I’ve been watching old episodes of Three’s Company, and one thing keeps cracking me up: this show was nowhere near as innocent as nostalgia would have you believe.

Take the episode where Mr. Furley ends up getting arrested for solicitation.

Yes. Mr. Furley. Don Knotts. Arrested for trying to buy a prostitute. On network television. 😂

Of course, he wasn’t actually trying to buy anybody. He was looking for Cindy, who had disappeared, and he approached a woman who happened to be an undercover vice cop. Because this is Three’s Company, one misunderstanding leads to another, money gets mentioned, and the next thing you know, Mr. Furley’s goofy ass is headed downtown.

And this was television.

Regular-ass television.

Not HBO. Not some late-night cable show. Not Netflix with a TV-MA warning flashing across the screen.

ABC.

People were sitting there watching this shit after dinner.

What fascinates me about old television is that we remember it as being so wholesome compared with what we watch today. And visually, maybe it was. Nobody was naked. Nobody was dropping an F-bomb every five minutes. Sex happened almost entirely offscreen.

But the subject matter?

Baby, they were talking about EVERYTHING.

Prostitution. Premarital sex. Affairs. Horny old people. Gay men. Men pretending to be gay. Women chasing men. Men chasing women. Casual sex. Sexual misunderstandings. People spending the night together. Jack Tripper practically lived in a permanent state of sexual confusion.

Hell, the entire premise of Three’s Company depended on Jack pretending to be gay because his landlord wouldn’t allow an unmarried heterosexual man to live with two unmarried women.

That alone tells you how much American culture has changed.

And Three’s Company had prostitution storylines more than once. Chrissy was mistaken for a prostitute. Jack worked as a male escort. Prostitutes and vice cops wandered through storylines like they were the mailman.

Yet somehow the show still felt playful instead of explicit.

That’s what I think has really disappeared.

It’s not that television today is too conservative to discuss prostitution. Please. Modern television will show you things that would have caused Fred Sanford to clutch his chest for real.

What we don’t have as much anymore is that particular kind of adult comedy disguised as family entertainment.

The writers knew grown folks were watching.

The kids might laugh because Jack fell over the couch.

Mama understood the double entendre.

Grandma understood exactly why everybody was laughing.

And the network somehow let the whole thing ride.

There was an art to that.

Sexual humor had to be suggested rather than shown, which meant writers had to be clever. A raised eyebrow, a misunderstood sentence, somebody walking out of the wrong bedroom, Mr. Roper grinning directly into the camera — that was enough.

Three’s Company made an entire television empire out of people misunderstanding who was sleeping with whom.

And John Ritter could turn a misunderstanding about sex into five minutes of physical comedy without anybody taking their clothes off.

That man could hear one suggestive sentence, choke on a drink, fall over a chair, crash through a kitchen door and somehow make the whole damn thing look graceful.

So when people talk about how innocent television used to be, I laugh.

Old television wasn’t necessarily innocent. It was sneaky.

It trusted adults to catch the joke without explaining it.

And apparently, in 1981, you could arrest Mr. Furley for soliciting an undercover hooker, play a laugh track over it, roll the credits, and everybody would be back next week.

They truly do not make television like that anymore.