Remembering "My Two Dads"

If you ever saw the movie The Player, you learn how movies get made -- a writer or director or producer or someone goes to a studio executive and "pitches," saying something like, "So here's the idea: we team a daredevil cop who doesn't play by the rules with a rookie or a babe or a chimp" (okay, so I stole this line from a Sonic TV commercial but you get the idea).

Much is the same for TV shows: "Okay, so six friends in New York who hang out in an apartment and a coffee shop and joke about their love lives" -- such pitches are what make TV history.

At some point in the mid-1980s, a writer named Michael Jacobs pitched a show to NBC called My Two Dads and I'd love to imagine he told Brandon Tartikoff and Warren Littlefield (the guys who ran NBC at the time), "Okay, so two guys who live in New York banged the same chick back in the 1970s, find out that she died and that she has a teenage daughter and that either of them might be the father, so -- work with me here! -- they decide to raise her together because, you know, that's believable."

But that's exactly the premise for this late '80 sitcom that starred a post-Diner, pre-Mad About You Paul Reiser, some guy named Greg Evigan, and a girl named Staci Keanan who went onto greatness in the 1990s sitcom Step By Step. Each episode presented the two VERY NOT GAY men living together in a stylish NYC loft with lots of neon lights on the wall as they negotiate taking care of this wonderful young lady who has completed disrupted their previously swinging single lives -- and learning important life lessons about along the way. 

Much like Friends, My Two Dads existed in an NYC fantasy land of huge apartments and jobs requiring little work. Unlike other NYC series, the city existed in the background, making it an almost generic setting. But I remember when I occasionally saw this show as a kid  that it was the rare show (besides Kate & Allie, about two other VERY NOT GAY people, in that case women living together) set in NYC. 

What makes watching this show interesting is that, while it's painfully dated, it's a perfect time capsule from the 1980s: a sitcom about how great family is, even when that family consists of two men as parents but of course they are VERY NOT GAY (hard to believe but this show ran nearly 30 years before gay marriage was legalized and the idea of two non-straight men raising a family was unthinkable) plus lots of neon, pastels, and music with saxaphones. 

Believe it or not, as absurd as the premise for this show was, it actually ran for three seasons (from 1987-1990) during NBC's 1980s glory days of Cheers, The Cosby Show, Family Ties, Night Court, and LA Law. It was one of those shows that was a minor hit and, after it was cancelled, completely and totally forgotten about (until now). Today if you pitched a show like this you'd get laughed out of the room but it was perfectly in tunes with its conservative times. 

A few years ago I heard Paul Reiser on a podcast talking about how he came to be on My Two Dads. In the 1980s, Reiser had a big stand-up comedy career and was also acting in big movies like Beverly Hills Cop and Aliens. His agent told him that NBC wanted him to do this pilot but that it was so silly that it would never get picked up and he'd get a quick and easy pay day. Instead ... he found himself stuck on a show he didn't really like for three years but, he said, it made him realize that he'd like to create his own show and that eventually became Mad About You (a vastly superior and much beloved 1990s classic). 

If you're interested in this very odd piece of 1980's TV and NYC nostalgia, you can find a lot of full episodes on YouTube or watch the pilot here:

Remember -- VERY NOT GAY