Not Allowed To Grow Up / Live-Action TV

• The Brady Bunch: With Susan Olsen, who played the youngest daughter (and child), Cindy. She was 7 when the pilot was filmed in December 1968, and production on the first season began in the summer of 1969, but the series ran long enough where she was 12 in the final season. Yet, she was singing "I've got a secret" and snooping in her sisters' diaries during that final season, and – until midway through that Season 5 – was still wearing pigtails. She finally got to grow up in the follow-up series The Brady Bunch Hour and subsequent revivals.
• Family Affair ran for five years and, more importantly, lasted long enough for its youngest cast member, Anissa Jones, to enter puberty in the middle of production. In spite of this, the writers insisted that her character — as well as her public image — should remain that of a very young, prepubescent girl. Thus, in the later years of the show's run, Anissa Jones was forced to conceal her developing breasts, tie her hair up in Girlish Pigtails, and hold the Mrs. Beasley doll when working on the set or making promotional appearances. Her requests that her character's dialogue be made less childish were turned down. This is often cited as a major factor in her eventual death by drug overdose.
• The trope still affects some contemporary "teen dramas", forcing characters to remain teenaged and in high school for ridiculous periods of time, even as their actors age into and through their twenties. See also Dawson Casting.
• Emmanuel Lewis, the star of Webster was twelve when he started playing the title role and seventeen when the show ended. His character aged only three years during the show's six-year run, from age five to eight.
• Similarly, Gary Coleman's character Arnold on Diff'rent Strokes appeared to age much slower than the rest of the cast. Coleman's kidney disorder meant that the actor never grew above 4' 8''. An aversion, though, in that the character progressed through his school years at a normal rate, especially after the older cast mates moved on to college and Europe. Arnold was 8 when the series started and 16 when it ended.
• The producers of Malcolm in the Middle were quite concerned about Frankie Muniz growing up, to the point where they filmed as many episodes as humanly possible in a very short period of time and then showed them on a regular schedule so that Malcolm would appear to age more slowly. Later seasons, however, avert this to some degree; you can see Malcolm graduating from high school and applying for colleges, and Francis gets married. This was probably due to Dawson Casting: at the series' beginning, Muniz was 14 whereas the character of Malcolm was somewhere around 11, and it would be understandable for them to want to make sure he didn't hit a growth spurt or a voice change before it would be plausible for Malcolm to do the same. After in-universe puberty struck, they didn't mind the actors growing up.
• SCTV parodied this with a Mockumentary in which Martin Short portrays a (former) child actor who has been the star of a Dennis the Menace-esque show called Oh, That Rusty! for thirty years. Rusty never ages, but the actor does. At one point, the show's producers start filming the show using oversized sets and props, and do some recasting... not for Rusty, but for his parents, who are now played by very tall basketball players (who also happen to be black, making for an inversion of the Diff'rent Strokes/Webster formula.)
• Lost similarly removed Walt from on-screen appearances for two seasons when the actor playing him began to age more visibly but brought him back once the progress of puberty had slowed somewhat. See Put on a Bus. Though it was for different reasons than most shows. Where most shows that do this hold to a nebulous frozen time frame, Lost was on a strict timeline with the first four seasons covering a span of roughly 100 days during which Walt's puberty would have been implausible. He returned when the show's timeline jumped forward a few years catching up with his age.
• During its short tenure, Century City explored two aspects of this trope: first, a child actor suing his parents over the right to take growth suppressant hormones to continue his acting career, and second, an elderly member of a Backstreet Boys-esque boy band suing his former band over a contractual dispute that forces all members to take gene therapy and other surgery to keep them perpetually boi-ish. Incidentally, both cases averted this trope: the child actor was convinced not to take the pills through an appeal to the wonders of growing up, and the boy band case was dropped after one of the members who went through the procedure died of old age.
  Lukas: But he looked so young.
• LazyTown provides a rare modern live-action example. Julianna Rose Mauriello was 13 when she took the role of 8-year-old Stephanie and was relatively believable as that age. She was 15 when the second season was shot, and is clearly a young woman rather than a little girl in those episodes (she doesn't even appear to have bound breasts, at least not consistently), yet no narrative time appears to have passed, and in one episode she is shown to be in the same grade school class as her young puppet friends. She was a month from 17 when the first season of LazyTown Extra was shot, and the 2010 single 'Go Step Go' features her voice much deeper than other songs from the show. She was finally replaced by a new actress, Chloe Lang, for seasons 3 and 4.
• After Punky Brewster moved from NBC, Soleil Moon Frye started developing early and went through a massive growth spurt. At first, producers dealt with the situation by binding her breasts while still playing the character off as, physically, a prepubescent child. When the premise became too unbelievable, Punky was finally allowed to have her puberty. The first episode that admitted Punky was growing up begins with Punky marching in on her caretaker at breakfast and announcing proudly "Henry, guess what? I'm getting boobs." Made even more obvious by the fact that Soleil Moon Frye would eventually have to have breast reduction surgery at 16 because of gigantomastia.
• Appears for reasons unknown on Rome with Vorena the Younger and little Lucius. Vorena is at least eight years old when she first appears in the second episode, and Lucius is an infant. When the series ends roughly 20 years later Vorena is still played by the same actress and Lucius seems to be no older than five or six. Especially odd considering the fact that Octavian ages from twelve in the pilot to being in his thirties when the show ends, and Caesarion (who isn't even born until Lucius is around four years old) shows up being somewhere around ten years old in the last episodes.
  • Since they editors stated that they 'compressed the timeline of events' somewhat (i.e. didn't overly worry about historical accuracy), Octavian may be younger at the end of the series than he was when he actually came into power.
• In Sesame Street, both Gabi (Maria and Luis' daughter) and Miles (Gordon and Susan's adopted son) grew up in real time, while the Muppets depicted as kids, like Elmo and Big Bird, stayed the same. For example, in an anniversary episode, Elmo asks Grover about the thing what happened when he wasn't there. In the scene of Maria and Luis' wedding, Elmo talks like he wasn't there, but he's visible holding the ring at the wedding. Plus, it's ironic that Gabi and Miles graduated from high school in Episode 4112 while their respective births on the show occurred four years apart.
• Archie Comics enforced this on Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Not on the characters, but on the show title itself, not allowing the show's producers to change the name to simply "Sabrina", even though Sabrina herself wasn't a teenager for the last couple of seasons, and although they did keep it as the official title, a lot of promotional material started calling it Sabrina Goes to College. (Sabrina's actress, Melissa Joan Hart, was 27 when the show ended). And boy did it start to show. She went from looking young enough to be late teens, early twenties, to the first episode of the penultimate season, where she and her college friends film a video with a genuine Vampire, the light strikes her, and wow, she suddenly looks much older.
• Parodied in an episode of You Can't Do That on Television where the kids found out the network was secretly feeding them shrinking hormones to keep them from looking older.
• Grey's Anatomy had this with adults. The first season only had nine episodes, so the main characters still being interns in season 2 was justified. There is, however, no excuse for them to be interns for the entirety of season 3. Especially bad because their first year is established as starting on July 1st, and the second season ended with a Prom (mid-April at best, early June at worst). Seasons 4 and 5 cover their second year of residency, and from season 6 on each season covers about a year, aside from a Time Skip in season 11. Averted with the children on the show, Bailey's son Tuck has progressed from an infant to a pre-teen over the years.
• Disney tried to enforce this on The Mickey Mouse Club via Suppressed Mammaries; the female Mouseketeers resorted to subversion (slicing the hated "foundation garments" with razor blades) when their protests proved unavailing.
• This was one of the reasons cited for the cancellation of The Adventures of Shirley Holmes, according to the producers.
• The entire cast of That '70s Show. Eric turned 17 in the second episode (despite telling Red that he was 17 in the pilot). He then turns 18 in the third episode of season six.
• In Round the Twist, all the kid characters were recast for the second series (made three years after the first) and then recast again for the third (made eight years after the second) so that the twins and their classmates could remain 14-year-olds (later de-aged to 13) and Bronson could stay an 8-year-old.
• During the later seasons of Dennis the Menace, Jay North (who played Dennis) was getting a little too old to be running around in overalls and a cheesy cowlick. Jeannie Russell (who played Margaret) was 12 years old in the final season, yet in her appearances in those last episodes, Margaret was still pushing her doll carriage up to the Wilson home and wanting to play "house" with Dennis.
• The reason that Jon Provost left Lassie in 1964 was because, at age 14, he (rightly) believed he was too old to still play the "little boy with his dog". Mind you, the producers' intention was for him to play that exact character until he was 17!
• Victorious is a modern example of this. The characters didn't age (or aged little) through the show's 4 seasons. Trina was a senior in season 1 and still a senior in season 4! It's even more interesting the fact that iCarly shares the same universe of Victorious, but kids age (almost) in real-time in that show.
• The writers behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer deliberately aborted an arc in order to prevent this trope from affecting any of the show's actors. The first season introduced the Anointed One, a vampire with the appearance of a prepubescent boy. He was initially planned to be the Big Bad of the second season, but his actor ran the risk of entering puberty within even a single year, and Buffyverse vampires are not supposed to age. Hence, the Anointed One was casually written out and replaced by Spike and Drusilla.
• On a Polish sitcom "Świat według Kiepskich", which has been on air for almost a generation, the daughter of the leading couple remains a teenager. She's been portrayed by an actress who is currently 29 and has been on the show from the age of 14 and has always appeared to be about 16-18 years old. She dresses, acts and speaks like a teenager, lives with her parents and is often told not to "snap back at daddy".
• On Southland, Ben is a trainee Officer for the first 3 seasons, even though training is supposed to take just a year. Arguably justified, as Southland had very short seasons and the first 3 seasons total to just 23 episodes.
• The plot of Downton Abbey spans over 13 years, but the characters don't seem to age nearly that much (it was only five years in Real Life). Daisy, the youngest main character, seems like a teenager throughout the series despite the actress being 25-30.
• The Flodder franchise plays this trope straight with the two youngest members of the family, Toet and Henkie. The producers simply recast the roles every time the current two child actors got too old for the part, and aside from the occasional A Day in the Limelight episodes mostly kept them as background characters.
• The Worst Witch initially was going to have the full four seasons of the 1998 series match the four years of study at Cackle's. But by Season 3 the child actresses were already starting to age notably. By Season 4, they realised Mildred looked too old to believably still be at school, and retooled it to be about Mildred attending college.
• Two and a Half Men had a downplayed example with Jake. Initially, he was aging in real time, but in later seasons, his aging was slowed down. For example, in seasons 6 and 7, Jake is around sixteen and just learning to drive when Angus T. Jones was eighteen at the time (he originally started out the same age as his character and it is explicitly stated in those seasons that Alan and Jake had been living with Charlie for seven years).
• Bobby in Mad Men went through a variation of this due to multiple recastings, because there was a Time Skip as well as a real-time gap between seasons and each time he was recast they went for someone the same age he had been in the latest episode (if not a bit younger and cuter) he ends up giving the impression of being no younger than four in 1960 and not yet a teenager in 1970.
• Leave It to Beaver averted this in an interesting way: the series ended, by intent and planning, at the end of Beaver’s last year of elementary school, the last year his actor could be certain to be prepubescent and the last year the character could be considered entirely a child.

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