In honor our my esteemed colleague's recent birth of the littlest Standing Blogger, I felt the best way to celebrate was with a list! Hey, everyone loves lists! In honor of SB's beautiful little baby boy, I present a top 5 favorite TV births (based on nothing more than my subjectivity)!
5. "Murphy Brown". Murphy Brown gives birth to a little boy eventually named Avery and gives Dan Quayle something to yell about. This episode was controversial because of the whole Dan Quayle/single motherhood thing but was great because of Candace Bergen and her horrible singing voice crooning "You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman".
4. "All in the Family". Gloria gives birth to baby Joey. Archie shows up at the hospital in blackface. Classic All in the Family! Bonus points for being the first television birth shown on screen. Its funny that a show made in the early 1970s could never get past network censors in the 21st Century.
3. "The Flintstones". Wilma gives birth to baby Pebbles. Having grown up watching reruns of The Flintstones, I always wondered how a couple that slept in separate beds could give conceive a baby but as I entered my teenage years, I just accepted that Fred had an urge to go caveman on Wilma and voila. Anyway, for a cartoon to have a story arc is one thing but to do so in 1963 was groundbreaking. In the end, Pebbles was cute and watching Fred be a dad continues to be an inspiration of sorts to all of us fathers out there. Also, this was a rare occasion where adding a baby to a show didn't signal the demise of its creativity or freshness.
The Flintstones: "The Blessed Event"
2. "I Love Lucy". Lucy gives birth to Little Ricky. Groundbreaking is the only way to describe this episode. While Wikipedia tells me that this was not the first television show to feature a pregnancy storyline, the use of Lucille Ball's real life pregnancy and coinciding the birth with her real life C-Section birth of Desi Arnaz Jr. was ingenious and America agreed with me. With 71.7% of all American television sets tuned in for the birth, it was the largest TV viewing of anything up to then (and easily eclipsed the Eisenhower inauguration coverage the next day). A bonus video of Ricky finding out they're having a baby!
1. "Friends". Rachel gives birth to little Emma. Everything clicked in this episode. The endless waiting of watching other moms come and go while you wait; "the sick bastard " mom to be; Janice!; the ending with Joey accidentally proposing to Rachel! Everyone wanted Ross and Rachel to be together and through Emma, they always would be.
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