In watching Father Knows Best and The Donna Reed Show, two family comedies from the fifties, I was struck by how different the family sitcom is today. Now, television networks are able to get away with showing racier material. Moreover, the American audience expects a show to be smart and witty. Shows centered on families have prevailed since the 1950’s, with noted shows such as Full House (a comedy about three men raising three girls from the nineties), Arrested Development (a faux documentary about a dysfunctional, corrupt, hilarious family in Orange County that premiered in 2003 on Fox), and the most recent Modern Family. Modern Family is a half hour comedy filmed in a mock documentary style. The show premiered on ABC in September of 2009 to rave reviews and a consistent average of 9 million viewers per episode.
The half hour comedy focuses on the hilarious antics of three related households living in the suburbs in California. There is the wealthy, sixty-something patriarch of the family, Jay Pritchard, who lives with his new Columbian wife and her eleven-year-old son. Jay’s daughter, Claire, lives with her husband, Phil, and their three children (two girls and a boy). And lastly, Jay’s son, Mitchell, lives with his gay partner and their newly adopted baby from China.
A gay, happy, functional couple is still not common on television today, and would certainly never appear in a show from the 1950’s. In that respect, Modern Family is taking a huge step forward in portraying families in a realistic way. However, in some ways, the show is eerily similar to those fifties sitcoms. Claire, the forty-something mother, does not work. She is often seen at home, cooking, cleaning, or yelling at one of her children. In one episode, the viewers learn that Claire left her business career once she got married and became pregnant. Plenty of mothers work in the twenty-first century, but none of the mothers on this show are portrayed as working mothers.
The relationship between parents between children is very different than in 1950’s sitcoms. The children often speak back to their parents, break the parents rules, and speak much more casually. However, the age-old plotline of parents worrying when their daughter begins to date is prevalent in both Modern Family and Father Knows Best. When Claire’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Haley, gets a boyfriend, Claire and Phil are worried that they might be having sex. Haley’s boyfriend is a skinny, hip, guitar-playing senior who’s in a band. He doesn’t show a lot of respect for Haley’s parents. In Father Knows Best, seventeen-year-old Betty’s father is terrified that she will date a boy who will take away her virginity. Betty’s boyfriend, who she brings home to meet her parents, in incredibly clean cut and polite. He calls Betty’s parents Mr. and Mrs., and he’s very respectful. That episode ended with Betty’s parents following the boy to a church, under the false impression that her daughter is going to run away and get married. On Modern Family, Haley’s parents simply accept the fact that she has a boyfriend. Both shows illustrate how the same plot line can be rendered in several different ways.
On Modern Family the characters are often sarcastic to one another, the kids speak back to their parents, and light swearwords like “damn” and “asshole” are uttered frequently. The characters live in modern homes, wear modern clothes such as jeans and t-shirts, and pop culture references are interwoven throughout the show. In the most recent episode, Claire desperately searches across town for the new i-Pad to give to her husband for his birthday.
In looking at these different shows, it becomes evident that a show often depicts the idealized way of life of that time. In the fifties, the white picket fence and two smiling kids was the idealized dream. That vision is portrayed in the shows of that era. Today, the sitcoms show messy, complicated families that don’t always get along, but they love each other in the end. It should be noted that in all three shows, Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, and Modern Family, the families are firmly upper middle class.
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