5 Sitcoms About Married Couples Who Chose Not to Have Kids
About one in three households with married couples don’t have kids, according to the Census Bureau, but you wouldn’t know it by watching sitcoms. If a television comedy features a married couple as its stars, odds are high that they already have kids (plot lines!), or that they will have children at some point over the show’s run (more plot lines!).
In fact, it’s surprisingly difficult to find popular sitcoms about married couples that don’t have children in the cast. Here are five examples of TV comedies where two members of the family were more than enough…
The Bob Newhart Show
“As to the issue of Bob and Emily Hartley having kids, the only other real creative demand I had was that I didn’t want them to have children,” Newhart wrote in his memoir, I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This!: And Other Things That Strike Me As Funny. “I didn’t want to be the dolt of a father who gets himself in trouble and then the precocious kids huddle in the kitchen and plot a way to get Dad out of this pickle.”
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But producers being producers, they commissioned a script about Emily having a baby in the show’s fifth season. They sent the script to Newhart, then one of the producers called the next day to see how he liked it.
“It’s a very funny script,” replied Newhart.
“Oh, I’m glad you like it,” the producer said. “We were really nervous about your reaction.”
Newhart only had one question about the storyline. “Who are you going to get to play the part of Bob?”
Green Acres
Oliver and Lisa Douglas bring no children along to Hooterville, and while they never exactly explain their choice, it’s easy to infer why they went that route.
Oliver was a high-powered Manhattan attorney — no time to be a stay-at-home dad, and by the time he opts for a lifestyle change, he’s likely too old for the responsibility. As for Lisa? Her priorities are made clear in the show’s opening theme song: She adores a penthouse view, Park Avenue, luxury stores and the glamour of Times Square.
“Dahling, I love you, but give me the opulent, childfree lifestyle to which I’ve grown accustomed.”
Curb Your Enthusiasm
In an era when childless couples are becoming more common, fewer sitcoms than ever feature such families. One exception is Curb Your Enthusiasm, but it required a retcon to remove the kids.
Larry and Cheryl had (at least) two children in the special that launched the show, with Larry mentioning an event at his daughter’s school and later swearing on his children’s lives. But when HBO turned that special into the Curb Your Enthusiasm series, the premise was rewritten as if those kids never existed.
Plus, “it’s much easier for me to play a guy without kids,” David said at a Paley Center Q&A.
The Honeymooners
The Honeymooners is a profoundly melancholy show, and that extends to the parenting status of Ralph and Alice Kramden. Reasons for why they don’t have their own child are unexplained, but in an extended sketch on The Jackie Gleason Show (later presented as a “lost episode” of The Honeymooners), the Kramdens actually adopt a baby girl. In a cruel plot twist, the girl’s birth mother has a change of heart and takes the baby back.
Ralph is furious, and the episode ends on a shot of a sobbing, heartbroken Alice.
I Dream of Jeannie*
I put an asterisk by this one for three reasons. First, Jeannie and her master, Major Nelson, weren’t married until the show’s final season.
Second, as star Barbara Eden has been telling everyone on her recent podcast tour, Jeannie and Major Nelson never had sex because she was an entity, not a human being.
Third, in the 1985 made-for-TV movie, I Dream of Jeannie... Fifteen Years Later, Jeannie and Major Nelson (no longer played by Larry Hagman) have a teenage son named T.J.
Explain that one, Barbara Eden — unless you’re going to tell us Jeannie blinked the kid into existence.
