Enceinte

Lucille Ball got pregnant. It’s not surprising; the whole thing with I Love Lucy was that it was Ball and her real-life husband playing a fictional young married couple. (Frankly, they weren’t that young; Ball was forty when the show debuted and Desi Arnaz 34.) Married women get pregnant. Not always, even then, but with regularity. But it meant that CBS had to figure out what to do about it. They made Lucy Ricardo pregnant, but, famously, the network censors wouldn’t let anyone say the word.

Ball wasn’t the first pregnant actress on TV, nor was she the first sitcom star whose pregnancy was written into a show. That honour goes to Mary Kay Stearns of the now-lost early show Mary Kay and Johnny. Her pregnancy was originally planned to be hidden before it was written into the show. She and her real-life husband, Johnny, were also the first TV couple to share a bed. However, only one full episode of the show is known to exist, so there’s not a lot I can tell you about that particular TV pregnancy.

But it was a problem a lot of shows would have to grapple with in the following decades, and there were three main ways of handling it. The first was what, with all due respect to Stearns, we’ll have to call the Lucy Route, where the pregnancy is written into the show and the character in some way gives birth. There’s the Phylicia Rashad Route, where the actress spends large amounts of a season behind a desk or carrying vases or large flower arrangements. And there’s the Gillian Anderson Route, where the actress is briefly written off the show to give her time to be pregnant, give birth, and recover.

The Lucy Route is easiest when a pregnancy is natural to the character. She is married or wants to be a mother or in some other way it’s reasonable to expect the character to get pregnant. Or at least not completely out of the question. You couldn’t do this on The Flying Nun without serious theological implications, for example. The Secret Life of the American Teenager, conversely, dealt with things like unexpected pregnancy all the time, so when Molly Ringwald was pregnant with twins, it was written into the show.

This, however, is not always an option. However, the writers will sometimes see it as an opportunity to get creative. Lisa Kudrow, for example, was married and in a place to be a mother in a way that Phoebe was not, so instead, Phoebe becomes a surrogate for her brother and his wife. The surrogate route is popular, though The Vampire Diaries had to get all extra about it and make it a spell that transfers the babies of a dying witch into the uterus of a vampire, who is herself unable to conceive because vampire. It makes Deep Space Nine’s mere medical transplant look perfectly normal by contrast.

Meanwhile, while Cynthia Nixon got a Sex in the City pregnancy as part of her character development, the fact that Sarah Jessica Parker was pregnant at the same time got a shortened season and a lot of bulky bags. The same basic thing was done with Mindy Kaling on The Mindy Project. Seinfeld did it to Julia Louis-Dreyfus twice. Mad Men dabbled in a variant by simply having the character stress-eat and gain a ton of weight. Courtney Cox was dealing with a plotline about how her character couldn’t have a baby while she was herself pregnant, so they went with the loose clothing route.

It’s mockable—The Nanny explicitly made the bump-hiding over the top—but it’s sometimes just what you have to do. Frankly, it’s often a better choice. The big example here is Moonlighting, which hid Allyce Beasley as Agnes DiPesto behind a desk during her pregnancy. Meanwhile, when Cybill Shepherd as Maddie Hayes was pregnant, they wrote the pregnancy into the show in a really unbelievable way. Shepherd had gestational diabetes and wasn’t supposed to be working at all; from what I can tell, she was not well-treated behind the scenes of that show.

Obviously, they should’ve gone with choice three, where the character just has to return to her home planet for six months or so. Such as, you know, when Scully is abducted on The X-Files, and about the only image you get of Gillian Anderson during that time shows her having weird things done to her with a large, rounded belly. The X-Files walked so The Vampire Diaries could have weird spell witch baby surrogacy.

Shooting schedules can get rearranged—not easy on Moonlighting, which already had a nightmarish production schedule were fifteen-hour days were just expected, but done for Amy Poehler on Parks & Rec and Claire Danes on Homeland. Zooey Deschanel was in a sequestered jury on New Girl. Characters go to other states or countries. A Glee character was admitted to college, presumably early. (I’ve never watched Glee.) Any time a female character takes a mysterious trip involving months off screen, odds are pretty good it’s because the actress is on maternity leave.

Then there’s the soaps, which make The Vampire Diaries look healthy and normal. Kelly Ripa played a character who was buried alive and filmed pretty much from the neck up. A Days of Our Lives character disguised herself as a man and was replaced by an actor for a while. Three As the World Turns characters whose actresses were all pregnant at the same time were sent to a weird offshore facility of some sort. I’m sure there are even more that I don’t know about.

Obviously, the worst of all is firing the actress, which can lead to a lawsuit and bad publicity. There’s a reason that movies, much shorter in filming length, just delay or use body doubles a lot of the time. It’s a better choice. TV shows, however, seldom have that luxury, leading to generations of attempted workarounds. Some actresses have even used more than one—a hidden pregnancy when it wouldn’t have worked for her character followed by one written into the story, for example. You do what you have to, and the ideal is what works for both the show and the actress.