Will these fathers know best?

Michael Mehle and Alex Neth

Monday, December 31, 2007

Michael Buckner / Getty Images

Scott Baio and Renee Sloan

Michael Buckner / Getty Images

Adrianne Curry and Chris- topher Knight

Here's an auspicious harbinger for 2008: This month VH1 will launch both My Fair Brady . . . and Baby? (Jan. 20) and Scott Baio Is 46 and Pregnant (Jan. 13).

The former follows the first couple of celebreality - Brady kid Christopher Knight and America's Next Top Model winner Adrianne Curry - as they settle into their idea of wedded bliss and contemplate a kid. The latter chronicles Chachi's plunge into parenthood, apparently skipping over the whole contemplation and wedded-bliss part, since he married Renee Sloan a month after she gave birth to their daughter.

Thanks to our public-school education and repeated viewings of Porky's, we know how these things happen. Both Curry and Sloan have been in Playboy, after all.

But is this a good idea? Should either Peter Brady or Charles in Charge be procreating, and should we be watching?

We're not suggesting dialing up social services, just an unhealthy debate complete with mudslinging, name-calling and eye-poking. Herewith, the cases for fatherhood for Knight and Baio:

Christopher Knight (aka Peter Brady)

Go ahead, run a smear campaign against the Bradys.

We'll even help: Off camera, stepmom and oldest son had a mutual crush. And at one point, Greg and Marcia had a thing going on. Even dad moaned to producers about how implausible most of the Brady plots were. And Jan abandoned the clan and let an impostor take her role in all the Very Brady reunion specials. Ingrate.

Just save your time and dignity and leave Peter out of it. You won't find any dirt on this milquetoast middle child.

Peter (Knight) was like Brady wallpaper, holding the household together while selflessly blending in with the scenery. Even cousin Oliver got more love from the writers than the forgotten son. Ever the gentleman, he never hit on Jan or (shudder) Alice, and you seldom heard him whine about how Greg got all the Lothario story lines. A stand-up guy in plaid bell-bottoms. That was Christopher Knight circa 1973.

Fast-forward 30 years and VH1 gave us televised proof that the years hadn't changed our Brillo-haired hero.

On The Surreal Life, he was the designated peacemaker among the usual freak show of D-list rappers, wrestlers and people we've never heard of - the sole guy you could count on not to vomit, sob and streak all in one episode. After he hooked up with Adrianne Curry - his Surreal Life cast mate who let her roommates eat sushi off her bare body (kudos, Mr. Knight!) - he let us bear witness to their courtship over two TV seasons. We lost count of how many of Curry's Krakatoa diva eruptions he calmly extinguished while she browbeat him into proposing.

The man needs no further training for parenthood; he already has a petulant child on his hands - albeit one who knows her way around a stripper pole.

We're usually above negative campaigning over here at Camp Brady, but we can't let Chachi's shortcomings go unmentioned.

He had a fling with Liza Minnelli.

The prosecution rests.

In closing, we're tempted to mention that Knight has moved beyond suckling off the Brady teat and is a respected high-tech entrepreneur - but you're right, who cares? Instead, we remind you of the first episode of Surreal Life, in which a blotto Verne Troyer wandered naked into the living room to relieve himself. We needn't tell you which housemate was called on to gently alert Mini Me that the house isn't his personal urinal.

If that isn't father material, we don't know what is. Someone get Peter Brady a baby. Or six.

Scott Baio (aka Chachi)

You don't want Charles to be in charge of just your days and nights. Or, like some bowl-cut Supreme Court of one, in charge of just your wrongs and your rights. You don't merely want Charles to be in charge of you.

You want him to be in charge of another human being.

Scott Baio will make Hugh Beaumont's character on Leave It to Beaver look like a junkie rooting through a KFC dumpster. He'll shame the very idea of Dick Van Patten - because eight will definitely not be enough, not for Mr. Baio and his lucky bride.

Proof of Baio's prime-grade dad status litters our cultural landscape like a thousand telekinetically unfastened bras. Let us enumerate but three of his qualifications:

* Understanding

Thanks to his understated work as Chachi Arcola on Happy Days, Baio is uniquely suited to empathize with teenage trials and tribulations. That experience of portraying Fonzie's goofy, kind of annoying cousin will prove invaluable, especially when his own kid(s) slam his vintage Porsche into a yield sign at 3 a.m., get caught selling steroids or fall in love with women named Joanie.

* Responsibility

This was Charles, for goodness' sake. The most famous Manny the world has ever known, the glue behind the Pembroke/Powell families. This was Dr. Jack Stewart from Diagnosis: Murder. This was Bugsy Malone, who fearlessly went to the aid of Fat Sam when Dandy Dan was covering Sam's associates in murderous custard. If you think Scott Baio would let his kid skip out on doing homework, you've been watching too much Full House.

* Manliness

Mr. Baio's list of conquests is so long that putting it to paper would drive this bit right into the car ads. But let's just throw out a few names: Pamela Anderson, Nicolette Sheridan, Erika Eleniak, Denise Richards and Heather Locklear. He told Howard Stern a few years back that he'd been briefly banned from the Playboy Mansion in the late '80s because he'd dated 24 Playmates in a year. Boys need a dad they can look up to - and girls need a dad who can identify when they're dating a guy like Scott Baio.

He's employed, he has 33 vertebrae in his spinal column, he can drive and he's probably not armed. But even more important, he's not that sniveling crybaby Christopher Knight, who didn't even possess the intestinal fortitude to fight his way to the top of the hardly forbidding Brady-family heap. You'd put fatherhood on the plate of a guy who couldn't outman Barry Williams?