SITCOMS - 1970S
Sitcoms, like pop songs, seep into memory through reruns, filtering home while we think were paying attention to something else. Reruns, which collapse time into the eternal present, are how we best appreciate television; a show's early episodes can be experienced as classics became we don't yet really know and love the characters-early episodes gain density over the years. Watching for the third time an encore episode of Wonder Years, with its nostalgic emphasis on old TV and old Herman's Hermits and James Taylor songs, is the Ur-sitcom experience.
The average American watches more than twenty-eight hours of television a week, and according to a 1989 study, even the Luddite 8 percent who insist they never watch average ten hours a week; TV, as Camille Paglia notes, is "a hearth fire in the modern home .... It is simply on all the time -- seeping in. So while velvet clown paintings and steamy drugstore novels trip a few cortical synapses and vanish forever, endlessly repeated songs like "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)" and the entire "Sanford and Son" oeuvre remain fresh. Seep, I should note, is the process by which we discover that we're mired in complex family relations, that were in love, or that we're getting flabby and short of breath. Seep is how we learn jugular truths.
It's important to make a distinction here that most critics omit as they blitzkrieg across popular culture, using "Three's Company" as the propaganda equivalent of the Reichstag Fire. There are actually two basic sitcom varieties: high concept comedies like "Three's Company" and "Welcome Back, Kotter," which feature farcical charmers, absurd mishaps, and double entendres; and character-driven comedies, like Seinfeld, which seek to illuminate emotional truths. It's hard to defend Three's Company too strenuously, because it is pure formula (four lame misunderstandings, eight pratfalls, twelve gay jokes, thirty-four boob and boinking gags).
On the other hand, the classic comedies-The Honeymooners, The Dick Van Dyke Show, All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, Cheers, Roseanne, The Simpsons-admit that life is too much for us. These show face death and despair combat them with man's best existential weapon -sharp wit-and suggest that in a cruel and possibly meaningless world, a soft bower awaits.
'For me, now even hearing The Mary Tyler Moore Show theme song on Nick at Nite is fiercely exalting. It's partly because the shows are weekly time capsules (remember Betty Ford's appearance?) and because they conjure up those family Saturday nights, watching MTM when I was fleshly bathed, in my flannel pj's, and angling not to be sent to bed. And because I had a monster crush on Mary. But it's mostly because MTM was so well written, well-acted, and funny that it subconsciously schooled me through seep. I knew those people better than I knew' anyone outside my family, and I understood them better than I understood most people in my family. So I believed that my Mends, too, would get married and give birth in my apartment, that coffee sobers a drank, that bald people are especially witty, and that women look sexy in flared slacks. Sadly, this information turned out to be false. But MTM also taught me, by implication, that loneliness, separation, divorce, and death can be borne and that life is a heard journey eased by love. If these sound like fairy-tale truths, they should: great character-driven sitcoms have become our fairy tales, while those high concept comedies are our fables.
Just as a child insists on hearing fairy tales read the same way every night, so we delight in reruns. Like fairy-tale formulas and stock characters, the three wishes, the wicked stepmother, character driven sitcom formulas and stock charmers are deeply satisfying. And fairy ales, like great sitcoms, show us our place in life, in the family we'll grow into: They provide the modern child with images of heroes who have to go out into the world all by themselves and who, although originally ignorant of the ultimate things, find secure places in the world by following the right way with deep inner confidence."
That perfectly describes Mary Richards, who set out in her car toward Minneapolis in 1979 alone and uncertain and ended seven years later clustered in a warm rugby scrum with her TV family. Murray, Ted, Sue Ann Georgette, Mr. Grant. In the final episode Mary made explicit the message encoded in all great sitcoms: "I thought about something last night. What is a family? And I think I know. A family is people who make you feel less alone and really loved. Thank you for being my family."
All in the Family introduced special issues and bedroom topics, and with The Simpsons, Married... with Children, and Shaky Ground, Fox established a new pop psychic paradigm - the dysfunctional family.
Through all these thematic changes, the basic sitcom structure has remained remarkably constant. Its narrative arc is usually divided into two "acts" comprising three or four scenes each. Classic sitcom structure "turns" the story every seven pages and has three jokes per page, or a joke at least every twenty-eight seconds. Characters can evolve over the years (Edith Bunker learns to stand up for herself; The Bob Newhart Show's Howard Borden becomes more than just an absent minded dunderhead-he becomes a nuanced absentminded dunderhead.
Sitcoms have developed their own emotional shorthand: For instance, that we never see Buddy's wife, Pickles, on The Dick Van Dyke Show; Phyllis's husband, Lars, on The Mary Tyler Moore Show; or Norm's Wife, Vera, on Cheers speaks volumes about those marriages. And most sitcoms ring changes on about ten plots.
The characters who inhabit these story lines-the ensemble of lovable eccentrics-are as typical as Punch and Judy or cornmedia dell'arte figures. Among many other types there's the blond bimbo (Chrissy Snow, Elly May Clampitt, Kelly Bundy); the crusty-but-lovable boss (Lou Grant, Mr. Mooney, Lottie De. Palms) the kooky-but cuddly foreigner/alien (Larks, ALl:, Mork); and the all-powerful servant (Benson, Mr. French, Ann B. Davis as Alice).
What we treasure about a show is not jokes and plot points but charmers and relationships_people we'd like to be like, friendships we'd like to be in. I was always skeptical about Bewitched because when Dick Sargent replaced Dick York as Darrin, the characters pretended nothing had happened, while I felt as one might toward a new stepfather. (Only years later did I realize Samantha was much too smart and creative for either dimwit Darrin.)
Do we so love the very idea of the sitcom family that well watch terrible shows because we know the characters right off the bat, because were seen them a dozen times before on other shows? "There are a lot of cynical people [in Hollywood] manufacturing just the right dose of warmth," says Conan OBrien. "Watching it starts to make you feel like a lab ape. The networks want a mother and father who arc good-looking and in their late thirties to appeal to baby boomers. They have some money because people like seeing nice possessions but not too much money because then people can identify. Their cute teenage daughter is just starting to date, which, appeals to teenage girls and guys. There's a bratty kid like Ban, who can get away with murder. And they have a big fluffy dog."
In the last decade alone that recipe reasonably describes Who's the Boss, Growing Pains, Diff 'rent Strokes, Gimme a Break and Family Ties. Webster, and The Cosby Show. It's fair to wonder who's running whose maze to get a food pellet. Many such sitcoms end episodes with "the warm moment"-"the hug." Everyone embraces and we learn a lesson: Prejudice is bad; sharing is good; slow and steady wins e race. Thus, in the Big Lie plot, the wiseacre invariable learns the biblical proverb that a stone will come back upon him who starts it rolling. This, like most such epiphanies, illuminates one of the core sitcom truths: Don't rock the boat. The other core sitcom truth is Just Be Yourself, which would seem to contradict Don't Rock the Boat, except that you should be yourself only insofar as it doesn't rock the boat.
Just Be Yourself is also something of a sly disclaimer, because the networks are skittishly aware that millions tune in to learn who they are and how they should behave. "A lot of latchkey kids are watching alone," says Gary David Goldberg. "and, frighteningly, you are many people's closest friend. So you avoid certain ambiguities. I will not make a casual drug joke. I will not show teenagers drinking. I will show kids doing the chores and Dad cooking dinner without anyone remarking on it. Or when you start a scene, someone's reading. Or when someone goes out, you have someone say, put your seat belt on."'
"The sitcom has taken the place of church, of religion, says Susan Borowitz. "bean episode is just a romp or a farce, the audience isn't as satisfied. Sitcoms work better if they function as fairy tales or parables." (In his novel Generation X, Douglas Coupland defines tele-parablizing as "morals used in everyday life that derive from TV sitcom plots: That's just like the episode where Jan lost her glasses!") In many families, watching sitcoms together is an almost sacred obligation.
But sermons-the deus ex telemachina descent of poetic justice- need to be taken with a grain of sale, a point made deftly on a Simpsons episode. In "Blood Feud," Bait donates lifesaving blood to Homer's boss, Mr. Bums, who presents the family with an ugly stone head.
MARGE: this story is, A good deed is its own reward.
BART. reward; the head is cool.
MARGE. guess the moral is, No good deed goes unrewarded
HOMER: if l hadn't written that nasty letter we wouldn't have gotten anything.
MARGE: guess the moral is, The squeaky wheel get the grease.
LISA: there is no moral to this story.
HOMER: a bunch of stuff that happened
Fables-whether via Aesop or CBS--are hackwork, no matter how sitcom producers gussy them up with highbrow claims. "There's a lot of underlying philosophy to the characters on Gilligan's Island. Its creator, Sherwood Schwartz, has said. "They're really a metaphor for the nations of the world, and their purpose was to show how nation have to get along together (I guess Mr. Howell, overdressed and fussy, would be France; Gilligan, underfed and disaster-prone, would be Bangladesh..)..Compare Gilligan's Island with the famous "Chuckles Bites the Dust" episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. While leading a parade, WJM's kiddie-show host Chuckles the Clown is killed by a rogue elephant that tries to shell him out of his Peter Peanut costume.
First Murray, then Lou, then Sue Ann, relieve their astonished grief with wisecracks.
LOU: This could have happened to any of us, Ted.
MURRAY. Somewhere out there, there's an elephant with your name on it.
Mary is shocked and priggish: At the funeral, she says, "A man has died. We came here to show respect-not to laugh." any conventional sitcom would stop with that lesson. But when Reverend Bums gives his eulogy and mentions Billy Banana, Mary has to stifle a snicker. When he reminds the congregation how Chuckles's
character "Mr. Fee Fi-Fo would always pick himself up, dust himself off, and say: 'I hurt my foo-foo,"' she giggles. Everyone glares, and she pretends she's coughing. Then Reverend Bums mentions Chuckles's ditty, "A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pant's," and Mary can't restrain a loud cackle. The reverend Burnsl asks her to stand and "laugh out loud. Don't you see, nothing could have made Chuckles happier? He lived to make people laugh. Tears were offensive to him, deeply offensive. He hated to see people cry. So go ahead, my dear-laugh for Chuckles." Mary bursts out crying.
First of all, "Chuckles" was hilarious. When Ted says, "If it were my funeral, this place would be packed," we laugh. Cut to Murray, and we chuckle anticipating. "That's right, Ted," he says, "it's just of matter of giving the public what they want." .4.nother laugh. This familiar by play between antagonists, this three-laugh transaction, is like the chorus of a great popular song to which we can all sing along.
"Chuckles" also went against type. By this, her sixth season, we'd spent more than sixty hours with Mary and had come to understand her in a way possible only on a long running sitcom and we knew she'd be mortified to laugh at a funeral. "Chuckles" also risked making Mary unlikable when she primly reproved her friends. And the episode flaunts-indeed, comments on- MTM's empathy encouraging verisimilitude: Its characters laugh when other characters say funny things, as they would in life, instead of saying "What?" or ignoring the line, as they would on Full House.
Furthermore, the lines aren't necessarily written on the page. "One of the definitions of a great sitcom is that you can't repeat the jokes out of context. In a character driven sitcom, explains a writer for the show, "You have to explain, 'Murray is coming into the newsroom and Ted is reading his script and Mary has been feeling sad and she's wearing a red dress with green buttons. "' In great sitcoms, lines are peculiar to the character.
Contrast that with these two-and three-beat gags:
WOMAN. Is there something you don't like about my cooking?
MAN. Yeah-eating it.
And
MAN. You made sponge cake the other night and used a real sponge.
WOMAN: But you ate all of it.
MAN: Yeah-but it was the best thing you ever cooked.
The jokes come from The Jeffersons and Good Times; they could come from anywhere.
Finally, there is no lesson-- only the same implicitly socializing example found in fairy tales (eg., we made up our own minds what it means that Little Red Riding Hood dailies on the way to her grandmother's house, enjoys a sexy interlude with the wolf, gets eaten up, and is rescued by the fatherly hunter). We are permitted to discover, if we care to, that Mary's glossy perfection hides a deep fear of death. But because it's Chuckles who died, not, say, Rhoda (who just got canceled), we aren't threatened.
Sitcom writers are fond of depressing themselves by reciting a catechism that goes something like this:
'"Chuckles'-is-great-it's-the best-we-can-do-but-is-it-great art? 1-think-not." They see themselves being well paid to crank out a commercial product. What they believe or profess to believe is beneath their true talents. They bemoan the straitjacket buckles of their form-the need to keep things fundamentally light; the need to goose the studio audience with easy jokes; the up to twenty laughs per half hour that deflate the gathering joy with pitches for marshmallows and incontinence underpants; the timid fretting of the networks; the actors' interference (according to writers' legend, My Favorite Martian star Ray Walston once vetoed his lines, explaining. "A Martian would never say that"); the Sisyphean demand for new episodes, many of which are written in a week and completely rewritten in three days; and the Tony Danza Syndrome-likability, likability, likability.
"I used to have such grand designs," says Matt Williams. "I thought every half hour could be a one-act play). The truth is, it's twenty two minutes, you're constantly interrupted by commercials, the phone's going to ring, and the dog's going to pee on the carpet. The most you can do is entertain and scrape the surface, be artful. If you want to delve into the human condition, go write a novel, or a film script no one will make."
Willams is judging sitcoms by the old standards of great art. But his capitulation is too profound. Even if, for the sake of argument, we allow traditional standards to flame the debate, it seems clear that great sitcoms both instruct and entertain. If the world were like sitcoms, sitcoms wouldn't be necessary. Our laughter is how we speak back to TV, how we thank it for helping us. Even if we sometimes feel abandoned by our TV families, our laughter reconnects us with the community, with the millions of people who think that Rob Petrie tripping over a hassock or Archie Bunker being kissed on the cheek by Sammy Davis Jr. is funny.
Sitcoms aren't great art because great art is, in some way, more than we can bear-it is awesome or terrible, it daunts and dares, it asks us to be more than we are. Great art is admirable, and it can be loved, but it can never be fully lovable. Good art,, because it is human and frail, is lovable. Great character-driven sitcoms should not be judged by the standards of great art but by the standards of fairy tales. Our lovable modern all fairy tales are good art because they provide life examples of our needs and fears. They ask us not to be more than we are but simply to be ourselves.
The strength of our collective hunger to be ourselves yet feel approved of by others is astonishing and a little alarming. But good art that reaches 30 million people and makes them feel connected may have more to offer us now than great art that reaches three thousand people and makes them feel more or less alone. In our time the standards for art have changed, expanded. The future belongs to Bart Simpson.