I’m all for realism in television, which is why I think HBO’s The Wire was one of the greatest programs ever produced for the little screen. But, as a child of the 1970’s, I have a soft spot for a good situation comedy. I know that television started out showing sitcoms with very idealized families. The parents loved each other and never fought over anything that might destroy domestic tranquility and end in divorce. None of the kids were depressed and sullen and hostile and secretly having sex and doing drugs. That stuff isn’t funny. But it began to creep in over time anyway. Even Andy Griffith was a single dad. Most of the changes represented an increase in realism. Single moms raising teenage daughters who had teenage problems. Widowed fathers with eight children. Black families in various states of disrepair. Eventually there were gay men on television, and then lesbians. Most of these shows simply added to the idea of what makes up a family. The only show I ever watched that I thought was hostile to family values was, ironically, produced by FOX. It was called Married…With Children. It seemed to have the singular goal of tearing down every taboo about what could be done on television, but without the goal of greater realism. The show could be hilarious, but it presented marriage as unending misery and fatherhood as a thankless burden. In comparison, Murphy Brown’s family life was bliss.
As sitcoms explored more non-traditional family situations it prepared people to accept them as normal. Shows like Will & Grace made gay people seem non-threatening and promoted gay rights.
But the idealized families of the 1950’s and 1960’s were never as normal as people wanted to believe. There’s nothing wrong with having parents who never fight and children who are never miserable. It’s just not very common in practice.
In a previous life as amarriage counselor, I would come across couples who suffered from what I called the Donna Reed syndrome. The man would expect his wife to be the type of oman Donna Reed was, with the addition of sex on demand, of course, and the wife would expect it of herself, usually resulting in severe self-image issues.
My “cure” frequently was to have them watch Roseanne. Personally, I couldn’t stand Roseanne Barr, but the family dynamics were interesting. There would be arguements all over the place but there would never be a question about the family members loving each other.
I would always make the point that that show was the epitome of what being a family and having family values really meant.
If we never argue then only one of us is doing the thinking. If I raise a human being that never pushes back, never becomes their own person, then I have a much more severe problem. I think we should change the name of marriage to, wait for it, ordeal. That describes the true nature of that union much better and besides, who would ever object to a same-sex ordeal. Comedy is really the art of getting us to laugh at ourselves. One way to do that is to say things we either had not enough guts to say or too polite to say in mixed company. Married…With Children was just that, only that, distilled down into a constant stream. It made me laugh. Why? Because so much of it rang true, a bit of realism if you will.
1950’s Cosmo Topper had no traditional, idealized family. He was a dweebish bank VP married to a true screwball. No kids, instead they had two adult married ghosts, and a St. Bernard dog ghost with a fondness for martinis.
But only Cosmo could see them, and spent the shows trying to explain away the trouble they caused by way of crazy excuses.
There was also this bit of realism:
So, plenty of drugs, two hotties that were surely screwing around offscreen, and the man of the house perpetually bamboozling his clueless wife.
No doubt if there had been kids they would have been out in the yard playing tavern with the dog.
Better:
More seriously Mr. Boo, I suspect few would argue with your premise. But additionally, those normal-family shows from the ’50’s were uniformly terrible comedies.
As a kid I hated Donna Reed/Beaver/Dad Knows Best and the single parent versions Bachelor Father/My Little Margie too, but loved the Abbot & Costello and Three Stooges re-runs.
I was only in it for the jokes, and the less the shows looked like real life the funnier they were.
One last not-so-normal ’50s family before i go … few sitcoms could rival the brilliance of George Burns & Gracie Allen.
Gracie was another screwball wife, but unlike Lucy, Henrietta, and I-Married-Joan, in the end Gracie was always way ahead of everyone else.
But the show’s masterstroke would come when George would tire of the craziness and go upstairs, turn on his teevee, tune in the show, and provide a running commentary on the action.
George knew how to deliver a joke like no-one else. In his ’90s, in an interview, he revealed that he still smokes a cigar and drinks a martini every day.
The interviewer acted shocked, and asked him what his doctor thought about that.
George smiled and said “He’s dead”.
Say Goodnight Gracie.
Mommy, there’s a man over there talking to himself.
Hush darlin’, it’s ok to talk to spirits no-one can see, depending of course, upon what you say, and also your eyebrows.
I suspect that many more folks could relate to Married..with children than those earlier American fantasies.
The Addams Family.
Not your typical idealized family, but were they ever considerate of one another.
Interfering outsiders, no so much.
Gomez and Morticia Addams had the best marriage I’ve seen on TV. Not only were they considerate to each other, they loved each other and they were hot for each other.
If TV has added to the idea of what can make a family, I’ve got a question:
Are there any TV sitcoms that involve a couple (married or otherwise) from two different races or cultures? I don’t watch much TV and the only one I can think of is the friends of George and Louise Jefferson: The Willis family .
There are a growing number of couples and families like this and they are not relating to a lot of the new TV families either.
Happy Endings (which is hilarious by the way) has an interracial married couple. No kids though.
The Jeffersons was excellent television. That may be the first really successful show to have a mixed-race couple.
My favorite sitcom as a young kid was Bewitched. It was from before my time so it was all reruns for me but it was just so campy. I loved it. Later I figured out why.
But you asked about “mixed marriages.” At the time (1960’s and early 70’s,) you couldn’t get away with mixed-race anything on TV. The sponsors would never allow it.
But Bewitched was a mixed marriage that they could get away with. The basis of the storyline was that Samantha’s family did not approve of her falling in love with and marrying a mortal. They knew what they were doing by mixing cultures the way they did, even though many of their viewers didn’t understand it yet.
“That may be the first really successful show to have a mixed-race couple.”
The thing is, it is almost the ONLY show to have an interracial couple. I didn’t know about Happy Endings until just today.
Star Trek was supposed to be expanding social boundaries and Nichelle Nichols (Uhura) especially for the time, had a role that did not follow the conventional stereotypes.
Six Feet Under had an interracial gay couple.
Since I wrote that I have been thinking the same thing. I can’t think of another black-white mixed race couple on a sitcom – ever.
Dramas and movies, a little bit. Six Feet Under even had a gay black-white mixed race couple. But that was on HBO, not ad-sponsored TV. Could advertisers still be averse to this? That would be the only reason we don’t have it.
Wow… But then I’m 42 and without children so I hardly ever watch sitcoms anymore. So what do I know? I guess I just assumed it would be no big deal nowadays.
Any younger people here want to prove us wrong?
Latinos are another culture, another ethnicity. They are pretty much thought of as another race, though they can be any mixture of races.
I’d say I Love Lucy qualifies.
yep. And that ain’t minor.
On every level it’s the best piece of drama (tv, stage, movie) that I’ve ever seen. And without sacrificing any of its core dramatic integrity it’s also the most damning indictment of everything that’s wrong with America
I agree, the Wire was the best show on television if only because it introduced me to my current celebrity obsession…Idris Elba. Aside from that, I honestly can’t say that I ever watched The Wire, but like you everyone I know who has watched it, loved it and still sings its praises.
Boo, you call it ironic that Fox produced a show that was hostile to family values. But long before Fox “News” was started, the Fox network made its market share with a steady diet of schlock and titillation. Murdoch’s entire media empire is schizo; his British tabloids have moral tut-tutting after the tits on page 3.
Less idealized, of course, were The Honeymooners, who fought constantly. The constant physical threats from Ralph grate contemporary sensibilities, of course, even if we know he is “all bark”, but probably also qualify to some degree as realism.
Late to the party, but even Dick van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore had spats.