May 18, 2010

Sitcom Family Values

T.V. Article by Bill Kunkel

Since its arrival in the years after WWII, TV has often served as the benchmark by which we judge our lives. For example, the earliest sitcoms often focused almost exclusively on a married couple

(Usually abetted by a pair of "whacky" neighbors) – and if they did have a kid or two, they were mostly props around which jokes could be written (as with Babs and Junior in "Life of Riley"). Retro sitcoms like "The Honeymooners", "I Married Joan" and even "I Love Lucy" (Little Rickey didn't turn up until the show's third season) were definitely not about the kids.

Then came the baby boom and sitcoms without rugrats began a slow migration into oblivion. Soon, family-focused sitcoms like "Leave It To Beaver," "Hazel" and "Father Knows Best" took on the task of informing parents everywhere that they were not up to the golden parental standards set by the likes of Hugh Beaumont, Robert Young, Donna Reed and Barbara Billingsley. In these shows, little girls wore dresses and little boys wore jeans and sneakers. The girls stayed clean and the boys got dirty and everything worked out at the 29-minute mark.

With the changing times of the 60s, however, television seemed to lose its rock solid certainty that it was indeed the great arbiter of social mores and child rearing. So, instead of trying to set the example, the medium opted to follow society's lead. As parents of the baby boomers began to split up and remarry, "blended" families became the go-to sitcom staple with the arrival of the 70s. Whether the families formed ludicrous, traveling pop bands ("The Partridge Family") or were simply the merger of a widowed dad, his kids and a widowed mom and her kids (no one ever got divorced in these comedies – you were dead or you were married, period) in slop like "The Brady Bunch" and "Eight is Enough", TV continued to follow the migration of the American families and the values they espoused (maybe they didn't follow them, but they did espouse them).

The goody-goody families, however, had already been dealt a serious blow as far back as the 60s when the monster fad engulfed America and an entirely different kind of family began to turn up on the boob tube. Familial units like "The Munsters" and "The Addams Family" offered loving parents who did what they could to raise their oddball children in what they perceived as "normal" but the risibility created by people in monster costumes sharing the same basic parental values as Ozzie & Harriett was the tent pole joke around which both shows were constructed.

No, the real monster families were yet to come – and they would look just like you and me.

The first major breakthrough was "All in the Family", a groundbreaking sitcom in which, for the first time in TV history, the family patriarch was a shameless bigot who had strong opinions on every race, religion and nationality outside his own. For the first time, the lead character in a sitcom did not have to be likeable, wise and loving.

"Roseanne", the saga of a loud-mouthed mom, a good natured dad and three kids who could have emerged from any house on your street – assuming you lived in a lower middle class neighborhood – was next up in expanding the limits of a family sitcom. Prior to "Roseanne", there were poor families in sitcoms, but they were almost exclusively black (ex: "Good Times"). The Bunkers on "All in the Family" were hardly rich, but they didn't start to panic when the mortgage was due, either.

Suddenly, TV audiences could actually identify – if not feel superior to – the families whose escapades they watched on a weekly basis. But then, something happened. Bill Cosby, who had already made several failed attempts at launching a sitcom, put together a return to the goody-goody family comedy with "The Cosby Show" and it became a ratings juggernaut.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about "The Cosby Show" was that it basically followed all the tropes of the typical white family sitcom. Mom and dad are both professionals (Cos is even a doctor, just like Carl Betz' Dr. Alex Stone in "The Donna Reed Show"), the kids never get in serious trouble and the entire family is so vanilla that the roles could have been played by Caucasians without altering a word of dialogue.

The success of Cosby's show was so astonishing that it created a backlash as TV creators decided to offer an alternative type a show; one that depicted the American family in a less flattering light. "Rosanne" upped its white trash content, animated programs such as "The Simpsons" and "Family Guy" crapped all over every illusion associated with the Red, White and Blue family unit and one show, "Married… with Children" seemed to take genuine delight in flinging its excrement all over the inside of our TV tubes.

As the Yuppie Era dawned, however, and American families soon learned that it took two incomes to keep the wolf from the door, a new kind of family sitcom was born that focused on a different kid of family: the workplace and its co-workers. This format had been around a while and probably first truly bloomed in the form of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." In this show, almost none of the employees at TV station WJM had families, and if they did we rarely saw them. The workplace family sitcom is still with us (ex: "The Office", "30 Rock") but a variant of that formula moved out of the workplace and morphed into series dealing with groups of unrelated individuals who formed their own family groups, such as "Friends", Seinfeld", "Cheers".

But where, you may ask, are today's family sitcoms? In fact, they are in many ways a dying breed as fewer and fewer such programs have debuted in recent seasons. Fortunately, I have at least one such comedy that I recommend without hesitation. The show is "Modern Family" and it's my favorite sitcom of this season. Produced by Christopher ("Taxi") Lloyd and Steven Levitan (rebounding nicely from last season's bomb, "Back to You"), you could call this series a Family Tree Sitcom in that it stars Ed O'Neil (that's right, bunky, the same Al Bundy from "Married… with Children" only he's finally taken his hand out of his pants) as Jay Pritchett, the family patriarch who has married a Columbia hottie (the muy caliente Sofia Vergara) and adopted her genius son (Rico Rodriguez – and no, not the MMA fighter who did a season with Dr. Drew). We then move on to Ed's two children, a gay son (Jay Tyler Fergusen) that lives with his boyfriend, the hilarious Eric Stonestreet, and Jay's daughter (Julie Bowen) who's married to Ty Burrell, who portrays one of the great nerds on TV today.

The comedy drips down, layer upon layer, much like when they stack the champagne glasses at a wedding and let the bubbly run down from layer to layer like a fizzy waterfall. The writing is seamless and no matter how out there the subject matter gets, it's handled with wit and sophistication.

So, if you're one of those parents who grew up watching sitcoms to find out what you're doing wrong with your kids, check out "Modern Family" – a totally functional family comedy.

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