Reading for My Life

by John Leonard

  Though situation comedies are now and always have been mostly about families, they didn’t start out as socializing agencies. That was what parents were for, and schools, churches, synagogues, armies, therapists, and jail. From our bygone radio days through the first two decades of network television, the best we could hope for from a sitcom, chugging along like a choo-choo on its laugh track, was a certain rueful wisdom. As in the slightest of John Cheever’s short stories, perfectly nice people, who played golf and raised flowers and never forgot to stock seed in their bird-feeding stations, might cry “at the death of a cat, a broken shoelace, a wild pitch,” but real pain and genuine suffering were “a principality, lying somewhere beyond the legitimate borders of western Europe.” Of course, in almost every Cheever story, something happens to darken the screen. Men drown and fall off mountains. Fifteen-year-old boys commit suicide. A wife shoots her husband as he is about to hurdle the living room couch. Someone is arrested for confusing a young woman with a Lucky Strike cigarette. Someone else is devoured by his own dogs. A killer sings commercial jingles. Innocents incinerate when a can of charcoal igniter explodes at a barbecue party. In the swimming pool: an undertow. In the liquor closet: skeletons. In the tossed green salad: lighter fluid instead of vinegar. In the snow: wolves.

  But not on TV. Sitcoms hardly daring to do more than suggest coping mechanisms for such routine domestic crises as incompetence and mischief were not about to explore the mysteries of intimacy, much less promote a secret social agenda in favor of working women, class war, teen sex, racial justice, secular humanism, gay rights, and spotted owls. We aren’t talking about art or politics. Can you really imagine gag writers in New York or Hollywood trying to come up with two jokes a minute, forty-four jokes for every half-hour sitcom, with time out for commercial breaks, while simulataneously sneaking in subversive snippets from Adorno or Wilhelm Reich? Then, as now, gag writers were trying to sell a fail-safe concept to network programmers, who were selling audiences in the tens of millions to ad agency account executives, who were selling floor wax and reek to a benumbed republic and themselves to greedy clients. Then as now these gag writers read the same magazines and newspapers, saw the same movies, listened to the same music and skimmed the same reviews of the same best-selling books as everyone else. They also stole from each other. Yes, if a concept survived pilot-testing, and the public liked the actors, and the series lasted a couple of seasons, and the nation in its living room was ready to tolerate a NutraSweet version of the ideological fevers that already raged on the streets outside, then and only then, and even then only maybe, would the private pain, politics, and passion of the writer surface in a pointed wisecrack, a problematic new character, or a surprising ambiguity. And always after the culture already knew that it had major trouble on the event horizon, after the zeitgeist had already sneezed that sneeze.

  For instance, the sixties: In a decade of civil-rights turmoil, the only lead character on a network sitcom who happened to be black was a high-school teacher on Room 222. In a decade of rioting on city streets, we sat down to watch The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, and Petticoat Junction. In a decade of consciousness-raising and militant feminism, the small screen seethed with dreamy genies, kitchen witches, magical nannies, and flying nuns. In a decade of youthful opposition to war in Vietnam we got Gilligan, Dobie, Beaver, Dennis the Menace, Hogan’s Heroes, Batman and Martians, My Mother the Car, and a spy who talked to his shoe. When, in the sixties, the angry and the disaffected petitioned the media for redress of grievance, we heard about it not on sitcoms but on the evening news with those images of water cannons and police dogs, or on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, from Pat Paulsen and Pete Seeger, before they were canceled in favor of Hee Haw. Only after the election of Richard Nixon did sitcoms take a turn toward the subversive, as only after the abdication of Ronald Reagan would westerns make a comeback. Does this mean that television is a counter-culture?

  But I can shuffle these concepts like a pack of cards and deal out almost any hand I want to. I can toss the cards in the air and assign arbitrary meaning to a random scatter. Why did black Americans disappear from sitcom television in the sixties? (After Amos ’n’ Andy and Beulah in the fifties, it was perhaps a mercy.) Why did urban working-class Americans likewise vanish, after The Life of Riley (aircraft factory), unless we count The Honeymooners (buses, sewers), till Alice (diner), All in the Family (tool and die), Laverne & Shirley (brewery) and Taxi (garage) in the seventies, after which of course Roseanne (plastics)? (We know they’re working class because they go bowling.) Why are so many sitcoms set in TV newsrooms or on talk shows or at radio stations or in ad agencies, even once at a talent agent’s, and why have so many of the male leads been newspaper columnists, usually covering sports? (Write what you know, like Herman Melville and Jackie Collins.) Once sitcoms moved out of the kitchen and into the living room, how come we always saw the same couch, directly facing the camera, as if the characters were laughing at us instead of the TV set they never seemed to look at, while we did little else? (Think of the screen as a looking-glass, with Alice on one side and Narcissus on the other, both thinking about Heidegger: in one sense obviously “being-there” [Dasein] but in another sense, just as obviously, “not-at-home” [Unheimlichkeit, Nicht-zuhause-sein.]) What was it about the eighties that caused so many dreadful sitcoms to succeed, while the best of them (Frank’s Place) failed, and the hour-long dramatic series went into one of its cyclic tailspins? (I would blame it on King Babar and Queen Celeste in the White House and Ollie North in Neverland. What was Iran-Contra but a high-concept Tom Clancy–S. J. Perelman sitcom?)

  Late in the seventies, a New York know-it-all with a flashy line in psychic yard goods, for whom TV criticism was merely a part-time indulgence, a kind of avuncular moonlighting between serious books on loftier subjects, I flew coach to California to present a paper at a conference on “Television and Human Sexuality” (Was it good for you? More taste! Less filling!) sponsored by a foundation that felt there was room for improvement. A car awaited me at LAX. This is because it’s necessary in California to drive for two hours whether you want breakfast or transcendence. In my case, it was two hours north to Ojai, where golf links lay like a rug in a lap of little hills and swimming pools shivered like sheets of undulant tin. We slept at night in bungalows carved out of pastel chalk and candle wax, and rose at dawn to put on leopard-spotted Bermuda shorts and troop to tape-recorded T-group sessions. Among psychologists, sociologists, network veeps, and by-the-numbers tele-playwrights, I was the only media smarty-pants. In Wilfrid Sheed’s savvy novel about a critic, Max Jamison, we were told:

  He was in love with the way his mind worked, and he was sick of the way his mind worked. The first thing that struck you about it… was the blinding clarity, like a Spanish town at high noon. No shade anywhere. Yet not altogether lacking in subtlety. Very nice filigree work in the church. This was the mind they were asking him to blow.

  You’ve heard such riffs. I was clever at the expense of those nuclear-family sitcoms of the fifties wherein it was permissible to cry but never to divorce and certainly not to die, not on I Love Lucy, The Life of Riley, Mama, The Goldbergs, The Aldrich Family, Father Knows Best, The Trouble with Father, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, December Bride, I Married Joan, My Little Margie, Blondie, Leave It to Beaver, and Make Room for Daddy. Several exceptions proved semicontagious. In Mr. Peepers and Our Miss Brooks, Wally Cox and Eve Arden found families in the schools where they taught. And in You’ll Never Get Rich, Phil Silvers, as Sergeant Bilko, found one in an army platoon. The idea that you could enlist or be drafted into a family led in the sixties to sitcom families on ships at sea (McHale’s Navy, Mister Roberts), in marine barracks (Gomer Pyle), in prison camps (Hogan’s Heroes), cavalry forts (F Troop), high schools (Room 222), a convent (The Flying Nun), and a spy agency (Get Smart). The nuclear family nevertheless kept on trucking in the sixties, from Dick Van Dyke to Peyton Place, missing the occasional parent (Doris Day
, Julia, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, and The Partridge Family), adding the occasional animal (Mister Ed, Gentle Ben, Flipper, and The Monkees) and the occasional monster (The Munsters, The Addams Family). But nobody on the small screen smoked pot, dropped acid, seized a college building, burned down a ghetto, or fragged a Bilko in ’Nam.

  As Wally and Phil were exceptions in the fifties, That Girl was the exception of the sixties, with Marlo Thomas as a wage-earning alternative to Donna Reed, Ann Sothern, and Gidget. That Girl made it possible in the seventies for a mysteriously single Mary Tyler Moore to have a career and even sex; for Diana Rigg, briefly, to be divorced; and for Bea Arthur’s Maude to have the first and the last abortion on a prime-time series till Picket Fences in 1994. (Even so, marriage and childbirth still goosed ratings. As it had been for a raucous Lucy and a bewitched Samantha, delivering babies in the fifties and the sixties, so it was for Rhoda’s wedding in 1974, and so it would be for Murphy Brown’s baby Avery in 1992.) Mary, Valerie Harper, Linda Lavin, Cloris Leachman, Karen Valentine, Sandy Duncan, Loni Anderson, Penny Marshall, and Cindy Williams found surrogate families in the seventies on radio and at TV stations, in dress shops, ad agencies, law firms, acting studios, beer halls, and consumer groups, as did Hal Linden at a police station, Gabe Kaplan at a high school, Dick Van Dyke on a soap, Bob Newhart in group therapy, and Alan Alda in Korea. Not that the family burden didn’t remain primarily nuclear: All in the Family, Good Times, Happy Days, Benson, The Jeffersons, and Mork & Mindy. Briefly, even Don Rickles came home from his ad agency to a wife and child who pretended to want him. But there were at least more working women, more black faces, and some fallout. As Maude faced up to abortion, and M*A*S*H to war, and Good Times to heroin, All in the Family sought to “cauterize” bigotry with taboo-busting incantations of “spic,” “coon,” “dago,” “hebe,” and “fairy.”

  So, I said, television is catching up with America. And because everybody in Ojai is afraid of our keynote speaker, Germaine Greer, all we have talked about, so far, is what this means for women. And certainly—if we duck our heads in order not to see the network movies whose only premise is a female menaced, in a lonely bedroom late at night in an empty suburban house, in a stalled car on the deserted road in a surprise monsoon, in a telephone booth on a mean city street in a problematic neighborhood, in a high-rise elevator or, especially, the underground parking garage—the women we see on TV more closely resemble the women we meet in the world than they used to: Instead of Harriet Nelson, Jane Wyatt, Barbara Billingsley, Betty Furness, Grandma Moses, the Miltown tranquilizer, or a White Tornado, they remind us of Annie Oakley, Amelia Earhart, Margaret Sanger, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Next year in Burbank: Antigone.

  But what about men? Why is it on sitcom television, between, say, Robert Young and The Waltons, that the American father is so generally a mishap, such a Dagwood Bumstead antihero sandwich? From Desi Arnaz in I Love Lucy, Stu Erwin in The Trouble with Father, Ozzie Nelson in The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, William Bendix in The Life of Riley, Charles Farrell in My Little Margie, and Danny Thomas in Make Room for Daddy, to Carroll O’Connor in All in the Family, Tom Bosley in Happy Days, John Amos in Good Times, Sherman Hemsley in The Jeffersons, and Redd Foxx in Sanford and Son, the Sitcom Dad can’t lace up the shoe on the foot in his mouth without falling off his rocker, into contumely.

  According to the theater, we are James Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. According to the movies, we have devolved from Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird to Charles Bronson in Death Wish. According to the men among our novelists, well, from Melville and Twain and Henry James to Malamud, Mailer, and Vonnegut, they’ve been either silent or evasive. Faulkner violently engaged the generations, but his children were flowering curses, clocks wired to bombs. Fitzgerald and Hemingway were bright little boys to the bitter end, waving wooden swords. (Who knew from Gatsby or Tender Is the Night that Scott was writing such splendid letters to his daughter? Only after Papa ate a gun would he worry, in a posthumous novel, about what fathers do to sons.) In Updike, a child is for feeling guilty about after a father commits adultery. Bellow’s no help. Both Eliot Nailles, in Cheever’s Bullet Park, and Robert Slocum, in Joseph Heller’s Something Happened, commute to dispiriting jobs in New York from homes in exurban Connecticut to which they’ve removed their families to spare them the frightful city. Slocum’s boy stops talking to him: “He used to have dreams, he said, in which the door to our room was closed and he could not get in to see us. Now I have dreams that the door to his room is closed, and I can’t get in to see him.” Tony Nailles goes to bed and won’t get up: “I just feel terribly sad.” Neither father can protect either son—from what, exactly? From Dad, perhaps: so fearful of failure that he secretes it. Failure is his homespun art.

  Anyway, the next morning at Ojai, we were asked in our T-group by the “facilitator” with the kindly voice and the gentle beard to close our eyes and talk about our sex lives. What? Yes. Well: very nice filigree work in the church. After which, three of the very best writers in the sitcom business, James L. Brooks, Allan Burns, and Ed Weinberger, fresh from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Maude, Lou Grant, and Taxi, on their way to The Cosby Show, Alf, The Simpsons, and The Critic, ganged up on an NBC vice-president for broadcast standards (a censor). Brooks had heard that any script submitted to NBC touching in any way on the subject of homosexuality was sent by the net for vetting to a gay dentist in New Jersey. Could that possibly be true? Not true, the veep replied: In New Jersey, he may once upon a time have been a dentist, but he was now a psychotherapist. We stared for a while at the clouds in our coffee. Then Weinberger waggled a hand. “You mean,” he said, “you mean… there really is a Tooth Fairy?”

  The point here is not to stamp one’s foot at a wisecrack that may be offensive to gays, or to dentists, or to New Jersey. When push comes to shove, at Stonewall or on Rodeo Drive, Brooks, Burns, and Weinberger are likely more liberal than the rest of us NIMBYs and certainly more fun to talk to, even in a T-group, than most of the people you meet at a New York literary cocktail party, obsessing about real estate. The point is, this is what sitcom writers do. They turn everything, even censorship, into wisecracks. It should not surprise us that Diane English and Jerry Seinfeld turned O.J.’s white Ford Bronco into a sight gag in the fall of 1994. Can you imagine what the gang at Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows—Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, Woody Allen—would have done to O.J.? To Michael Jackson? To a John Wayne Bobbitt? Or, for that matter, to Woody, Mia, and Soon-yi? That’s what they get those big bucks for and why Chekhov doesn’t. From Cheers did you really expect the loneliness of the long-distance runner or a goalie’s anxiety at the penalty kick? From Home Improvement, a class-action suit against the Ford Motor Company for exploding Pinto gas tanks? The surprise ought not to be that nothing under our sun is safe from the trivializing one-liner. The surprise is that, every once in a sitcom while, there is actually something new under that sun, like Hawkeye’s nervous breakdown in an episode of M*A*S*H; or Judd Hirsch on Taxi falling in love with the radio voice of an obese dispatcher and learning just how thin our culture is, how starved for sympathy; or Jane Curtin’s discovering late in Kate & Allie’s run what it felt like to be homeless; or Tim Reid on Frank’s Place taking the paper bag test to see if his skin color was light enough for membership in the New Orleans men’s club; or Dixie Carter on Designing Women opening her mouth to deliver an impassioned aria on Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas; or Roseanne opening her mouth to kiss Mariel Hemingway.

  A decade passed before I dared again to leave the house for another conference, this time at Brown University in Providence on “The Changing American Family.” There’s no reason why I couldn’t have repeated the same growl about dumb dads—Know-It-Alls are invited to summit meetings in order to repeat themselves and secure a niche; it’s like performance art—updated, maybe, with a new emphasis on “the single father epidemic.” While single fat
hers have always been around on network television, more often widowed than divorced, from My Little Margie, The Rifleman, and Brave Eagle in the fifties; to My Three Sons, Bonanza, and The Andy Griffith Show in the sixties; to Nanny and the Professor, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, Sanford and Son, and Hello Larry in the seventies, they had seemed in the eighties to undergo a fruit-fly proliferation—Benson, Coach, Empty Nest, Silver Spoons, You Again, Rags to Riches, Dads, My Two Dads, Paradise, Free Spirit, Raising Miranda, I Married Dora, and First Impressions. (The odd trend would spill over into the nineties with Blossom, City, Uncle Buck, American Dreamer, Sunday Dinner, It Had to Be You, Second Half, Me and the Boys, Daddy’s Girls, and The Critic). What could this possibly mean? Although divorce was catching up to death as an excuse for single fatherhood, and many of these dads at least had rudimentary nurturing skills, the facts were out of whack. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 25 percent of all children in the Real America lived with single parents in 1989. But in this same Real America 89 percent of all those single parents were women. Moreover, 57 percent of the children who lived with single parents were black and 32 percent Hispanic. Whereas, in TV America, more than 90 percent of all the Little People with just a single Big One in the backyard bomb shelter seemed to be yogurt-colored.