It Takes Two aired from October 1982 until September 1983 on ABC.
A pair of overachievers found that dual careers can get in the way of family life in this contemporary comedy. Dr. Sam Quinn ( Richard Crenna) was chief of surgery at a Chicago hospital, working long hours but able to come home to a devoted wife-until she got her law degree. Now that Molly ( Patty Duke Astin) had embarked on her own busy career as an assistant D.A., Sam found his dinners cold, his shirts unironed, and his love life decidedly wanting. In bed his wife just fell asleep. To complain would be chauvinistic, so Sam coped as best he could, which is more than could be said for the couple's teenaged kids, shy Lisa ( Helen Hunt) and aspiring rock musician Andy ( Anthony Edwards).
New careers brought new opinions too. While Sam remained a dedicated liberal, Molly's exposure to street criminals had turned her into something of a hard-liner. One psychopathic offender caused her to erupt, " Say's it's because he comes from a broken home. Of course he comes from a broken home-he killed his father." Surprisingly the one island of calm in this disrupted household was Molly's dippy Mama ( Billie Bird), whose nutty responses sometimes helped make everyone else forget their complaints.
A Review From The New York Times
TV: NEW COMEDY SERIES WITH PATTY DUKE ASTIN
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By JOHN J. O'CONNOR
Published: October 28, 1982
DADDY, Sam Quinn, is chief of surgery at a Chicago hospital. Mom, Molly Quinn, has raised two children to their late teens and, after spending her spare time taking college courses, has earned a law degree and a job with the city as a prosecuting attorney. She no longer has time to be a totally devoted wife. He feels neglected and resentful. We are, in short, in the world of women's liberation and the adjusting of traditional relationships.
The situation-comedy vehicle is entitled ''It Takes Two,'' and it begins tonight at 9:30 o'clock on ABC-TV. It is a Witt-Thomas-Harris Production and, like the same company's ''Soap,'' was created by Susan Harris, one of the more gifted women toiling on television's weekly surfaces. The series also has an exceptionally appealing cast. The husband is played by Richard Crenna, the wife by Patty Duke Astin, the same Patty Duke who once won numerous awards for her stage and film depictions of a young Helen Keller in ''The Miracle Worker.'' The collection of talent, therefore, is certainly promising.
After going as far as she conceivably could with ''Soap,'' in terms of outrageous situations and silly flights of fantasy, Miss Harris seems to have returned to some of the more substantial problems of upper-middle-class existence. The premiere episode, shown a couple of weeks ago, introduced Sam and Molly as two intelligent, pleasant people with few illusions about contemporary mores. Marriage is difficult, yes, but the simple fact is that Sam has got used to Molly's being his wife. She has become ''a habit that's hard to break.''
Dipping into her grab-bag of favorite characters, Miss Harris once again comes up with the dizzy mother, in this case Molly's mother, a wonderfully off-center gal who gets on swimmingly with Sam. She is played to nutty perfection by Billie Bird. Instead of a witheringly sarcastic father, though, this time Miss Harris provides a cynical psychiatrist, on the staff at Sam's hospital. Dr. Chaikin insists that he is bored with all of his patients, advising them only to ''grow up and don't talk to me about your mother.'' He admits to getting terribly depressed around sick people.
Miss Harris retains an enviable gift for switching neatly from laughs to moments of seriousness. The first show found Sam suddenly sitting down with the 18-year-old son he was always berating to discover that he was repeating the patterns of his own father, a man whose only claim to fame, besides his gifted son, was the making of an egg-salad sandwich with sour cream as its secret ingredient.
A darker theme was sounded when Molly announced that she was prosecuting a criminal whose life Sam had saved earlier at the hospital. ''We're asking for the death penalty,'' Molly declared. This same subject is explored at length on tonight's episode when Molly is selected to work on a case involving a notorious killer of several women in the Chicago area. Molly is a crime hardliner, periodically calling for the return of public executions. At the same time, Sam is working at the hospital trying to save lives, one of them being that of a dignified man (Scatman Crothers) who is now facing an eighth operation to stay alive.
The half hour proceeds in a deftly handled point-counterpoint fashion, balancing one argument against the other. In the end, nobody ''wins.'' There is merely the realization that concepts such as fairness and goodness are essential to the survival of the flawed system that encompasses us all. This kind of sermonizing can be treacherous in a sit-com, but ''It Takes Two'' brings it off impressively. That is what puts the series among the most promising of the new season.
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