Sitcoms’ 9 Most Sheltered Sweeties
The series premiere of St. Denis Medical, which launched on NBC last fall, employs a time-tested trick for getting the audience up to speed on a workplace show’s setting and cast: starting on someone’s first day. In this case, the newcomer is Matt, an ER nurse from Montana. While that description primes his colleagues to expect someone tough and rugged, Matt is played by Mekki Leeper, so he’s kind of short, definitely slight and very nervous.
Matt finds his new situation overwhelming partly because he’s working in a hospital ER, and partly because he grew up on an extremely strict religious compound, so he doesn’t have much practice interacting with secular strangers. This means he missed a lot of pop culture, but he is extremely conversant about the Bible! It also means that, even as a medical professional, he’s suspicious of organ donation; he makes it his mission to expose the hospital chaplain as a fraud; and when a co-worker arranges a hang over drinks for her birthday, he dresses up his usual look with a gold chain identical to one his (female) boss also owns.
Unlike the lovable dummies I celebrated here a couple of years ago, Matt isn’t a full-on idiot; he’s just been shielded from a lot of experiences others may have taken for granted on their road to functional adulthood. And he’s not alone: sitcoms are full of characters trying to integrate into society despite the hindrances of very sheltered backgrounds.
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Here we’re counting down 10 (or so), ranked by just how intensely they were sheltered…
Amina, ‘We Are Lady Parts’
Lady Parts is an all-female, all-Muslim punk band, so it should be a perfect fit for Amina (Anjana Vasan), a Muslim woman who observes hijab and who is also an extraordinarily gifted guitarist. But Amina is plagued by stage fright, which she spends most of the first season overcoming. She also manages to come out to her conservative family and loved ones as a part-time musician and full-time Don McLean stan, with a shrine to ‘70s-era folk singer-songwriters hidden inside her closet doors. A lot of Amina’s shelters turn out to be self-constructed, as she figures out how to balance her career as a PhD student with her passion as a musician. She even relaxes her own rules about dating, and on the use of terms that might come into play in the process.
Morgan, ‘The Mindy Project’
Morgan (Ike Barinholtz) has had a different experience of being sheltered than most of the other characters on this list: his was literal, as he was incarcerated in his youth for stealing cars. His time in Otisville wasn’t wasted, however, since he learned nursing behind bars. But his isolation from the outside world stunted his social skills; boundaries aren’t part of his calculus in any interaction. He does form extremely strong bonds with anyone who shows him kindness, to say nothing of the nearly four dozen dogs he’s rescued.
Charlene, ‘Designing Women’
In the Designing Women foursome, Charlene (Jean Smart) is often slotted as the ditz — unfairly! If anyone isn’t using her whole intellectual capacity, it’s narcissistic Suzanne (Delta Burke), who has had every advantage in life and rarely bothers to engage in higher-order thinking. Charlene, on the other hand, grew up one of 13 children in a strict Baptist household in mid-century Missouri; she’s doing her best. If you sprang from that background, you might end up in a prison pen pal relationship with a government agent supposedly named Shadow or delay any major decision until after you’d consulted your psychic, too.
Radar, ‘M*A*S*H’
M*A*S*H is, at least some of the time, about the horrors of war, something only the World War II veterans among the characters could have sufficiently prepared for. Walter “Radar” O’Reilly (Gary Burghoff) is probably the least prepared: though joining the army has been his ambition for a long time before the war, he’s the youngest character in the regular cast and by far the most naïve. He’s probably going to lose his virginity eventually, but it won’t be on Hawkeye’s (Alan Alda) timetable, or in a loveless clinch on an R&R weekend in Seoul; this sweet little Iowa farmboy still sleeps with a teddy bear.
Rod & Todd, ‘The Simpsons’
It’s amazing that Ned Flanders (voice of Harry Shearer) and his wife Maude (Maggie Roswell) were able to raise their sons Rod (Pamela Hayden) and Todd (Nancy Cartwright) with so little curiosity about the world when the lawless Simpson kids live right next door. But the Flanders kids have apparently never thought to disobey anything Ned has ever told them about anything. They play their religious board game without “wicked” dice; they only watch faith-based TV shows; and have so little exposure to the big, scary world that they consider a ladybug visit a “bug attack.” “They’re gonna get eaten alive in middle school,” comments Lisa (Yeardley Smith) when she babysits them. Probably true, which is why it’s lucky for them that The Simpsons mostly exists in an eternal present that will never send them there.
Noah, ‘Jury Duty’
Jury Duty — an improvised sitcom about the titular process for a fake legal case, in which everyone but oblivious solar contractor Ronald Gladden is an actor in on the scheme — features a variety of weirdos testing Gladden’s capacity for credulousness. There’s an old lady who keeps falling asleep. There’s an aspiring cyborg with stool legs attached to his pants (aka chair pants — “chants” for short). And there’s Noah, played by Mekki Leeper years before St. Denis Medical. Noah is just as nervous as Matt, and for similar reasons: Noah’s Mormon, and he’s hoping not to be seated in the jury so that he can still go on a vacation with his girlfriend that, for the first time, the couple’s parents won’t also be joining as chaperones. Spoiler: Noah does join the jury, and develops a flirtation with his fellow juror Jeanie (Edy Modica). Before very long, he thinks he’s come up with a loophole, as it were, that will permit him to have sex with Jeanie without violating his religious beliefs. Maybe if Noah were a little less sheltered, he’d realize he didn’t really need to go to these extremes.
Richard Splett, ‘Veep’
As an Iowan, Richard (Sam Richardson) enjoys an outsized degree of influence in national politics, at a level possibly only known to residents of New Hampshire. After working on political campaigns for Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), Richard does eventually hold public office himself, rising from small-town mayor to a two-term U.S. president. This is a remarkable level of achievement for someone so sheltered that he can volunteer to donate sperm for Selina’s daughter Catherine (Sarah Sutherland) and her partner Marjorie (Clea DuVall) without actually understanding any part of the process, including how the sperm gets out of his body. At least Noah knows what parts he’s not supposed to connect and what would happen if he did.
Kenneth, ‘30 Rock’
We almost can’t start describing the ways Kenneth (Jack McBrayer) has been sheltered because we simply might not stop. His Stone Mountain, Georgia upbringing led him to study Bible Sexuality at the college level (along with Television Studies), but moving to New York hasn’t slackened his religious observances: he seeks out the Eighth Day Resurrected Covenant of The Holy Trinity and eventually starts making preparations for a Biblical apocalypse.
One might wonder why he’s that concerned about the end of the world, though: all evidence points to Kenneth being immortal.
Kimmy, ‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’
Playing naïve former foster kid Erin in The Office was probably good practice for Ellie Kemper to move on to Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. In what is surely the darkest show on this list, Kimmy (Kemper) is abducted in her early teens by Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne (Jon Hamm) and kept in a bunker with three other “mole women” to wait out the nuclear apocalypse that the Reverend tells them they’ve barely survived.
Fifteen years later, the bunker is discovered and the women are freed; after the initial media coverage, Kimmy is left to make her own way in New York and figure out how society actually works. Is it an upsetting premise? Yes. Does it also provide countless opportunities for her new friend Titus (Tituss Burgess) to lord his superior knowledge of the world over her?
Also yes.
