Mediacy Articles – Volume 16, No. 3
Recently, a successful play was fashioned out of the material from the hit television series of the 70's – The Brady Bunch. But why now? Apparently, when Generation Xers get together, they constantly allude to scenes, songs and dialogue from this family drama they watched and loved in their childhood. For them, it serves as a set of shared allusions. For some, it is clearly a seminal influence on their lives. This may be making too much of cornball TV dialogue, parent- child feuding, sibling rivalry and insider's knowledge of trivia, but that is exactly what the bonding experiences generated by media culture are all about.
Today, popular sitcoms, TV dramas and the important feature films of the day have become the arena for acting out the struggles, fears, aspirations and the contradictions in our lives and, above all, those of our families. The mass media are, arguably, next to the role played by the family, the most influential source of information in our lives. For most people, the media help us make sense of the world. That they can provide us with plenty of pleasure and insight as well as misinformation and a steady diet of the banal or the sensational, is the price we pay for allowing the media industries to give us what we crave. But if the family is the prime influence on shaping our lives, it should be no surprise that the media have immersed themselves in exploring this time-honoured institution, now in the 1990's looking a trifle frayed at the edges.
A few snapshots taken from television will set the stage for a brief examination of the television family: In the last presidential election campaign, the rhetoric around family values and the so- called "culture wars" escalated and took a bizarre twist when TV's fictional Murphy Brown, in her role as a feisty feminist journalist, was cited by then Vice-President, Dan Quayle, as subverting family values through bearing a child out of wedlock. At the end of this program, Murphy refuted Quayle by defining families around the principles of trust, love and common human concerns and then proceeded to clinch her argument by ushering into the studio a small crowd of diverse, real-life single parents, all of them beaming with pride. The boundaries between news and fiction were never so blurred and the legitimacy of single parent families never so eloquently defined for a television audience.
Last year, the long-running Cheers ended with a special two hour show summing up story lines, reprising favourite scenes and bringing back actors like Shelley Long, who had already left the show. Like many good sitcoms, Cheers was capable of providing empathy for its cast of alienated loners having the punch line ready if the overconfident but vulnerable superstud, Sam Malone, got too arrogant. The concept of family is suggested by the show's signature song, "Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name". The Boston bar served as a retreat from the real world where the guys and some of the women get regularly pushed around and defeated. Everyone can identify with the need to have a middle ground to settle a grievance, to sort out a crisis and to share a dream. In our mobile society with countless pressures to perform, keep a job and maintain a relationship, Cheers provided us with a compromise: a surrogate family that listened to you and occasionally gave good advice.
Today, social limits have been pushed even farther. The Fox network capitalised on our collective cynicism about social mores and delivered Married with Children, a case of a sitcom that is symptomatic of the backlash to feminism. The show features a working class, dysfunctional family who are trapped by their narrow lives, long standing grievances and by insults that render their experiences into self-parody. Of greater appeal and durability is Roseanne, about the ups and downs of another working class family. Roseanne's abrasive manner provides plenty of dramatic tension as she flings insults at her kids and portly husband. But the positive values inherent in the storyline, along with Roseanne's cleansing grin, prepare us for the soft usually optimistic endings. These scenarios of the stressed out family worrying about the father's sporadic employment, puzzling over homework assignments and the dating practices of teenage daughters, serve as moral tales and advice columns for our time. Is it any wonder that Roseanne, along with the Simpsons, a show distinguished by its black humour and mordant wit, (as Bart reminds us, "proud to be an underachiever") have become popular with young people and adults alike?
While popular culture can be progressive, it is not radical, it follows trends and rarely starts them. After society in the 1960's had been agonizing over civil rights and anti-war protest marches, the networks challenged us with All in the Family, in which Arch Bunker's bigotry was made comically endearing. As usual, the networks wanted to have it both ways. They acknowledged that the audience knew about racism and feminism and attitudes to work and ethnocultural shifts from disturbing news stories, but encouraged viewers to look at Archie's solutions. You could agree or disagree or even feel superior but at least have a good laugh.
Television has always been a site of struggle for the family, giving us what we would like to believe but, measured against lived experience, what seems too slick, too easy or clever. Who can forget Leave It To Beaver, with its mischievous kids in the idealized, middle classless white suburbs of the 1950s? Or more recently, Cosby, the most popular sitcom in television's history in which racism never reared its ugly head. And despite its enormous comic appeal, the Cosby family had, as its sub-text, consumerism and affluence. Also, Cosby went about solving his problems rather deviously in the style of a predecessor – Father Knows Best.
And what about Canada in this discussion? With only a small underfunded television industry, we have not been given much to talk about. We have had to be satisfied with programs such as King of Kensington, Street Legal, North of Sixty, Anne of Green Gables and Avonlea. The key issue here is whether or not our family struggles have the same ideological basis as our American cousins. In the age of NAFTA, when the culture industries have already appeared on the negotiating table, Canadians need to have their point of view recognized and celebrated. Teachers concerned about Canadian content would do well to raise some critical questions.
The same dilemma, that of cultural appropriation, is not true in Quebec, however, where language is the chief line of defence in television according to Florian Sauvageau, a communications professor at Laval University. Although language is the foundation of this defence, Quebec does create its own brand of television programming. Representative of the difference is the teleroman – a television novel characterized as low budget but steeped in fine writing and acting and drawing on the finest writers working in the province. Quebec has created its own stars and supports its own performing artists.
One of the most popular shows was La Famille Plouffe created by Roger Lemelin. Other popular fare include, La Petite Vie (a sitcom), Les Duchesnay (mini-series) and Poule aux Oeuf D'Or (gameshow). Quebecers tend not to watch U.S. based signals like CNN and Arts and Entertainment now available on cable. The efficacy of francophone cable services like MusiquePlus and the newly licensed Arts ∓ Divertissement may produce a negative result, however. Much of the music on MusiquePlus is U.S. originated music performed in English while the new arts channel only provide programming that has been dubbed so as to make it palatable for Quebecers. This so-called cultural incursion may not have been intentional but may, in the long run, have an undesired effect.
Ella Taylor, in her excellent book "Prime Time Families" points out: "Like all storytelling, television speaks to our collective worries and our yearning to improve, redeem, or repair our individual or collective lives. Television comments upon and orders, rather than reflects experience, highlighting public concerns and cultural shifts." As a social and cultural exercise for your class or perhaps even with your own family, you could discuss this quotation in terms of current shows, both American and Canadian, centred on the politics of the family. How do these shows measure up? In family struggles, who wins? Who loses and why? What notions about the changing family are lurking beneath the surface? To what extent have the producers constructed an idealized family or trivialized important social concerns? Here is a fascinating and important media literacy exercise. The answers would provide for a rich cultural studies curriculum. As Uncle Martin in My Favourite Martian put it; "Culture is like spinach. Once you forget it's good for you, you can relax and enjoy it."