The 1980s were a dangerous time for many of us, but it was especially dangerous if you were from a specific demographic: A sitcom mother.
Go ahead, think about it. Have you ever noticed that while you were watching reruns of Diff’rent Strokes or Full House that there was never a mom around? To paraphrase a 90s sitcom, what’s the deal with that?
This was no accident. There was a reason why so many sitcoms were about single fathers dealing with multiple children, and the After Hours team at Cracked took a quick look at why “audiences tuned in week after week to laugh at grieving families and abandoned children?”
In this video, Cracked uncovers the reason that the 80s were such a bad time to be a sitcom mom, or a sit-mom, as I’ll refer to them. Some reasons include: the success of the first example, Diff’rent Strokes led to copycats; the removal of a show’s moral center (the mother) would result in “dad’s burning dinners and uncomfortably buying bras,” as well as unaccompanied minors playing in a dump and getting stuck in a fridge. But ultimately, they discover that these shows were a response to rising divorce rates and the breakdown of the American nuclear family.
Check out the video and learn a little something about how the 80s were a golden age of abandoned kids and idiot fathers.
