Gimme a Break Transformed Into a Lesbian Perfect Strangers
Explicit content warning
02/21/24 • 99 min
1 Listener
“Joey’s First Crush” (January 28, 1987)
Few other shows changed as much as Gimme a Break, which began as a fish-out-of-water sitcom that had Nell Carter playing mom to three white girls in California but ended up with Nell and her best friend, Telma Hopkins’ Addy, co-parenting two white boys in New York. Minus the kids, it’s basically a female-female twist on Perfect Strangers, only they don’t get steady boyfriends. Perhaps in an effort to make the show seem less gay, they tossed in a happily married character... who was played by newcomer Rosie O’Donnell. This episode, which is the second of Gimme a Break’s outings to feature actual gay characters, showcases a lot of how this show ended up pretty damn gay.
... Now that I think about it, maybe the only sitcom that changed as much over its run was Ellen — and that’s pretty notable, right?
Listen to our previous Gimme a Break episodes.
Learn all about Betty and Barney Hill in the Monday Afternoon Movie episode about 1975’s The UFO Incident.
Watch:
“Joey’s First Crush” (January 28, 1987)
Few other shows changed as much as Gimme a Break, which began as a fish-out-of-water sitcom that had Nell Carter playing mom to three white girls in California but ended up with Nell and her best friend, Telma Hopkins’ Addy, co-parenting two white boys in New York. Minus the kids, it’s basically a female-female twist on Perfect Strangers, only they don’t get steady boyfriends. Perhaps in an effort to make the show seem less gay, they tossed in a happily married character... who was played by newcomer Rosie O’Donnell. This episode, which is the second of Gimme a Break’s outings to feature actual gay characters, showcases a lot of how this show ended up pretty damn gay.
... Now that I think about it, maybe the only sitcom that changed as much over its run was Ellen — and that’s pretty notable, right?
Listen to our previous Gimme a Break episodes.
Learn all about Betty and Barney Hill in the Monday Afternoon Movie episode about 1975’s The UFO Incident.
Watch:
Previous Episode
The Simpsons Does a Riff on Lesbian Cult Classic
“Lisa the Drama Queen” (January 25, 2009)
So here’s an interesting one. In its twentieth season, The Simpson did an episode inspired by Heavenly Creatures, the 1994 Peter Jackson movie that has Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey playing schoolgirls who flee into a fantasy world and also each other. More than a decade later, this story would play out again, only with Lisa Simpson and a new character voiced by Emily Blunt, and that might seem like a strange combo, especially because the Simpson version nixes the sex and violence of the original, but it nonetheless works.
Special thanks to the writer of this episode, Brian Kelley, for sharing his memories of how this episode came to be.
For a limited time, you can still screen Heavenly Creatures via the GEE Patreon, but that window is closing. Info here.
Listen to Drew on the In Retrospect podcast’s episodes about the “lesbian/Lebanese” joke (part one & part two)
Go shop at our TeePublic store!
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And yes, we do have an official website! We even have episode transcripts courtesy of Sarah Neal. Our logo was designed by Rob Wilson. This episode’s art was designed by Ian O’Phelan.
Next Episode
Jerri Blank Is a Pansexual Sex Predator
“Blank Relay” (August 13, 2000)
Honestly, we could have picked just about any episode of Strangers With Candy to focus on for this podcast about queer themes, but we ended up deciding on the one where we see Jerri Blank at her most girl hungry. It’s light on Mr. Noblet and Mr. Jellineck, but we can always circle back to this one in another two hundred episodes, right?
Watch the Exit 57 “Down in the Basement” sketch, which does not translate especially well to an audio-only format.
Watch The Trip Back, the 1970 PSA featuring Florrie Fisher, the real-life inspiration for Jerri Blank.
Listen to the two-part Rasputin episode of the Unexplained podcast.
And we dropped a whole hell of a lot of Sam Pancake Presents the Monday Afternoon Movie episodes. Here are all of them:
- Angel Dusted with Gedde Watanabe (the one where Helen Hunt doesn’t jump through a window)
- Desperate Lives with Arden Myrin (the one where she *does* jump through a window)
- It Happened One Christmas with Sarah Thyre
- The Cat Creature with Becky Thyre
- And finally Crowhaven Farm and A Vacation in Hell, both with Rose Abdoo
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