TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/041690/0416250.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.0 KB | 132 lines

                                                                                VIDEO, Page 85

Home Is Where The Venom Is


Domestic life takes a drubbing in TV's anti-family sitcoms

By RICHARD ZOGLIN


    "Ah, home sweet hell." It's Al Bundy of Married . . . With
Children arriving at his doorstep, which in fact does resemble
the gates to Dante's Inferno. Conversation in the Bundy family
is a torrent of verbal abuse. "This is a home, not a
restaurant," insists Al's wife Peg, after he demands his
supper. "I know," he snaps. "If it was a restaurant, we'd have
a clean bathroom."

    The Conner household on Roseanne is hardly an abode of peace
and contentment either. Mom has a constant chip on her shoulder
-- about her job, her housework, her nagging kids. "They're all
mine," she says in a moment of reflection after a Thanksgiving
get-together. "Of course, I'd trade any one of them for a
dishwasher."

    Now comes TV's latest hit family, The Simpsons. Here the
characters are animated but still a grungy, bickering lot.
"Sometimes I think we're the worst family in town," says Dad
gloomily. His solution is to drag his brood to a therapist, who
hooks them up to electrodes as part of behavior-modification
treatment. Result: they start giving one another electric
shocks.

    After nearly four decades of sweet, wholesome TV clans, from
Father Knows Best to The Cosby Show, a new clutch of
anti-family sitcoms is exploring the squalid underbelly of
domestic life. And making a killing. ABC's Roseanne is the No.
1-rated show on TV. The Simpsons, on the Fox network, is a
smash mid-season success; it and Fox's Married . . . With
Children, airing back-to-back on Sunday nights, have jumped
into the Nielsen Top 20, an unprecedented triumph for TV's
fourth network.

    The anti-family shows aren't against the family, exactly,
just scornful of the romantic picture TV has often painted of
it. Was Dad once a pillar of wisdom and understanding? In the
new shows he is either a slob or an oaf. Did Mom used to be the
nurturing guardian of home and hearth? Now if she even knows
how to put a roast in the oven, she could sear it with her
sarcasm. TV kids have always been mischievous, but now they are
bratty and disrespectful as well. Standards of decorum have
gone out the window too: Dad burps out loud at the dinner table;
a kid snaps photos of his mom shaving her underarms.

    Why is America tuning in? One reason may be the refreshing
dose of real-world grit these shows provide. "With Ozzie and
Harriet, everyone felt guilty," says Barbara Cadow, a
psychologist at U.S.C. School of Medicine. "With these new
programs, we see that we're doing all right by comparison."
Alvin Poussaint, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard
Medical School and an adviser to The Cosby Show, suggests that
these shows, with their exaggerated nastiness, are an "outlet
for people who feel, yeah, they really would like to knock the
kid in the head, but they know it's wrong."

    TV family comedies, of course, have always depended on
domestic discord and jokey put-downs for humor. A few of them,
like The Honeymooners and All in the Family, have focused on
grumbling working-class households. But their barbs were rarely
aimed at the institution of the family. Archie Bunker may have
railed at Edith and argued politics with Meathead, but the
domestic bonds remained rock solid. Roseanne's whiny wisecracks,
on the other hand, protest a setup that forces Mom to work
during the day to help win the bread, then come home at night
to cook it. The message, writes Barbara Ehrenreich in the New
Republic, is that "Mom is no longer interested in being a human
sacrifice on the altar of `pro-family values.'"

    Those values are shredded completely in Married . . . With
Children. The matriarch of this clan is a slothful shrew who
never does a lick of housework. Dad is an insensitive lout who
picks his toes and spends his happiest hours on the toilet
seat. The oldest daughter is a floozy who can barely count to
ten. Their repartee is drenched with venom. (Al wants to take
Peg bowling for her birthday. "Come on," he says, "this'll be
the first birthday you begin in an alley.") Gross and funny in
roughly equal measure, Married . . . With Children turns the
TV family into a vicious cartoon.

    The Simpsons, a real cartoon, is actually much closer to
recognizable human life. Family members are not depraved or
offensive, just a little dim. Homer, the father, works at the
local nuclear power plant and gets no respect at home. His wife
Marge, her blue hair piled into an otherworldly beehive, is a
scratchy-voiced simp. The only real live wire is Bart, a bratty
fourth-grader whose vocabulary includes such bons mots as "Eat
my shorts." Created by cartoonist Matt Groening, The Simpsons
has a good deal of savvy wit. One episode, in which Bart is
mistakenly labeled a genius, sharply parodies a class for
gifted children, where a "learning coordinator" leads the grade
schoolers in discussions about free will and paradox. The
Simpsons, however, is strangely off-putting much of the time.
The drawings are grotesque without redeeming style or charm
(characters have big beady eyes,  beaklike noses and spiky
hair), and the animation is crude even by TV's low-grade
standards.

    Still, ratings keep going up, and Simpsons merchandise, from
T-shirts to key chains, is flying off the shelves. Obviously,
these raffish losers have struck a chord. Maybe it is because,
for all their grumbling, this misfit family sticks together in
the end: the camaraderie of the downtrodden. There's something
oddly touching about the sight of five Simpsons lurking in the
bushes, spying on neighbors in their living room. "They
actually enjoy talking to each other!" marvels Marge. Or of
Homer encouraging his son before sending him off to class: "One
day, you may achieve something that we Simpsons have dreamed
about for generations. You may outsmart someone." In the world
of the anti-family show, parents learn to think small.