#but there doesn’t seem to be a consistent pattern between all Breakout episodes

[quibbs126]

So what do you think are the chances we get a new Breakout Main Episode anytime soon?

I don’t know, I just remember getting a new Breakout episode around April last year (which was bad but regardless), would we get a new one sometime around these next couple months, possibly even March?

Listen I just would like a new Breakout episode. Wandercrab’s fun and all, but I want something new (and also I mean, Wandercrab is basically half the old Sugarteara episode)

[twentiethcenturymoviesandtv]

Growing Pains: The Story

A television show setup, at its core, is the basic idea, the core elements of the show.  The ‘setup’ is what the audience returns to, week after week, the known part of a show.  Setups are easy to spot, they’re what you describe when you try to get your friends to watch the shows.  Whether it’s a military hospital plagued by hijinks, a group of commandos on the run from the law, or a mystery writer who is constantly stumbling upon murders, these setups are what the individual stories build and expand upon.

In other words, the setup for your television show is the foundation that subsequent episodes explore.  

While there are cases when a bad setup can lead to genuinely good episodes, (or vice-versa) traditionally, a show is often only as good as its setup.  It is based on whether or not the audience likes a premise that can enable a show to continue, and in the case of sitcoms, there isn’t usually a whole lot of premises to choose from.  Especially when it comes to the standard domestic-comedy.

So, what’s the setup for this one?

The premise behind Growing Pains is a very simple one, echoed in plenty of other sitcoms to some degree or another.  The dad of the family, Jason Seaver, decides to take his psychiatry business home, choosing to work as a stay-at-home dad in order to allow his wife, Maggie Seaver, to return to her job as a reporter.  This Happily Married couple work together to raise their three kids, who also seem relatively standard for this kind of show.  There’s the oldest (and Breakout Character) Mike, a troublemaking con-man in the making with a heart of gold, middle child Carol, a smart, scholarly Deadpan Snarker, and youngest Ben, a rambunctious kid who is alternatively too smart for his own good, or not smart enough.

There were other characters, of course, (notably the Seaver baby, Chrissy, who would arrive in season four, and homeless kid Luke Brower, played by a young Leonardo DiCaprio in season seven) but for the most part, the stories were centered around the family.  As a setup, this works really well.

The family dynamic isn’t terribly unique (besides the idea of the father staying home to work), but it does work rather well as a setup.  The show’s main cast is five people who are all different from each other, who can interact with each other in different and interesting ways.  You can count on Mike and Carol to insult one another, Ben to misunderstand a concept (early on, especially), or the parents to be in a clash of opinions about how to discipline their kids.  Mix in a bunch of other supporting characters and one-off appearances, and you’ve got yourself a decent setup for a sitcom.

But there’s more to a show than setup.  While it’s true that typically, a show is only as good as its premise, the stories that spring from it end up being the true test of a television program.  Which brings us to the question:

What about the episodes themselves?

The thing is, there’s a large difference between writing a plot for a movie, and plots for television.  A movie has one plot, that has time to be explored and used to examine the characters within the story.  It can afford to be large-scale.

In a television show, it’s not that easy.

When you write stories for a television show, that means that you need not just one story, but several.  This means that you need characters that you can get a lot of stories out of, and in the case of the sitcom, that typically means comedic stories.  That’s the hardest part about writing for television.  You have to write multiple stories, keeping the show interesting while also remaining true to the show’s setup and characters.  That comes easier when you’re writing a show like Murder, She Wrote or The A-Team, where stories follow a very similar pattern, but writing stories for a show that’s meant to depict a family’s life?  That’s something else entirely.

A show that follows the lives of multiple people in a family can’t really have the same type of plot over and over again, because people change, as do their experiences.  Over the seven years of the show, you watch the kids grow up, and experience lots of things ranging from the humorous (Mike continues making up a false image of himself to impress a culturally refined girl at his high school) to the unfortunately realistic (Maggie’s father dies while visiting the family).  As the kids grow older, the stakes get bigger, and as a result, the show ends up being a multifaceted, seven year charting of growing up and finding a place in the world, shown through each of the kids and their different personalities.  For all of the problems Mike has as a teenager, he slowly matures and becomes a responsible adult.  Carol grows to find that life doesn’t revolve around academics.  Ben goes from a trusting, rowdy kid to a somewhat rowdier teenager, and even the parents change as their household goes from five to six with an unexpected pregnancy later on in the series.

Due to the very nature and time that the show came out, the stories tend to be more realistic than the domestic sitcom plots of old, and sometimes, the ending was less than pleasant.  While there were the typical ‘very special episodes’ of the day (there was an episode where Mike is pressured to do drugs at a party), there were other episodes that took the concept of a very special episode, and made it something a bit more serious.  While many family shows of the time discussed things like drugs, or alcohol, few episodes had the genuinely shocking conclusion of the episode ‘Second Chance’, where Carol’s boyfriend gets into an accident while driving drunk.  Instead of him recovering and everyone ‘learning their lesson’, the character dies in the hospital, and the repercussions of that event do not leave by the next episode’s opening credits.  In short, on Growing Pains, consequences mattered, for everyone.  Sometimes the parents couldn’t ‘fix’ the kids’ mistakes, and sometimes the parents made mistakes of their own.  The parents argued, the kids screwed up, but in the end, the family did love each other, and that’s what was important.

Growing Pains was part of a new generation of domestic comedies, family comedies, that had one chief goal: portray realistic family struggles in their stories.  And for the most part, they did.

Along with shows like Family Ties, the stories for typical Growing Pains episodes focused more on what actual families might be going through, scenarios that, while exaggerated (whether for drama or humor), hit closer to home than many sitcom storylines of the past.  As a result, characters were allowed to grow and be more fleshed out.  They were allowed to learn their ‘lesson’, and it made it a more satisfying experience watching the kids grow up, get jobs, go to college, and start relationships.  Even the parents existed as ‘real people’ with their own concerns and worries.  In short, the stories worked very well at making the characters seem like a real family.  The story was always different, and the characters were changing and growing, but in a consistent way that made sense within the rules of the world, our world.  It was through these down-to-earth, character-driven stories that made the audience feel that we were the Seavers, or could know them, whether we were from Long Island or not.

The writers for Growing Pains knew how to tell stories with characters that made sense and seemed, if not ‘realistic’, real.  They handed us twenty minute snippets of events that we could see happening to us, or that have (in some way).  They made us laugh, cry, and tune in week after week for seven years, to share the laughter and love right along with them.

And in the end, that was kind of the point.

Stay tuned for the next article where we’re going to be taking a look at the genre of Growing Pains.  Leave an ask in the ask box if you have any thoughts you’d like to share!  Thanks so much for reading, and I’ll see you in the next article.