TV Widows

[RicoGregg]

This is what I get for not ever being a Trekkie, but I'm just wondering, were any of the Star Trek characters widowed?

 

[Jimme]

1.) On "Gimme A Break", the police chief's wife and Nell Harper (Nell Carter) are longtime friends. While the two ladies are spending a pleasant day together, the chiel's wife confides to Nell she is dying - "it's terminal and there's nothing they can do" (I think it was a tumor of some sort) - and she makes Nell promise to make sure the girls are taken care of. The wife knows chief Carl won't be able to do it on his own and demands Nell promise to take care of the girls, who they have known all their lives and like very much.
2.) At least one of Maude's former husbands died on her. Another former husband died after they were divorced, and Maude accidentally flushes the ashes down the toilet. Her housekeeper, Mrs, Naugatuck is a widow. She keeps her the ashes of her husband, Cyril, with her - until Maude accidentally knocked the urn over. She vacuumed them up, conforting Mrs, Naugatuck the vacuum bag was recently changed.
3.) James Evans of Good Times was killed in a car crash after he got to the south to begin a new job.
4.) Lucy Carmichael, Lucy Carter and Lucy Barker are all widows. We know Lucy Barker (Life With Lucy) was married to Sam Barker, who owned M & B Hardware with Curtis McGibbon (Gale Gordon) The premiere episode explains that Sam left Lucy his interest in the hardware store. While she never cared about the store before, now she says she wants to be involved in the daily operations (hence the importing of pasta makers, an industrial strength fire extinguisher, and rearranging all the items in the store alphabetically.)
5.) Laverne DiFazio doesn't seem to miss her departed mom too much, nor does her father.
6.) George Jefferson commented how hard it was for Mother Jefferson to raise him all alone after his dad died while he was a little boy.

 

[bpatrick]

I wasn't suggesting that Bachelor Father was cancelled in its original run because of Sammee Tong's portrayl of the "houseboy." That's the kind of problem the writers can solve - just by eliminating the word "houseboy" and possibly by toning down the sterotyped speech or behaviors in the actor's portrayl.

What I said was - I think that might have been the reason the show seemed to disappear from re-run syndication by the late mid or late 60s.

Along the lines of Calvin and the Colonel - my father was an amimated cartoonist, and worked for UPA studios in the early 60s on Mr. Magoo and Dick Tracy cartoons. The animated Tracy basically played the "straight-man" in those cartoons to two bumbling detectives - Joe Jitsu (think Mr. Moto or Charlie Chan, only inept), and Go-Go Gomez. As I remember, Gomez was lazy and liked to take siestas. Needless to say, they represented uncomfortable ethnic stereotypes. So Dick Tracy also seemed to disappear from rerun syndication by the late 60s. It probably didn't help that Chester Gould, the creator of the Tracy comic strip, was a notorious right-winger who frequently got in trouble by putting his opinions in his comic strips. The LA Times and a number of other papers dropped Tracy by the early 70s.
[/quote]

Probably the real reason "Bachelor Father" disappeared from the rerun circuit is the same as that of most 1950s shows: black and white. By the late '60s color was in, and studios had difficulty selling shows in reruns (Groucho, for example, tried for years to get NBC to syndicate "Best Of Groucho" only to be told that it was too slow and in black and white--producer/partner John Guedel did get KTLA to take it in 1974, but that's a long story). Unless a show achieved a cult following ("I Love Lucy" or "Leave It To Beaver,"
for example), its chances of extended life on the rerun circuit without the benefit of color dwindled after about 1970.

 

[Markxxx]

The "Gimme A Break" storyline was rewritten later on to show Nell as being a mother to the girls since they were very little.

One thing I hated about "Here's Lucy," is the writers quite often confused the fact that Lucy and Harry were in-laws and as such Lucy's kids were blood to Harry and Lucy didn't know of a lot (if not most) of Harry's relatives, which she should've at least had marginal knowledge of, because they would've also been Lucy's husband's relatives.

I was surprised to hear about "Groucho," since that ran a LOT on WFLD-TV in Chicago until the mid 80s, and it was running on WPWR in the very early 90s too.

Laverne was like 9 or 10 years old when her mother died, so it kind of makes sense she'd have gotten over her mother's death. My dad was 11 when he died and my mum died when I was 16 and I certainly was over it sooner than ten years

The Drummond did a few episodes with Arnold and Willis upset over their parents' death but Kimberly remarked her mother died when she was very little and didn't remember much about her.

But then again, who wants to watch a sit-COM(edy) about sad people

 

[dhett]

I just realized that no one has yet mentioned Dr. Richard Kimble - The Fugitive.

His widowhood was the entire premise of the show. However, unlike O.J., he really was trying to find his wife's real killer.

 

[WMC2006]

The "Gimme A Break" storyline was rewritten later on to show Nell as being a mother to the girls since they were very little.

Just as an aside, Dolph Sweet (who played the Chief) died during the series run so Nell became mom and dad at that point...although, also at that point, the girls had pretty much become hot adult chicks and didnt much need nanny-ing anymore. :