by Ben Shapiro
CHEERS (1982–1993): BLUE-COLLAR ELITISM
It’s difficult to find a more ubiquitous triumvirate than Charles-Burrows-Charles on television reruns. That’s because when you watch reruns, there’s a solid chance you’re watching Cheers, one of NBC’s greatest success stories. Despite early failures (the show ranked seventy-seventh in the ratings during its first year), Cheers eventually became the third most popular comedy on television, after The Cosby Show and Family Ties.
Its initial difficulties sprang from its elitism. The first season featured jokes about Schopenhauer. But that shouldn’t have been a surprise from the highly educated Charles brothers, Les and Glen, who wrote the show. Glen was a former lawyer who quit his job to work in television; his brother was a former public school teacher. James Burrows, who combined with the two to form the production company for Cheers, was an industry baby—his dad, Abe, had been a major Hollywood figure. All three had worked with Grant Tinker at MTM Enterprises. None of them are overtly political, but all three are liberal. “I can tell you,” said Burrows, “not only for myself but my two partners, all we did was try to make the most funny show and characters you could identify with.”81
Cheers is a show with which we can identify.
Still, there’s no question that Cheers is a liberal show. Cheers was set in a Boston bar, but it was truly a soft culture clash in the mold of All in the Family, although it was far more sympathetic to blue-collar sensibilities. Sam Malone (Ted Danson, a major liberal in his own right) is a dog, a feminist caricature of men. “He’s a spokesman for a large group of people who thought that [the women’s movement] was a bunch of bull and look with disdain upon people who don’t think it was,” explained Glen Charles.82 Diane Chambers (Shelley Long) was the conscience of the show, a liberal woman and solid feminist who constantly won the morality game with Sam and the rest of the boys, even if she was mocked during the process.
Episodes pushing the liberal agenda in a soft and funny manner peppered the first season. The episode “The Boys in the Bar” centered on the breaking news that one of Sam’s old teammates—a former roommate—had come out of the closet in his autobiography. The regulars at the bar encourage Sam to reject his former roommate, fearing that the bar will turn into a gay hotspot. Sam comes out in favor of his roommate, and a gay couple shows up at the bar. Norm (George Wendt) and Cliff (John Ratzenberger) try to chase the gay couple out, but target the wrong couple. The gay couple ends up kissing Norm on the cheek at the end of the episode, demonstrating just how wrong and silly he is.
The co-writer of the episode, Ken Levine, told an illuminating tale about the filming. The network hesitated, but, “To their credit, the Charles Brothers and Jim Burrows did not back away.” The cast loved it; Ted Danson told Levine not to change a word. During the run-through, the crew laughed hysterically. “And by far the biggest [laugh] was the last joke where the two guys flanking Norm kiss him,” Levine recalled. But when it came time for the live filming, “Silence. Dead silence. You could hear crickets. It wasn’t like some people got it and others didn’t. Nobody laughed. Not a single person. . . . No one had an explanation.”83 Of course, the explanation was simple: The last laugh was simply too awkward for the general public. But in the world of Hollywood, if your buddies get you, everyone else must, too.
The fact that the show was always about the clash of low and high culture, represented by Diane and Sam respectively, and that high culture generally won out in terms of prevailing morality, meant that the Cheers universe skewed left. Nonetheless, there were clear rumblings in the Cheers universe that something was amiss in the lower-class conservative vs. elitist liberal universe. The show’s angst about Diane’s education and her tendency toward looking down her nose at Sam presented the first inkling of the yuppie conundrum that would haunt liberals throughout the 1980s. The 1960s generation that had rejected capitalism as exploitative was all grown up, and they were suffering from the cognitive dissonance of wanting monetary success. This was the same conflict that would permeate television throughout the decade in shows ranging from thirtysomething to Family Ties—how could the left, with all of its socialist tendencies, reconcile its proletariat principles with its elitism? The answer on Cheers lay in the synthesis of Sam and Diane. She eventually began to outgrow her disdain for Sam and to learn from his blue-collar authenticity, and he began to respect her intelligence as well as her beauty.
As early as season one, the synthesis was taking place. Take, for example, the season-one episode “No Contest.” The episode concerns the Miss Boston Barmaid contest, a beauty competition among Boston waitresses. “These contests perpetuate the attitude that women are mere objects to be judged and ranked in respect to how well they serve men,” Diane says. Sam secretly nominates Diane, and Diane decides to take part only if she can push the feminist agenda by winning. When Sam discovers what she’s doing, she tells him, “Sam, some day, you will realize that I am doing the right thing.” “Why do you always have to do the right thing?” Sam replies. She wins the contest and a bevy of prizes, including a trip for two to Bermuda. She gets so excited she forgets to make her speech. But never fear, she gets to moralize: “I sold out womankind for a trip to Bermuda,” she laments, before realizing that she has also been able to shake herself out of the uptight sexuality she normally inhabits. At the end of the episode, Sam proposes that Diane take him with her to Bermuda; she’s hot on the idea until he pledges to be a gentleman. It seems that he’s taught her too well—she’s now the sexualized feminist, the liberated woman.
This episode teaches us something about the nature of television liberalism in the 1980s. By this point, television creators were beginning to see blue-collar people as working-class heroes, so long as those dockworkers and barmaids embraced the liberal agenda (think of Martin Sheen in Wall Street); elitists, by the same token, could be liberal heroes by smoothing out the rough edges of the blue-collar workers. This is a view of politics that persists to this day: liberals often tend to think of lower-income people as rough material waiting to be shaped, and they think of themselves as limousine liberals waiting to be dirtied by the soot of the underclass.
“I would say that television has produced one comic masterpiece, which is Cheers,” said far-left author Kurt Vonnegut. “I wish I’d written that instead of everything I had written. Every time anybody opens his or her mouth on that show, it’s significant. It’s funny.”84 Even if the creators didn’t mean to overtly insert Vonnegut’s kind of politics, they did.
FAMILY TIES (1982–1989): REAGAN’S CHILDREN OF THE CORN
Gary David Goldberg, creator of Family Ties and Spin City, greeted me warmly at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on Santa Monica’s trendy Third Street Promenade. It was midday on a weekday, and he was dressed in sweatpants and a windbreaker. Goldberg is an unapologetic liberal—he counts Barbara Boxer and Chuck Schumer among his personal friends. During our interview, he told me that he had gone to an Al Franken fundraiser the prior night—“I think [he’s] going to be great”—and that he and his daughters had worked for the Obama campaign.
Goldberg got into the industry by accident, he told me. He was a 1960s-era hippie. “[In] the 1960s I went out of my mind, just crazed. [I’m] still running into people going, ‘We lived together! How can you not remember?’ ” he laughed. After getting married, he and his wife moved to San Diego so that she could pursue her PhD. They were living on food stamps and welfare at the time. Because he needed college units, Goldberg took a writing course with a past president of the Writers Guild and former Oscar nominee. When his professor read his writing, he told Goldberg to head to Hollywood—and his professor set up meetings with agents and showed him script forms. Soon enough, Goldberg was writing for television.
It wasn’t long before the honchos in the industry took notice. At an interview with Nichols, Ross, and West (the same folks who produced Three’s Company), they suggested that he join up with MTM Enterprises. After working on
several shows, Goldberg had the idea for Family Ties.
“It really was just observation of what was going on in my own life, with my own friends,” Goldberg told me. “We were these old kind of radical people and all of a sudden you’re in the mainstream . . . but now you’ve got these kids and you’ve empowered them, and they’re super intelligent, and they’re definitely to the right of where you are. They don’t understand what’s wrong with having money and moving forward.”
As Goldberg describes, Family Ties riffed on the angst of the 1960s generation at the Reagan Revolution. It also reinforced the nascent yuppie upset so evident in shows like Cheers and later, thirtysomething, questioning how the rebels of the 1960s could preserve their radical values while becoming bourgeois parents and business owners benefitting from the capitalist system.
But Family Ties wasn’t designed to be an evenhanded riff on Reagan-era politics or even 1960s-liberal angst. It was designed to target conservatives. Alex P. Keaton (Michael J. Fox) was the stand-in for conservatives. He was brilliant and witty and serious-minded—and totally amoral, Gordon Gecko at age seventeen. The whole point of the show was that Alex was always wrong. Only the panache of Michael J. Fox made Alex palatable. “The interesting thing with Alex, and to the same extent with Archie Bunker, and if you go back to Norman and ask him, he’d say he did not think he was creating a sympathetic character,” said Goldberg. “But all the sympathy went to Archie. It was crazy. With Alex, I did not think I was creating a sympathetic character. Those were not traits that I aspired to and didn’t want my kids to aspire to, actually. . . . But at the end of Family Ties, when we went off the air, the New York Times had done a piece and they said ‘Greed with the Face of an Angel.’ And I think that’s true. . . . [Michael J. Fox] would make things work, the audience would simply not access the darker side of what he’s actually saying.”
A few examples. After being told in season three by his younger, innocent sister that there’s more to life than just getting rich and that “people who need people are the luckiest people in the world,” Alex replies, “Jennifer, people who have money don’t need people.” Another season-three episode has Alex telling his pregnant mother that she shouldn’t fly. “Alex, you know, if you had it your way, Mom would be locked in her room for nine months wearing a veil,” sister Mallory snipes. “Oh come on, that’s not true,” says Alex. “I see no need for a veil.” Alex is constantly putting his foot in his mouth this way, ironically poking at and caricaturing conservative positions—and he gets a laugh because he’s so charming.
In fact, Alex became so much of a hero that even liberals didn’t understand when he lost battles. “Steven Spielberg was a huge fan,” Goldberg recalled, “used to come to all the tapings, and was a close friend and he’d come Friday nights, and one night we did a show where Alex lies to this girl and completely disses the [Equal Rights Amendment] and everything it stands for and pretends to be a feminist, and at the end, she tells him off. . . . So after, Steven comes over and I said, ‘How did you like the show?’ He said, ‘Well, it’s all right.’ And I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ And he said, ‘Alex didn’t get the girl.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but he lied, he cheated,’ and he said, ‘But it’s Alex, you want him to win at the end.’ ”
But Alex rarely won, because Goldberg and the writers’ room didn’t want him to win. In fact, Goldberg said, “We actually had this structure that we’d inherited from Jim Brooks and Allan [Burns], which was six scenes and a tag. . . . And then the last scene became Alex apologizes, in every show, we just left it up. Alex apologizes. Some version of it.”
For example, in the season-one episode “The Fifth Wheel,” Alex is supposed to babysit younger sister Jennifer. As always, his desire for cash gets the better of him. He decides to take Jennifer with him to a poker game, justifying his actions with an appeal to pseudo-conservative masculinity. “In this industrial society of ours, there aren’t a lot of battles for a man to fight. There aren’t a lot of opportunities to go one-on-one with another man. There aren’t a lot of tests of one’s courage and stamina, do you know what I mean?” he says.
Naturally, things get out of hand—Jennifer walks out of the game and gets lost. Later, she shows up at home after taking the bus. Alex gets into trouble, then promises his parents that he’ll take better care of Jennifer from now on: “Yeah, we’ll keep her happy, we’ll make sure she gets out every now and then, we’ll feed her, and keep her clean.” Finally, he apologizes, blaming his own self-centeredness and his lack of sensitivity. This is a more subtle episode than some of the earlier ones, but it is just as effective: money is the root of all evil, and Alex is the greedy Reaganite who loses the child.
This show format, repeated over and over again—Alex has a conservative/greedy idea, Alex screws something up, Alex apologizes—exposes just what Goldberg and the 1960s-era creators thought of the Reagan generation. The show always ends with Alex needing to be reaccepted into the family, after attempting to individuate, to be himself. The liberal assumption is that Alex’s political choices are merely teenage rebellion, and that reunification will inevitably occur once Alex comes to his senses. For that reunification to occur, however, Alex must subordinate his principles—which aren’t true principles but greed manifest in a false facade of principles—to his need for communion with his family.
Goldberg makes that clear in the pilot episode. In that episode, Alex wants to go out with a hot, blond, rich cheerleader-type named Kimberly. She takes him to a “restricted” country club—it bans blacks, Hispanics, Jews, and anyone who didn’t “come over on the Mayflower,” as Elyse puts it. Steven stands up against Alex, but Alex goes anyway. Later, Steven shows up at the country club, humiliating Alex. Alex reams Steven when he gets home.
“I was wrong to go over there like that,” says Steven, “but I hope you understand why I felt so strongly about your being at a restricted club.”
“I do, Dad,” replies Alex, “but I’m seventeen years old. When I see Kimberly Blanton in a strapless evening gown, I don’t look past her for the Bill of Rights.”
“I was seventeen myself, once,” answers Steven, “but I had principles, I had beliefs.” The pattern is set: Alex, despite all his talk of principle, is unprincipled; Steven and Elyse are the principled heroes of the piece. Alex’s rebellion is simple Freudian psychodrama. (By contrast, Meathead’s rebellion in All in the Family is principled opposition to conservative bigotry.) What Goldberg did not expect, of course, is that by allowing Alex to mock liberal values, he was unwittingly undermining them.
Goldberg made no bones about the fact that he infused politics into the show—but he learned early on that he couldn’t simply do it in Norman Lear’s obvious fashion. “That’s a tension [between messaging and entertainment] we welcomed. . . . What you can’t do is ‘a very special episode of,’ where you do this show and there’s no jokes. . . . The shows we did earlier in the season were the ones we buried, because I was completely wrong about what I thought the show was going to be: nuclear war, gun control, climate change, death. And so you had to put it in a different package . . . it had to come out in a different way.”
And Family Ties did do it in a different way. There were episodes about nuclear war—one in particular in which Alex learns to get along with a Russian kid at a chess tournament—and episodes about sex and episodes about the evils of capitalism. But they were covered over in a brilliant display of hilarity. It’s no wonder that Ronald Reagan said that Family Ties was his favorite show.
Like Cheers, Family Ties was a slow starter out of the gate, but the network stuck with it. And like Cheers, it eventually became a massive hit when it was placed behind The Cosby Show in 1984, running for seven seasons.
Goldberg’s other big show came years later, when he brought back Michael J. Fox for Spin City; Goldberg wrote the show with partner Bill Lawrence (who would go on to create Scrubs). That show cast Fox as the deputy mayor of New York, and wa
s even more political than Family Ties. Fox was still playing Alex Keaton, but this time Keaton was grown up and a Democrat. He was just as Machiavellian, just as manipulative, but this time, he was good-heartedly trying to ram through the liberal agenda. His liberal conscience was Carter (Michael Boatman), a gay man who made sure that Michael didn’t lose his leftist principles. Boatman’s character ardently pushed the gay rights agenda, including same-sex marriage (one episode featured Boatman staging a marriage to one of the straight employees at the mayor’s office as a political statement, then canceling the wedding when it became clear that he had too much respect for the institution of marriage generally). “Carter came about in the pilot,” Goldberg told me. “We decided that was really a one-shot, but we just fell in love with Michael Boatman and what that character represented, so after that we made a deal with him to put him in as a regular, bring him in.” Carter, Goldberg said, was “basically a saint.”
I asked Goldberg why there didn’t seem to be any real debate about politics on television anymore—why everyone simply assumed that the far-left position was correct, and that the only real question was whether that position was practical. At least in All in the Family, I said, the conservative position was articulated, however badly, and then knocked down. Modern television doesn’t even bother articulating the conservative position. “If I was writing now I wouldn’t be having those debates, either,” Goldberg said. “Because I think it’s great we’ve moved beyond that.”85
That’s certainly arguable—we’re still debating gay marriage, the morality of which Spin City took for granted. But if we’ve begun to move beyond such debates, it’s due in large part to the success of writers like Goldberg, who have made the leftist position so palatable to a broad swath of Americans simply by presenting likable characters who promote liberal politics as tautologies.
