Down at Our Rendezvous: Why Three’s Company Is a Progressive Show

I sometimes wonder what the youth of today would make of Three’s Company. I even searched the internet as I prepared to write this piece, but all I found was that kind of over-confident historicism centered around the thought that things “were different at the time.”

That may be true, but it’s also boring, and generally when people start saying a show “couldn’t be made now” they level down the extent to which it was edgy when it was made. We fall into that conceptual space that is both a little bit clichéd and at least a little bit false.

I don’t want your historically detached view of Three’s Company, laden with speculative offense that others might hypothetically take—I want to know if it offends you now, or if, perhaps, you find it to be progressive.

It’s not a straightforward question, and one I’ve thought about for myself a lot over the years. My first experience with the series was when I was a kid in the 1980s. It was already in syndication, and since I was so young it already felt old. I’m sure I didn’t get all of the double entendres at the time, but there was something warm and fuzzy about the show, and something alluring about how it presented adulthood. Also, there was nothing else on.

Years later, circa 2000 and as I entered my 20s, Three’s Company was a part of the nightly block of sitcoms on Nick at Nite, along with All in the Family, The Cosby Show, and Family Ties. I used to watch that two-hour block of TV virtually every night (again, there was nothing else on), and I definitely got the sexual allusions that pervade Three’s Company that time around.

Still, it wasn’t really until later that I started pondering the show’s sexual politics (if that’s the right term). I presume you’re familiar with the premise: Jack Tripper (John Ritter) pretends to be gay so that he can live in an apartment with two single women. So, is it problematic that he’s pretending to be gay when he isn’t, along the lines of something like cultural appropriation? Or is it progressive that he’s accepted as a openly gay man in the late 1970s/early 1980s, even though he actually isn’t? Is it somehow both?

Returning to the series now, it’s striking how clear its early episodes make it that Mr. Roper (Norman Fell) would absolutely not be OK with Jack living with Janet (Joyce DeWitt) and Chrissy (Suzanne Somers) as a straight man. He’s even offended at the idea that Jack spent the night after the party the girls held the night before the series begins. But, after Janet tells Roper that Jack is gay, suddenly Stanley is fine with him moving in. So, Mr. Roper is conservative to the point of being regressive when it comes to what occurs between consenting heterosexual adults, but seems to be incredibly tolerant about homosexuality, when it had been classified as a mental disorder in the DSM up to a few years prior.

That is not to say that Mr. Roper is woke. Throughout his time on the series, he’ll make cracks about Jack’s sexuality, and, even if those don’t tend to be mean-spirited, he’ll refer to being straight as normal, and to Jack as being not normal.

Part of what’s interesting here, however, is the dynamic of the humor Three’s Company mines out of these moments. Jack (who is bursting with hetero horniness when he’s not pretending for the sake of his landlord) can never take offense when Roper makes a jibe about Jack’s sexuality, since he’d be at risk of losing his home. So, instead, Jack tends to lean into it until Roper gets uncomfortable. And, mostly, they get along.

As for Mr. Roper, his wife, Helen (Audra Lindley) is always DTF, but Stanley is never interested. Indeed, Mrs. Roper makes so many jokes about this in Three’s Company I’m led to wonder whether Mr. Roper is a closeted asexual (the term wouldn’t have even been in widespread use at the time), and whether those jokes are maybe problematic from this perspective. But, from another point of view, the dynamic between the Ropers inverts a gender stereotype.

Helen learns Jack’s secret in Season 1, but keeps it from her husband so that he doesn’t kick “the kids” out of their apartment. She’s clearly more progressive than Stanley, but she stays with him, even as he fails to satisfy her sexually. I guess she loves him.

Unfortunately, the Ropers exit Three’s Company after three seasons, to be featured in an ill-fated spinoff called The Ropers (which I have not seen). This is unfortunate in real world terms because Norman Fell apparently resisted leaving the flagship show, and wanted to come back after The Ropers failed. Three’s Company had moved on, however, bringing in Don Knots as Ralph Furley. His episode count as landlord would ultimately double that of the Ropers.

In contrast to Stanley Roper, Mr. Furley styles himself as a ladies man, though he very much isn’t. The pretense about Jack’s sexuality persists, as the lie was passed from Stanley to Ralph (and, of course, it’s central to the premise of the show). Jack tells Ralph that he’s straight in the series finale, as Jack is about to move in with Vicky (Mary Cadorette) to set up another failed spinoff, but lets Furley believe that his exemplary masculinity contributed to a conversion on Jack’s part.

And, again, that feels kind of problematic, even if the joke is really about how Ralph isn’t nearly as suave as he likes to think he is.

What saves Three’s Company from the scolds (or should) is how everything it does with regard to gender and sexuality puts them into the space of play. Sure, the series mines humor from the lie about Jack’s sexuality, but the laughs tends to come more from misunderstanding than from anything like bigotry.

The same goes when the show plays with gender. When Jack pretends to be Chrissy in “Jack on the Lam,” Chrissy’s blind date, Walter (Dick O’Neill) is so smitten that he isn’t even interested in the real Chrissy after he finds out he’s been on a date with a man. He’s still into Jack-Chrissy, and it’s funny.

I’m not claiming that Three’s Company is without its flaws. What I am arguing is that the show doesn’t bolster heteronormativity so much as it suggests that it’s funny.

And, in that way, Three’s Company is progressive, because it’s the repressive bigot who takes gender and sexuality too seriously, who wants to stop others from loving who they love, having consensual sex with those they want, or playing with gender however they please. It’s absurd to think you have the right to tell people how to live in these regards. Would that, in the real world of 2026, I could find it funny.