Yesterday Would Be Nice

It's hard to think that it's been almost four years.

That's a long time. We elect presidents every four years. We go to high school for four years. Some of us even get a college degree in such time. (Some of us, I said.)

But counting the days from one graduation to the next is nothing compared to four years-1,460 days-without a father. Trust me.

Last week's episode of "8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter" offered a beautiful hour showing the darkest days a family can live through. In its eloquent modesty, it showed that tragedy can strike at any time; even sitcoms have their dark days.

The ABC comedy that starred the late John Ritter, who died of an aortic dissection in September at the age of 54, is taking a bold and courageous step in contributing to sitcom history - and television history.

Rather than folding the one-year-old sitcom, which stars "Married ... With Children" matriarch Katey Segal as the mother of three teenagers, the show's producers and Ritter's wife, actress Amy Yasbeck, decided the show would carry on without its loving patriarch.

Dealing with the loss of a central family figure, the characters will now deal with the suddenness of their father's death. (Ritter's character collapses at a grocery store while on a quick errand picking up milk.)

Watching last week's two-part episode, in which the family learns of the death and begins to cope with it, brought back so many trunks full of memories that I had to pause it many times just to get through it. (Courtesy of TiVo.)

Between 1998 and 2000, I dealt with the sudden deaths of my stepfather and father. My stepfather died on a bright summer afternoon of an aortic aneurysm (a similar tearing of the heart's main artery that led to Ritter's death).

Soon after the time our family was beginning to find peace with his departure, we were hit with another loss, this time on a cold early winter morning.

In 2000, one day after ringing in the new year - when we realized that the world's computers hadn't frozen and that our bank accounts would be just fine - we got a call from the hospital in the middle of the night that my father had suffered a heart attack. We'd better get there soon, they said. We arrived at the emergency room, where he had already died.

He was 54, like Ritter.

I sympathize with the loss the children on "8 Simple Rules ... " must now endure. The episode gracefully shared the tender dichotomies of the aftermath of death: silence and chaos, pain and numbness, loss and hope. Even the annoying bickering of Segal's character's parents (played by guests Suzanne Pleshette and James Garner) was true to reality. The smallest little irritations really do cause a commotion when we grieve.

There's a healthy dose of reality in ABC's decision to continue the show. What started last season as a "Father Knows Best"-meets-"Meet The Parents" riff on dating woes and family dynamics, has now turned into the most honest show we can look to for real-life family situations. It is, perhaps, the first (watchable) reality show.

The special episode, still flowered with soft laugh lines and comic relief, was performed not in front of a studio audience, but for cameras only. An intimate feeling was evident, as the cast seemed to need the alone time for reflection and healing. The characters aren't the only ones that lost a father, after all; the actors lost a colleague.

Where laughs would normally come from the audience, there was silence. Initially awkward, the unexpectedness of the quietness added chilling effect to the dialogue. There's no reason to hold for applause. There's no laugh track in real life.

Time can help, but it can't really heal. When the wounds of TV's now fatherless family begin to feel like distant memories from seasons past, perhaps they'll look back on last week's episode and remember the importance of love and togetherness.

It's true, what they say: there's no day like today. But sometimes, yesterday would be nice.