5 Kids’ TV Shows That Launched The Careers Of Multiple Stars

3Leo DiCaprio And Ellie From The Last Of Us On Growing Pains

In the days before streaming, TV shows didn’t need anything so sophisticated as “a central premise” — you could just make a show about a functioning, loving family without any major external or internal problems. As long as you had some corny jokes and at least one cute kid, you could make it five or six seasons without breaking a sweat before people started to wonder why they were watching.

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Growing Pains, an ‘80s sitcom that made it into the ‘90s, is a perfect example. It’s right there in the name: Maybe the sixteenth or seventeenth-worst thing about puberty and adolescence, in TV show form. The show followed the Seaver family through their incredibly minor struggles, and kept following them for so long that eventually, the family didn’t have any cute kids anymore. 

Like we’ve established, that’s an unthinkable calamity for a show like Growing Pains, and they took action. They aged up the baby girl of the family into a precious but precocious five-year-old, and just to cover their bases, they had the family adopt a foster kid in his early teens. It was a tough job trying to find someone who could be cute enough for adult viewers and cool enough for kids. Let’s see how they did:

ABC

In addition to acting, he also started pointing at things and laughing while holding drinks at a young age.

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Yeah, hard to argue with that choice. The young DiCaprio was such a find that he outgrew Growing Pains pretty much immediately, and left the show before he finished his first season in the main cast. The show ended pretty soon after, since after Leo left there was only the little girl to support the cute kid quotient. What ended up happening to her, the last of them?

Naughty Dog

“We said “the last of them,” not “us!”