeable character, not just the clumsiness, because I think that's sort of—as a comedy writer, sometimes I find clumsiness as the lowest bar to make someone likeable. But he is—

Drew:  Now who's criticizing romantic comedies? Go ahead, sorry [laughs].

Glen:  Probably you, still. But yes, he's pretending to be gay, and that's sort of awful. But he is also genuinely okay with it. He's okay with it and not just doesn't mind, but he sees nothing wrong with people thinking that he's gay unless it gets in the way of him bedding a lady. But outside of that situation, he doesn't see a stigma to it.

Drew:  Right, which I actually wonder how a guy living in a big city—there probably were a few guys that felt that way, but probably a lot of them who would still not have been okay with being mistaken for gay, those shorts notwithstanding.

Glen:  Yeah.

Drew:  We were born in the wrong time. Those shorts were really good.

Glen:  John Ritter will do this a couple times in the episode, but he does sort of—when Mr. Roper's around and directly referencing Jack's sexuality, John Ritter will slip into coded effeminate mannerisms. 

Drew:  Yes. I actually thought about this myself, and I think it's a genius writing choice because it works for two very different reasons. For people who would have been a coastal progressive who liked gay people, they would have viewed it as Jack camping it up to make fun of Mr. Roper's homophobia. For people that didn't feel that way—regardless of where they lived, I guess, but who didn't like gay people, they would have read that as Jack making fun of how a gay person acts, and everyone could laugh at that for their different reasons. And maybe that's why this show had such success across the entire country. 

Glen:  And for young gay boys who don't know what gay means yet—they sort of see those as warning signs. 

Drew:  Arched eyebrows and wry deliveries of comebacks? 

Glen:  Mm-hmm. And flittiness.

Drew:  Flittiness? What does that mean?

Glen:  I don't know, man.

Drew:  I picture you doing an impression of a hummingbird and just like—

Glen:  Yeah. That's basically—

Drew:  [laughs] So the party very quickly basically ends [when] Celise dances off with Jack and the sexy woman in blue dances off with Mr. Roper, and then Chrissy and Janet are back. It's the next morning. The apartment is trashed in a way that a sitcom party always looks in the aftermath, and they are—no. They want to find Jack is what they want to do, right? Because they're like, "What the hell happened?"

Glen:  Yeah.

Drew:  And then Janet looks in on Jack and she's like, "Oh, no." And then Chrissy looks in and we see what she sees, and it's Jack in bed with someone. 

Janet:  Jack?

Chrissy:  Maybe he's asleep.

Janet:  Oh, boy. Jack? [knocks] 

[door opens and then quickly shuts]

Janet:  Let's unpack.

[audience laughs]

Chrissy:  What is it? What'd you see in there?

Janet:  Oh—

Chrissy: [gasps] 

[audience "ooohs" and laughs]

Chrissy:  Huh.

Drew:  And the audience has a shocked reaction to this, which is weird because I was like, "You guys know this is a sex comedy show." They're all fucking, right? But the way Janet and Chrissy react makes me think maybe they're not.

Chrissy:  I never would have believed this of Jack.

Janet:  Oh, Chrissy. Why not? Look. It is about time you realize Jack is no saint. He's got the same desires as any normal male. 

Chrissy:  What's that supposed to mean?

Janet:  He's an animal. 

[audience laughs]

Chrissy:  Say, wait a minute. Janet?

Janet:  Huh? 

Chrissy:  Aren't we overreacting?

Janet:  Over—you mean this is all right with you? 

Chrissy:  Of course not. The last thing we need in here is another girl.

Janet:  Right.

[audience laughs] 

Chrissy:  Still—

Janet:  Oh, still what? 

Chrissy:  Well, he does live here. 

Janet:  Yeah? Well, so do we. 

Chrissy:  [sighs] And he does pay a third of the rent. And that is his bedroom.

Janet:  Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Chrissy:  Janet, I don't like this any more than you do, but it is Jack's life and we've got no right to interfere. 

Glen:  I don't remember the exact rules. I do think there was probably at some point some conversation about maybe Jack can't bring people over. I mean, because Janet and Chrissy probably have to have some weird arrangements since they sleep in the same room.

Drew:  Oh.

Glen:  So maybe this is, like, can't host.

Drew:  Do straight people use that expression?

Glen:  I don't know. 

Drew:  Okay. 

Glen:  So it's weird for them to have a no fucking rule in the apartment, but that also gets around—it could be a comedy that talks about sex without ever having to show it.

Drew:  I guess. Like, they're all having sex elsewhere, and the girls are not engaged in sex because that's what America would want to see. And then they kind of go into this move like, "Well, I guess we'll clean up," and then they kind of realize, "Wait no. Jack should clean up." It's a very—it's kind of an oddly paced thing.

Glen:  I do want to say that Chrissy is so reasonable in this scene.

Drew:  She's more progressive than Janet is in it.

Glen:  And this is where her bimbo joke comes in.

Chrissy:  And remember, what happens between two consulting adults in the privacy of their own home—

Janet:  Chrissy.

[audience laughs]

Chrissy:  That—us consenting adults.

Janet:  I know, but first they have to consult. Otherwise they wouldn't know what they were consenting to. 

[audience laughs]

Glen:  And it's sort of like that episode of Friends where Joey says, "It's a moo point because it's like a cows opinion—it doesn't matter."

Drew:  Yeah. They're not wrong.

Glen:  Yeah. It's like, "Okay. That's so stupid it's genius." 

Drew:  Yep. Mm-hmm. So then they decide to quietly wake up Jack and tell him that he needs to clean up, and then they also say, "We're going to be in the kitchen so no one has to be embarrassed"—which is nice of them—"so get your floozy out of here." And that is when he pulls off the covers and reveals "Mr. Roper! Oh, no." 

Glen:  Hey, Drew.

Drew:  Yeah? 

Glen:  Do you know what we should have done when we talked about them going to commercial break?

Drew:  No. We should do it now because this is the natural break in the story.

Glen:  Sure. Let's talk about money stuff.

["Come and Knock on Our Door" instrumentals play]

[Gayest Episode Ever promotes A Love Bizarre]

[An old Happy Days commercial plays] 

[Gayest Episode Ever promotes their Patreon]

["Come and Knock on Our Door" instrumentals play]

Drew:  I'm looking at my notes and it says, "Do they not fuck?" because they act like they literally have never had sex.

Glen:  [laughs] Mine is, "No fucking?"—question mark.

Drew:  So we're back, by the way, and Mr. Roper and Jack have just realized that they spent the night in the same bed.

Glen:  Oh, no!

Drew:  Oh, no! What do you think happened?

Glen:  Probably fucking.

Drew:  That's the thing though. That does seem to be the concern that Mr. Roper has, and that seems like a weird concern. I don't know anyone—I don't know anyone that's been blackout drunk and had sex with someone—like, a gender that they weren't normally attracted to and then been like, "I don't remember if I did this or not." 

Glen:  Yeah. That's the thing. Mr. Roper immediately assumes it was consensual. I guess, again, it's a sitcom in the late '70s, so they're not going to bring up rape.

Drew:  But they just talked about consent.

Glen:  True.

Drew:  Consent is something that's brought up very explicitly, so maybe he thinks that Jack took advantage of him? I don't—

Glen:  But that's never his charge. He just—

Drew:  Yeah. He never says that out loud.

Glen:  Yeah, which is strange that he just sort of misses that step or never addresses it. It's just like, "Oh, I guess I had a gay experience," which means that maybe it isn't out of the realm of possibility for him normally?

Drew:  Yeah. If he's worried that he had sex with a man, he's downplaying the horror that a man of his age in the '70s would have had. He should be—in a realistic story he'd probably beat Jack to death, to be honest, or be revulsed by the situation. But he says, "Oh, no. What did I do?"—eye roll. The closest he gets to outright horror is when he's leaving and he says, "Nothing ever happened."

Mr. Roper:  You got to promise me something—that we'll just keep it between the two of us.

Jack:  What happened here will never leave these lips.

Mr. Roper:  I appreciate it.

Jack:  Of course, I can't vouch for all the blabbermouths at the party last night.

Mr. Roper:  What?

Jack:  Well, not to worry. Most of them were your friends from The Regal Beagle.

Mr. Roper:  Oh, my god. 

[audience laughs] 

Mr. Roper:  I got to get out of here. Ooh! The girls. The girls went to San Diego, right?

Jack:  Right—and they got back a few minutes ago.

[audience laughs]

Mr. Roper:  The window.

Jack:  It won't open.

Mr. Roper:  Why not? 

Jack:  You still haven't fixed it.

Mr. Roper:  I'm trapped!

[audience laughs]

Jack:  Mr. Roper, the girls will be in the kitchen. So you can just sneak out, and they won't see you. 

Mr. Roper:  Oh, good. Good. Oh. This never happened, right?

Jack:  Right. And thank you for a lovely evening.

[audience laughs uproariously]

Glen:  Janet and Chrissy catch him sneaking out, tiptoeing out. He has a bunch of lame excuses that no one believes why he's there—testing the floorboards, things like that. They don't believe him. They're just laughing at him the entire time.

Mr. Roper:  You got a loose floorboard here. I came up to inspect it. That's why I'm not wearing my shoes, see, because my feet are much closer to the ground. I can— 

[audience laughs] 

Mr. Roper:  Oh, yeah. The reason I didn't ring your bell was because I knew you were in San Diego and you wouldn't hear it down there.

[Chrissy and Janet laugh]

Mr. Roper:  What's so funny?

Janet:  I'm sorry, Mr. Roper, but we saw you coming out of Jack's room [laughs].

[audience laughs]

Mr. Roper:  [gasps] Oh, that. Oh. I got a very good explanation for that.

Janet:  Oh, no. No, please. You don't have to explain to us.

Mr. Roper:  But I want to.

Janet:  No. It's none of our business.

Chrissy:  Anyway we know what we saw.

[Chrissy and Janet laugh]

[audience hoots]

Mr. Roper:  It's not what you think. 

[doorbell rings] 

Mr. Roper:  Don't answer that!

Drew:  And the laughter's interesting because to them, they're like, "Oh, we know what happened. This is a funny misunderstanding, and you're making a big deal of it, and we're giggling at you." But I think he thinks that they think there actually was a hookup, and he's kind of horrified that the women are laughing at him because he might have had a gay moment.

Glen:  Yeah. Their laughter is emasculating to him because he's not in on the joke that Jack is straight. And then Mrs. Roper comes in, catches Stanley sneaking out, she was—

Drew:  Legitimately worried.

Glen:  Yeah. She was concerned because he didn't come home.

Mrs. Roper:  Janet, I'm so worried. Stanley—Stanley! 

[audience laughs] 

Mrs. Roper:  Where have you been all night?

Mr. Roper:  Why do you ask that, Helen? 

[audience laughs]

Mrs. Roper:  Why do I ask that? I just got up and found out you hadn't been in bed all night.

Mr. Roper:  And you got worried?

Mrs. Roper:  Of course I got worried! After all, sleeping is your favorite hobby. 

[audience laughs]

Mr. Roper:  All right. Well, you see—oh, I slept up here last night. 

Mrs. Roper:  Up here?

Mr. Roper:  Yeah. Oh. On the couch.

Mrs. Roper:  Oh.

Jack:  Good morning, Mrs. Roper.

Mrs. Roper:  Oh, good morning—

Mr. Roper:  Oh, hi Jack. How have you been? I haven't seen you for a while. 

[audience laughs]

Mr. Roper:  Here's your wallet. You left it in my bed.

[audience laughs]

Drew:  Which is not helping anything at all, but—

Glen:  But then she believes that nothing happened, obviously.

Drew:  Yeah, because she's probably spent like five minutes with this man and would be like, "I would know if he was secretly interested in having sex with men."

Glen:  And also she knows that Jack isn't gay.

Drew:  Right.

Glen:  But everyone's being very perfectly reasonable until our favorite guest star—

Drew:  Celise!

Glen:  —enters and—

Drew:  I actually knew someone named Chalice ["sha-leese"], but it's just a very odd—

Glen:  Chalice ["chal-lice"]. 

Drew:  Chalice ["chal-lice"]. Yeah [laughs]

Glen:  My friend, Chalice ["chal-lice"].

Drew:  Chalice ["chal-lice"] comes in—and, yeah.

[audience laughs]

Celise:  Mr. Roper! I couldn't believe what you did last night.

Mr. Roper:  I didn't do anything! What did I do?

[audience laughs]

Celise:  Don't you remember? The way you and Jack were carrying on?

Mr. Roper:  Oh, my god.

[audience laughs and applauds] 

Celise:  Jack couldn't get over it. You really surprised everybody.

Chrissy:  How? How?

Janet:  What did he do?

Mr. Roper:  I don't want to hear it.

[audience laughs]

Celise:  Is he alright?

Mrs. Roper:  I don't think he knows what he is right now. 

[audience laughs] 

Mrs. Roper:  Well, go on. Tell us. How did he surprise everybody?

Jack:  Excuse me.

Celise:  Well, the party was in full swing, and you—

Glen:  And then she's beginning to tell a story about how wild and crazy Jack and Mr. Roper were last night, and Stanley—Mr. Roper—can't take anymore, runs into the kitchen horrified—

Drew:  And we don't get to hear the story, which is what we want to actually hear because we've not seen what the result of this party was. But also, I think of it as Chalice being—Celise—whatever the fuck her name is—being like, "Hi. I'm a minor character. I'm going to provide some valuable narration," and that's basically what she does. 

Glen:  And then Jack follows Mr. Roper out of concern because Mr. Roper is genuinely upset. 

Drew:  Like, he might kill himself. 

Glen:  Yeah. In the kitchen, which other than the bathroom, the kitchen's the best place.

Drew:  The greenhouse. The conservatory. 

Glen:  The attic.

Drew:  [laughs] Oh, yeah. 

Glen:  The coach house. 

Drew:  We can just keep naming Clue locations, or we can go on—

Glen:  Clue master detective locations. But Jack has a—this is, I think, a genuinely nice scene where Jack risks it all.

Jack:  Mr. Roper?

Mr. Roper:  Don't talk to me.

Jack:  Oh, come on. It's not as bad as you think.

Mr. Roper:  How could it be worse?

Jack:  You could be dead!

Mr. Roper:  That would be better! 

[audience laughs] 

Mr. Roper:  I'm so ashamed.

Jack:  Oh. Come on, now. Hey.

Mr. Roper:  Look. I can't even step outside my own house. People are going to start pointing their fingers at me and telling stories behind my back, and my own wife— my own wife, who's always looked up to me as a man. 

[audience laughs] 

Mr. Roper:  I don't know what to do. 

Jack:  Mr. Roper?

Mr. Roper:  I'm so ashamed. Don't say anything! There's nothing you can say that's going to help me. 

Jack:  Yes, there is.

Mr. Roper:  I'm so ashamed [cries]. 

Jack:  I'm not gay.

Mr. Roper:  What? 

[audience laughs]

Jack:  I'm—not—gay. It was all just a made-up story, so you'd let me stay here in the apartment with the girls.

Mr. Roper:  Really?

Jack:  It's true. I'm straight. 

Mr. Roper:  If you're straight, then I'm the king of Siam—

[audience laughs and claps]

Jack:  Just listen to me for a minute, please.

Mr. Roper:  —and you're the queen. 

[audience laughs]

Glen:  But the reason I know we didn't have sex last night is because I'm not gay.

Drew:  Which doesn't actually prove anything. We all know that you can still have sex, but yes—yeah. It's a very nice moment for him. He does the right thing. He's a very nice person, and he really has nothing to gain by doing this. He only wants to make this person who's having an unnecessary freak out just settle the fuck down. So he's willing to possibly risk getting kicked out of his apartment just to make this man feel okay with himself. It's very nice.

Glen:  Yeah, this old, unlikeable man.

Drew:  Basically. Yeah.

Glen:  Who just makes our lives hell.

Drew:  Mm-hmm. And his reaction is—he's like, "If you're straight, then I'm the king of Siam—

Glen:  [aggressively] —and you're the queen." Sigh. Still a good comeback—but, sigh. So they rejoin the others and Chalice—

Drew:  I don't know what she's been talking about all this time because she's just now getting to the part. It's like, "What the fuck were you talking about?"

[audience applauds] 

Celise:  And just as the party started to sag, Jack and Mr. Roper surprised everybody. Oh! I'm glad you're back. I was just about to tell them what you two crazies did [laughter].

Mr. Roper:  See? It's starting up already. I'm ruined! 

Celise:  [singing] I'm a little teapot short and stout. Here is my handle. Here is my spout.

Mr. Roper:  Never mind the singing! Tell them what happened. Tell the whole world what happened. I don't care anymore. 

Celise:  Oh, you two were so cute! [singing] I'm a little teapot [laughter]. He had us all in stitches.

Mr. Roper:  All right. Get on with it. Get on with it. What else did I do? 

Celise:  Nothing. You said that was the only song you knew all the words to. The two of you kept singing it all night long.

[audience laughs]

Mr. Roper:  Oh, I'm so ashamed!

[audience laughs and applauds]

Drew:  Also, Chalice's rendition of it is very sexy [laughs]. 

Glen:  Oh, yeah.

Drew:  I've never seen a sexy version of "I'm a Little Teapot" before. I was like, "Oh. Look at that."

Glen:  So let me tell you about my takeaway from this when I was a young child.

Drew:  Okay.

Glen:  I very earnestly thought, "Oh, is that a likeable thing to do?" in front of a group of people. So I had me and my best friend at the time, who has also turned out to be gay now—I made us do "I'm a Little Teapot" at recess in front of other kids.

Drew:  How'd that go?

Glen:  I don't think it went particularly well.

Drew:  But you don't remember it being really bad, so it couldn't have been—

Glen:  Probably because I was being blacked out from being beaten in the playground.

Drew:  [laughs] Mm-hmm. Yeah [laughs]. Aww. Yeah. 

Glen:  Anyway.

Drew:  Why did we think TV was giving us an accurate depiction of how the world works? That really has come to bite us in the ass quite a bit in our youth. 

Glen:  Oh, yes. All that looking out for quicksand.

Drew:  Uh-huh. Yeah. And apparently they sang it all evening and that was funny, and then she's like, "Found my earing. I serve no purpose now because I've delivered the one piece of information that I can give"—other than the fact that she blames the lost earing on Mr. Roper because he was nibbling her ear, and Mrs. Roper is not pleased.

Celise:  [laughs] It's all your fault, you little ear nibbler, you [laughs].

[audience "ooohs"] 

Celise:  Well, goodbye y'all. Don't forget me the next time you throw a party.

Jack:  I'll see you at the Beagle.

Janet:  Bye-bye.

Chrissy:  Bye, Celise.

Mrs. Roper:  So the little teapot has taken up ear nibbling, huh? 

[audience laughs] 

Mrs. Roper:  Come on, Stanley.

Mr. Roper:  Wait, Helen. Wait, wait. I was just thinking—

Mrs. Roper:  So was I—about breaking your spout. 

[audience laughs]

Mr. Roper:  Oh, wait, wait, wait.

Drew:  So what happens next is an affirmation of what we've already said—that Jack is an upstanding guy because Mr. Roper's interpretation of what happened is that no sex was had, but he did spend the night in Jack's bed—because things happen when you're drunk. And this made him uncomfortable, and Jack saw that and was willing to make up an outrageous lie to make him feel better. The lie being that like, "I'm not gay, I'm actually straight," which Mr. Roper acknowledges would have got him kicked out of the house.

Mr. Roper:  Jack.

Jack:  Mm-hmm?

Mr. Roper:  The stuff that you were telling me, about how you tricked me so you could live up here?

Jack:  Oh. Oh, that? Well—

Chrissy:  What did you tell him?

Jack:  That I was straight.

Janet:  What? 

Mr. Roper:  Now if that's true and you're living here with them, I got to throw you out of here.

Janet:  Now wait, Mr. Roper—[characters protest].

Mr. Roper:  Wait a minute. Why would he say something that wasn't true if it was true, huh? Huh?

Chrissy:  Well, because—

Mrs. Roper:  He probably—

Mr. Roper:  I'll tell you why. He did it for me. He did it to get me off the hook.

[female characters agree in relief]

[audience laughs]

Mr. Roper:  He's a decent person. I don't approve of what you stand for—

[audience laughs] 

Mr. Roper:  —but in my book, you're okay.

[audience laughs and applauds]

Glen:  Goes in to give him a hug and stops short because he doesn't want to touch him because he's a dirty gay man.

Drew:  Yep, which is very nice. And he is a very upstanding guy, and I'm glad that was at least acknowledged because he acted very admirably in this episode—much better than a lot of men in sitcoms usually do. But it does play into that problem we've seen the entire run of this podcast where Mr. Roper says, "I don't like what you stand for, but I think you're okay as a person," where gay people have to prove their worth as a decent human being whereas straight people are just assumed to be decent human beings from the get-go.

Glen:  Even though we know they're all monsters.

Drew:  All of them. All of our straight listeners are monsters. You meant straight people—or gay people are monsters?

Glen:  No. Straight people are monsters.

Drew:  Okay. That's right.

Glen:  Gay people are also monsters [laughter]. 

Drew:   Different kind—slightly different kind of monster.

Glen:  Yeah. One's like Lady Gaga. Isn't that what that means?

Drew:  Oh. No.

Glen:  K. 

Drew:  We don't talk about that. And then—[laughter]. My dog is licking his penis [laughter]. I wonder if that's getting caught. I wonder if that picks up. If that gets picked up on on the mics I'll keep it in there, just so people can get a real experience of what it's like to record with us.

Glen:  He's really going to town.

Drew:  Maybe he has a really dirty penis.

Glen:  Thurman, you're done.

"Thurman":  No. No I'm not.

Glen:  And then there's the tag where Jack is rubbing Janet's foot to make up for the mess—both literal and metaphorical—that he left for them to come home to, and then he trips around and hurts his own toe.

Drew:  The metaphorical mess, I don't think he really has to apologize for it because they seem to be loving this whole situation. It was very entertaining for them—but, yep. And then Janet massages his toe. Do you have a reach around for this exchange of toe massages?

Glen:  I thought two reach arounds was enough.

Drew:  Okay. Yeah. Well, you're a busy guy. Yeah. That's all I actually have to say about this episode. It's very simple. Very clean. I liked it. I think it represents a lot of the reasons of why this show was progressive and good. 

Glen:  I would agree.

Drew:  Great. I was curious—because I have not. Have you ever seen any episodes of The Ropers or Three's a Crowd? 

Glen:  Yes. 

Drew:  How are they?

Glen:  Not good. The Ropers feels very stale, I guess. Jeffrey Tambor and his family just don't have the same—like, it's weird to put the Ropers in the victim role. You're not really clear what the conflict is whereas in Three's Company they served a very specific purpose, whereas just being kind of weird neighbors that you don't actually have to talk to—

Drew:  No. 

Glen:  —doesn't have the same zing to it. Three's a Crowd I love because I assumed it was just still Three's Company.

Drew:  I think it was packaged—the syndication package included that one season often, so we didn't really know it was supposed to be different. 

Glen:  Right. And because his love interest/fiancée/wife, she was a flight attendant, and my mom was a flight attendant. So—

Drew:  So you loved it because you related to it.

Glen:  Yeah. But, yeah. Again, the conflict there of being a chef at his fiancée's father's restaurant, which I think was what was going on—no. I don't actually remember what the conflict was other than the father-in-law-to-be did not approve of Jack.

Drew:  Who is clearly not gay anymore.

Glen:  Clearly.

Drew:  Who is your favorite of—

Glen:  Terri.

Drew:  Terri. Why Terri? Terri Alden. She's probably not most people's pick for the most memorable female roommate.

Glen:  I like Terri because she was slightly neurotic and because when she came in she sort of—I don't want to say knew her place, but she knew she was walking into a situation where she was an outsider and she acknowledged her role as the outsider. And also, her first episode—where Jack keeps pranking her and she's standing there, makeup running because he had just seltzered her? She's just standing there weird and vulnerable and very sexy, and it's just a very strange scene, I think it made me feel very strange ways.

Drew:  I for some reason thought she might have gone on to do scream queen stuff, but apparently she didn't. She was in The Devil's Rejects and that's about it.

Glen:  Oh.

Drew:  Yeah. But for some reason I thought she was one of the nurses in Halloween II, but she's probably a different Pamela. Pamela Barnes is the actress' name. Pamela Barnes. 

Glen:  Well, who's your favorite roommate?

Drew:  For some reason when I was a kid I liked—what was Chrissy's sister's name?

Glen:  Not sister—it was a cousin.

Drew:  Cousin—the other Snow?

Glen:  Cindy.

Drew:  Cindy. I don't know why she stuck out because I can't recall a single thing about her. I guess I would have to—

Glen:  She likes horses. You're a horse girl, so you guys get along.

Drew:  I would go with Janet now, just because she's sensible and—

Glen:  Well, yeah. Janet's obviously the best. I thought we were just choosing between the three blondes.

Drew:  Oh.

Glen:  I guess I could have let you finish your question.

Drew:  No, I think that's it. Do they ever give a reason for why Suzanne Somers' character name is Christmas Snow? 

Glen:  I don't think so.

Drew:  I mean, that's a very specific name right? Her name is Christmas Noel—"Chrissy" Snow.

Glen:  I did not know that Chrissy was short for Christmas.

Drew:  Yeah. It's one of two characters in pop culture, I think, named Christmas, the other one being Dr. Christmas Jones played by Denise Richards—"I played a nu-cu-lar psychiatrist in a James Bonk movie" [laughter]. Okay. I think we're good. Glen, where can people find you on social media?

Drew:  On Instagram, you can find me @BrosQuartz—B-R-O-S-Quartz. On Twitter, it's @IWriteWrongs. I and then "write" with a W, and then "wrongs," also with a W. The proper spelling.

Drew:  I, Drew Mackie, am on Twitter @DrewGMackie—M-A-C-K-I-E. You can follow this podcast on Twitter @GayestEpisode. We're also on Facebook @GayestEpisodeEver. If you want to listen to any previous episodes of this show, please do so at gayestepisodeever.com. Please subscribe to this podcast if you haven't already. We're available basically everywhere you'd normally find a podcast. If you look somewhere and we're not there, tell me, and I will put us on there. Please give us a rate and review. We like rates and reviews because they help other people find this podcast. Literally, it only has to be a sentence long. But if you're listening to this show and you've enjoyed a few episodes, please take a little bit of time to go on iTunes and give us five stars and like us. We'd be eternally grateful, and we will read new reviews on future episodes. Gayest Episode Ever is a TableCakes podcast. TableCakes is a Los Angeles based podcast network. To see some of the other shows that we have on the TableCakes network, go to tablecakes.com. I host two of them.

Glen:  I co-host one of them. You're listening to it.

Drew:  You're listening to it. But that's it. We're going to be back next week with a shorter episode, and then we're going to go into the final stretch for season two of the show. So look forward to that.

Glen:  At the end, Drew shoots me.

Drew:  No. That's not true.

Glen:  Please help.

Drew:  But give us money on Patreon to make sure that doesn't happen. I'm not holding Glen ransom I swear.

Glen:  Help.

Drew:  Episode over.

Glen:  Bye forever.

["Raise Me Up" performed by Hercules & Love Affair plays] 

Katherine:  A TableCakes production.