In Ep 4 Season One Vint and Naomi get married. But then in Ep 11 Season One Vint's friend Claude tries to get Vint to marry a woman who need a green card and there by make $1000 in the deal. In that episode Naomi is once again living next door and is shocked when Mama tells her about Vint's illegal scheme. Then in Ep 13 Vint threatens to move out after stealing Mama's silver to sell for bail money for his slacker friend Claude. So what happened to Vint's and Naomi's marriage at the end of Season One? Because in Season Two they are back to being married. Am I missing something? Did Mama's Family pass through the Twilight Zone in Ep One?
There's really two explanations for the confusing sequence of events around Vint's marital status: a short one and a long one. The short explanation is that the episodes were shown out of order, but before blaming Me-TV for this goof, the real blame goes all the way back to when these episodes originally ran on NBC. After the first two episodes were filmed (Mama's Silver and Alien Marriage), Vicki Lawrence shut down production on the show because she felt her character was too harsh and unfunny, so she brought in Harvey Korman to retool the show and help her soften Mama. During the shutdown in production, a lot of things were changed: Besides Mama becoming more likeable, the decision was made that Naomi would be brought into the family to be a thorn in the side to Mama. When they resumed production, they basically filmed a new pilot episode which shows Vint and the kids moving in and then quickly married Vint and Naomi in the next few episodes.
The problem was, they still had the first two episodes they filmed with Vint still being single. So NBC decided to just bury these episodes near the end of Season 1. Watching the repeats, it makes no sense at all but that's because these episodes were edited for more commerical time. In the unedited version, all of the Season 1 episodes had an "introduction" by Harvey Korman playing Alistair Quince. For those first two episodes filmed, Korman explains that they were flashback episodes to a time before Vint and Naomi were married. But these intros were all edited out for more commerical time, so the explanation that they are flashback episodes is gone. That's probably more info than you wanted but that's the story for the confusion.
When I watched the show on Fox back in like the early 90s, they aired Mama's Silver as the 1st episode, and thy aired Fran's Dress like before the wedding, BUT Vint mentions being married to Naomi... I BELIEVE the run was : Mama's Silver, Alien Marriage, Vint and the Kids Move in, Fran's Dress, ~The one where Naomi stays over night, I forget the name~ The Wedding 1, The Wedding pt 2, Cellmates, Positive Thinking,
I always assumed that in Mama's Silver, that Vint had not moved in with Mama yet and still has his own place somewhere and was just visiting Mama.
tinkerbell, I was thinking the same thing. Vint and the kids probably had not yet moved in with Mama in the Alien Marrage episode. But in the Mama's Silver episode they were living there. It's all very confusing.