Finally, sitcom-reality catches up with, er, reality-reality
in this week’s episode of According to Jim, wherein Cheryl pops the big news on
Jim: she’s pregnant. Big time.
This works out nicely because in real life, Courtney
Thorne-Smith (aka Cheryl) was pregnant while filming all of this season’s
episodes. She gave birth in January to a
baby boy, BTW, so congrats to her and her husband.
It’s been interesting the lengths that the producers of
According to Jim have gone to hide Thorne-Smith’s pregnancy. In the fifth episode of the season they
shipped Cheryl off to Florida to take care of her ailing mother, effectively reducing her presence on the
show while she was visibly pregnant. Cheryl still checked in on the phone and stuff, but on the occasions
when they did film her, they took pains not to show her baby belly. She was seated behind a table or lying in bed
with the sheets pulled up, stuff like that. For this week’s episode, the ninth of the season, they showed Cheryl in
one scene on a laptop during a video-conference with Jim (just a head shot) and
in another scene they blocked out her lower torso with a crib and boxes. I was beginning to wonder if they were going
to work Thorne-Smith’s real pregnancy into the show or just try to make it
through the whole season without even addressing it.
There’s been a long history of hiding an actress’ pregnancy
on weekly television shows, so According to Jim is in good company. Seinfeld’s Julia Louis-Dreyfuss and The
X-Files’ Gillian Anderson both opted for the “long coat” approach to disguising
their pregnancy and were, if memory serves, written out of their shows for a
while. I seem to recall The Cosby Show’s
Phylicia Rashad carrying a lot of pillows and standing behind couches a
lot. There are loads of more examples; daytime
soaps have to deal with situations like this all the time.
Ultimately, all show-runners must deal with the question: do
we write the pregnancy into the show or not? Of course, the precedent for incorporating real-life pregnancy into the
constructed reality of TV was set back in The Day by Lucille Ball – just one of
the many ways she was a pioneer for women in TV. Her situation was doubly challenging because
in 1953 they couldn’t even use the word “pregnant” on I Love Lucy – instead
Lucy was “expecting.” Or as Desi
pronounced it, “spectin.”
We’ve come a long way culturally in the decades since then,
but biology and the mandates of a weekly TV shooting schedule remain. The producers of According to Jim solved their
particular problem in this week’s episode, “Goodwill Hunting,” when Cheryl
finally announced that she was pregnant - with twins no less! I’m glad they’re dropping the visual
trickery, but now I’m just curious how they’re going to explain the rapid growth
of her belly – maybe pull a LOST move and skip ahead in time? I’m not clear on how she could go from first
trimester to a big mamma belly in one week’s time.
But perhaps I’m over-thinking the whole thing…
--Dave Campbell
