The Ropers relationship with "The Kids" is actually pretty touching

I remember being a kid and when I first started watching on Nick at Nite, I thought that Stanley and Helen were actually the trio's parents. I was really young of course and it was made clear they were not in fact their parents, but now watching as an adult I see why I thought that. Because it was likely intentional on the show's part.

The Ropers spinoff may not have been great, but it contains a key piece of information in the pilot episode. Asked by her new neighbor if they have any kids, a question Three's Company kinda danced around during their run, Helen confirms that the two did not have any children. They tried and tried and tried, but Stanley's famous fatigue prevented a fourth attempt. In all seriousness, problems with conception aren't exactly a game of dominoes in 2023 when a few options are available to couples. The Ropers had their 25th anniversary in 1981, meaning they married sometime in 1956. If you had a problem with conceiving a child back then, it had the potential to be a horror show, for various reasons. It also may finally provide the biggest reason for their infamous lack of intimacy, aside from general aging and Stanley's laziness: they still held leftover resentments towards each other from the difficulty that they had back then.

While all that would turn the Ropers into very depressing characters, which they already kinda are, this is balanced by their tenants in 201, the trio that Helen *always* affectionately called, "the kids." It's been noted before in several spaces, notably the excellent and much missed The Kids in 201 blog, that while Three's Company will likely always be remembered as a sexy, goofy, "jiggle television" farce filled with characters who never acted anything like real people, it actually won a lot of its initial audience through its reinvention of the age old, "family sitcom" premise.

Jack, Janet, and Chrissy were the kids, as Helen always reminded us, the Ropers were the parents, and Larry was the troublemaker friend of the kids next door. Richard Kline did some reinvention of his own, as he turned the old Eddie Haskell routine into a completely new type of character with a hell of a legacy (Larry+Jack=Cosmo Kramer). Helen played "mom" to the kids by consistenly being their ally and, while she may have made them cringe sometimes, she also is legitimately loving and nurturing to them at times. She most famously keeps Jack's secret that he's actually straight, but she also is often seen teaming with Janet and the two have a way of encouraging each other, even if they don't have the best ideas sometimes, and she gives Janet the guidance that nobody seems to recognize that she needs at times. Helen respected her and valued her opinions, which gave her confidence, and she does the same to a lesser extent for Chrissy. Jack straight up calls her, "Big momma" when she returns in The Night of the Ropers in Season 5 (where they are inconsistenly written by what I assume was a different writer's room).

Stanley is the disapproving and strict father, always grumbling about money, work, marriage, noise, kids these days, putting up shelves. He's such a miserable fuck, except when he laughs at the camera. Then he's the funniest miserable fuck in the world. Accordingly, many episodes are about hiding something from him. Hell, the whole show is literally about hiding something from him. I think Stanley knew deep down that Jack wasn't gay though; he was always making jokes and all that but he caught Jack with a woman more than once and I think it was something of a subconscious thing when he became *very* suspicious of Jack out of nowhere in Season 2 and then only stood down when his conscious stereotyping of gays calmed him. When you look at the whole picture though, even if he really was convinced at some point, he asks Jack with help painting the building, he proudly shares his homebrew with him, he confides in him, helps him get his, "first car" (which is the inevitable piece of shit), and provides Jack with some useful life lessons, however dumb he may look when he is dispensing them. In other words, Jack was really like a son to Stanley.

Knowing that the Ropers were unable to have kids of their own makes me look at the whole first three seasons of TC differently. It's almost like a completely different show after they depart. Furley was hilarious and Don Knotts had me laughing very loudly around 4 this morning from watching his attempt at working in the kitchen of Jack's Bistro in The Impossible Dream, but it's another kind of viewing experience. I think it has something to do with the writing; the scripts for a lot of the episodes with the Ropers were lifted directly from the corresponding episode of Man About The House, the English show that TC was based on. Humour on the other side of the pond in the early 1970s was more Monty Python than I Love Lucy, and as a result I think it led to the episodes post-Ropers having a different feel as far as the actual jokes went. New writers, New words, new jokes, new feel. With the actors aging, the family sitcom premise also would eventually wear thin without a reworking.

The sentimentality that is running under the series when Helen and Stanley are there is mostly gone when the show is reworked in favor of a more madcap energy that leaves less room for sympathy and the like. This is appropriately most evident in their return episode, in which the tone is just a little too mean and the way the Ropers and the kids (absent Chrissy, who they never even ask about) has confounded many fans over the years. The script writers didn't seem to know the characters or their relationship dynamic.

Norman Fell and Audra Lindley deserved better. John Ritter has gotten the praise he deserves over ther years and his untimely death has assured his place as a comedy legend. Fell and Lindley, however, brought a lot more viewers to the show at the start than they probably have been given credit for. Their unhappy marriage was one of the very first of the kind on weekly television and, in spite of Audra chewing a little too much scenery sometimes, they both hit every single fucking note. The bitterness felt in every scene that starts in the Ropers' apartment dissipates by the time the episode is done, because of the kids. Their "family of choice" with the kids is the foundation of Three's Company and their years on the show are the ones with the most impact, emotionally and culturally.