Charles in Indentured Servitude

I’ve been tossing around the idea to write a post about the 1985 sitcom Charles in Charge—specifically, its theme song—for a few weeks now. It’s always struck me as sinister:

New boy in the neighborhood
Lives downstairs and its understood
He’s there just to take good care of me
Like he’s one of the family
Charles in Charge of our days and our nights
Charles in Charge of our wrongs and our rights
And I sing, I want, I want Charles in Charge of me
Charles in Charge of our days and our nights
Charles in Charge of our wrongs and our rights
And I sing, I want, I want Charles in Charge of me.

When this theme song became inexplicably lodged in my head in September, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much it makes Charles sound like a cult leader. It is a known truth that Charles is there to care for you. That he’s as close to you as a blood relation. Charles sets the order of your days and your nights, and you want him to do this. You no longer need your moral compass; Charles will be that for you. And to prove that your participation is voluntary, you will sing that you want Charles in charge of you.

I was feeling very smug and self-assured when I sat down to write this, based on that premise. One, because I enjoy being ridiculous, and two, because Scott Baio has me blocked on a lot of social media platforms and I miss cyberbullying him. Cyberbullying Charles seemed just as good.

But then I started remembering things about the show that I never questioned when I was a child. Mainly, the fact that Charles appears to be locked into some kind of domestic slavery or indentured servitude situation to the two different families he works for over the course of the show.

It all started when Michael Jacobs (Dinosaurs, Boy Meets World, the criminally underrated The Torkelsons) and Barbara Weisberg (an author of nonfiction and children’s books) sat down to develop a new television show for the Scholastic Corporation (that book fair you never had money for). The premise they came up with was pretty simple: a broke college student accepts a job as a live-in housekeeper/nanny for an upper-middle class family with three children. In other words, a well-off family dupes a desperate college kid into being a nineteen-year-old single dad.

The show had all the ingredients required for a sitcom in 1980s: an affluent white family with precocious kids and a pristine house, a handsome leading man (Scott Baio, coasting into a second series lead on the fumes of his fading Happy Days good will), a wacky best friend character (Willie Aames, who shares a birthday with me and Forest Whitaker), and a premise that becomes troublesome as fuck if you think about it even a little bit. Because Charles isn’t actually being paid for his services to the family. They’re providing him room and board. He lives in their house, cooks their meals, does their chores, cares for their children both materially and emotionally, and he doesn’t get paid. All because he needs a place to live while he attends college.

If this happened in real life, the arrangement would violate labor laws. And it gets even stranger when season two starts. Charles, returning from the longest hiking trip ever (there is a three year gap between season one and the show’s revival in syndication), finds that the Pembrokes, the family he originally worked for? They don’t live in that house anymore. They decided to move to Seattle, knowing that Charles would be returning to college and, presumably, to work in just two weeks. He bursts through the front door of the house he assumed he lived in, only to startle the young girl reading on the sofa, whom he mistakes for the Pembroke’s daughter despite acknowledging that she has “a different head.” This girl is obviously a different child from the one who was in his full-time care for twenty-two episodes. How much attention could he possibly have been paying to these children?

Mrs. Pembroke is, for some reason, still wandering around the house, as is one of the Pembroke children. Charles is totally thrown. He keeps wandering into rooms and there are people he doesn’t know. His best friend, Buddy, is no help, because Buddy is the kind of guy who’d bring an air horn to cheer you on in a chess tournament. The cheerful, boyish lights are on, but there are only ghosts of thoughts at home.

Mrs. Pembroke explains to Charles that her husband was transferred to Seattle, and the new family, the Powells, are subletting the house. The biggest shock to me, upon rewatch, was finding out that the Pembrokes are renting in the 1980s, when houses cost roughly thirty-six bucks. The second biggest shock was that the son cheerfully announces that they’ve not only sublet the house, but they’ve sublet Charles as well. And yes, they absolutely say they sublet another human being: “We sublet you, too.”

With no prior discussion, the Pembrokes have decided that Charles will transfer to the new family, in the same arrangement. And Charles is like… uh, no. I’m getting an apartment with my friend Buddy. He decides that there’s no reason to stay at the house and start chilling with the Powells, until the boy-crazy oldest daughter announces that she’s already lined up dates for herself and her sister, the bookish and jaded Sarah, who looks exactly like the human character from the 1980s My Little Pony cartoon. He resists his natural urge to parent when Sarah begs him to bring her along while he and Buddy try to woo girls at the local pizza place, but he ultimately can’t help himself. The kid needs help learning to meet new people and be popular, and if anyone knows about popular, it’s Scott Baio in the 1980s. And Mrs. Powell is totally okay with sending her daughter off to watch a strange man trying to pick up women, so… that’s cool.

What I find so bizarre about this series reboot is how casually the Pembrokes sold Charles with the house. Mrs. Powell doesn’t find anything wrong with this arrangement, either. She’s heard nothing but good things about Charles and has taken it for granted that he’ll come work for her. The kids are even excited to meet him, and Sarah is disappointed that he doesn’t initially want to get involved in helping her become liked and popular.

Who the fuck are these people?

The only person in the family who initially appears to have a lick of sense is the grandfather, a retired Navy curmudgeon who prevents two unknown men from leaving the property with his thirteen-year-old granddaughter. Charles and Buddy do not make a great first impression on Mr. Powell, who is shocked when two civilians don’t know the names of famous admirals. Also, the fact that they are, and I cannot stress this enough, two strange men expressing an interest in hanging out with his thirteen-year-old granddaughter.

Charles and Buddy take Sarah to a pizza place, where two girls are immediately all over the guys. We’re talking breathy voices, leaning up against them, hand feeding them pizza, all in front of a child they have zero questions about. Neither of these girls say, “Um, why are you hanging out with this literal child? And why is she on our date?” Meanwhile, back at the house, Mrs. Powell explains to her father-in-law that sure, they don’t know Charles at all, but she trusts Sarah’s judgment and thinks he’ll be good for the family.

I need to impress upon you how absolutely beezonks this plot point is. This woman is going to entrust the full-time care of her children to a strange man because he took her thirteen-year-old daughter along on his pizza date. This is the type of storyline we all just accepted in the 1980s.

When one of the horny pizza girls explains to Sarah that she, too, used to be interested in books and nerdy pursuits, Charles takes Sarah home and away from such slutty influences. Jamie is miffed that Sarah doesn’t want to go out and meet boys with her, but Charles puts his foot down, saying that Sarah is not ready, and that deciding when to date is her choice. And this leads to Charles realizing that he needs to stay with the Powells to make sure Sarah doesn’t get led down the garden path by Jamie, and to prevent Jamie from growing up too fast (we won’t get into the allegations of Baio’s real life sexual predation toward actress Nicole Eggert). The episode ends with Charles informing Buddy that they have a date later that night with the two girls from the pizza place, and the credits roll.

It seems like Charles has made the decision to stay with the Powells. He’s entering their employment as an equal, albeit on the same terms as with the Pembrokes. But what choice does he actually have? He’s been working for room and board. While Buddy finds them a potential apartment to live in, Charles has no money. He’s in debt to the local pizzeria. Do you know how fucking broke you have to be to finance pizza? Is moving out of the Pembroke/Powell situation even achievable for Charles? He’s still going to college, and now he’ll be responsible for parenting these new children (despite the grandfather being retired and at home full time). And the Pembrokes were fully prepared to skip town without informing him that they were leaving. If he hadn’t arrived home that day, at that time, he would have just missed his former “employers”; within minutes of him receiving the news of their departure, Mrs. Pembroke and her son are loading their suitcases into a cab. They didn’t even count on him being there to drive them to the airport. They were fully prepared to up and leave and never see Charles again or explain to him what’s happening.

As if the entire premise of simply selling their unpaid housekeeper to a new family wasn’t upsetting enough, the first episode of the reboot ends with a tag wherein the children sneak into Charles’s room to watch him as he sleeps.

Jamie: I wanna see what we got here.

Adam: He’s going to teach me how to throw a knuckleball. And to drive a car!

Sarah: We’re going to read all of the poetry books together!

Jamie: He’s gonna do my math homework. He’s gonna clean my room! Look at him. Isn’t this great? We own this guy. He’s gonna do whatever we tell him.

Of course, the gag is that Charles is awake the whole time. He barks at them to go back to bed, and they scramble out because, no matter who signs his checks (no one. No one signs his checks because he doesn’t get paid), Charles is the one truly in charge.

Upon rewatching this episode, I realized exactly why the theme song disturbs me. It isn’t an assertion that Charles is in charge. It’s an argument for the innocence of the people exploiting him. They’re not culpable. They’re not responsible for that exploitation. Charles is. Charles is in charge, and if he wanted to escape, he could do so at any time. The theme song makes us, the viewer, complicit in his abuse and captivity.

Charles is not in charge. Charles is a victim, and God has looked away.