Dysfunction gives 'family TV' a different meaning
James
Knight Ridder
Looking for an uplifting TV show about families? Well, let's see what's on ABC.
Oops, on ``Hope & Faith,'' two grown-up sisters are throwing food and insulting
each other's breasts. And on ``Married to the Kellys,'' they're taunting their
new son-in-law with anti-Semitic jibes.
Let's click over to The WB. Hmmm, no dice on ``All About the Andersons'':
Anthony's father has made him move into the garage and use a pay phone. Maybe
``Run of the House''? Nope, the adult kids supervising their 15-year-old sister
just forgot her at a bar.
Give me that remote. Yikes -- on NBC's ``Happy Family,'' one of the kids just
got kicked out of the house for flunking out of college, so he went next door
to have sex with his parents' best friend. Fox? The granddad on ``Arrested
Development'' just got thrown in the slam, and two of his grandchildren are
French-kissing each other.
Say good night, John-Boy.
It's been a long time since television's idea of a family scandal was Harriet
catching Ozzie with his finger in the cake frosting. But the new TV season
that's been rolling out over the past two weeks has pushed family disharmony to
new highs -- or perhaps lows.
Of the 36 programs scheduled to debut on broadcast networks between September
and November, only one, the CBS drama ``Joan of Arcadia,'' is set in a
reasonably amiable family environment where both parents are present. (You
still can't exactly call it ``normal,'' since the teenage daughter is apt to
have visions of God in the school lunch line.)
The dozen or so other new families in the TV neighborhood range from discordant
to dysfunctional, and they live in any configuration you can imagine except the
traditional two-parents-and-a-couple-of-kids:
--In ABC's ``Two and a Half Men,'' a neurotic, divorced man moves into his
club-hopping brother's bachelor pad, bringing along his 10-year-old son. The
only thing the brothers have in common is fear and loathing of their uberbitch
mother.
--UPN's ``All of Us'' is about the relationship, which varies from testy to
vicious, between a TV reporter's ex-wife and his new girlfriend, with his
6-year-old son caught in the middle.
--The WB's ``One Tree Hill'' has jealous half-brothers -- one poor, one rich --
fighting for playing time on the same basketball team and choogling time with
the same girl.
As one character on The WB's ``Like Family'' says of its contentious
multifamily household, ``That place is a 500-pound Indian away from being ``One
Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.''''
We're a long way from June Cleaver country here, and getting farther away all
the time.
``I think that the ideal nuclear family depicted in 1960s sitcoms perhaps never
existed to the degree that it did in the mythology of television,'' observes
Scott Sublett, who teaches screenwriting at San Jose State University in
California. ``But maybe the pendulum has swung farther in the direction of
dysfunction than is true in reality.''
Statistics bear that out. Domestic bedlam is now the TV rule rather than the
exception. A 2002 study by the Parents Television Council found that fewer than
half the children on prime-time television lived with their two biological
parents.
But sociologists and psychologists say that's not much more accurate than ``the
old mom, dad and 2.5 kids model,'' as University of Miami professor of
counseling psychology Blaine Fowers puts it.
``The research shows that somewhere around a third of American children will
live in a household that doesn't include both biological parents,'' he notes.
``So there are a lot of nontraditional families ... But not as much as what
television is indicating. It's sort of an overreaction to the past.''
To put it another way, says John Rash, a marketing executive with the Campbell
Mithun agency who teaches communications and popular culture at the University
of Minnesota, most Americans, ``if they don't live as Ozzie and Harriet, don't
live as the Osbournes, either. The truth is somewhere in between.''
It's difficult to pin down any single reason for the meltdown of the TV nuclear
family. In part, it's television's familiar pattern of imitation: If one show
is a success, a hundred others stampede down the same path. In part, it's
because it's easier to write insulting wisecracks than thoughtful dialogue.
``The extremes are always easier to explore,'' Rash observes. ``The intricacies
of real life and everyday people are often more challenging.''
And because so many shows about families are sitcoms, the nature of comedy
comes into play. ``The reality of comedy is that we love to laugh at someone
else's pain,'' says Anthony Anderson, the star and creator of ``All About the
Andersons.''
Anderson makes another point: that often, TV producers are just following the
old rule of ``write what you know'' when they center shows around cracked
families. He calls ``All About the Andersons'' ``92 percent true.''
His own father, just like the one in his sitcom, imposed harsh measures to
discourage his pursuit of an acting career, starting with a pay telephone in
the living room and a coin-operated washer and dryer in the garage. ``Then,
once he realized that wasn't going to break me, he started putting padlocks on
the refrigerator,'' Anderson says.
Likewise, Betsy Thomas, who created ``Run of the House,'' really was brought up
in large part by older brothers and sisters after health problems forced her
parents to move away from their Michigan home during the winters. ``It was like
being raised by wolves, kind of, but really fun ones,'' she recalls, adding
that writing her show is ``like therapy, but I get paid instead of paying
somebody.''
Other shows -- like the darkly funny ``Arrested Development,'' about a family
of wealthy parasites caught up in an Enron-style scandal -- are clearly satires
with no pretense of realism. ``Arrested Development'' producer Ron Howard, for
years the embodiment of the feel-good family sitcom as the star of ``Happy
Days,'' is obviously teasing when he says he's ``trying to dispel the myth of
the functional family.''
Sometimes, though, that's not a joke. ``There are times when a network is
pushing an agenda,'' says Melissa Caldwell, research director of the Parents
Television Council, citing the famous (or infamous) out-of-wedlock pregnancy on
``Murphy Brown'' a decade ago that ultimately embroiled the White House itself
in a debate over the virtues and deficiencies of single motherhood.
Guilty as charged, proudly reply the producers of ``It's All Relative,'' which
includes a family of two gay men and their adopted daughter.
``I think (the show) is pretty significant in terms of redefining what exactly
a family is in terms of going away from bloodlines to how alternative families
are stronger, if not the same, as the regular traditional families,'' says Neil
Meron, one of the producers. ``I think this show could -- without sounding
pretentious -- it could potentially help that redefinition.''
Unsurprisingly, there are sharp divisions of opinion over whether the current
state of family affairs on TV is good or bad. Margaret Crosbie-Burnett,
chairman of the educational and psychological studies department at the
University of Miami, is delighted to see TV families that don't look like the
Cleavers and the Nelsons.
``It's maybe too strong to say those shows were destructive, but the
meta-message was, `This is a good family. If you look different from this
family, you're not so good ... You're not normal,''' Crosbie-Burnett argues.
``If you were a kid living with a single mom, I think the message was pretty
clear.''
Others insist that TV is contributing to the further erosion of the American
family. ``Television has a way of normalizing things,'' says the Parents
Television Council's Caldwell. ``It sort of leaves a stamp of approval on
activities and behaviors ... It would be better for television to try to
represent healthy, happy, functional families as a goal to strive for, rather
than tearing families down or ripping them apart.''
UM's Fowers focuses more on the bellicose, antagonistic relationships that mark
so many TV shows about families. They depress him so much that he has stopped
watching most of them.
``TV shows are like a mirror we look in, a reflection of the society we live
in,'' he muses. ``The question is, do we like what we see in the mirror?''
WHEN TO WATCH
--''All About the Andersons,'' 9:30 p.m. Fridays, WB
--''All of Us,'' 8:30 p.m. Tuesdays, UPN
--''Arrested Development,'' 9:30 p.m. Sundays, Fox
--''Happy Family,'' 8:30 p.m Tuesdays, NBC
--''Hope and Faith,'' 9 p.m. Fridays, ABC
--''It's All Relative,'' 8:30 p.m. Wednesdays, ABC
--''Joan of Arcadia,'' 8 p.m. Fridays, CBS
--''Like Family,'' 8:30 p.m. Fridays, WB
--''Married to the Kellys,'' 8:30 p.m. Fridays, ABC
--''One Tree Hill,'' 9 p.m. Tuesdays, WB
--''Run of the House,'' 9:30 p.m. Thursdays, WB
--''Two and a Half Men,'' 9:30 p.m. Mondays, CBS
David Johnston
>
>Others insist that TV is contributing to the further erosion of the American
>family. ``Television has a way of normalizing things,'' says the Parents
>Television Council's Caldwell. ``It sort of leaves a stamp of approval on
>activities and behaviors ... It would be better for television to try to
>represent healthy, happy, functional families as a goal to strive for, rather
>than tearing families down or ripping them apart.''
How are happy healthy functional families funny or dramatic?
David
It reminds me of a quote from "Titus" about how dysfunctional families
are the majority now and so they're the normal ones. I guess
television is reflecting that, and if someone did a normal family
sitcom without any sort of a twist no one would watch.
Ken
"David Johnston" <rgo...@telusplanet.net> wrote in message
news:3f7c7868...@news.telusplanet.net...
Usually by dealing with external crises (e.g., children not doing well in
school, bullies, encounter "weird" kid, parents dealing with neighbor,
harassment at work, bribe offer, blackmail; and the ever popular one or more
members of the family is a cop, doc or lawyer).
-- Ken from Chicago