A Perfect Ten

So, as as I recently noted, I’ve just gotten cable again. So I was home early and started watching some of the sitcoms that I used to watch as a kid, like “Full House”, “Who’s the Boss?” and “Growing Pains”. However, the episodes of “Growing Pains” that I watched happened to reference a sitcom that I definitely remember fondly “Just the Ten of Us”. Since that show isn’t running anywhere, I decided to search on the Internet to see if I could see any episodes of it. Most of them aren’t, but I did manage to find some of them and decided that, yes, I still really like that show.

The show was about an explicitly Catholic family — which was referenced a number of times during the show — that had eight children, and was headed by a high school football coach father and a stay-at-home mother. As stated, religion was referenced, but it was both mocked at times but also treated reasonably seriously; the mother and eldest daughter were both very religious, and this wasn’t generally presented as an odd or a bad thing (although the eldest daughter, in true sitcom fashion, took it to extremes). The cast was predominantly female, and that gave the show, in my opinion, its greatest strengths. Sure, it had a number of attractive female characters, as the four oldest children were female teenagers — whose actresses were all older than their ages in the show, in true sitcom fashion; the youngest of the four was actually played by one of the oldest actresses — which is what the show is probably best remembered for, especially once the show formed the band “The Lubbock Babes” where they sang old songs in attractive outfits. But that’s actually not the strength I mean. The strength it had is that by not having an overly mixed cast they could focus — in typical sitcom fashion — on building a range of “stereotypical” female characters, and then putting them together and letting that drive the storylines and interactions. So, a bit like the mix in “Sailor Moon” except the differences between the girls drove the comedy and the storylines, which didn’t happen as often in “Sailor Moon”.

The other thing is that despite them being stereotypical, they all were, in fact, teenage girls, and thus often a mass of contradictions as they tried to figure just how all of this stuff was supposed to work anyway. So, for example, Marie was the excessively religious, pious, and “good” sister … who still at times was interested in the more salacious details of what her less “repressed” sisters were up up, while at times being excessively judgemental about it. This being a sitcom, depending in the episode she was either more “trampy” or more judgemental and offended by that sort of thing, but her character is at its best when her interest is more against her better judgement than something that she accepts.

Ultimately, it was a very clever show, and it’s a shame that it effectively only got two full seasons.