I Married Dora: Cast Photo - Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries

I Married Dora ran from September 1987 until August 1988 on ABC.

This short-lived sitcom wins the trivia award both for the most outrageous premise of 1987, and for the most bizarre final episode. The idea, you see that busy Los Angeles architect and single dad Peter ( Daniel Hugh-Kelly) was faced with the loss of his young housekeeper, a Central American refugee named Dora ( Elizabeth Pena). The feds had discovered that she was an illegal alien and were about to deport her. Of course, Peter married her so that she could continue to be his maid. " No love," he kept reassuring her, " this is just a formality." Dora, a feisty young woman who assumed she would be shot if she were sent back to her native country, went along with the marriage.

ABC inserted a full-screen announcement in the premiere episode stating that what the series was depicting constituted a federal offense and then helpfully added "You should not try this in your own home," since marrying an illegal alien for the purpose of avoiding deportation is a direct violation of U.S. law.

Other cast members included: Kate and Will ( Juliette Lewis, Jason Horst), Peter's young kids, who really liked Dora and thought it was all a great idea; Mr. Lennox( Henry Jones), Peter's doddering boss at the office and Marisol( Evelyn Guerrero), Dora's seldomly seen sister.

I Married Dora had a short run and one of tv history's most surprising episodes. In the last telecast, Peter received a lucrative offer for a two-year job in Bahrein, packed his bags and was getting ready to leave Dora and his family. Dora pleaded with him not to go and couldn't believe that he had actually gotten on the plane. Then, to everyone's surprise, he got off. The dialog went like this:

Peter: "It's been canceled."

Dora: "The flight?"

Peter: "No, our series!"

The camera pulled back to reveal the stage and crew as everyone waved goodbye to the few remaining viewers. Now that's how a failed sitcom should end!

Here's a review from USA TODAY previewing two new Friday night sitcoms. One was Full House and the other was I Married Dora. I wonder which one would survive? LOL

TV PREVIEWS/BY MONICA COLLINS
Published: September 22, 1987

TV sitcom moms are an endangered species.

In these two ABC comedies , which get special preview tonight before moving Friday to their tough regular time period ( 8-9 p.m. EDT/PDT), the families are missing a mother.

In Full House, she died six months before the pilot episode begins. I Married Dora starts with a macabre prologue in which a depressed mother, half-hysterical, flies the coop on a plane to Rome. The plane is hijacked and goes down with everyone on board presumed dead. The action picks up five years later.

Mama mia, could we use some nurturing about now?

It's no better on the other networks. NBC's My Two Dads is about a girl whose mother dies, leaving her in the care of the woman's two former lovers. When there is a mom, as in CBS' Everything's Relative and NBC's Mama's Boy, she's a kvetching snoop forever meddling in the affairs of her grown sons ( never a daughter).

Of ABC's two new family comedies, Full House at least brings some giddy, if uninspired slapstick to the child-rearing situation.

The widowed father, played by Morning Program refugee Bob Saget, is a wimpy, moist-eyed guy with two high-concept friends: a macho, rock-in-rolling brother-in-law ( John Stamos) and a comic ( David Coulier) who impersonates TV types like Pee Wee Herman and Bill Cosby to keep the kids amused and diverted.

While popa Bob goes to his unlikely job as a TV sportscaster, the two buddies stay home to tend Saget's three daughters-two wretchedly precocious preteens and one blissfully nonverbal baby.

It's no shock to learn that this comes from the producers of Perfect Strangers, because the comedy here is, at best raucous and rowdy. When the two buddies change a diaper they put it in a tupperware box, while using paper towels ( the absorbed type), the kitchen sink and its spray attachment.

Nothing new, but there are giggles to be had. The Father Knows Best stuff, however, is creaky , mainly because the little girls-including Growing Pains star Kirk Cameron's younger sister Candace-make your teeth hurt.

Still that's better than the lump in the stomach that forms from watching I Married Dora. This has a ludicrous and unlawful concept: a man marrying his Central American housekeeper to keep her from being deported.

He likes her because she cooks and cleans and keeps the kids happy. She likes the microwave and the kids.

There's nothing likable about this show. You won't find Dora adorable. You won't find it watchable.

Lugubrious and laughless, Dora is a miracle of miscasting. The kids are the most sluggish TV brats since last season's Heart Of The City. As the architect pop, Daniel Hugh Kelly looks like he'd rather be back on Hardcastle & McCormick. And Elizabeth Pena as Dora, fails to be the lovable south-of-the-border spitfire the concept demands.

This is not a sitcom. It's merely a sit-all situation, no comedy. And it looks like someone got nervous about the situation here. At the pilot episode's close, a title card notes that marrying someone to avoid deportation is a federal offense. " Do not try this in your own house." Better yet, do not watch this in your own house.

These title cards, by the way, are an intrusive and weak device, announcing things like " Popa and Dora stay up and talk brieftly." What is this a silent movie? Would that it were.

Watching these uneven efforts makes you yearn for the nuclear family. Let's have a moratorium on these mom-less sitcoms. I want my mommy. No joke.

An Article on the changing values of TV from The New York Times

Move Over, Ozzie and Harriet

By ALICE HOFFMAN;
Published: February 14, 1988

The only family that can disappoint you more than your own is a network executive's vision of a family. Television betrayed us when it gave us the perfect 1950's families in which every daughter was a princess and every son an honest and brave all-American boy. Our parents could never measure up to the kindness and patience we saw dispensed on television, and yet it seemed they should.

Old habits die hard. We television viewers who came of age in the 50's have been trained not to expect or even to want anything like reality when it comes to the family shows we watch. We may be working out our hostility toward our mother in therapy, we may be feuding with our sister over our father's will, our teen-age cousin may have smashed up our car while under the influence of cocaine, but when we switch on the television, we want a genuine family, not one like our own.

This season, the networks have attempted to shake up the formula we've grown accustomed to, either by reworking the nuclear family (NBC's ''My Two Dads'' and ABC's ''I Married Dora''), opting for realism (NBC's ''A Year in the Life'' and ABC's ''Thirtysomething'') or re-inventing the family entirely (''Frank's Place'' and ''Beauty and the Beast,'' both on CBS).

These new shows not only reflect the changing American family, they are searching for acceptable variations. They want to present us with alternative families that work. But in an era when there is no set formula for family happiness, this is a difficult, if not an impossible, task. Clearly, there are no easy answers for happiness these days; the ways in which the family - fractured or intact - has failed is no longer any secret.

And yet, in a frantic attempt to give us families that work, many of this season's shows insist on applying the old TV formula of tidy resolutions to modern, complex relationships. The shows that seem most promising are those which struggle to make sense out of changing roles, exploring relationships, rather than imposing false, ''workable'' solutions.

''My Two Dads'' and ''I Married Dora,'' both allegedly comedies, tell us something about the confused state of the American family: that many traditional nuclear families have disintegrated and are now evolving into the kinds of households that would have been, if not unthinkable, at least unpresentable on television in the 1950's. And yet, from all the wildly varying possibilities of family constructions to choose from, the networks seem compelled to create the most bizarre family arrangements imaginable. Having already presented black children who, for mysterious reasons, live with white parents (ABC's ''Webster,'' NBC's ''Diff'rent Strokes''), this season the networks haved moved on to motherless families.

In ''My Two Dads,'' a woman dies and, not knowing which lover from her past is the father of her daughter, leaves the teen-ager in the custody of two antagonistic bachelors. Together, these two men - one an uptight professional, the other a laid-back artist -make up one whole father, and their daughter, Nicole, gets over her mother's death in record time, perhaps because her ''fathers'' seem to spend most the time vying for her affection.

''I Married Dora'' - at present, on ''hiatus'' from ABC's schedule - revolves around the premise that not only needs rethinking, it needs a disclaimer, letting us know it's illegal to model ourselves after this television family. Here, a widowed father marries his housekeeper, an illegal alien who is threatened with deportation. One supposes we are meant to find the father's plight amusing - so desperate for a maid, he marries one!

Clearly, the networks find a father's inability to take care of his children tremendously humorous. Surely they must: Another of this season's shows, ABC's ''Full House,'' has three inept men struggling to raise three youngsters. Feature films also seem enchanted by this scenario, as can be seen in ''Three Men and a Baby'' and its French predecessor.

Although this season's shows don't fracture reality any more than 50's sitcoms did -in fact, more than 10 million American families are headed by single women, with only 2.4 million headed by single men - they are infinitely more insulting. In the 50's, what we got was a simplified reality; what we get now is merely simple-minded. It's not only that most single parents and orphaned children don't consider their fate to be a laugh riot, it's that these shows corrupt the new visibility of some fathers as an integral part of daily household life for one purpose: getting an easy laugh. Alas, the laughs in these shows are not so easy to come by.

The fact that most single-parent households are headed by women may help explain why CBS's ''Kate & Allie'' works so well. We want to believe that people like Kate and Allie can form their own sort of family. But when we watch a show like ''I Married Dora'' or ''My Two Dads,'' we're watching a comic strip, with blown-up, contrived situations and characters who seem less like family members than strangers trapped within the same half-hour.

''A Year in the Life'' and ''Thirtysomething,'' ongoing chronicles that examine not only the larger issues of family life but the minutiae as well, both owe something to that earlier attempt at realism on television, ''Family,'' starring Sada Thompson. Like ''Family,'' ''A Year in the Life,'' is well acted and well crafted, but like real life, it is more often slow-moving and stirring. Richard Kiley is the widowed patriarch heading a family of grown children, an average upper-middle-class family with average, and somewhat dull, problems. (If I were a network executive's mother, I might begin to worry over just how dispensible mothers are this season.) Watching ''A Year in the Life,'' we don't get the sense of a family as an entity, with each member affecting the others, but rather we're treated to separate lives that sometimes intersect.

Realism for its own sake amounts to little more than a slice of life, which, though it may be initially appealing, wears thin without a broader purpose. Getting the facts in an understated way doesn't necessarily reveal domestic truths. One of the first shows to rebel against the traditional TV formula, ''All in the Family,'' illuminated family life by exaggeration. And even the back-stabbers of ''Dallas,'' ''Dynasty'' and ''Falcon Crest'' may communicate more truth about family relationships by reshaping our petty arguments into baroque intrigues than ''A Year in the Life'' does when it treats it characters' trivial concerns with unwarranted reverence.

''Thirtysomething,'' a braver and more uneven show than ''A Year in the Life,'' takes unheard-of risks, tempering its realism with dreams and fantasies in an attempt to enlarge the concept of family beyond static roles . The bare bones of the show could make anyone queasy: an examination of a yuppie marriage between Michael and Hope (Ken Olin and Mel Harris) who happen to be not only stunningly attractive but smart and moneyed as well. The valid complaint against ''Thirtysomething'' is that it can be considered realistic only for a small select group, and one wonders if for that group watching a parallel life on television is often less entertainment than it is masochism.

And yet, amazingly, ''Thirtysomething'' transcends these complaints with its own brand of authenticity. There is a good deal of attention paid to the surrogate families often established within a network of friends when one's birth family is removed by distance or by choice. It also brings into play its characters' ''ghosts in the nursery,'' the attitudes and fears of parents and grandparents that affect current family relationships. Despite a sometimes calculated familiarity and an occasionally sluggish pace, ''Thirtysomething'' gives us not only a remarkably rich portrait of a marriage but an entire social network and family history.

When the family disappears as a support group, there is no choice but to restructure other relationships into an alternative brand of kinship. Some of the best family shows of the past, notably ''The Mary Tyler Moore Show'' (in which Mary played ''daughter'' to boss Lou Grant and ''sister'' to colleagues Ted and Murray), have been set in the workplace. In CBS's ''Frank's Place,'' community fulfills the function of family. Here, in a restaurant in New Orleans, which has been left to Frank (Tim Reid) by a father who deserted him as a child, we find the interwoven, intense bonds usually associated with those related by blood. In this show, which easily moves back and forth between comedy and drama, the action revolves around the intricate allegiances of the restaurant's staff and regular customers, characters who are far kinder and more tolerant than most family members usually are of one another.

Perhaps the most interesting and original departure this season has been CBS's ''Beauty and the Beast,'' for here a family is created out of ashes. Like the fairy tale, in which the heroine's family is a nightmare and the nightmarish beast a true soul mate, ''Beauty and the Beast'' follows a woman estranged from her natural family and the beast, called Vincent. Vincent (played to leonine perfection by Ron Perlman) is too ugly to live above ground. He has been raised by a surrogate father - known only as ''Father'' - in an underground world below the New York subways, a dark, cavernous place, peopled by an extended network of mysterious outcasts. More and more, Beauty, an assistant district attorney named Catherine (played by Linda Hamilton) finds herself drawn to this city within a city and to the beast, who helps her pursue criminals.

At present, ''Beauty and the Beast'' is a hybrid - part Cocteau fairy tale, part ''The Equalizer.'' It often recycles over-used cops-and-robbers themes. And yet, it speaks to the dreams and fears we have about our own families in a rather remarkable way. Though the initial intent of ''Beauty and the Beast'' may have been to provide us with a quirky crime show, one in which the hero uses his claws rather a gun, the emotional core of the show is the urge to create a mythic family that can save us when our real families fail us. If what we all search for in our own families as well as in the surrogate families we form with colleagues and friends is a web of rich, significant relationships, what we are given in this show are people so connected it is possible for them to communicate without words.

Though it's often comforting to watch reruns of our favorite 50's shows, it's a little easier now to perceive the lie behind those perfect families in whom we once believed. After all, they're in black-and-white. But just who were those people? How did they manage to convince us that our homes should mirror theirs?

What TV executives don't seem to realize or don't want to face up to is that the shows they foist upon us actually touch us. Laugh tracks and all, television seeps into our consciousness, affecting our expectations and our fantasies. At least this season, we've had a few more choices than usual, and perhaps this is just the beginning. What, after all, could be more fascinating or mysterious than a family? Once the tired formulas of television's past are thrown out, the possibilities are endless.

To read an article about I Married Dora go to http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=tgshAAAAIBAJ&sjid=fXIFAAAAIBAJ&dq=i%20married%20dora%20tv%20show&pg=2448%2C6237357

To watch some clips from I Married Dora go to http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=i+married+dora+episodes&aq=f

For a 2001 interview with Elizabeth Pena go to http://www.acidlogic.com/elizabeth_pena.htm

For a Juliette Lewis Website go to http://www.juliette-lewis.com/

For a website dedicated to Juliette Lewis with tons of pictures go to http://web.archive.org/web/20071030122237/http://www.geocities.com/juliettelewis2/

For a Review of I Married Dora go to http://www.televisionheaven-usa.com/overview2.htm#dora