In case you’re in the dark on this: Pregnancies as shown on scripted TV are pretty dumb. They just don’t play out the way they do in real life … pretty much all the time. And a few recent episodes led me to need to talk about that a lot.

• According to TV, every pregnant lady craves weird food.
• A really dumb pregnancy episode on “Warehouse 13”
• “Modern Family” and its pregnancy storyline, especially as related to pregnancy brain
• “I Love Lucy” as the standard-setter for how pregnant women are shown in sitcoms
• How labor progresses on TV vs. real life
• “Mad About You” and its pregnancy story
• Morning sickness as the key indicator of pregnancy on TV
• Pregnancy as a source of bad writing on TV
• “Up All Night”
• “Grey’s Anatomy” and its one-episode Kepner pregnancy art
• The “My Biological Clock is Ticking” trope
• “New Girl” and its biological clock thing
• TV tropes of people who have tried to get pregnant for a long time
• Friend rivals seeing who can get pregnant first on TV
• How delivery always happens the same way on TV
• Laboring Under an Illusion
• Ultrasounds!
• The episode where Lucy tells Ricky she’s pregnant
• “The Mindy Project” and “The Cosby Show” and their OB/GYN characters
• A favorite birth scene for me “Northern Exposure”
• Holly’s contribution: “Home Movies” (of course) and the episode “Coffins & Cradles”
• Listener mail! From Ed, discussing our episode on gender segregation
• Episode link: TV Pregnancy: Why so stupid?

My research:

• Morris, Theresa. “Media Representations of Pregnancy and Childbirth: An Analysis of Reality Television Programs in the United States.” Birth: Issues in Prenatal Care. June 2010.
• Tropp, Laura. “‘‘Faking a Sonogram’’: Representations of Motherhood on Sex and the City.” The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 39, No. 5, 2006
• Young, Diony, “Childbirth Education, the Internet, and Reality Television: Challenges Ahead.” Birth: Issues in Prenatal Care. June 2010.

Holly’s research:

• TV Tropes: Pregnancy Tropes

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