COMMENTARY
Dysfunction plays different role in family TV
By Glenn Garvin
Knight Ridder News Service
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.
ABC
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.
Two sisters (Faith Ford and Kelly Ripa) have a food fight on ABC's "Hope & Faith." The new TV season has been pushing family disharmony to new highs — or perhaps lows.
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 slammer, and two of his grandchildren are French kissing each other.
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 during 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 call it "normal," because 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 mother.
- The WB's "One Tree Hill" has jealous half-brothers — one poor, one rich — fighting for playing time on the same basketball team and competing for 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 further 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."
When to watch
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."
The WB
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."
From left, Joseph Lawrence, Sasha Barrese, Kyle Howard, Jake McDorman and Margo Harshman star in WB's "Run of the House."
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.
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?"
