Series · Prime Video · 2015

Catastrophe

Filthy, and on the side of staying. The marriage is the work. The language is not for the house at large.

Sharon and Rob are funny because they are specific, not because marriage is a prison sketch. The series follows them into the years when a couple tells the truth badly and still does not pack. That is rarer on television than another detective.

Adults only. If the filthy talk is all anyone quotes the next day, you watched it wrong.

The eight

Industry
6/10
Two jobs, a flat, the logistics of a baby. Adulthood is not styled away.
Household
8/10
They did not plan the family. They refuse to abandon it. That is the whole show.
Piety
2/10
No altar. The vow, once made, is the thing they keep failing and keeping.
Courage
7/10
Staying, after the romance, is the brave act.
Republic
3/10
Friends, a city. The public world is scenery.
Temperance
3/10
The talk is obscene on purpose. The drinking is not a phase.
Truth
8/10
It will not pretend the marriage is easy or that leaving would be cleaner.
Stewardship
6/10
A child is the reason the joke has to end somewhere serious.

Live historicallySay one true, unkind thing you have been saving, kindly, and then stay in the room.

Series · Prime Video · 1977

Eight Is Enough

A full house before the phrase was a brand. The number of children is not treated as a mistake.

Television later decided a large family was either a reality-show spectacle or a joke. This one thinks eight children and a working father is a life. It is soapy. The soap is about the right people. Worth having in the memory of what a house can be.

The eight

Industry
5/10
He writes for a living. The children have school and parts.
Household
8/10
Eight children and a father who stays. Later a stepmother who has to join a going concern.
Piety
4/10
Domestic decency, of the period.
Courage
4/10
The dramas are the size of a family that large.
Republic
4/10
A Sacramento household as a whole society.
Temperance
6/10
Earnest.
Truth
5/10
The problems are the ones a family actually has: money, a sibling, a marriage.
Stewardship
7/10
The children are the point, not the obstacle to the adults' plot.

Live historicallyCount the people you are actually raising, and give one of them an uninterrupted half hour.