: "Fran was, from the beginning, envisioned as Jean Stapleton in All in the Family in that she is stuck in the existing power structure, and having a very hard time pulling herself out of it. She’s aware it’s not working, but she’s spending so much energy holding the family together that she doesn’t have much time to be a crusader for anything better or to push it. So we didn’t want to raise her consciousness too quickly. It shouldn’t happen on its own. The idea is to bring in an outside character, so Monica poking her head through the window and having a completely different idea and bringing all these ideas right into the house could open Fran’s eyes to the fact that her own inner thoughts might, in fact, have value. And that Monica could be such a plainspoken and open and honest character without any embarrassment — that could just take Fran’s breath away and allow her to think, Oh my; all these private thoughts I’ve had, they’re perfectly reasonable. Monica was great. And the fact that Earl couldn’t stand her is even better. You wanna take shots at Earl. That’s the fun, knocking him down. Because you can’t kill him. He’s always wrong. Just take your shots. He’s essentially everybody’s father."There aren’t many contemporary reviews of Dinosaurs from the early '90s — perhaps because it was considered a children’s show. There’s a preview in The New York Times in which a reporter focuses on Brian Henson and the weight of carrying on his father’s legacy through a show about Muppet dinosaurs. Explaining the show's premise, he says, “We go around as if we’re kings of the earth, but who knows how much time we have left?” But in November 1991, the same paper of record acknowledged Dinosaurs as part of a slew of television shows that were addressing the Anita Hill hearings, when she accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. The episode, titled “What Sexual Harris Meant,” centers around a male dinosaur who works with Earl called Sexual Harris. He makes inappropriate jokes and advances to Monica, who unexpectedly gets a job as a tree pusher with Earl and the other male dinosaurs. In the Times write up, Jacobs tells the reporter that it would be fairly clear to viewers that the show sides with Hill. “There will be a realization that perhaps the female is equal to the male,” he told the Times. (In our interviews, every writer brought up this episode without prompt as one of their proudest moments.)And finally, in February 1992, Dinosaurs received a rave review from acclaimed TV critic Howard Rosenberg of the Los Angeles Times. Rosenberg reviewed the episode in which vegetarianism serves as a metaphor for homosexuality, he wrote that the show “finds its metier,” and was “genius in lizardom.”: "That was the landmark, that Howard Rosenberg story. We got nice reviews at the beginning — everybody loved the Hensons. They liked the look of it. They didn’t think it was necessarily that great a show, the critics, but they were okay. They were kind enough. We were kind of regarded as a kids show until Rosenberg wrote that piece. And then everyone realized, similar to The Simpsons, I guess, there was something else going on. Like, they’re actually being seditious here and telling stories within stories. There’s something for the adults, stuff aimed over the head of the kids."