Missing in Action: Gimme a Break

OK, so today's post is not about a classic, nor even a show I really--what's the word for it?--like, but what better way to get the blog going again than by exploring a mystery? Last time I did a "Missing in Action" post, I wondered why the "Carol Burnett Show" was absent from DVD and from the airwaves, and since then Time-Life stepped up and delivered a big box set. The complete series "Gimme a Break" is available on DVD, but through a Canadian company (it was too polite to leave fans hanging after the first seasons) , and it never seems to turn up in national syndication these days. I'm not sure why.

It was well regarded enough to be a constant in the 1980s and 1990s and I am sad to say, I watched it a lot. I watched it an awful lot considering I never even really liked it, and in fact, I grew to despise it in its later seasons. Yet I watched it first run, I watched a bunch of the reruns, and likely saw many episodes more than once. Why? Well, because it was on. I'm not trying to weasel out of admitting past enjoyment of the series--after all, really how much "cooler" is it to confess to consuming a ton of episodes of a program I didn't even like--but rather I think I genuinely just kind of...absorbed it.

You remember this sitcom, right? It was a Nell Carter vehicle all the way, a showcase for the multi-talented star of Broadway and other mediums. Of course, there was nothing "medium" about her presence on the small screen. (Hey, at least I avoided a cheap gag on "broad"). I could be imagining this, but I recall Carter as one of those performers who was always described as a "force of nature." Ever notice how that term is invariably used to describe someone who is fat and/or loud? Isn't nature ever subtle?

"Gimme a Break" stars Nell as a live-in housekeeper/cook/all-around busybody who somehow managed to find herself in situations in which she has to sing every other episode (much to my annoyance). Someone should apply the prodigious statistical analysis we see in baseball these days to a study comparing Carter on "Gimme a Break" with Linda Lavin on "Alice" to see who gets more singing time and is therefore more (or less, depending on your POV) valuable to her sitcom.

I know what you're thinking--Nell is a force of nature, sings--she's just playing herself. Nuh-uh. See, she is playing a woman named Nell Harper, not Nell Carter. Totally different.

Nell shares the screen with an assortment of precocious kids and seasoned hands like John Hoyt as the grandpa, Howard Morton as a bumbling policeman/friend of the family, and Telma Hopkins as Nell's best friend and former bandmate who also managed to gets in a lot of musical numbers (again, much to my annoyance--tell me again why the hell I watched this so often?), but the co-star is Dolph Sweet as the widower cop who hired Nell. Sweet was a solid pro who did the crusty but good-hearted lug thing well enough, and I remember his sudden passing was a shock. On the bright side, we never had to endure sexual tension between those two.

On the even darker side, though, his absence paves the way for more screen time for Joey Lawrence, plus the eventual ultimate shark-jumping moves like relocating the show in New York and adding an even more precocious kid, Matthew Lawrence. Oh, and might I mention that Rosie O'Donnell joins the series in the New York era? I'm certainly not selling this as one we're all gonna rally around and get back on TV.

If it sounds very generic/sitcommy, well, it is. The only memorable aspects of  the series to me are the two distinct yet equally sassy theme songs (sung by Carter herself, natch), both of which ARE IN MY HEAD THIS VERY MOMENT FIGHTING WITH EACH OTHER FOR MY ATTENTION, and the scenes in the opening credits of Nell vacuuming a goldfish and strangling a scale after measuring her weight.
Still, my personal taste aside--and as I keep saying, I did watch the show--it ran for 6 seasons and well over 100-some episodes, and those kinds of successful sitcoms don't tend to disappear like "Break" did. I'm not surprised that it hasn't been on TBS or something like that in years, but there are a lot of outlets gobbling up cheap retro product nowadays. Maybe the show isn't up to Nick at Nite's standards, but as an ethnically diverse family sitcom, it might have fit in at some point. I'm surprised African-American cable network TV One hasn't given it a shot. Hasbro's HUB network aired "Facts of Life" for a while and might have tried this one. Even the black-oriented subchannel Bounce doesn't air it.

As "Break" was a Universal show, perhaps NBC Universal's new Cozi subchannel will add it eventually. I'm not sure why it's such a forgotten series (yes, even though a few paragraphs ago I just said virtually nothing about it is memorable). It doesn't have a specter of tragedy to keep it in the public consciousness like "Diff'rent Strokes," but is it really so much weaker than "227" or "Amen?" Just because I am not a fan doesn't mean it shouldn't be on somewhere.