As had always been true, marriages also pop up with little yoohoos of honesty in movies that are technically about something else. The darkly violent 1996 comedy by the Coen brothers, Fargo, puts onscreen one of the best movie marriages. The lumberingly pregnant Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) and her husband, Norm (John Carroll Lynch), who paints duck decoys, hoping one will be chosen by the postal department for reproduction on a stamp, are an authentic example of an everyday married couple. Marge is a sheriff, and she gets her man. Meanwhile, her husband stays at home painting, but is always thinking of her, whether he’s giving her frozen car “a jump” on a cold morning, bringing her junk food for lunch, or just snuggling up to her in bed. Marge and Norm ring true. As the gay couple in The Birdcage (1996), Nathan Lane and Robin Williams are the perfect example of two married prima donnas who drive each other crazy, but who’d die for each other should it become necessary—die onstage, perhaps, under a spotlight, wearing spangles, but die for sure. Lane and Williams are very married even though the legal system said they couldn’t be.
During these decades of decline—years that seemed to be transitional but were apparently transitioning to nowhere—television soldiered on as the show-biz world of married folks who had kids, in-laws, neighbors, and money issues. Throughout the 1970s, there were homespun family shows like Happy Days, The Partridge Family, Family Ties, and Little House on the Prairie. There were mystery shows with charming married couples, bringing back the glamorous world of the Nick and Nora Charles (Hart to Hart, McMillan & Wife). There were prime-time soap operas with glamorous settings and all kinds of up-to-date marital issues (Dallas, Falcon Crest, Dynasty). There was the groundbreaking All in the Family, which attacked political issues with comedy, as did its spinoffs The Jeffersons and the innovative Maude. Television paraded marital shows, making them more and more honest in some way: Roseanne (about a lower-middle-class couple), The Cosby Show (an upper-middle-class black couple), Mad About You (yuppies without kids), Married with Children, Growing Pains, and others, moving on toward Everybody Loves Raymond, Evening Shade, Dharma and Greg, Kelly Kelly, and, of course, The Simpsons.
Soon enough, however, even the marriages on TV slowed down; by the year 2000, there was little left. According to Jim and Malcolm in the Middle kept up the sitcom tradition. Brilliantly written and acted hour-long dramas such as The Sopranos and Mad Men appeared, and both shows contained significant portraits of marriage within their respective arenas (the Mafia and 1960s Madison Avenue advertising).12 Yet neither show focused on marriage as its dominant topic, although hour-long drama did bring one of the finest shows ever presented on marriage: Friday Night Lights.
Writing about the high quality of the underrated Friday Night Lights in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Heather Havrilesky perfectly described the show’s magic: “The real message of Friday Night Lights is a message about the joy of little things: the awkward thrills of a first kiss; the strange blessing of an unexpected rainstorm on a lonely walk home from a rough football practice; the startling surge of nostalgia incited by the illumination of football-stadium lights just as the autumn sun is setting; the rush of gratitude, in an otherwise mundane moment, that comes from realizing that this (admittedly flawed) human being that you’re squabbling with intends to have your back for the rest of your life.” In her last example, she’s referring to the core relationship of the series, the marriage of Coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) and his “hot coach’s wife,” Tami (Connie Britton). It’s possible that there’s never been a more honest and natural marriage portrayed in film or television.
When Friday Night Lights opens up on its first episode, the local radio sportscaster blares out, “Sit down and shut up, it’s game time, people!” It’s early on a Monday morning. The coach is watching game tapes and fielding reporters; his wife is reading house-sale ads and dreaming of his-and-hers closets; and their teenage daughter, Julie, is reading Moby-Dick and rebuffing guys who want to date her. They are living in the small town of Dillon, Texas, where winning in football is the definition of success over failure. The Taylors are from the get-go defined as real.
They have money problems. They struggle with their rebellious teenage daughter, cope with the unexpected birth of a new child, survive a live-in visit from her sister, and always endure the challenges of Dillon, Texas, and the pressures of football. They have each other. He’s tight-lipped, a man of few words. She’s communicative, outwardly social, but in her way as self-contained as he is. She’s loving, but so is he. He’s tough, but so is she. He stands up for his football code of behavior, and she, all southern charm and sex appeal, knows how to “stand up,” too. She breezes into the Booster Club meeting to let the old boys know she’s on to their game (“Hi, y’all!”). Both are very good at their highly stressful, always precarious jobs (she’s a high-school guidance counselor and sometime principal). The Taylor marriage is a wedding between two strong and independent individuals who know what is expected of them by the town, by their jobs, and by each other. While he endures endless and useless downtown quarterbacking and the constant threat that he’ll lose his job if the Dillon Panthers don’t win State, she makes two hundred Rice Krispies treats (with M&M’s) and prepares a football party for over one hundred people with two days’ notice. They smooch on the couch, obviously enjoying a full and rewarding sex life, and navigate their too-small house as best they can. (“Room in the bathroom has saved more marriages than Oprah and Dr. Phil combined,” a real-estate agent solemnly informs Tami.) The Taylors are underpaid and overworked, so they do what real couples do—they quarrel a lot. The Taylors cope and they juggle and they stay focused, but they’re not afraid to let each other have it. Their quarrels are the greatest validation of the honesty of their relationship, because what comes out is an endless river of daily woe every married person in the audience recognizes. He forgot to do this, and she forgot to do that. He wonders where his clean socks are, and she already told him. She’s trying to talk to him about something important; he’s not listening. One of the gems of this realistic presentation is a moment when they fight over garbage cans. He drives up just as she’s struggling to get them out to the curb for pickup, and she gets on him about it. In a huff, he insists on taking over and doing it himself, but she’s not having that: it’s her issue of complaint, and she’s going to see it through. They grapple for control over moving the cans until someone connected with football suddenly drives up and needs the coach’s attention. He immediately drops the can he’s commandeered and walks away, leaving her right back where she started. (All audiences know that one of a real marriage’s biggest issues is who’s gonna take out the garbage.)
One of the most honest marriages seen in either movies or television is that of the five-year series Friday Night Lights, in which Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton play a Texas high-school football coach and his wife. (Photo Credit 3.7)
When the quarreling turns serious, as it often does, they are quieter and more careful with each other. They know negotiation is possible, but that compromise will be necessary. Who will come out with the short stick, because neither of them is really going anywhere else? (“You know your father and I love each other very much, don’t you?” Tami asks their daughter during a particularly difficult crisis. In other words, she says, it may look as if this latest problem is hopeless, but they will work it out.) They are committed. “I’m sorry that you’re mad at me,” he says. “I’m not sure that counts as an apology,” she replies. Things stay touchy between them for periods of time, but he’s a man who knows he doesn’t understand women and never will, and he’s also a man who knows he’s got a fabulous wife and he loves her. He’s learned the basic rule of marital survival: “I was wrong,” he tells her. “Of course you were,” she replies. “Friends?” he asks, and they kiss. And that is the answer to why their TV marriage is so honest: they are friends. They will survive, and he knows to apologize because she’s the one who most commonly gives in. (And yet, she’s no doormat. Short
ly after the birth of their new baby, when he’s eager for sex and all she wants is a good night’s sleep, she resists his advances and tells him flat-out, “You know what, honey? I don’t want to.”)
When Tami is invited to become dean of admissions at a Pennsylvania college, she carefully reminds her husband that she’s been a coach’s wife for eighteen years. It’s her turn now. When school representatives come to their house to offer him a new job with all the support he deserves, she lets them in, again with her cheerful “Hi, y’all!,” but as she passes her husband in the hall, she quietly says only two words: “Eighteen years.” (He doesn’t take the offer. When the series ends, they have relocated, starting new jobs with a new life—as always, together.)
The Taylors’ marriage plays out with ups and downs, highs and lows, crises and triumphs, all presented with a kind of quiet honesty and impeccably acted by Chandler and Britton and a superb supporting cast. The marriage in Friday Night Lights has time to develop, played out over five seasons in multiple episodes, which helps its credibility, but its bottom line is in the ability to present life as it is actually lived by ordinary people in a small Texas town. Friday Night Lights is not really a show about football. It’s a show about how marriage works when it actually does work.
In all the movies about marriage I watched, I observed a constant attempt to find the best strategy to tell what was, as I said in the beginning, a story that the audience already knew. Satirize it, romanticize it, criticize it, idolize it. Pretend the couple weren’t really married. Tell the story in flashbacks. Reverse the roles so the woman was smarter, richer, higher ranked than the man. Make it really about divorce, etc., etc., etc. These constant strategies made it necessary to shape a marriage story into something constructed, plotted, designed. When I thought about all the marriages I viewed in movies—and television, too—the Friday Night Lights marriage stood out for its lack of such strategies. Over the five years the show was on the air, there was no “strategy” for their marital story: no clever plot twists, no dream episodes, no other woman or man, no cheap theatrics or misunderstandings. The “big seven” problems that I could clearly identify in marriage movies didn’t swamp the Taylors or interfere with their daily lives. The Taylors were not rich and had to plan their budgets, but they both had jobs, a nice home adequate to their needs, and enough money to feed the football team steaks if it was necessary. The thought of infidelity was ludicrous; they were totally committed to each other. The one time a colleague just up and kissed her, Tami Taylor was deeply shocked, and really embarrassed by his lack of judgment. The couple has problems with their daughter of the sort all parents face, and they coped with Tami’s unexpected pregnancy, but neither children nor in-laws undid them. (A sister overstayed her visit, but that got sorted out.) Neither Coach nor Tami became an alcoholic, and they didn’t try to kill each other. (They just yelled a lot.) The Taylor marriage was a marriage not governed by genre rules or assaulted by plot development.
Friday Night Lights was a one-hour continuous series on nighttime television about the everyday lives of real people. Yet it wasn’t a soap opera. Soap operas (god bless ’em) have drahhh-ma. Friday Night Lights had emotional truth, ladled out a drop at a time so viewers could recognize it, absorb it, and be nourished by it. The marriage of the Taylors was the driving force, but when the series ended, five new potential relationships between a man and a woman sat unresolved, each with the possibility of becoming an honest story about marriage. One couple was married: the somewhat dim-witted and hapless newlyweds with a small baby who were expecting twins. The other four couples were young and unwed, with stories that had not grown out of romantic comedy. The Taylors’ young daughter and her high-school boyfriend had reunited, living together in Chicago, with plans to wed. The town’s James Deanish, tender-hearted sex symbol was staying behind to wait while the girl who truly loves him went out into the world to prove to herself that she’s not the trailer trash she was born to be. The high-school-senior football hero was at fall practice while the girl he loves, already graduated, has gone to work in Dallas. The sadly neglected young girl who found love with a rancher’s son says goodbye to him at the bus station when he leaves for military service. If Friday Night Lights had continued, each of these relationships could have played out honestly, week by week, with no need to hold the interest of viewers through jumped‑up strategies that could later be easily resolved. The Taylors had set the tone, their marriage creating a trickle-down effect, their honesty dripping over onto the rest of the story and characters. Viewers accept that, for whatever inexplicable reasons, two people have been drawn together and will try to make a life together if they can.13
Taken all together, most of the hit TV shows of the later decades were less and less about marriage.14 It was big news when a fresh new show, still a variation of the half-hour sitcom, appeared in 2009. Modern Family tightly linked three families: one traditional, with husband, wife, kids, and house; one with a gay male couple who adopt an Asian daughter; and the last with an older man, his sexy young Colombian wife, and her son from an earlier marriage. When, at the end of the first episode, the three families turn out to be one larger “modern” family, it was a wonderful surprise—and a big hit. New hit TV shows were often about family dynamics, raising children, the issues teenagers face, and romance and solving mysteries, but sitcoms that focused on marriage alone had become rare. Even the early prototypes, The Donna Reed Show and Father Knows Best, were family dramas, because TV had the time to develop multiple characters. “Marriage” became “family.” (A situation comedy was going to run for years and have between twenty to twenty-four episodes a season. To find enough plots for only two people—a husband and wife—was difficult. Adding on children, relatives, co-workers, and neighbors opened up the plot possibilities for harried sitcom writers.)
Television’s episodic quality, however, makes it ideal for developing marriage stories played out over time, set inside a larger narrative context. Such shows as The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Homeland (among others) offer viewers a slow revelation of the complicated power dynamics that shift back and forth between two married people. There’s time to incorporate small but significant marital moments that provide big insights: the Sopranos in their kitchen, Carmela repeatedly offering her man endless choices of food out of her well-stocked refrigerator; Betty Draper, alone at night in her kitchen, drinking white wine, smoking, waiting for her husband to come home; the uneasy wife of an Iraq War vet, nervously moving around the kitchen, trying to make conversation with her unresponsive, brooding mate.
The Danish series Borgen (the popular nickname for Denmark’s parliamentary building) appeared in 2010, just as Hollywood had begun to produce more and more false portraits of marriage in a pseudo-comic mold: Date Night, in which a couple go on the town and have exciting “adventures” that reunite them; Hall Pass, where new strategies for pepping up dull unions include letting the husbands feel free to have affairs; It’s Complicated, with a titillating “rethinking” between a divorced couple; and Hope Springs, in which a bored husband and wife go for supposedly hilarious marriage counseling. Borgen, by contrast, presents an intelligent, thoughtful, and engrossing version of marriage. It’s beautifully acted and written, sobering in its clarity about the difficulties of two people staying together when they move far apart in the ordinary daily sharing that makes a marriage work. A happily married career politician (Sidse Babett Knudsen) is elected to the office of Danish prime minister. She lives with her husband (Mikael Birkkjaer) and their two children in a charming cottage surrounded by flowers. The couple pledge to each other that, despite her new high-powered position, they will maintain “a normal family life.” No matter what is happening in Denmark, Mom will get home in time for dinner and put the kids to bed. Nothing will really change, because she has always worked, the children understand the situation, and her husband (a professor) has a flexible schedule.
This family’s “normalcy” doesn’t make it through the first seas
on. Borgen lays it down cold. Week after week, it shows how things in a marriage can slowly, but irrevocably, change. The wife is caught between two power structures: the Danish government and the average marriage. In the first, she is allegedly the designated leader with the ability to wield power. In the second, she is allegedly in a world of equality in which she and her husband will share decisions. Both structures are, in reality, deceptive. She finds that as prime minister she is forced to fight for her implied power. This means becoming tougher, ruthlessly seizing hold, and giving full attention to all aspects of her job. She begins an inevitable wheeling and dealing, making the hard decisions she has to make, betraying old friends and threatening new ones. She accepts the subtle corruption required to own her position. As a viewer watches—and it’s like watching a beautiful statue crumble to dust—she becomes a different person. Meanwhile, as her grip on politics sharpens and strengthens, her marriage disintegrates. The person who is in the home on a regular basis—formerly herself, now her husband—is actually a person with daily power. Since she arrives home too late for dinner, the kids are already in bed, she’s distracted and certainly too tired for sex, so her husband begins to make all the key decisions. The children turn increasingly to him, and he, lonely and unhappy, turns to another woman. The Danish prime minister might as well be Ann Carver or Mildred Pierce.
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