Dads of Derring-Do
I’ve got a theory that accounts for the pattern John Tierney notices in a recent Times column. The column complains about dumb dads on TV:
Where did we fathers go wrong? We spend twice as much time with our kids as we did two decades ago, but on television we’re oblivious (”Jimmy Neutron”), troubled (”The Sopranos”), deranged (”Malcolm in the Middle”) and generally incompetent (”Everybody Loves Raymond”). Even if Dad has a good job, like the star of “Home Improvement,” at home he’s forever making messes that must be straightened out by Mom.
There have always been some bumbling fathers like Dagwood Bumstead and Fred Flintstone, but now they’re the norm. A study by the National Fatherhood Initiative found that fathers are eight times more likely than mothers to be portrayed negatively on network television.
Something fishy: the study he cites isn’t mentioned at all on the National Fatherhood Initiative website, so I’m going to assume they’re not too proud of it. One way to explain these dubious results is through demographic trends:
The most obvious [cause of this trend] is that the television audience has splintered along gender lines, and sitcoms are now a female domain. Four out of five viewers of network sitcoms are women, and they apparently like to see Mom smarter than Dad.
Another explanation is the rising number of mothers with paying jobs. Now that they have their own paychecks, the old bread-earning patriarch is less essential and therefore more mockable. And TV writers no longer have an easy stereotype of Mom to work with. Jokes about daffy middle-class housewives like Lucy Ricardo and Edith Bunker seem dated now that so many women work outside the home.
As I understand it, back in the Cleaver days, the idea of questioning authority was pretty much absent from public culture. The dominant frame was that people in positions of authority made it there through being wise and moral, and were therefore supposed to be respected. Well, that story’s been balanced with a different one. Modern TV-watchers are very conscious of the logic of questioning authority. They know why authority should be questioned, and what is supposed to happen when the questioning takes place. That’s a frame–a structure of ideas that we use to interpret the things we experience.
Both frames for authority are out there. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that maybe the second frame makes for better comedy. Dads whose ethics or intelligence aren’t on par with the authority they’re given are funny dads. Maybe TV writers construct their worlds around doofus dads because flouting their traditional moral authority results in more chuckles than putting a cardigan on Homer Simpson.
But if you zoom out and look at the universe of male figures on TV, you’ve got quite a lot of strong patriarch figures. President Bartlet from The West Wing, the guy on 24, the dad on Six Feet Under, and all sorts of guys who aren’t fathers but are still good role models. But these guys are all in dramas, where there’s no incentive to portray them as bumbling.
July 14th, 2005 at 7:29 pm
As far as sitcoms that have a bumbling male lead juxtaposed with a relatively competent and attractive wife goes: there is probably a strong path dependence from Gleason’s The Honey Mooners. THM was so successful in our culture that its knock-off The Flintstones was knocked off by the Simpsons, which was so successful that it killed all the Cliff Huckstables and Danny Tanners, spawning replacements that attempted to emulate its success (Family Guy).
Sitcoms that break the Gleason mold: King of the Hill, American Dad, Everybody loves Raymond, and Arrested Development.
As far as our discussion:The following is an excerpt from a polemic against libertarianism I wrote in my first week of posting anything on the internet. Unfortunately the original is lost to the delete button of the admin for Slate’s message boards called the Fray. Originally posted March 2, 2003″
Even if you accept this paradigm as descriptive of the actual intellectual motivations of Republicans and Democrats (rather then the philosophical definitions I intended them to be at the time), what better way is there to point out the arbitrary nature of success then by pointing out corrupt crony capitalism? This is a cadre of people who succeed or augment their chance of success simply by virtue of who they know. As the Hippy is the posterboy for the impotent ineffectual layabout, whining instead of working, the kleptocapitalist is the posterboy for the undeserving arbitrarily wealthy.
But Protestant Calvinist theology completely rejects the ostensible conservative view that individuals can control their fate through virtue and effort. In the Calvinist cosmology, G-d created and controls all, and man is helpless to effect change. There either is acceptance of the divine will or rebellion against G-d’s natural order. On the subject of wealth dispersion, the Republican Calvinist is basically agnostic. He’d say that it’s just divine will that some have more then others. He might repeat the line that they earned it (which is in fact impossible in their cosmology). But press him with an example of a good Christian who failed in business and there is no way that he’d hold up the hypothesis that the Christian businessman failed because of his intrinsic worthlessness and others succeed due to their intrinsic worthiness.
The evangelical Calvinist alliance with the Libertarians is completely superficial. While they dismiss socio-economic disparities by externalizing their harm to G-d’s mysterious will, they formed an alliance with the Libertarians because of mutual fear of Communism. Now all they have left is the mutual distrust of Commie coddling Hippies and maybe some economic incentive. There could easily be a reversal in which “social decadence” (id est recreational sex) is excused as G-d’s will in order to form an alliance with liberals and improve work-family balance along with getting a little economic incentive. (I’ve said before that there is a reason the internet revolution happened in San Francisco, and that reason may involve three snaps in Z formation.) And the klepto-capitalists would of course be the usurpers of the G-d’s order by their gluttonous and greedy hoarding of nature’s bounty.
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