Anyone notice that we never see the inside of the Keaton's bathroom?

This point is along the lines of the "No Toilet" issue or the "One Bathroom For 6 Kids" issue on the Brady Bunch. So in general, why weren't bathrooms emphasized on older shows?

One of the Brady Bunch books says that a toilet was put in there when the set was first constructed, but the network executives quickly ordered it removed.

The best explanation is that the Brady Bunch, as well as all TV of the time, was supposed to portray an immaculate image of the family. Despite the fact that having a toilet obviously does not make one "immoral" or "unclean", a commode would still serve as a reminder that the Brady kids would, ahem, have a need to use it. (Just try to mentally juxtapose your favorite Brady kid and a porcelain throne, and you'll see what I mean.) But how many other TV shows had toilets in them back then? Or even bathrooms for that matter.

Now of course Brady Bunch was made in 1969 and ran until 1974. In one ep, Bobby goes into the bathroom and you can hear it flush. Of course by then, Archie Bunker had made the flushing the toilet gag popular. Family Ties, made in the 80s, probably decided to deemphasize the bathroom or just didn't think about it.

Amen.

Family Ties is much like Brady Bunch:

Righteous Man.

There actually was one episode where you got a partial glimpse of the bathroom. In the first episode of the second season where Cari Newman comes to visit Alex, there's a scene where Alex is in the shower, and Cari goes into the bathroom to join him. Alexe's reaction to this was to run out of the bathroom, and when he did you could see part of the bathroom for about a second. Your right though, aside from that episode I don't recall them ever showing, or even mentioning the bathroom very much.

Yeah, and you never see the outside of the house either. But otherwise the house was very realistic. Unlike other sitcoms, who think every middle class American family lives in a gigantic houses with six bathrooms and two stair cases and big windows. It was a realistically sized house, which made it all the better.

Their house did have five bedrooms though (one for each kid and one for Steven and Elyse) which is nothing to sneeze at.