Sitcom Mom: The Evolution of a Classic Television Character 166693464X, 9781666934649

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Sitcom Mom

Sitcom Mom The Evolution of a Classic Television Character Judy Kutulas

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE, United Kingdom Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kutulas, Judy, 1953– author. Title: Sitcom mom: the evolution of a classic television character / Judy Kutulas. Description: Lanham: Lexington Books, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “This work considers the evolution of American notions of motherhood through sitcoms, examining depictions of “good” and “bad” mothers alongside the ways these depictions have diversified over time”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2023045534 (print) | LCCN 2023045535 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666934649 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666934656 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Situation comedies (Television programs)—United States—History and criticism. | Mothers on television. | Women on television. | Television programs—Social aspects—United States. Classification: LCC PN1992.8.C66K88 2024 (print) | LCC PN1992.8.C66 (ebook) | DDC 791.45/617—dc23/eng/20231017 LC record available athttps://lccn​.loc​.gov​/2023045534 LC ebook record available at https://lccn​.loc​.gov​/2023045535 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

To a lot of unruly women who have provided me over the years with that classic sitcom mom combination of support and disruption: Nancy McCoy, Lin Spangler, Monte Kugel, Jill Watts, Sarah Entenmann, and Dolores Peters.

Contents

List of Figures

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Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 1 Worrying in Pearls: Defining Sitcom Motherhood in the 1950s

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2 Of Witches, Cars, and Mothers-in-Law: The Fantastical Sitcom Mothers of the 1960s

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3 Reality in the “Fantasy World of Television”: New Moms—and Some Old Ones—in the 1970s

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4 Here Comes Clair: Having It All—or Trying To—in the 1980s

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5 Single Moms and Man-Children: Gender Wars and Motherhood in the 1990s

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6 Mama Don’t Care: Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, Yummy Mummies and Other New-Century Developments

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7 “When Did This Become My Life?”: Recent Sitcom Motherhood 141 Conclusion 163 Bibliography 167 Index 179 About the Author

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List of Figures

Father Knows Best 18 Bewitched 45 The Brady Bunch 50 Rhoda 58 One Day at a Time 67 The Cosby Show 80 Roseanne 115 Malcolm in the Middle 120 Modern Family 130 Mom 158

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Acknowledgments

By rights, I should begin by thanking my late uncle, Peter Kutulas, for buying my family a television set as a Christmas present when I was but a toddler, making it possible for me to have a lifetime of memories of television sitcoms. Yet television entered my scholarly life only because St. Olaf College was willing to let an amateur become a professional at television, teaching interdisciplinary classes on it as a medium and American Studies courses on comedy and sitcoms. These were so much fun to teach that I started writing down my thoughts and ideas, which led to more teaching about sitcoms and more writing. Finally, writing this book at the end of my career has brought satisfying closure to my lifelong fixation with the sitcom. Because I am self-taught in the field of television studies, though, feedback for previous work has been crucial to developing competency and expertise, so I thank Laura R. Linder and Mary M. Dalton, editors of The Sitcom Reader, for letting me contribute to their book, including a piece on the evolution of the sitcom family that really served as background for this. My late colleague, Jim Farrell, read those pieces as well, posing difficult but important questions about them. A piece I wrote on sitcom maternity stories that appeared in MidAmerica was a first opportunity to try out my voice as someone trained a bit differently than most others writing in the field. Writing on Friends in The Journal of Popular Culture forced me to really think about sitcom structure and to be mindful of something I always used to remind students in my film classes: that everything is there for a reason. Television studies is a discipline whose expertise is not confined to academics like myself, but includes a variety of participants and critics, who have reminded me that any study of sitcoms must also include aspects of production and reception. Many of my sources reflect such broad expertise, critics as xi

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well as those who care enough to comment online about their favorite shows. My late mother, Alexandra Kutulas, was a sharp-eyed observer of television who demonstrated more than once how much viewers come to rely on television to show and tell them about others’ experiences. It was she who got me started watching sitcoms as a child and ceded the set to my sisters and me as we entered what must have been a dark period sitcom-wise in her life, the era of one family TV and The Beverly Hillbillies. Thanks also to my father, the late John Kutulas, for his enthusiasm for workplace sitcoms. His love of the inexplicable, Hogan’s Heroes, certainly helped me contemplate the illogical allure of series. My sister, Janet Kutulas, was the original resistant reader of sitcom texts, questioning everything about Gilligan’s Island. Later, my sisters Nikki Kutulas and the late Sandra Kutulas Perez would join in the fun as we watched The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Andy Griffith Show reruns on summer mornings while my mother did that most un–June Cleaver-like thing, went to work. By the time I came of age, I discussed any number of dysfunctional family stories with college and grad school friends, Jane Badley, Cate Kelly, Lin Spangler, Monte Kugel, and the late Linda Brown, each of whom assessed what they saw with discerning eyes. Since then, my husband and now-grown children continue to watch with me. Sitcoms have always been a big part of my world. This project required no research trips or visits to archives, although support for previous sitcom-related projects by the Popular Culture Association and the UCLA Film and Television Archives definitely spilled over into this work. St. Olaf College has not only tolerated my stubborn belief that sitcoms are important cultural documents, but encouraged it. During my last three years at the college, I held an endowed chair, the Boldt Family Distinguished Teaching Chair in the Humanities, predicated on my pursuit of “new” humanities, facilitating my crusade to use popular culture as a teaching tool. My budget enabled my acquisition of a wonderful library of books about television. Librarians at St. Olaf College have also helped me secure resources and negotiate quirky databases and impossible catalogs. And I would also like to thank a few students who answered my questions, read my work, and offered insights, especially Olivia Cooper, Katie Barnes, Faith Goede, Aerin O’Malley, Carol Luna Morales, George Wood, Sydney Hall, Sam Sadiq-Adams, and Grace La Nasa. My editors at Lexington Books, Jessie Tepper and Jessica McCleary havebeen helpful and patient and so very supportive that the process of publishing this has been, well, maybe not easy, but without glitches. My extended family and family of friends (a whole other genre of sitcom) have offered a lot of support for a lot of years. My sisters read early chapters and sang theme songs to cheer me along, especially during COVID Zooms. Jill Watts listened to many ideas and Dolores Peters and Sarah Entenmann

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read parts of this and offered feedback. Sarah serves as the editorial voice inside my head reminding me to shorten sentences and get to my points. My nieces and nephews helped with a different generation’s perspectives, so thank you Kamau and Kalif Purce and Christina, Shelly, and Isabella Perez for your thoughts. My older son, Alex Fitzgerald, helped me find some sitcoms he liked when he was younger, particularly The George Lopez Show and My Wife and Kids. My younger son Nate Fitzgerald read the chapters on the 1990s and 2000s—his childhood—and offered much encouragement as well as providing me with a factoid or two about his favorite shows. My husband, Michael Fitzgerald, might prefer news programming and documentaries, but the historian in him finds the opportunity to take apart sitcoms and probe their social import intriguing. All of these people have helped to make this better; I alone am responsible for any errors.

Introduction

On the premier episode of the 1991 situation comedy Blossom, Blossom Russo, played by Mayim Bialik, confronted a difficult moment in her young life when she got her first period. She was by turns confused, embarrassed, and frustrated. She couldn’t, however, turn to her mother for advice and comfort because her mother was in Paris, as she would later complain, “fulfilling her needs.” Her best friend, Six, tried to help, bringing Blossom boxes of sanitary napkins and tampons. An elderly neighbor, her wrinkled face and sagging body reminding the audience what her wisecracks confirmed, that the last time she menstruated, women were “sent to the edge of the village,” offered comfort. Eventually her father and brothers welcomed her into womanhood, her father apologizing that she didn’t have “a good mother” and her brother helping her on with her jacket before they all went out to celebrate her puberty with Chinese food. On the way to the happily-ever-after of a neat sitcom ending, a dream sequence revealed how Blossom wished the experience had gone. In her fantasy, Clair Huxtable, the no-nonsense mother from The Cosby Show, stood in the Russo kitchen in a frilly apron, ready to help. “I’m your mother, Blossom,” she soothed, and “a mother knows.” With a bag of icing and a sheet cake, she explained the biology of menstruation, drawing ovaries and fallopian tubes. Then she hugged Blossom and promised her a hot water bottle for cramps. Blossom’s “dream mother” (as the IMDB credits read) was selfless, empathetic, comforting, and of a slightly earlier time. She was also not a real person, but a mother from a sitcom. This book is about sitcom mothers, how they embody our cultural fantasies as well as reflect the changing nature of motherhood in American society. Motherhood, the performance of mothering, “is culturally derived” (Thurer, xv). It evolves, but the cultural norms surrounding it must also be 1

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Introduction

disseminated. For Blossom’s creator, Don Reo, Clair, a fictional character, served that function. She was “America’s mother” (Don Reo’s commentary on the DVD set of Blossom, seasons 1 and 2, 2009), instantly recognizable as a character and for the maternal qualities she represented. Reo had a point. Other than within our own families, the largest number of mothers we likely see performing motherhood on a regular basis are in sitcoms, be they in firstruns or reruns. Those mothers come to us, as entertainment, not lessons, and generally when we, like Blossom, are seeking comfort of some kind, from a tough day at work or school or as a reward or a shared activity with people we care about. One could say that the sitcom is an insidious form of indoctrination as it teaches norms and explores changes as entertainment, without us identifying it as such. We are tolerant, not judgmental, looking for the laugh of familiarity when we see something that resonates or the groan of discomfort as a comedic situation turns a bit awkward. We understand that TV is not real life, but it can’t help but influence how we see real life. Sitcom mothers are ubiquitous, like and unlike our mothers, a pretty potent combination that helps sear the images of mothers like Clair Huxtable into our brains. Sitcom mothers are popularized versions of the real thing. Writers can’t simply construct them sui generis. They need to reflect a resonant reality as well as a believable ideal. And sitcom mothers do because they are remade to reflect social change. Over time, they have mimicked demographic trends, challenged social norms, expanded viewers’ horizons, and leaned more toward reality and away from ideals. They have also gained more voice, shifting, overall, from objects to subjects as women have gained more voice within the sitcom industry and as society pays more attention to their situations. Sitcom mothers are not just constructed in the moment, but, like real mothers, exist within a cultural history that complicates their stories. Studies show that most Americans are familiar with older family sitcoms, watch them for “comfort,” and “relate to the family dynamics” within. Of course, we also know that they don’t “accurately represent the average American family” (Harris). Sitcom mothers are in our heads in a complicated way. Sitcoms serve as a cultural space to explore norms as well as social changes. Sitcom historian Gerard Jones describes the family story as a sort of paradox, a “mirror” that provides a recognizable version of reality and a model “of what our culture thinks we should be like.” As Jones points out, though, the sitcom is also a “corporate product” designed to sell things (Gerard Jones, 5, 4). On top of all of those functions, though, the sitcom is a creative product. It expresses someone’s thoughts; it tells a story they want to tell. These have beginnings, middles, and ends, structures that follow the conventions of plots, structures designed to amuse, entertain, and sometimes make you think. Sitcoms provide comfort, but also anxiety as we think about ourselves and our families in relation to what we watch.

Introduction

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The social norms and etiquettes that sitcoms model, as any social scientist will tell you, constantly evolve. Family comedies, with their balance of continuity and discontinuity, stability and disruption, reinforce traditional values, but also introduce innovation. As Joanne Morreale explains, series “incorporate and contain change,” making them “ideal sites for critical examination of tensions and contradictions” within the American family (Morreale, “Introduction,” xii). One of the most significant sets of changes in American life since World War II, the same moment when network television began, has been changes in the structures and roles of the American family, and particularly, mothers. This work will look at the ways that sitcoms have contained as well as helped to assimilate our cultural notions of motherhood. “The good mother,” psychologist Shari L. Thurer tells us, “is reinvented as each age or society defines her anew” (Thurer, xv). Because America has been a patriarchal society for much of its time, women’s roles within families have been defined against men’s. “True womanhood” in the nineteenth century assigned women the qualities that protected the home and the social order—piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity—so that men could be aggressive and ambitious. A “true woman” was also White and middle-class; poorer White women might aspire to the ideal, but women of color were excluded from it entirely (Welter). With smaller family sizes and increasing scientific and medical knowledge, children became precious and preparing them for adulthood required that mothers have both knowledge and character (Mintz and Kellogg, chapter 6, Margolis, chapter 2, Skolnick, 25–30, Coontz, The Way We Never Were, Grose, chapter 1). In the twentieth century, mother judgment began in earnest, particularly as waves of immigration and emancipation brought other ways of mothering to the attention of authorities worried about protecting whiteness and its nationalist culture. With consumerism and experts, mothers slowly lost a lot of their “moral authority” (Plant, 3). At the same time, the once sacred cow of motherhood gained critics, like Philip Wylie, who characterized “mom” as “lazy and parasitical” (Plant, 33). At the moment television really took off, a new cult of motherhood began, shaped by the traumas of depression and war and the emergence of a cold war, the suburbs, and a baby boom (Meyerwitz, 1–2; May; Grose, chapter 1). So too did a whole new range of experts comment on women’s maternal roles, from Freudian Helene Deutsch to pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose popular Infant and Child Care served as a manual for millions of postwar mothers raising members of the Baby Boom (Nancy P. Weiss). Mothers became moms, “a more informal and exclusively familial role” characterized by young women with lots of babies and with little social utility outside the family, which Betty Friedan’s seminal book, The Feminine Mystique, would describe as the absence of any real identity (Plant, 12; Friedan, chapter 1).

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Introduction

American culture has long supported motherhood as a sacred status as well as something constantly policed. Marmee, mother to Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy in Little Women, was gentle, loving, selfless, and moral, a perfect true woman. Mammy, the stereotypical Black woman of Aunt Jemima advertisements and Gone with the Wind, tended White families with sass, handling the heavy-duty work of mothering, like cooking, freeing up Scarlett O’Hara’s actual mother to be frail and dithering. Mother’s Day, first launched around 1900, celebrated “good mother[ing]” with sentimental rhetoric and, increasingly, commercial enterprises (Antolini, quotation from 2). The classic 1916 song, “Mother,” praised a “heart of pure gold,” sacrifices, tears, and mother love. Jazz Age culture often distinguished between young flappers out to have a good time and their mothers, who could be too stern, too puritanical, or just nurturing depending on the movie, book, or song. The Depression brought sacrificing mothers like Ma Joad to the movies and novels; a portrait enhanced by World War II. Yet, contradictorily, the idea of bad mothering solidified then, reflecting social concerns about women stepping beyond their places. “The ‘evil woman’ trope has a well-established history,” as Kristi Rowan Humphreys has noted, the very opposite of the good woman whether she be a femme fatale, a witch, or the “unruly” woman who makes trouble (Humphreys, 3; Rowe). Especially in moments when we, as a society, are uncomfortable about women’s changing possibilities, the culture creates evil twins, female characters to serve as cautionary tales. The bad mother can go one of two ways, too involved or not involved enough in her family life, a smotherer or a “refrigerator” (Plant, chapter 1; Zeavin). Either way, the sin committed by these bad mothers is that they put their own needs and wants selfishly ahead of their families’. Blossom’s absent mother, pursuing her career as a singer in Paris, falls into the second category, a mother who lacked the appropriate amount of attachment to her children. Too much concern for the self contradicts what sainted motherhood is supposed to be about: sacrifice, nurture, and selflessness. In this book, the crucial moment in time that launches a thousand changes and brings the question of maternal selfishness to the foreground is the 1960s. During the 1960s, a lot changed in American society, often described as a set of “revolutions” against the implicit hierarchies that had defined the nation as a White patriarchy. Women, people of color, poor people, and LGBTQ individuals demanded inclusion, justice, and equality. Governmental, cultural, and religious leaders lost authority as more diverse and inclusive counterinstitutions undermined traditional practices. A counterculture and a sexual revolution helped to shift at least some American mindsets toward pleasure and freedom and away from that classic middle-class virtue touted by sitcom parents, delaying gratification (Isserman and Kazin). In the 1970s, with the

Introduction

5

first stage of the “revolutions” done, Americans turned to the second stage, assimilating change into everyday life (Kutulas, After Aquarius Dawned). As changes percolated through American society, countercurrents also emerged, countercurrents designed to stop change; countercurrents that have evolved over time; countercurrents that represent, as Andrew Hartman titled his book, “a war for the soul of America,” a series of culture wars (Hartman; Self; Faludi; Sandbrook). Women’s roles are at the center of many of the cultural clashes of the last decades. Second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s encouraged women to think beyond the notion that wife-and-motherhood was “true feminine fulfillment” (Friedan, 5), to find more in their lives than nurturing and serving others. Second-wave feminists pressed to codify this something more with access to abortions, equal pay, equal access to education, and protections from violence. Second-wave feminism tended not to be very kind to the housewife, however, leading to movements to assert and protect what some characterized as a natural predisposition to mother (Schlafly). The Moral Majority, founded in 1980, recognized how important television was in shaping norms. It campaigned against programming that its evangelical Christian leaders deemed undermining of the family. The Reagan-era backlash emerged at the same time, suggesting that while women had choices, some were better and the best of all was wife and mother (Faludi). Gender issues remained in the forefront with the emergence of soccer moms and angry White men in the 1990s and beyond (Hartman). In the present day, abortion fights and fights over transgender care raise questions about motherhood and its responsibilities. As new, socially sanctioned, options for women have emerged, sitcoms have helped to popularize them, leading away from the simple stereotypes of the 1950s sitcom, the efficient-but-man-hungry secretary or the nurturingbut-secondary mother. Across time, sitcoms have made room for a wider variety of mothers as well as, increasingly, tolerated more less-than-perfect ones. Television depictions of women have, thus, shifted from a few to many and from paragons to more-resonant-because-they-are-real mothers. These transformations not only reveal social changes; they are also the functions of changing industry practices. “Blossom Blossoms” could not have existed much earlier than it did. Its once-taboo subject, menstruation, had become common on programs because there was more public tolerance for popular cultural references to it, because there were sitcom creators who wanted to make mainstream feminist programming (Dow), and because television censorship rules had slowly fallen away. When Blossom’s creator (Don Reo) decided to make his main character a teenage girl, he added female writers to his staff to gain authenticity for the stories (Zurawik). One target audience for the show was that of teenage girls; he could not assume that a family story,

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Introduction

especially one with a teenage girl at its center, would draw the big audience that The Cosby Show did. The decision to include a dream sequence dependent on viewers’ knowledge of another sitcom as well as the tropes of sitcom motherhood was indicative of writers’ confidence that audiences had cultural knowledge and would appreciate an episode that was self-aware, ironic, and playful. They were “familiar with TV conventions” and watching with a touch of irony (Nussbaum, “When Episodes Could Still Be Very Special”). Reo and his staff of writers also included tropes, stereotypes, and archetypes the audience would recognize, a wisecracking post-menopausal woman, a kind-but-bumbling father, and some goofy brothers. All these tropes and practices—the stereotypical characters, the attention to audiences, the growing sophistication of presentations, and the changing styles of humor—will also be moving parts in my evolving story of sitcom mothers. This book is organized into chapters that move roughly chronologically through representations of sitcom motherhood, although some crucial sitcoms extend across the decades. I begin with how and why the conventions of the 1950s stereotype emerged in the late 1950s, but quickly became overwhelmed with the more interesting exploits of nearly everybody else, fathers and men who acted as mother-substitutes, witches, genies, monsters, and hillbillies. Sitcoms were slow to incorporate the revolutions of the 1960s into their plots, but by the 1970s, in pursuit of the baby boomer demographic, networks attempted to reflect their interests and points of view, often-fractured families with more young adults grappling with generation gaps that included older mothers with a toxic form of old-style mothering. The Cosby Show revived the family sitcom in the 1980s and updated it, with more diverse families and Clair Huxtable–like mothers who, to borrow from the parlance of the times, had it all—perfect families, perfect houses, and satisfying careers. These shows competed in the 1980s and 1990s with a rash of more sophisticated programming, much of it aimed at women, series like Murphy Brown, Designing Women, and Cybill that were infused with some mainstream elements of feminism and provided a woman’s point of view. Simultaneously, though, were shows specifically aimed at audience segments who preferred their families to be more old-fashioned, especially in their gendering. The 1990s brought us a rash of friends-as-family stories that consigned mothers to secondary—generally disruptive—status. Everybody Loves Raymond, though, constituted another sitcom reinvention, a throwback comedy about a family that also questioned traditional roles. Just as Raymond faded, Two and a Half Men updated the family sitcom dynamic and a few years later, Modern Family modernized its format. Sitting as they do today on a raft of platforms and networks, motherhood stories in the twenty-first century are varied and, often, specific, yet many of the same tropes and conventions still enable us to see the sitcom mom’s origins. Motherhood used to just be in American

Introduction

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society, a ubiquitous and natural way of life for women. Today it is examined, questioned, and dissected in real life as well as in its small-screen varieties. Like any attempt to explain social phenomena, mine has biases. I am a US historian by training, but someone whose interests and professional experience are also with gender, television, and film. I am White, a baby boomer, and grew up middle class and suburban watching shows like Leave It to Beaver. I got the generational strife present in 1970s programming, including mothers like Rhoda’s or Mary’s (The Mary Tyler Moore Show) who really didn’t understand their daughters’ more ambitious single lives. I gravitated to what was sometimes called feminist TV in the 1980s and 1990s because its characters experienced things I did, like careers and older motherhood. Murphy Brown and I had our sons at about the same time; sitcoms like hers frankly shaped my expectations about what giving birth would be like. With my children, I watched some quirky mothers in the 2000s, like Lois on Malcolm in the Middle, Lucille on Arrested Development, and Modern Family’s Claire and Gloria. I learned about The Middle’s Frankie while watching with my mother and sisters as my mother lay dying, a nightly moment that truly affirmed that the essence of the family sitcom is comfort and nostalgia. There are always going to be quirks in my interpretation because I am not outside the culture, but irrevocably inside it in a privileged position. Even if my perspective is scholarly, that does not make what follows without biases. It is obviously impossible for me to watch every sitcom with a mothering story. I have mostly stuck to mainstream shows that lasted at least a couple of seasons. I haven’t specifically focused on animated shows or those comedies created for the preteen Disney and Nickelodeon markets, but I have tried to address how they might have influenced other kinds of shows. I have avoided hour-long dramadies, like Gilmore Girls, and mostly avoided halfhour streamed dramadies, although, again, I certainly mention their impact as relevant. I have not ruled out a crucial program, The Cosby Show, because of the crimes of its creator, but I would like to acknowledge the horrors imposed on his victims by someone once labeled “America’s dad.” Because sitcoms have rarely departed from the binary, I have relied on their categorization of mothers as people assigned as female at birth. I have tried to project what I’m seeing onto what I know about the times as a historian and to find meaning and draw conclusions, keeping in mind that, like any other part of popular culture, there will always be counterexamples. It is my job as a sitcom scholar to identify the trends and explain them, so this is not one of those books that lovingly describes each show or catalogs their best episodes. Rather, it is intended to help us understand how something as seemingly frivolous and entertaining as a situation comedy can both shape and be shaped by our experiences and realities.

Chapter 1

Worrying in Pearls Defining Sitcom Motherhood in the 1950s

“Ward, I’m worried about the Beaver,” is a catch-phrase millions of older Americans recognize from their childhoods, uttered by the fictional, yet influential, character, June Cleaver from Leave It to Beaver. She said it to her husband Ward with a concerned look on her face, perfectly capturing the role American society—and sitcoms—imagined for post–World War II women. If pressed, most people who remember June recall her pearl necklace and high-heeled shoes, that she spent a lot of time in the kitchen, and that she worried, often for good reason, about her two sons, Wally and Theodore, the latter nicknamed Beaver and the star of the show. She certainly didn’t get into any of the silly trouble Beaver did; nor did she usually solve his problems (Ward did). But she worried and nurtured and intuited when something was wrong with her family. She and Ward co-parented in a gendered manner, her job being to observe and then act as the sounding board for the solutions he would take to their sons. When people reference June as a stereotype—and they clearly do, as her name is part of the title of more than one book—they inevitably mean the larger set-up that allowed her to exist: the privilege, the status, the money, the security, the whiteness, even the locale and the house that supported the Cleaver family. Regina Corso of Harris Polls explained her appeal thusly: “she stayed at home and was there when the kids got home and had cookies and milk” (Corso, as quoted in “June Cleaver, Clair Huxtable”). For a lot of Americans, the absence of big drama in the Cleavers’ lives was what made Leave It to Beaver appealing. June Cleaver was a cultural stereotype during an era when conformity prevailed in American society, albeit a time when powerful traditions and values had already started to weaken, which was one of the reasons June came into existence. She was wholesome, perfect, maybe a little sweetly naïve about the real world, but generally insightful about people. As the New York Times 9

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obituary for the actor who played June, Barbara Billingsley, noted, June “baking a steady supply of cookies, she would use motherly intuition to sound the alarm about incipient trouble . . . in their immaculate, airy house in the fictional town of Mayfield.” She became “a cultural standard, one that may have been too good to be true but produced fan mail and nostalgia for decades afterward” (Pollak). How she rose to such prominence despite being tucked away in the kitchen, sensitive to her sons’ emotions but befuddled by their choices, speaks to the power of the situation comedy to deliver fantasies as well as norms to the American public. Once established, 1950s family sitcoms depicted “the way things should be” (Croker, 22), not the way they were to a generation of Americans willing to conform in exchange for security and material comfort. The series reveled in “the details of kid stuff” (Gerard Jones, 124), drawn from its creators’, Bob Mosher’s and Joe Connelly’s, childhoods. In this nostalgic environment created by men, June modeled a version of motherhood that was so selfless that her needs, even her identity, didn’t need to be addressed. She was “just a housewife,” a phrase that feminist Betty Friedan would make infamous in her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, someone who lived for others and lacked an identity of her own. June Cleaver has been remembered across generations, but more for her pearls and her worries than her identity or personality. What’s true of June was true of those other sitcom mothers who helped to define the ideal maternal figure during the days of the classic family sitcom. Margaret Anderson’s secondary status was signaled by the very title of the show on which she co-starred, Father Knows Best. Another contemporary show might have been called The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, but nearly all of Harriet’s adventures seemed to occur in the kitchen. Donna Reed was the title character as well as married to the head of the production company that created The Donna Reed Show, giving fictional Donna Stone more scope, perhaps, yet the real Reed was still frustrated by her “wholesome” reputation (Humphrey, “Donna Reed”). The June Cleaver stereotypic mother had to serve, both literally and figuratively. Her role was written, not to showcase, but the opposite, so she could hover in the background while other, less selfless family members disrupted family harmonies that could then be put right by episode’s end. That limited the ideal sitcom mother’s TV function because, as Reed herself conceded, there were “only so many ways to hover” (Reed, quoted in Humphrey, “Mom”). Her selflessness was what made Americans admire, but maybe not aspire to be, just a housewife like June. Situation comedies had several radio roots, including “dialect” radio comedies (Mama, Amos ‘n’ Andy), musical-variety programs, and family stories that were themselves hybrids of soap operas and comedy (Marc, “Origins”). Migrating from radio to television came two early family comedies, The Goldbergs and Mama, that better spoke to audiences in the 1930s than the

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1950s with their “nostalgic recapitulations of America’s assimilation of European immigrants” (Gerard Jones, 45). The popularity of these programs reminds us of just how many immigrants entered the United States between the 1880s and 1924, when restrictions began to limit their number, and how many of those immigrant-led families might have relied on radio’s family comedies—as well as the commercials within them—to master American culture. The Goldbergs and Mama were sentimental and sweet, demonstrating that hyphenated Americans valued the same things as did native-born Whites, but had some amusingly quirky old-country ways and humorous misunderstandings of American culture. The mothers on these programs were tender and loving and strong. Mama, noted Lynda Glennon and Richard Butsch, was “a figure of dignity . . . [and] the inspiration for the rest of the family” (Glennon and Butsch, 267), equally true of Molly Goldberg. Both reflected a common trope during the Depression and World War II, strong, older, often amply sized maternal characters who, like The Grapes of Wrath’s Ma Joad, selflessly took care of others. But in the real world in which the viewers who first found June and her sitcom friends so compelling were raised, American women sometimes seemed to have a little too much power and authority. However much social engineering attempted to push married women from the 1930s workplace, it was gendered and men couldn’t—or wouldn’t—fill women’s jobs. More married women left the traditional maternal role and stepped into the workplace or led their families altogether. Later, with millions of young men off fighting World War II, a lot of women, young or older, single or married, worked outside the home. So too did many assume leadership of families with all that entailed, making parenting decisions as well as financial and logistical ones. Across the middle of the twentieth century, very mixed messages emerged just as the first members of the so-called silent generation (born 1928–1945) became teens: that women were natural mothers, but needed to pay heed to experts; that they should devote themselves to their children, but that too much devotion was unhealthy for their children and could even turn their sons into homosexuals (Coontz, “When We Hated Mom,” Plant, chapter 1; Ehrenreich and English, chapter 7). Masculinity felt weakened at war’s end, as soldiers shifted from the battlefield to offices where they needed to fit in and get along, documented in cultural products like The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and The Organization Man. The suburbs, as the 1956 bestseller Cracks in the Picture Window warned, were in danger of becoming “a matriarchal society” (author John Keats, quoted in Coontz, “When We Hated Mom”). At the very same moment when American women were having a record number of babies, motherhood itself was a bundle of paradoxes, and women who stepped out of their natural roles were deemed a threat to men.

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In the early days of television, the few family comedies that existed often migrated from radio to the new medium, like The Goldbergs and The Life of Riley. As The Beverly Hillbillies’ creator and radio writer for another radioto-TV import, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, Paul Henning, recalled, “you could do . . . [a] lot of stuff back then, because nobody knew what a sitcom was” (quoted in Marc, “Origins,” 10). An early family comedy like Mary Kay and Johnny, might be improvised, broadcast live with blurry kinescope feeds to the western half of the country, and not subjected to much network scrutiny. The new form was still exploring its possibilities. The strong ethnic mothers on The Goldbergs and Mama migrated to early television. Alongside them were comedies like The Life of Riley about workingclass families where wives and mothers were the sensible counterparts to husbands whose failure to face adulthood explained the family’s economic insecurity (Cantor). Marital comedies, like The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show or Life with Elizabeth, demonstrated that men and women were very different, but that love helped them overcome those differences. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the sitcom format wasn’t yet stable, making more things possible in the universes those series created, but, overall, they had little influence on American tastes as television sets were still not in most homes. In the end, though, most of the radio transplants were ill-suited to a new age, and one of the main reasons why was that they were out of step with post-war American values and norms. Visually, their home spaces were meager, failing to encourage consumerism, and their frames-of-reference were out of date. Families like the Goldbergs lived in apartments in cities when roughly a third of all Americans—the ones who mattered most to advertisers—lived in the suburbs (Lipsitz, 356, 359). At a time when the middle class was expanding, the economy was growing on the twin pillars of consumerism and cold war technology, and a baby boom necessitated that women occupy domestic spaces laden with consumer goods (May, chapter 7), these early sitcoms offered weak platforms from which to advertise post-war American plenty. And advertising, of course, was at television’s center, what paid the bills. The situation comedy that fully reoriented the genre from radio to television and established many long-lasting sitcom conventions was I Love Lucy. Created by its stars’, Lucille Ball and husband Desi Arnaz’s, newly founded production company, Desilu Productions, it shifted the sitcom industry’s home from New York to Southern California and its product from kinescopes to film that could be rerun. Its structure, two acts with commercials in the middle, established the typical sitcom format. It was filmed before a studio audience with three cameras. Its formula, a rupture in family harmony resolved by the episode’s end, defined plots for years to come. The series was

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also a battle-of-the-sexes comedy, with Lucy and neighbor Ethel squaring off against husband Ricky and Ethel’s husband Fred, over money, status, and gender roles. Its success launched a sitcom wave of “zany” wives who taxed their “patient and understanding” husbands on shows like I Married Joan (David C. Tucker). Nearly all of I Love Lucy’s most famous moments addressed husbands’ and wives’ dissatisfaction with each other, but Lucy also found women’s roles limiting. She resisted, albeit mostly performed, the housewife’s role, although she was constantly chided (and on at least one occasion, spanked!) by Ricky for wasting money and spending too much time gossiping and shopping. Typically, in the gendered battles that drove plots, Lucy disturbed the domestic peace by performing some task for which she was completely unsuited, making candy, stomping grapes, doing ballet, pretending to be Superman. The Ricardos’ interactions were that of child and parent, with Lucy behaving as a child, only to be “out-maneuver[ed] and controlled by Ricky” (Glennon and Butsch, 268). America loved Lucy, making it the number one program in the USA. It was also successful in selling merchandise, “Desiloot,” in Variety’s phrasing (Sanders and Gilbert, 71), including furniture, flooring, clothing, matching his-and-her pajamas, and I Love Lucy comics (Mellencamp, 39; Marling, 5). Yet when Lucille Ball found herself pregnant as the series was about to begin filming its 1952–1953 season, sitcom motherhood was about to become big news, and controversy. Lucy’s pregnancy was not the first on a situation comedy; it was actually Mary Kay Stearns’s on the 1947 live series, Mary Kay and Johnny. These were television’s early days and the show existed in a more free-wheeling, less corporate environment. When “visibly pregnant” Mary Kay (Mary Kay Stearns in “Interview”) got tired of hiding herself behind chairs, husband Johnny, who also wrote the series, “matter-of-factly wove the pregnancy” into episodes (Genzlinger, “Mary Kay Stearns”). The sponsor (Anacin) was fine with blending the Stearns’s facts with their fiction. The audience sent gifts for the baby. Ten days after he was born, son Christopher made his first appearance on the series. Given the eagerness with which networks looked for anything to fill hours of programming and the improvised nature of the early medium, Johnny Stearns had relative freedom to do things his own way. Eventually, he felt hemmed in by the limits of network production, and Mary Kay and Johnny left the air. Even in its more free-for-all early days, though, television abided by the same code of conduct as did the movies, one that prohibited mention of sex, conception, passion, or the physical process of childbirth (Kirby), which meant that sitcom children usually didn’t arrive as infants. The Motion Picture Production Code that had been put into place in the 1930s might not have applied to television, but even tighter standards prevailed. TV, after all,

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relied on an “undifferentiated mass audience” watching from their homes (Taylor, Prime-Time Families, 24). Because the medium was so dependent on advertisers’ funding, self-censorship persisted longer than in other parts of the popular culture. No sponsor wanted a pregnant woman hawking their cigarettes or advertising in a story that might lead a child watching to ask their parents where babies come from. The creative types at CBS Television, I Love Lucy’s network, might have worried about fitting motherhood into the series’ premise, but their executives were more alarmed by how the sponsors would react. The advertising agency that handled sponsor Philip Morris’s account initially handed down an edict: “you cannot show a pregnant woman on television” (Sanders and Gilbert, 65). They suggested hiding Ball’s growing mid-section behind things. Executives at Philip Morris were equally insistent that Lucy couldn’t be pregnant on “their” show, putting pressure on CBS. It took an angry letter from Desi Arnaz reminding everybody that, hitherto, his creative gambles had paid off with high ratings to keep Lucy from hiding behind couches and holding bags to her pregnant belly (Kanfer, 154). Even then, Arnaz and Ball had to compromise on the number of episodes featuring Lucy pregnant. A priest, a rabbi, and a minister—which sounded like the beginning of a joke—screened each pregnancy episode for appropriateness (Sanders and Gilbert, 65–66). The I Love Lucy pregnancy episodes reinforced the ideas of gender difference consistent with a marital comedy as well as prevailing cultural norms. From the moment Ethel interpreted Lucy’s “dauncy” feelings as a potential pregnancy until Lucy finally told Ricky she was pregnant, there was a look of dazed bliss on her face and even tears in her eyes (I Love Lucy, “Lucy is Enceinte,” 1952). Her actions elicited concern, confusion, fear, and sometimes alarm or horror from those around her. Ricky’s eyes comically bulged as she urged him to add sardines to her sundae (I Love Lucy, “Pregnant Women are Unpredictable,” 1952). She, however, was uncharacteristically calm about her blessed event, even mothering Ricky as they arrived at the hospital. That same aura of quiet confidence and gentle maternalism that pregnant Lucy manifested established a pattern that sitcom maternity stories would follow for years (Kutulas, “Do I Look Like a Chick?”). Reconciling Lucy as mother, though, with zany Lucy who so recklessly fought against gendered limits with outrageous acts became an ongoing series challenge. However much network bigwigs, sponsors, and advertising agencies feared what a pregnancy would do to the show, it turned out to be what I Love Lucy head writer Jess Oppenheimer called “a hell of a gimmick” that boosted the series’ already-high ratings even higher (Kanfer, 154). Merchandising enterprises followed (Mellencamp, 39). Ball and Arnaz’s infant son, Desi Arnaz Jr., graced the very first cover of TV Guide. But Oppenheimer’s

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gimmick did not suggest itself to other series as a pathway to higher ratings. For one thing, it was disruptive of the series’ production. More importantly, although none of the writers directly articulated it, the series needed to make some subtle shifts, from a marital comedy full of battle-of-the-sexes’ humor to a story about family. Overtly, I Love Lucy changed little. She continued to wage her war against housewifery. Sometimes, the stories focused on parenthood; but for every episode where Lucy was a mother, there were five or six where Little Ricky was barely an afterthought. When the Ricardos and the Mertzes went to Hollywood, Lucy’s mother was in charge of the baby, leaving Lucy free to chase celebrities. The couple had barely returned from Hollywood when they were off to Europe, with Little Ricky left behind. Even when the Ricardos and the Mertzes relocated from their New York City apartments to a house in suburban Connecticut, the stories focused on Lucy fitting in, not children. When compared to later family comedies on I Love Lucy, the “parent-child relationship was of minimal importance” (Douglas and Olson, 252). I Love Lucy’s almost-frantic number of venue switches was necessary to hold viewer interest. Sitcoms struggled to attract audiences in the latter 1950s as newer genres emerged, westerns, variety series, and game shows. The networks began to use focus groups, audiences they studied to gauge their reactions. Sponsors often called the shots, insisting on positive associations between attractive characters and their products and, increasingly, aiming their pitches at children, which could affect plots and characters. Danny Thomas may have been the star of his show, Make Room for Daddy (later, The Danny Thomas Show), for example, but his young stepdaughter, Linda, played by Angela Cartwright, was the reason why many young girls made their families watch the show each week and the Linda doll, available through a combination of Post cereal box tops and a few dollars, helped to sell a lot of cereal, so Linda got more screen time. Cute kids tended to be valuable additions to sitcom families as well as attractions for what was a growing part of the sitcom audience. Although the networks didn’t parse viewer demographics the way they would later, they already had their default audience in mind: White, middle-class, suburban families. It was from these new shows that the stereotypic June Cleaver mother would emerge. Lucy and Ricky’s move to the ’burbs spoke to a new way of life, one not possible for all Americans, but nevertheless constructed as the American dream. While millions of Americans remained in poverty and people of color struggled with segregation and injustice, the White middle class grew in size after World War II, many lifted by the GI Bill that made low-interest loans and education available to those who had served. That same middle class fueled a burgeoning consumer economy, cars and clothes dryers and television sets. The government favored them with policies and programs

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that benefited them, like a National Highway Act that made often-restricted suburbs easily accessible but left inner cities with a shrinking tax base. Promoting the middle class meant promoting an anti-communist ideology, suggesting that in this land of opportunity and democracy, everyone had comfort and security and the amazing wonders of the model kitchen Vice President Richard Nixon so famously brought to Russia in 1959 (Avila; May; Marling, chapter 7). This was a new way of life. Much as immigrants had relied on vaudeville, films, and radio to teach them American ways, members of the silent generation forming families in the 1950s looked to television to tell them how to be modern. These earnest—and very young—adults held sometimes contradictory notions about marriage: that it should be a joining of equals but that men should make all the bigger decisions and that women could contribute economically to the family unit, but shouldn’t. These young parents wanted to raise their children in comfort and without the sorts of compromises and adjustments their parents might have made. They were a generation reliant on experts, like pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose childcare manual was an enormous bestseller. Parenting, though, was something mothers engaged in and busy fathers had to be induced or persuaded to be a part of (Nancy P. Weiss; Jessica Weiss; May). Housewives relied on television for advice and visual cues, especially during the daytime, when they were the presumed bulk of the viewing audience (Spigel, Make Room, chapter 3). I Love Lucy was entertainment, but could sell many a “large piece of living room furniture,” the TV set (Stuart Miller, 143), while calling ever-greater attention to what the Ricardos wore, sat on, and even drove. Visually, sitcoms helped to normalize a particular style, one that dressed men for the workplace and made home a haven and a workspace for mothers. The structure that determined the value of any single program, the Nielsen rating system, relied on raw data, how many people watched at any given time. Yet who became a Nielsen family skewed White and middle-class, and marketing experts assumed they would be the most lucrative audience, so they imagined strategies to get them watching and producers imagined series they thought appealed to them. On most early programs, sponsors had disproportionate power over content. While they might appreciate the juggernaut of I Love Lucy, the show’s anarchistic gender roles were problematic and hardly in sync with notions of motherhood promoted in women’s magazines and by Freudian experts. The marital sitcoms of the first half of the 1950s gave way to family stories of the later 1950s that would extend into the 1960s. The shift remade sitcom wives and mothers, rendering them as selflessly servile to children that didn’t have to be the afterthoughts that Little Ricky was. Family as a unit and concept was at the center of these shows, each one shaded a bit toward different family members. Family sitcoms employed

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gentle humor, usually with a moral thrown in, a lesson about how family life and family members ought to be as well as many lessons about the value of sponsors’ products. On the new shows, there were no gender wars, no shouting, and no insults. The style of physical and verbal humor or wildly misplaced conclusions declined, replaced by innocent misunderstandings or brief bursts of selfishness on the part of one or another family member, all of which could be quickly resolved. Their central theme was raising children to fit in and get along, to understand rules and social conventions. Along the way, women lost the centrality they had on series like Life with Elizabeth, I Married Joan, or I Love Lucy, while “fathers gained prominence” (Mock, 33). While Lucy was still a ratings success, actor Robert Young and his producing partner, Eugene Rodney, decided to migrate their radio program Father Knows Best? to television. On the radio, the series’ title ended with a question mark, putting father’s wisdom in doubt. Young, however, had seen enough early television to know that he didn’t want his character to be a goofy father and he wanted a series with gravitas. Consequently, the show “relentlessly pursued social and political issues with a friendly, confident, authoritarian zeal” (Marc, Comic Visions, 46), offering mid-episode preachiness and morals at the end. Anderson was the voice of reason for three children who were “citizens-in-training” (Marc, Comic Visions, 49) while mother, played by Jane Wyatt, hovered and worried. Parenting was generally the subject on Father Knows Best, but a particular form of gendered parenting, one where, as the title unambiguously established, fathers knew best. The shift from marital comedies to family ones had begun. The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, similarly migrated from radio and was reshaped by the “authoritarian, almost dictatorial” attention of Ozzie Nelson (David Halberstam, as quoted in Tueth, 73). Ozzie the character was more laid-back than Jim Anderson, “the suburban father as democratic authority figure” (Tueth, 74). As “creator, head writer, producer, nearly sole director” of the series, however, Nelson controlled the content and presentation, even negotiating with sponsors. He presented the world as he wanted it to be seen, a world where everything was very clear and straightforward, including its gender roles. As Nina Leibman has argued, both Father Knows Best and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet were part of a larger cultural process, one designed to reposition modern fathers, not as tyrannical masters of their homes or absentee parents too consumed by their jobs, but as wise and central family figures (Leibman, chapter 5). The iron-fisted control over their series by male creators like Young or Nelson was gently encased in the velvet gloves of the fathers they portrayed, constantly available, always ready to listen, and full of wise counsel. They were precisely who companies wanted to head the series that they sponsored. They had education, character, and taste, and so did their

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The most didactic of the late 1950s family stories, Father Knows Best, elevated father to a position of centrality and authority after yet another crisis of masculinity, but left mother, played by Jane Wyatt, with little to do beyond hovering and worrying. CBS/Photofest.

families. They were intended to be aspirational for viewers, both as human beings and for the products their series sold. As Gerard Jones has noted, “As Father Knows Best did well in the ratings, it transformed sitcoms all around it.” No series was more relentless in creating its family as upstanding, moral, and practically perfect. In a fantasy sequence in one episode, “Father’s Biography” (1958), St. Peter welcomed Jim Anderson as the ideal family man and civic influence who deserved Heaven. “Moral lessons became an accepted, even expected, part of the form, even when the content didn’t seem to justify it” (Gerard Jones, 102). Few viewers could measure up to the Andersons, which was how Robert Young wanted it, and what sponsors liked, breeding insecurity and suggesting that their products could fix whatever ailed a family. Modeling gender for the parents who watched as well as their children was part of the package. Girls transforming from tomboys (younger daughter Kathy) to emotionally volatile young women (older daughter Betty) to nurturing mothers (Margaret) was the implicit growth arc for females. Over the span of the series, Kathy learned to dress and act like a girl, as well as how to manipulate boys while Betty explored college and career options until she finally “got her man” in one of the last series’ episodes (Jim in Father Knows Best, “Betty’s Career

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Problem,” 1960). There were a lot of messages about being female. An unmarried friend from Jim’s and Margaret’s college days with an illustrious career, for example, visited, explaining her career as unnatural and undertaken “to prove myself,” while Margaret had “everything a woman could ever want” (Father Knows Best, “An Extraordinary Woman,” 1959). Father Knows Best, thus, resolved any contradictions between women’s education or ambition and their domestic roles by sketching out their best pathway to success. Taking care of others, the show assured, was both fulfilling for women and their destiny. The Andersons lived in fictional Springfield, a town that had all the amenities of a city but none of its problems. Father Knows Best, like other late 1950s’ family sitcoms set in other fictional towns with generic names, illustrated “the proper manners for . . . suburban life” (Waldie, 62), including mothers’ roles. Margaret might talk about juvenile delinquency before the PTA, but never had to deal with it in real life. The Andersons’ home looked nothing like the average pre-fab post-war suburban homes where the show’s privileged viewers lived. Margaret only got dirty when it was crucial to a plot. She generally hovered over the breakfast table, an apron tied neatly around her shirtwaist dress. Sitcom suburbs combined old and new, spacious homes with hints of Colonial style filled with modern conveniences that were safe, pleasing, and away from the hustle and bustle of the big city, “cultural representat[ions] of the ‘good life’” (Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse). In such spaces, as historian Jessica Weiss has noted of real women, sitcom mothers served “to modulate the emotional content of the home” and facilitate “the ability of men to father” (Jessica Weiss, 93). Family stories like Father Knows Best and those that followed it featured fathers whose careers only temporarily got in the way of their full commitments to family life. Viewers used to joke that even though The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet ran for fourteen seasons, they never did find out what Ozzie did for a living. Instead, he sat in his cardigan, dispensing advice about things like basketball and fraternity dances to his sons, exchanging jokes with his neighbor, and sitting down to dinner. Unlike the actual suburban dad, who often came home too late and too tired to interact with his children, sitcom fathers were central family members. They contrasted with what Time magazine called the “bumbling, well-meaning idiot who is putty in the hands of his wife and family” on some earlier shows (“Daddy with a Difference,” 83). They psychically reclaimed fathers’ power after several decades of what felt like challenges to their familial centrality. They supported what sociologists, psychologists, marital experts, and doctors advocated, for men to serve as the heads, the brains, and even the moral arbiters of their families. That put the Harriet Nelsons or the June Cleavers of the sitcom universe in the secondary parenting role. Mothers “lost clout” (Marla Brooks, 3). Family

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sitcoms showed them noticing, observing, intuiting, as well as handling the domestic sphere with “love and the sense of duty that grows from it” (Marc, Comic Visions, 49). Like the true woman of the nineteenth century (Welter), these good 1950s mothers were domestic, moral, and instinctively feminine. June Cleaver mothers mostly confined themselves to feeding their families, hovering with a serving platter, and worrying about their children, worries they confided to their husbands, the people who actually solved the problems. In those households without mothers to handle the day-to-day stuff, homes devolved into the chaos of the Douglas household on My Three Sons. Similarly, without good mothers who were alert to their children’s psychological states, children acted out, as the family dynamics of the more provocative friends of the Cleaver boys demonstrated. This is not to suggest that sitcom mothers did nothing but cook and clean. As June’s iconic claim to be worried about her son indicates, she possessed maternal intuition and empathy, natural qualities in keeping with the psychology of the day, which held that motherhood was “a force of nature, an instinct” (Ehrenreich and English, 220) that mothers ought not to fight or resist. Helene Deutsch, a Freudian psychologist whose ideas shaped the midcentury medical community, argued that the “reality principle” of womanhood was sacrifice, that truly feminine women gave up any outside ambitions and submitted to the power of men (Deutsch, as quoted in Ehrenreich and English, 270). Parenting, in the 1950s, was significantly gendered, and while the mostly male writers of family sitcoms might not have read Deutsch or other experts, the ideas circulated widely enough that they wrote them into stories. As June once explained to Ward, who questioned one of her parenting opinions, “I use the tender approach. A woman gets results using her heart, not her head” (Leave It to Beaver, “Brotherly Love,” 1957). “I’m your mother,” June reminded Beaver. “I don’t always know what goes on in your head, but if you’re hurt or unhappy, then I don’t even have to guess . . . because I’m hurt and unhappy too.” June believed that mustering empathy was something “mothers do . . . better than fathers” (Leave It to Beaver, “The Silent Treatment,” 1963). Yet June and other 1950s sitcom mothers seemed to have a pretty good command of human behavior as well. It was June who realized that she and Ward couldn’t pry into older teen Wally’s romantic life any longer (Leave It to Beaver, “Wally Goes Steady,” 1961) and who understood the classic 1950s bad-boy, Eddie Haskell, explaining to Beaver that Eddie’s “polite business” was “sort of a camouflage .  .  . [that] cover[ed] up” a more insecure Eddie underneath (Leave It to Beaver, “Eddie Spends the Night,” 1961). While Jim was “ashamed” of Betty’s participation in an initiation ritual that got out of hand, Margaret had faith that Betty would “do the right thing,” confess to the principal, and accept her punishment (Father Knows Best, “Dilemma for Margaret,” 1956), which was exactly

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what happened. Sitcom fathers like Ward Cleaver or Ozzie Nelson lacked mothers’ instincts and intuition. Ironically, sitcom fathers in the late 1950s were often unable often to think beyond themselves, exhibiting what later sitcom wives would see as self-absorption. Their attitudes were usually tinged with nostalgia and linked their families to a glorious American past. When Jim and Margaret Anderson took daughter Betty to their alma mater on a college tour, he imagined Betty almost literally “following in our footsteps,” right down to taking the same classes (Father Knows Best, “Betty Goes to College,” 1956) and had real trouble accepting that she had her own ideas about where and how to go to college. Sometimes Ward got so caught up in his past that it caused trouble, like when he recommended a favorite childhood book to his sons, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, only to discover that in a more modern time, some of Tom’s choices were, as son Wally put it, “delinquent” (Leave It to Beaver, “The Garage Painters,” 1959). More than once, June put Ward back on track after he got lost in thinking about his childhood, which wasn’t always so wonderful, as he, like other sitcom fathers of the era, recalled the “woodshed,” but rarely mentioned what happened to them there (Mock, 37). Still, as Erin Mock has argued, children in these perfect family sitcoms of the era sometimes feared their fathers’ rage and were discomforted by their stoic notions of old-fashioned masculinity (Mock). Mothers’ selflessness made them less coercive and more willing to trust their offspring. Their parenting often began with them demonstrating a superior knowledge of their children’s emotions, as when Margaret explained to Jim that the idea of moving into an apartment was “glamorous” to an eighteen-year-old girl (Father Knows Best, “The Homing Pigeon,” 1956). Jim, though, did some heavy-handed moralizing about the value of home and how it was “instinctive in almost every living thing,” even reciting a poem and using the analogy of son Bud’s homing pigeon returning in a storm. Betty lasted exactly a day in the new apartment, discovering that roommates were messy and didn’t keep food in the refrigerator. Margaret was instinctively correct, but in the meantime, Jim had cited literature, history, and ethics, not to mention done a lot of mansplaining, dominating the episode with his overthe-top opinions. June Cleaver also had emotional sensitivity; but while loving, she didn’t always understand or know best, especially when it came to the interior lives of boys. Leave It to Beaver, more centered on children than other family comedies, suggested that the male animal was a mystery to her. Her sons’ hobbies, their love of all things dirty, and their choices of friends mystified her. She invited Beaver’s teacher to dinner without considering what embarrassment that invitation might cause him. She cried over the haircut Wally gave Beaver after Beaver lost his haircut money. When Beaver had to bring

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a childhood photo for a class display, she provided him with a naked baby picture that everyone else recognized was inappropriate. Wally, though, advised his brother not to complain for fear of making her cry. Instead, like a good big brother, he recommended that Beaver take his problem to his father. Ward instantly agreed that the photo was embarrassing and seconded Wally’s notion that June not be told at all. He separated Beaver’s head from the more-offending parts of the photo and sent Beaver off to school. “It sure is good when your father’s a friend,” Beaver concluded (Leave It to Beaver, “Baby Pictures,” 1959). The episode depicted June as her family saw her, naïve, emotional, and loving. The idea that she was resilient enough to handle Beaver asking for a different picture occurred to no one. The division of sitcom parental work between head and heart might make more sense for the fictional Cleavers than a family with girls, but family sitcoms of the 1950s and 1960s didn’t confirm this logic. On Father Knows Best, Jim’s den got less use than Ward’s did as a venue for dispensing advice, but his children, two girls and a boy, still appealed to him when they needed direction. It was father who advised Kathy to act more feminine to fit in better at junior high (Father Knows Best, “Kathy’s Big Deception,” 1960) and father who hatched the plan that let Betty compete in a track meet and be Flower Queen on the same day (Father Knows Best, “Betty, the Track Star,” 1957). When Betty had an emotional crisis about growing up just before high school graduation, Margaret was the one hemming her dress, answering phones, baking a pie, and otherwise holding down what Jim called “the home front,” while he correctly diagnosed and solved Betty’s angst, ironically by reading to her from Margaret’s high school diary (Father Knows Best, “Betty’s Graduation,” 1956). When her children expressed sadness that their mother had never won anything, Margaret opined that she was “perfectly happy cooking the meals to keep all you champions hale and hearty,” so they made her some medals rewarding her for service to them (Father Knows Best, “A Medal for Margaret,” 1958). The message these programs sent under the guise of entertainment was that fathers were important family members, family heads, and, most especially, integral to raising the next generation while mothers happily, instinctively, cleaned, served, sacrificed, and nurtured, their sentimental hearts sometimes getting in the way of logic, rationality, even morality on occasion. Social undercurrents of concern in the post-war era reflected, as historian Jessica Weiss has noted, “a fear of the consequences for children raised almost entirely by mothers” and Dr. Spock warned “that unless dad got involved in their rearing, the children would view mom as the boss” (Jessica Weiss, 88). Thus, it was crucial that viewers see these roles as natural, and sitcoms were part of that process. At a moment when rising numbers of corporate jobs sent men into offices that rewarded fitting in rather than leadership, sitcoms like

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Father Knows Best created the fantasy of control over the family. Sitcom mothers occasionally challenged those norms or turned out to be smarter than father, which tempered the message and helped viewers see enough imperfection to find verisimilitude in the portrayals. Yet, overall, late 1950s sitcoms like Leave It to Beaver, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and Father Knows Best were cultural texts that emphasized engaged fatherhood that was modern, replacing the stern and aloof father with a wise and understanding friend. Visual tricks quietly reinforced the gendered family dynamic where father knew best and mother provided secondary support. As Nina Leibman observed, 1950s sitcoms symbolically excluded mothers from meaningful conversations between fathers and children by using their seat at the family table for the camera while leaving them to “circle upstage, coffeepot in hand” (Leibman, 130). Keeping mothers in the kitchen likewise separated them from conversations taking place elsewhere in the house, in living rooms, dens, or even bedrooms. Kitchens were places where mothers could look busy without doing drudgework, where they might have conversations over washing up with their helpful spouses, and kitchens showed off what sponsors sold. Fathers got more run of the house, including the outdoor space as they puttered with their sons in the cleanest garages ever or tossed a softball back and forth in the backyard. Mothers just didn’t get much physical variety on early family sitcoms, which limited their impact and, seemingly, stunted their personalities. The classic family sitcom framing device reminded viewers that home, as Jim Anderson said, offered “security, shelter, and warmth . . . the things [humans] love” (Father Knows Best, “The Homing Pigeon,” 1956). At some point, the opening credits of Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, and Leave It to Beaver featured variations of the same theme, family members headed out the door in the morning, sometimes being handed a briefcase or a lunch box by mom, standing at the door to see them off. The implication was clear: mothers stayed behind to tend the safe haven of the home and didn’t have adventures. Only on The Donna Reed Show, which came slightly later in time than Father Knows Best and had a female lead, did a sitcom mother have other things to do. Later seasons of the opening showed Donna in a suit, gloves in hand, ready to head out the door herself. While elsewhere in the culture, wives might be depicted as lazy and self-absorbed, watching soap operas, eating bonbons, and gossiping with the other women of the culde-sac, sitcom mothers were atomized in their perfect homes and endlessly engaged in easy domestic tasks like baking cookies or straightening magazines on the coffee table. Their families’ well-being consumed all their time. Clothing reinforced the message. Sitcom mothers rarely wore pants unless they were picnicking or camping. Shirtwaist dresses neatly covered in aprons

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were their uniforms, again distinguishing them from lesser mothers, including real ones, who wore pants or the negative stereotype of the housewife who never got out of her bathrobe and curlers all day long. Unlike earlier sitcom wives, they neither lusted over luxury items like mink stoles nor were spendthrift when it came to hats. Sitcom mothers were also family clothing consultants, since it was within their realm of maternal competency. The new dress Margaret offered Betty—and Betty initially dismissed—became the costume Betty wore on a date with the engineering student, signaling her acceptance of her gendered role (Father Knows Best, “Betty, Girl Engineer,” 1956). On another episode, a houseguest, a young, hip newlywed, sat around all day in dungarees, smoking cigarettes, getting under Margaret’s skin, not just by her inappropriateness but because Margaret read them as signs of disrespect for her choices (Father Knows Best, “Woman in the House,” 1955). For Margaret and June and all the other mothers in family sitcoms, their costumes expressed their status, although the item that later represented 1950s sitcom mothers, June Cleaver’s ubiquitous pearl necklace, was a camera necessity to hide a “big hollow” in her neck, just as her high heels helped to put her in the same frame as the growing actors who played her sons (Barbara Billingsley, as quoted in McLellan). Plots also supported the message that women took pride and found comfort in taking care of others. Several years before Betty Friedan, in The Feminine Mystique, argued that American women lacked independent identities, Donna Stone (The Donna Reed Show), objected to the phrase “just a housewife,” but not what housewifery entailed (The Donna Reed Show, “Just a Housewife,” 1960), tasks which she performed automatically while railing against the term in her kitchen. In another episode, “Career Woman” (1960), she explained to the career woman in the title how satisfying she found her role, although, as Joanne Morreale has noted, “the word ‘sacrifice’ occurred repeatedly throughout the episode” (Morreale, Donna Reed), which to a more modern viewer perhaps reveals the underpinnings of what in 1960 seemed natural. Reed was the star of the show as well as a co-executive producer (with her husband), which enabled her character to be more engaged in her community than either June Cleaver or Margaret Anderson could be; yet there were limits. When she ran for town council, her husband grew tired of her never being home, causing him to declare “we need you more than the country does” (“A Woman’s Place,” 1963). Housewifery was a full-time job on family sitcoms, one only occasionally celebrated. Yet not one that looked all that strenuous. When something untoward intervened, driving mother from the home, she might rush in the door lamenting the fact that she hasn’t had time to make the beds or that dinner might be a little late, but few TV housewives did much housework. Several series even suggested that someone else might be doing some of the work, although

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Harriet Nelson “no longer had the assistance of a maid that she had enjoyed on the radio show” (Tueth, 74). On earlier marital comedies, a common plot was a husband’s messiness, which provoked endless fights on I Love Lucy. The good husbands of family comedies were much neater, even helping by drying dishes after dinner, a common moment for June to confess to Ward her worries about Beaver. Once, while planning a two-week vacation, Ward looked forward to lazing around, to which June tartly added, “while I’m cooking the meals, making the beds, and cleaning the cabin,” but she noted that she would “love every minute of it” (Leave It to Beaver, “Untogetherness,” 1962). Loving housework was apparently the more important element than actually doing it, which was left for the struggling housewives in the commercials within the shows. The family where father knew best and June Cleaver nurtured existed because mostly White men created family sitcoms, cold war ideology posited that the American family was the strongest bulwark against communism, and sponsors only wanted their products associated with whiteness and consumer bounty. “Male power and privilege” (Morreale, Donna Reed) and the prejudices and assumptions of those with power and privilege dictated sitcom standards and stories. Even as cracks began to appear in the perfect American façade as the first actions of the civil rights movement followed the Brown decision (1954), as sociologists and economists exposed the persistence of poverty in the nation, and critics suggested that the nation had been pacified by consumer goods while the Soviets were making marked advances in science and technology, sitcoms focused on what they believed their imagined audience wanted to see. Father Knows Best co-producer Eugene Rodney emphasized that what their viewers reveled in were stories about the little moments of life, like “family relations, allowances, boy and girl problems” (Rodney, as quoted in Haralovich, 116). Because the sitcom was a commercial product dependent on advertising, June also had to be constructed as a model consumer. She needed to live in a visually alluring space that was aspirational, the better-than-mine-but-attainable norm that continues to predominate on sitcoms nearly seventy years later. Shows like Leave It to Beaver and The Donna Reed Show emphasized consumer goods for the benefit of the family and to ease mothers’ burdens, precisely the areas where real families put their money (May, 165–66). As art historian Karal Ann Marling has noted, television’s visuality provided “an absorbing sense of pleasure” that was “absolutely central to the meaning of the 1950s” (Marling, 5) and one of the ways many Americans constructed their aspirations. Certainly, this author, at a young age, and her sister, longed for bunk beds after seeing them on an early season of Leave It to Beaver. The plots of family sitcoms might have suggested that being an exemplary wife and mother was both natural and fulfilling; however, its female audience was

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unlikely to miss the consumer benefits that seemed to come with being like June, assuming, of course, that one looked like June and married the right Ward to provide the wherewithal to be modern and comfortable. The only other TV model for women was the single working woman, always competent, but minus the comfort, security, and bounty of her married counterparts. Schoolteacher Connie Brooks (Our Miss Brooks) lived in a boardinghouse and was perpetually short of money. Susie McNamara’s (Private Secretary) home space also lacked the splendor and space of the large two-story houses where the Nelsons and the Andersons lived. Their lives were more contingent and more public, generally in a big city. They lacked the ability to occupy the safe haven of the modern home, a space protected from the urban hubbub, the implicit threats of people of other races and income levels, and the necessity of venturing outside for entertainment and pleasure. Shows tended to support what a majority of Americans believed in the 1950s: that a single woman was an unhappy woman and that it was both her destiny and her pleasure to nurture a family. In many ways, though, the benefits of family for women reflected reality. Without equal pay and equal access to the public arena and with much social approbation about their status, single working women in the 1950s seemed, as Phyllis on The Mary Tyler Moore Show would later describe them, like “lost little lamb[s]” (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, “Phyllis Whips Inflation,” 1975), both economically and emotionally. Connie Brooks (Eve Arden) constantly connived to outsmart the principal at her school and to hook oblivious fellow teacher, Mr. Boynton. Her outright victories were few and far between; she usually settled. She lacked what historian Beth Bailey described as the “base of a pyramid,” a husband, on which she could build a comfortable and satisfying life full of things (Beth Bailey, 75). Television, as Nina Leibman has noted, “designed its programming to appeal to a pre-determined group of desirable consumers” (Leibman, 86). When it came to sitcoms, presumed family viewing, White, middle-class mothers were the key, the people most likely to make decisions about what their family ought to watch, an easy-to-facilitate part of what McCall’s magazine dubbed family “togetherness.” So too were they the more likely procurers of the smaller products coming into their homes regularly, like food, as well as the more informed part of the decision-making team about larger items, like couches and refrigerators. By offering aspirational models rather than realistic reflections of lives that were messier and much less perfect, family sitcoms invited what sponsors regarded as the most desirable consumers to dream, to scrutinize the sets, the products, and the clothing along with the stories. The family sitcom set, with its “deep-focus photography, .  .  . tasteful furnishings, tidy rooms, appliances, and gender-specific functional spaces: dens and workrooms for men, the ‘family space’ for women,”

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promised the female viewer freedom from “domestic drudgery” (Haralovich, 114). Commercials reinforced that promise, subtly cementing the equation of good mothering with consumer rewards, status, and the knowledge that your husband valued you enough to buy you the automatic dryer or dishwasher you saw on TV that would make your life as carefree as any sitcom mother’s. Dangling the social promise of security and happiness through the wifeand-mother role, family sitcoms were particularly powerful definers of typicality or keeping up with the Joneses in the parlance of the 1950s, both as consumers and individuals seeking to live modern middle-class lives. Viewers wrote letters lauding family sitcoms for improving their family dynamics, providing “a high moral tone,” giving parents things to talk about with their children, and something to watch together. A letter-writing campaign helped to save Father Knows Best, when its initial later-evening timeslot “was telecast too late to get many children viewers” (letter to Robert Young, letter to Barbara Billingsley, and TV Guide, all quoted in Leibman, 88–89). If some viewers found the little morality plays enacted each week on family sitcoms wearying or were frustrated by the absence of people who looked or sounded like them, it was still possible to find something in the viewing that resonated. The level of didacticism varied from sitcom to sitcom, Father Knows Best being the most portentously moralistic, while My Three Sons, which lacked a mother, featured a more believable version of domestic improvisation and flexibility when it came to family problem-solving. Family sitcoms left their mark on the nation, visually reinforcing social messages about gender, race, and class. Also present in those family stories were portraits of marriages that followed “shifting codes of marital behavior and responsibility,” making both marital partners into a team (Jessica Weiss, 40). This pattern was more familiar to women than to men, who were less likely to read women’s magazines or take a marriage preparation class. Family sitcoms offered a modern take on interpersonal dynamics. Couples discussed family problems before acting, and when they didn’t, that too got discussed. After June suggested that she was worried about the Beaver, she and Ward strategized how he might handle discipline, just as Jim and Margaret did on Father Knows Best and Donna and Alex did on The Donna Reed Show. Men helped around the house, did things with their children, and were part of family outings, all satisfying fantasies for young mothers whose husbands might come home from work too exhausted to do much of anything but ask for their stereotypical pipe and slippers. The obvious respect and love couples in family sitcoms showed one another stood in strong contrast to the battle-of-the-sexes comedies from a few years earlier, where partners often seemed locked in competition. The partnership dynamic was one that younger women desired in their marriages (Jessica Weiss, chapter 1).

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For the millions of White ethnic Americans able, after World War II, to join the middle-class retreat into the suburbs, family sitcoms helped to shape notions of what both the middle class and an “American” lifestyle looked like. The children of immigrants who entered during the last wave of immigration that ended in the mid-1920s left their ethnic moorings behind as they moved up and out of enclaves like the Lower East Side of New York City. Actor Stanley Tucci, whose parents were the children of Italian immigrants, remembers a childhood in suburban Westchester partially defined by Italian customs and extended-family occasions, but equally shaped by the television shows he watched and the snack foods in his TV-themed lunch box that his mother came to recognize as a typical part of a middle-class American childhood (Tucci). At a time when conformity was a powerful force in life and most adults had grown up with some level of deprivation, sitcoms visually taught how to consume like Americans, including the commercials that touted national brands that represented their own form of democratization. Everyone with enough money and taste, after all, could buy Wonder bread, Gerber baby food, Ivory soap, and Tide laundry detergent. One reason why the June Cleaver ideal stuck around so long and with so much power had a lot to do with the 1950s American mindset and the newness of the medium. Americans were confident that their lives would be better than their parents’ were, but not always sure how to make them that way. Television, beamed into their living rooms and filled, at least in its sitcom incarnation, with people also building and sustaining families, felt right to them. They were not jaded or overly critical, but trusting. They appreciated the convenience of television as babysitter and family entertainment. They mastered the sitcom’s conventions and found comfort and security in them. They liked the ritual of gathering the family together to see what their favorite sitcom families were up to each week, something they could then parse a bit if the situation seemed familiar, or even if it didn’t. They regarded Father Knows Best or I Love Lucy as entertainment; they did not expect sitcoms to speak truths, but tell stories that felt true. Because television was such a new medium and options were few, families had but one set that everybody watched together. While the number of African Americans able to afford television sets was smaller, those who acquired them—and by 1960 more than three-quarters of American households had TV sets—watched actively, taking what was relevant to their lives, signaling to one another any sighting of a Black character, and yet often still finding models in what they watched. Neither courted nor regarded as a desirable part of the sitcom viewing audience, Black Americans still watched sitcoms, resisting what seemed wrong, unfair, or downright insulting, but absorbing possibilities. Civil rights activist Julian Bond recalled liking sitcoms as well as being frustrated by them, noting that TV “gave you

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pictures of a world that you could live in, so the possibility was there. You weren’t there, but you could be there, and in many ways it taught you how that world behaved” (Bond, as quoted in Croker, 24–25). Although it was news coverage of Southern injustices that would help to engage a nation, for many African Americans, sitcoms that mostly excluded them nevertheless whetted their desire for equality. Among the still-undifferentiated mass of sitcom viewers, the one group particularly affected by the symbol of the 1950s sitcom mother were members of the vast baby boom, Americans born between 1946 and 1963. They were the first television generation. So too were they the first generation that marketers directly courted in a significant way. They watched more television than their parents did and while there might be rules about what they could watch or if they could stay up late enough to watch it, they had a lot of influence over what a household watched in the earlier hours of prime time. Programmers sought to please them. Families with children were more likely to buy televisions in the 1950s than those without, adults who might continue to listen to the radio, go out in the evenings, or engage in other activities at home (Spigel, Make Room for TV, 60). Children sang commercial jingles and nagged their mothers to buy things they saw on programs that the other kids had in their lunches or toy boxes; they talked about programs at recess. With much less life experience and, in most cases, few real glimpses of how other families lived, what went on in the Cleaver or the Anderson households became a norm of sorts for many children. Whatever comfort or security or pleasure younger viewers felt watching family sitcoms, much of it emanated from mothers who were always there, always attentive to their needs, and always loving. Whether or not their families looked like the Cleavers or the Andersons, it was certainly a glorious fantasy, a happy, conflict-free home with parents who understood, cared, nurtured, and didn’t use physical punishment. Adults were better able to mentally question or challenge what they saw, recognizing the conventions of sitcoms for what they were, edifices on which to build loyalty through familiarity. Children, by contrast, used sitcoms to make sense of their own situations and understand how the world worked. Family sitcoms went out of their way to depict the smaller, easily resolvable crises of childhood in their twenty-two-minute frames, sharing struggles over school, friends, and responsibilities, with the children themselves articulating their concerns. The makers of Leave It to Beaver featured a child’s-eye-view of the world, familiar or at least desirable, accompanied by images of loving and secure parenting to make everything better. The necessity of conflict to drive a sitcom plot often meant that children confessed their misdeeds and concerns, whether to their siblings, friends, or parents, setting up precisely the chain of events that would cause June to be worried about the Beaver. For a

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child viewing such an episode, whether or not your family looked like the one you were watching or lived in the same comfort as a television family, it was easy to absorb the family roles themselves as normal. The 1950s sitcom mother ideal left its mark on many Americans, but most powerfully on baby boomers. The nearly perfect mothers in late 1950s sitcoms were popular when the larger number of boomers were still in elementary school, watching a lot of television, developing shared generational touchstones because of the ubiquity of television in most of their lives. The stay-at-home mother imprinted on them, even when it didn’t reflect their reality. Actor Rob Reiner recalled watching—and loving—all the family sitcoms of the 1950s. It was, he conceded, “an idealized version of suburban life” that “didn’t really exist, but we all wanted it to exist,” which meant the fiction could become confused as fact for many children (Reiner, as quoted in Croker, 21). Media scholar Laura Linder might analyze the specifics of 1950s family sitcoms, but recalled that, in the moment, they provided reassurance “that we were doing okay” (Linder, 64). Later, the degree to which baby boomers began to criticize and mock the 1950s sitcom stereotypes suggests just how much power they had over them, how much they defined, in an unthinking way, their sense of what mothers were supposed to look and be like. The true 1950s mother in a family sitcom was a bit of an ephemeral phenomenon, in part because the sort of comedy that required them existed in a particular moment in time and served a particular purpose, reinforcing an idealized portrait of the American family as seen through the eyes of culturecreators. In their vision, wives and mothers played particularly gendered roles, roles that freed them to perform the more meaningful parts of parenting and they could construct more-central sitcom fathers than their careers actually enabled. In the cultural moment in which those programs existed, women generally embraced this gendered vision themselves because of what it promised: marital partnerships, thriving families, creature comforts, and status. For Americans moving into the middle class and out into the suburbs, it could be instructive, and for those who couldn’t make their lives quite fit the possibilities June and Ward modeled, it was a glimpse of how their lives could be if America changed. Yet, at some level—and especially for children—what the stereotype of the sitcom family in which mom was an important, but secondary, character conjured for viewers was a vision of security and stability and love. And it was a combination of all of those things that would make the 1950s mother epitomized by June Cleaver such an enduring image, whether she was idealized, trashed, or subverted.

Chapter 2

Of Witches, Cars, and Mothers-in-Law The Fantastical Sitcom Mothers of the 1960s

An infamous single-season NBC series whose improbable premise was summarized by its title, My Mother the Car (1965–1966), reveals much about sitcom motherhood in the 1960s. Mother, aka Gladys, wasn’t a young suburban mother, but a dead woman reincarnated as a 1928 Porter touring car, as her son Dave discovered when she talked to him—and only him—through the car’s radio on a used car lot. Dave purchased his mother’s new earthly form, much to his wife’s puzzlement, and then struggled to keep her out of the hands of a collector, a sort of silent-film villain with a twirly mustache. Gladys suffered versions of human ailments as a car, getting drunk on antifreeze and temporarily experiencing amnesia after a fender bender. Unlike the younger sitcom mothers who happily stayed in the background, Gladys meddled and demanded, inducing her son to do things he would not otherwise do, including choices that risked his own family stability and safety. At a time when sitcom horses could talk and Martians stashed space ships in suburban garages, a mother reincarnated as a car didn’t seem the laughably doomed premise it does today. Indeed, the series’ reliance on fantasy reflected a creative strategy to avoid having to incorporate the many changes in American society beginning when it premiered. Sitcoms in the 1960s only cosmetically addressed 1960s “revolutions.” They did, however, slyly begin to question and undermine the sitcom mother’s perfection with cars, witches, and, especially, transgressive older women. Although sitcoms generally didn’t feature protest marches, sexual revolutions, or racial strife, domestic harmony, as Twilight Zone host Rod Serling might say, was nevertheless disturbed. As the Eisenhower years ended, the family sitcom suffered as a genre. Against a background of racial protests, failed rocket launches, and rising cold war tensions, the perfect TV families of the late 1950s—with their small problems—seemed stuck in the past. Their emphasis on “the proper solution 31

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of ethical crises” that trumped “actual humor” began to wear thin (Marc, Demographic Vistas, 15). Sitcom families like the Andersons or the Cleavers lived “relatively static” lives, inured from “cultural heterogeneity” as well as “real life” (Marc, Comic Visions, 134). Sitcoms competed, moreover, with enticing other options for viewers, theatrical releases, anthology series with taut dramas, quiz shows, variety programs that showcased everything from opera to Elvis Presley, sports, documentaries, enhanced news coverage, and westerns redolent with a romantic American past. On series like Leave It to Beaver, cute kids whose innocent misunderstandings allowed fathers to impart wisdom became teenagers and teenagers became young adults whose “biological aging determined the end” of the series (Attalluh, 106–7). Family sitcoms needed to adapt or lose their centrality, including mothers. By the 1960s, the vast majority of American households owned a television set; some owned two. That ubiquity finally altered who had the power to control what went out on the airwaves. Television was, by 1960, an enormous commercial venture, one whose range encompassed not just entertainment, but news and informational programming and sports. As the number of viewers rose, so too did the cost of sponsorship, putting it out of the range of most companies, who were no longer able to rely on stars to deftly hawk products in the middle of a show or exercise some control over content so directly. Network personnel, thus, gained more power to affect programming, even when it was made by independent production companies. Network programmers picked which sitcoms to broadcast and where to place them on schedules, and standards and practices departments policed them for content that they deemed problematic. Nielsen ratings determined the costs of advertisements, and sponsors matched their products to programs whose audiences seemed most likely to buy. For sitcoms, especially family sitcoms, the presumed audience was families, especially women and children. Mothers, traditionally households’ shoppers, were the principal targets of advertisements pitching household and personal care products, packaged foods, detergents, shampoos, and appliances. Sitcoms were one of the logical places for selling such things, often employing guilt and reward for housewives who used Wisk laundry detergent to avoid the dreaded “ring around the collar” on their husbands’ shirts or experienced the satisfaction of serving a yummy meal to an enthusiastic family with help from Chef Boyardee. Ads in family settings echoed the family roles depicted in sitcoms, duplicating the well-equipped houses and new-model cars in those stories. But as the nation divided over race, gender, and politics, meshing the privileged audience, the program, and the ads grew more challenging. By the end of the 1960s, the nation was pretty evenly split between citizens excited by social change and those attached to older ways. Many of the reasons for those splits played out on television news, which became a

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dinner-hour mainstay in a majority of American homes: civil rights marches, race riots, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy, a confusing war in Vietnam and growing opposition to that war, a woman’s movement, a counterculture, a Black power movement, the beginnings of the gay rights movement, and a sexual revolution, all reported by TV anchors like Walter Cronkite. “The revolution will not be televised,” declared singer Gil-Scott Heron in 1971. While he specifically referred to assertive Black voices, the lyric was apt overall, capturing the networks’ reluctance to embrace changing times on scripted series, especially in that most family-friendly of genres, the sitcom. Whether network executives wanted to face the national divide directly, though, it could not help but affect their programming strategies and sponsorship decisions. The divide was also a generation gap that raised questions about who to privilege within an audience increasingly inclined to disagree about choices, boomers or their parents. Members of the greatest generation (born 1901–1927) and the silent one that followed (born 1928–1945) were the people who paid for the TV set, but their baby boomer children and teens (born 1946–1964) often made family choices and they were too lucrative a market to ignore. Adults who grew up during the Depression and the Second World War tended to be careful with their cash, especially if their incomes were fixed or encumbered by mortgages and car payments. The oldest boomers, by contrast, delayed all the milestones that had consumed their parents’ incomes at early ages, marriage and parenthood. As they came of age by the mid-1960s, they demonstrated a willingness to buy products that signaled that they were modern, hip, and sexy, transforming the marketplace for everything from clothing to home furnishings (Kutulas, After Aquarius Dawned, 51–53). Was there a way of pleasing everybody? Television was at its apex as the “unchallenged leading medium” in the 1960s (Von Hodenberg, 2) and the sitcom revived during the decade as its most popular genre of program. Change could only be held back for so long. Federal Communications Commissioner Newton Minnow, in his “vast wasteland” speech, identified the weaknesses of American sitcoms, calling them “formulaic comedies about totally unbelievable families” (Minnow). If, as David Marc has suggested, the situation comedy “imbues the banal with potent allegorical force,” then as the American context started to shift in the early 1960s, the family sitcom’s version of ordinary lost a lot of its believability (Marc, Comic Visions, 133). The “trials and tribulations of children growing up” (Morreale, Donna Reed) had trouble competing with the heroic doctors, public defenders, and cowboys of drama series. Once sitcom children grew up, moreover, they lost a lot of their appeal. By the last season of Leave It to Beaver, Beaver was old enough to double-date with brother Wally, who was in college, just as the baby of the Anderson household on Father Knows

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Best was a teen and oldest daughter Betty finished college. Viewers who grew up with Wally or Betty had grown up themselves, but lived in a real world of duck-and-cover drills, teenage pregnancies, and youth civil rights activism, not malt shops and country club dances. Nor were young people as apt to take their gentle lessons to heart as their elders might have been when an eye roll seemed more appropriate. Network executives, noticing the decline of family sitcoms in the late 1950s, shifted gears. Several of the new family sitcoms released on the cusp of the new decade didn’t have mothers at all, justifying fewer lessons and more laughs as fathers and other mother substitutes attempted to handle what was culturally presumed to be mothers’ work. A spate of workplace-based series like I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster and Car 54, Where Are You? and military-based comedies like McHale’s Navy, F Troop, Gomer Pyle, USMC, and Hogan’s Heroes also mostly eliminated mothers from their stories. In the early 1960s, neither centering a family story on the antics of a teenage lothario (The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis) nor a beloved older character actor, Walter Brennan, in The Real McCoys nudged the family sitcom back into an upward cycle. Instead, that redemption came from a show that was something different, a hybrid, half-workplace sitcom and half-family show. Most scholars would agree that The Dick Van Dyke Show effectively reflected the changing times with its creation of a family that suggested the new president, John F. Kennedy, his family, and his milieu (Waldron, Marc, Comic Visions, chapter 3; Gerard Jones, chapter 7). Created by Carl Reiner, and greeted with critical acclaim and strong ratings, the series told the story of Rob Petrie, husband, father, and head writer for the fictional Alan Brady Show, a weekly comedyvariety show. Rob, wife Laura, and son Ritchie lived in a specific suburb, New Rochelle, New York, in a single-story ranch house decorated in midcentury modern style (Bennett, 75–79). Rob’s workplace was peopled with quirky characters, the mercurial Alan Brady; Brady’s sycophantic brother-in-law/ producer, Mel Cooley; and Rob’s cowriters, self-proclaimed “human joke machine” Buddy and single, man-hungry Sally. Rob’s wife Laura, played by Mary Tyler Moore, became a much-beloved sitcom character, but as Rob’s wife rather than Ritchie’s mother. One of the ways that The Dick Van Dyke Show updated the genre was to do away with the exemplary moralizing of the earlier family sitcom by reintroducing the marital comedy and modernizing it, hinting at both a sexual and a gender revolution. While June Cleaver’s most famous line—“Ward, I’m worried about the Beaver”—spoke to the centrality of motherhood in her life, Laura Petrie’s most famous, “oh, Rob,” suggests that her focus was on her marriage. Indeed, in five seasons, the series did roughly a dozen episodes that were about parenthood, barely more than the number of episodes exploring changing marital

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and sexual norms. Son Ritchie was often an afterthought with his absence rarely explained. Ritchie, moreover, wasn’t a charmingly naïve Beaver Cleaver type waiting to be filled with good values, but a whiny consumeristic kid. His signature line, “what did you bring me, Daddy?” demonstrated the importance of consumerism in the Petries’ lives (Morreale, The Dick Van Dyke Show). Unlike Beaver, but like millions of actual baby boomer children, Ritchie regularly watched TV, knew brand names, and begged for products. That small touch also helped to make the Petrie family relatable to a lot of viewers, both old and young. Laura looked modern and sexy in her Jackie Kennedy hairdo and casual slacks, but acted sometimes like a more-restrained Lucy Ricardo. She was eager to step outside her socially proscribed role as wife and mother. She got into all sorts of trouble that the good-wives of the last family sitcom cycle never would: opening up a package addressed to Rob that inflated into a boat, announcing on television that Rob’s boss wore a toupee, and getting her foot caught in a bathtub faucet at a swanky hotel during a romantic weekend getaway. Rob the comedy writer used her for inspiration, publicly constructing her as “a kook” (The Dick Van Dyke Show, “Ray Murdoch’s X-Ray,” 1963), emotional, jittery, and a little ditzy. Still, both Petries regarded their marriage as a “50/50” marital partnership (Rob on The Dick Van Dyke Show, “The Bad Old Days,” 1962). Her approach to motherhood, though, was only superficially different from the sitcom mothers before her. She deferred to Rob when it came to discipline. She was the psychological parent who could intuit when Ritchie was bullied or scared or had lied, the one who read Dr. Spock. The older family sitcom dynamic remained on The Dick Van Dyke Show as the Petries discussed Ritchie’s upbringing and disciplining, but then Rob talked to Ritchie or got to the bottom of the problem. Mary Tyler Moore did further the status of the sitcom mother sartorially as Moore insisted that a young mother like Laura would favor the costume for which the character became famous, her fitted capri pants. “Laura Petrie pants” became as culturally identifiable as June Cleaver’s pearls, but they were more problematic. CBS’s standards and practices department limited how often they could be worn, carefully policing what they regarded as the line between appealingly sexy housewife and sexpot, for Laura had considerably more sex appeal than did Margaret Anderson or Harriet Nelson. The Dick Van Dyke Show ventured into topical stories older sitcoms explicitly avoided: divorce, job loss, race, and religion. Plots resolved with more moral ambiguity and jokes rather than didacticism. When Ritchie came home with a black eye from a bully, for instance, the episode began much as it would on a perfect-family comedy, with Laura spotting the eye and urging Rob to take action. Just like on a similar episode of Leave It to Beaver, it was

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a girl who delivered the punch. On Beaver, June disappeared and while Ward tried to solve the problem, Beaver and the girl worked it out for themselves, suggesting that children instinctively got along (Leave It to Beaver, “The Black Eye,” 1957). On The Dick Van Dyke Show, Laura also faded from the scene while Rob tried to solve the problem and also failed. Instead of the lesson at the end, though, Ritchie revealed that he’d worked it out by giving the girl what she wanted, a kiss, which the girl pronounced “goofy” and Ritchie enjoyed. The episode ended with Rob demonstrating a goofy kiss to Laura, a quick shift to the playful sexual chemistry between the two actors (The Dick Van Dyke Show, “Girls Will Be Boys,” 1965). In other episodes, Ritchie learned about sex, his unusual middle name (Rosebud, a sly reference to Citizen Kane in another episode that also ended with Rob kissing Laura, this time with self-professed tooth-rattling vigor), used a dirty word repeatedly, and got pecked by a woodpecker. The tone in The Dick Van Dyke Show was more irreverent than the family comedies that preceded it. It felt modern and topical, challenged its audience to understand its jokes, and yet still managed to be silly enough to entertain children. When compared to The Dick Van Dyke Show, most of its sitcom contemporaries felt dated and static, whether it was the ways Beaver and his classmates stood before they addressed their teachers or the outdated clothing on Dennis the Menace. The plots, settings, and characters of family sitcoms had always been more nostalgic than modern; by the 1960s, the gap between them and viewers’ real worlds grew more obvious. So, the sitcom industry set about some gentle modernizing. One way of doing so was to replace the two-parent family with a one-parent one. Getting rid of mothers enabled that classic storyline of fathers or father-figures trying to handle women’s work, although there were sitcoms where mothers presided over families, like The Lucy Show. Broad physical comedy predominated on gender-switch sitcoms as Lucy put on a catcher’s mask for her son’s Little League team or My Three Sons’ Bub tied on an apron to cook dinner, “role-reversals” that entertained audiences (Cantor, 212). Fatherless families could be strapped for money that led to a lot of do-it-yourself disasters and motherless households could be a mess. Ghosts could appear and disappear (The Ghost and Mrs. Muir). The 1960s were a more informal, more flexible, less conformist time altogether and newer shows modeled that, dressing mothers in sneakers and jeans and allowing more chaos to reign in households like the Nashes (Please Don’t Eat the Daisies) as children and dogs ran amok. Another tweak was to focus more stories and even series on teenagers. Gidget and The Patty Duke Show featured teen girls who were “perky” and, thereby, not particularly interested in such “prescribed female traitslike being docile, obedient, apolitical, and sexually passive” (Douglas, Where the Girls Are, 103). Rock ‘n’ roll music persuaded teens to tune in, whether it was the

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end-of-the-episode songs by Ricky Nelson on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet or rockers Chad and Jeremy popping up as guests on Patty Duke and The Dick Van Dyke Show. That Girl told the story of a wannabe actor in New York City whose parents—especially her father—tried to monitor her. The generation gap slowly crept into comedies about families, gently distinguishing one generation from the other. Similarly, the ideas of the emerging feminist movement also found their way into sitcoms, acknowledging that motherhood wasn’t all vacuuming in heels and pearls and baking cookies in a perfectly clean, modern kitchen. The Patty Duke Show, for instance, tackled the ideas of a book having a national moment when the episode aired in 1964, The Feminine Mystique. It started with a version of the leaving-the-house ritual that opened so many family sitcoms of the 1950s, as each family member headed out for school and work. Each, though, asked mom Natalie to do something for them as they grabbed the lunches she prepared or the briefcases she remembered. Turning on the radio as she began her daily chores, the show she heard had as its subject housewifery and how unrewarding and unacknowledged it was. “They’re selfish,” she agreed as she listened, an epiphany that prompted her to disrupt daily life by not doing her job and telling her family she felt like “an unappreciated household drudge.” “I guess we all take a lot for granted sometimes,” conceded daughter Patty, vowing change. Then, in another reference to sitcom conventions, Natalie, earlier seen in full-out mother-hovering-over-thebreakfast-table mode, urged by her family, sat down and ate breakfast with them. As the moment that encapsulated her discontent approached, though, it was apparent that nothing had changed; each asked for a favor, making the episode title “Are Mothers People?” an open question (The Patty Duke Show, “Are Mothers People?” 1964). The series gave its usually secondary maternal character a moment where her point of view prevailed. It did so, though, in the most conservative of ways. Natalie was perfectly content with her role until the voice on the radio agitated her. She did not rebel against her family role so much as expect some appreciation for it. By fitting her story into the classic sitcom plot of harmony briefly disrupted and then restored, Natalie’s brief burst of proto-feminism was neatly contained. The Dick Van Dyke Show, meanwhile, took a gentle swing at the “biological” aspect of motherhood (Plant, 13), the maternal instinct. Convinced that son Ritchie was unwell because her maternal instinct told her so, Laura only reluctantly left him with a babysitter to accompany Rob to a party, something the episode characterized as mother/martyr versus woman having fun. They returned to find the family doctor, not because Ritchie was sick, but because the babysitter hurt herself. The story ended with Laura explaining how she knew something would happen, even if she got the specifics wrong. “I’m a woman,” she replied, “casting off the ubiquitous string of pearls” that had

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symbolically condemned so many earlier prime-time wives to a life of sexless domesticity and dangling them alluringly as she sashayed toward the bedroom in her little black dress (Waldron, 96). “Yeah,” Rob replied with a wolfish grin (The Dick Van Dyke Show, “The Sick Boy and the Baby Sitter,” 1961). Laura’s identity, at least in that moment, confirmed her as a sexual being as well as an intuitive mother. Sexuality gently found its way into the sitcom family story, carefully reflecting a conservative version of the sexual revolution while modernizing family stories beyond the conjugal twin beds of the 1950s. Darrin and Samantha Stephens (Bewitched) were the first TV couple to share a double bed and the chemistry between Morticia and Gomez Addams on The Addams Family was palpable, even to preteens. Laura “displayed unusual sex appeal for a TV character of that time” (Stark, 102), although not enough, apparently, to feel secure in her allure as several stories dealt with her jealousy or fear that another woman was interested in Rob. Wives’ wholesome sexiness contrasted with smart, sensible “working girls,” like Miss Jane Hathaway on The Beverly Hillbillies or Sally Rogers on The Dick Van Dyke Show, who dressed in tweedy suits and whose lives were filled with “pathos” (Morreale, The Dick Van Dyke Show) because they lacked husbands and children. As these were sitcoms designed for family audiences and as network censorship remained powerful, the emphasis wasn’t on sex so much as romance. Rob and Laura partook of a lot of parties, dinners out, and weekends away, with Ritchie invisibly watched by unnamed babysitters. Stories told of Laura’s old boyfriends and the fiancée Rob jilted, and flashbacks recalled their courtship and wedding. TV’s single parents had livelier dating lives; several even remarried during the 1960s. Sexy innocents popped up on shows like The Beverly Hillbillies, naïve women unaware of the impact they had on men or sometimes deliberate husband-poachers eager to seduce men away from their wives. More romance also equaled more lovers’ quarrels and marital instability. Sitcom romances, though, also included a lot of women pleasing men by being extra feminine or extra helpless, the emphasis being on women acting as pleasers, not the men (Humphreys, 51). Even housewives, thus, had to project glamour and sex appeal. Sitcom wives modeled stylishness with their trim figures, perfect hair, and attractive wardrobes, yet they still worried they weren’t attractive or young enough to please their husbands. Poor Laura even had to compete with a bevy of beauties in skimpy clothes when Rob helped out an old friend, who just happened to be the head of a Playboy-like empire (The Dick Van Dyke Show, “The Man from Emperor,” 1964). Lovely young wives, stories advised, shouldn’t be taken for granted. A male gaze was part of most sitcoms, meaning that as the culture loosened up, there were new physical standards sitcom wives had to meet, less elegance and more sexiness.

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Sitcom mothers existed in a larger media environment where women’s looks and sexuality were constantly on display, especially as programming switched from black-and-white to color. The sexual revolution in conjunction with the emergence of the counterculture elevated sexual allure as an ideal, a combination of youth and hip looks. Sitcom mothers certainly weren’t hippie chicks, the stereotype that would pop up on television and in movies of the woman with “loose inhibitions,” “hippie attire and hippie activities” (Humphreys, 55), but neither were they prim housewives in aprons and housedresses. They had to be sexier in order to compete with the likes of Mrs. Peel from the British spy import series, The Avengers, in her formfitting catsuits or the “private eyeful” title character on Honey West (as she was described on the spinoff episode of Burke’s Law, “Who Killed the Jackpot?” that launched the series in 1965). Goldie Hawn danced on Laugh-In in a bikini with the camera zooming in so the audience could read the slogans painted on her naked flesh. Television’s version of the sexual revolution in family sitcoms wasn’t more sex, but more sexy-looking wives who could be assertive yet also insecure and jealous. Far from liberating women—or their sitcom counterparts—the sexual revolution helped to objectify them in ways that invited judgment and critique. Youth was also an important aspect of women’s attractiveness in the 1960s and, increasingly, something that affected how sitcom mothers looked and acted. As the first half of the baby boom reached their teens and early twenties, they had unprecedented economic power to dictate style (Kutulas, After Aquarius Dawned, 54–56). By mid-decade, the mod style was evidenced by the miniskirts and trendy clothing seen on series like Get Smart (1965) and The Girl from U.N.C.L.E (1966). As important as the style itself was, more important was the way it served to differentiate generations. Because they were mothers, sitcom mothers could only exist on the fringes of hip, donning flowered minidresses or styling their hair in late-decade shags. As older series like The Donna Reed Show ended, sitcom mothers started to disappear, replaced by younger sitcom wives, like Laura, or even younger women without children who exuded youth and hipness on shows like He and She, Love on a Rooftop, and The Mothers-in-Law. The dilemma of a very popular sitcom star from “another era,” Lucille Ball, illustrates the challenges posed by the so-called youth-quake of the 1960s (Lucille Ball, as quoted in Kanfer, 268). Ball launched a new series, Here’s Lucy, in 1968, when she was well into her fifties. As producer Bernie Weitz recalled, one of her challenges was that “it’s difficult for a woman almost sixty to act like a kid” (Weitz, as quoted in Sanders and Gilbert, 328), although whether or not the physical schticks that made I Love Lucy so successful would have the same appeal in 1968 as 1951 is an open question. Instead, Lucy relied on her young-adult children, Lucie Arnaz and Desi

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Arnaz Jr. (formerly part of the pop-rock trio, Dino, Desi, and Billy) in the hopes of drawing young-adult viewers. She tried for hipness, titling the premier episode “Mod, Mod Lucy,” and gamely tolerated “a lot of help from the makeup department” to look younger (Kanfer, 272), as well as a faux hippie wig and miniskirt. The series was successful initially, but not with younger audiences, who preferred its time-slot competitor, Rowan & Martin’s LaughIn, rated number one, so the show started including guest stars appealing to older viewers, Milton Berle, Lawrence Welk, and, most famously, Elizabeth Taylor. The series hovered in the Nielsen top ten until the decade’s end and then dropped as more engaging shows started to appear, finally leaving the air in the early 1970s. Something similar happened to another family show with older characters, Petticoat Junction, the story of a widow and her uncle running a rural hotel reached only by train. Initially, the train got most of the attention and families who enjoyed the stories of CBS’s “hayseed” comedies (most successfully, The Beverly Hillbillies) watched it, but the stories started to wear thin after a while, with its “wholesome” characters and jokes about “how dumb city folks are” (Dederer). Like Here’s Lucy, Petticoat Junction did well enough in the ratings, but when Procter & Gamble, one of its sponsors, discovered that nearly half the audience was over the age of fifty, they pulled the plug on their advertising since their products served younger families (Humphrey, “Hitching a Ride”). The series updated Kate’s look and shifted attention to her three teenage and young-adult daughters. But the series remained an “oldsters’ show” while younger viewers thought Kate and her “three pretty gals” “too square” (Humphrey, “Hitching a Ride”). Eventually, its star, Bea Benaderet, died and was replaced by a younger career woman, a doctor, as the anchor character. By then, CBS had simply given up trying to appeal to younger viewers, moving it to Saturday nights, a timeslot, as one TV reporter noted, when younger viewers had better things to do (Humphrey, “Hitching a Ride”). As the creative team behind Petticoat Junction discovered, stories about families just weren’t enough to engage viewers in the turbulent second half of the 1960s. Still, the networks never seemed to consider the possibility of exploring the many changes happening in the country. Instead, they turned toward fantasy. The “magicoms,” as David Marc called them, and their brethren, stories with “fantastic” concepts that still “at least paid lip service to the physical principles of the universe,” were “arguably the most popular type of program on all of American television during the sixties,” especially popular with children (Marc, Comic Visions, 107). Some commentators believe they included veiled commentary about “serious issues” by revealing how “intolerant and weird” some traditional practices were by having audiences identify with “odd ‘others’” (Stark, 117). Whether or not audiences noticed those

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subtexts—and, by and large, the large audiences of children didn’t—like Petticoat Junction, their trajectory tended to be conservative. Hippies, when they appeared on shows like I Dream of Jeannie or The Beverly Hillbillies, were shallow and silly and all about the costumes and mindless protest. Sitcom historian Gerard Jones argues that fantastic sitcoms were designed to cater to TV’s heaviest TV watchers, children, rural viewers, and older Americans, people who, one network executive thought, “don’t want to think” (Jones, 164). Escapist entertainment seemed like the best way to attract and keep television’s most prolific viewers, at least so long as sponsors didn’t stop buying advertising time. Fantastic TV disproportionately appealed to baby boomers, until they aged and relevance beckoned to them. Stories about witches, monsters, and futuristic families fueled their imaginations. Children delighted in the questioning of norms, the breaking of scientific principles, and the unfixedness of objects that occurred on The Beverly Hillbillies, Bewitched, The Addams Family, The Munsters, and series like them. They collected Addams Family bubble gum cards, carried their lunches in boxes decorated with Grandpa Munster’s car, and played Beverly Hillbillies’ board games, making the marketing rights to related products part of any program’s potential profitability. They discussed plots at recess and improvised scenes after school. They loved the visuals, laughed at the challenges to conventionality, but generally paid almost no attention to mothers, who continued to act like their more conventional sitcom predecessors while everyone else around them got into the most hilarious predicaments. In one of these first fantastic-universe series, The Flintstones, wife and mother Wilma took a backseat to bumbling husband Fred and a host of modern-day objects transposed to prehistoric times, like a record player with a sharp-beaked bird needle. The family relationships, allegedly modeled on The Honeymooners, reinforced the sitcom’s notion of working-class gender roles, sharp-tongued, sensible wife and goofy husband given to the most foolish of get-rich-quick schemes. Wilma was a grounded, if boring, character, at least until she got into a department store, when her military-like attacks on sales, often preceded by the word “charge,” reinforced the stereotype of the housewife as spendthrift. The Flintstones aired on Friday evenings, a viewing time that its parent network, ABC, would reserve for family viewing well into the next century. A host of other fantastic-world shows followed, all designed to appeal to children, at least some of their parents, and older viewers. Gilligan’s Island creator Sherwood Schwartz imagined that his show was an allegorical “social microcosm,” but children accepted without question the two-dimensional portrayals of rich people, smart people, beautiful people, and no mothers, paying far more attention to the world the Castaways built, full of “Robinson

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Crusoe-cum-Rube-Goldberg island contraptions” (Schwartz, as quoted in Metz). It’s About Time, The Second Hundred Years, Get Smart, and Green Acres featured topsy-turvy universes where things looked very different, but a host of simplistic characters never developed much complexity or grew. Maleness and whiteness dominated on these shows. On Gilligan’s Island, where everyone was White, the men invented and built while the women—a rich older married woman, a farmgirl in peasant blouses and short-shorts, and a glamorous movie star—did the cooking and the entertaining. Green Acres might feature a pig named Arnold who was treated as a human, but traditional gender roles otherwise prevailed as Oliver Douglas drove the tractor and his wife Lisa—also not a mother—made the “hotscakes.” When the series briefly engaged with one set of changes happening in the real world, “feminist rhetoric,” as Susan Douglas has noted, came out of “the mouths of ridiculous sitcom characters” (Douglas, Where the Girls Are, 196–67) like Lisa while Oliver, the lawyer and voice of reason, pointed out how easy American women had it, an oft-made claim by conservatives. Some fantastic sitcoms didn’t even feature children or barely did, like My Mother the Car, which meant that young viewers would identify with the child-like adults, inevitably males, like Gilligan on Gilligan’s Island or Uncle Fester on The Addams Family, whose disruptions could be bigger than Dennis the Menace’s or the Beave’s because they were adults. Sitcom escapism enabled television to evade change by situating the American family in increasingly unlikely circumstances, neither real nor aspirational. Its cartoonish hippies and feminists, though, demonstrated the essential conservatism of their creators’ attitudes toward social change. On two 1960s fantastic-world shows about families, The Munsters and The Addams Family, mothers played traditional roles, just slightly askew. The opening for The Munsters literally mimicked the opening of the more traditional family sitcoms of the late 1950s, with wife and mother Lily handing briefcases and school books to family members as they headed out the door in the morning. Yet the Munsters weren’t ordinary people; they were the classic horror trio of Frankenstein’s monster, vampire, and werewolf. They were “an eminently wholesome lot in search of nothing more than a congenial family life in a suburban community,” with Herman as “head of the house” and Lily doing “household chores,” as a contemporary TV review noted (Jack Gould). In fact, its creators were none other than the same pair that made Leave It to Beaver, Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher. The jokes were corny and full of slapstick, a standout character was flamboyant Grandpa, played with vaudeville-like broadness by Al Lewis. Although the actors would later press for less fantasy and more social commentary, for much of the audience, it was the props that made the show (Jack Gould). Lily might have cooked up such delicacies as cream of vulture soup, but Connelly and Mosher told her

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she should “play the part as sweet as Donna Reed plays her TV character” (Yvonne De Carlo, as quoted in “Yvonne De Carlo”). Indeed, the show occasionally featured direct references to older family sitcoms like The Donna Reed Show and Father Knows Best. De Carlo was in her forties when playing Lily, twenty years older than Laura on The Dick Van Dyke Show, and best known for playing exotic women in movies set in biblical times, a pedigree older viewers would recognize that mattered little to younger viewers. The series rated higher than the other family comedy with monsters, The Addams Family, but was less critically successful, in part because of its rendering of the parental pair, Lily and Herman. While the Addamses also comported themselves as though they were, as the actor who portrayed wife and mother Morticia, Carolyn Jones, said, the “best adjusted family on TV,” the series came with other compensations for viewers interested in seeing more than cars shaped like coffins and jokes about bats. While Jones took pride that the series was rooted in a family dynamic very much like what prevailed in 1950s sitcoms (Jones, as cited in Humphrey, “Morticia’s Proud of Her TV Brood”), it was the marital relationship between Gomez and Morticia that interested a lot of viewers. Whenever she muttered a French phrase, Gomez turned “into a helpless, slavering fool,” suggesting the power of female sexuality (Douglas, Where the Girls Are, 137). Thus, Morticia, in her form-fitting black dress and her parted-in-themiddle hair, brought hints of contemporary culture into her character. Shows like The Munsters, Bewitched, My Favorite Martian, and I Dream of Jeannie only hinted at the first signs of change brewing in the United States, the civil rights movement, the beginnings of feminism, the emergence of a counterculture, and political protest (Kenton, 76) by projecting what their makers regarded as natural ways of being on increasingly weird families. They lived as nuclear families in big houses, men generally worked outside the house (even Gomez, who did not, paid attention to a stock ticker in the house) and women stayed home, although the Addamses did have a butler to do all the household labor as well as play the spinet so Gomez and Morticia could tango. The gendered division of family labor was the norm, but the gendered power relations in some of the shows was not. No series better reinforced, as well as undermined, the near-perfection and order of the 1950s family sitcom than Bewitched. Bewitched told the story of a couple, Samantha and Darrin, including their love for one another and the family they created. The only catch? Samantha was a witch and Darrin wasn’t, although in the pilot episode she promised to give up all her magical powers in order to be a suburban wife (Bewitched, “I, Darrin, Take This Witch Samantha,” 1964). At first, stories focused on Samantha fitting in and becoming the perfect wife, using witchcraft to enhance Darrin’s career and bring retribution on people who deserved it, like his snooty old flame or the nosy neighbor lady.

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Played by Elizabeth Montgomery, whose husband executive-produced the show, Samantha was “a happy, respectable suburban housewife who exerted power beyond the kitchen or the living room” (Douglas, Where the Girls Are, 128). Over time, though, the series’ dynamic shifted and “Sam,” who once disrupted, became the person who put others’ disruptions right. Especially after giving birth to baby Tabitha, she spent her time trying to rein in Tabitha’s powers as well as those of a host of wacky relatives, the sensible wife and responsible mother who used her powers for the good of the suburban family ideal. Samantha’s role was to restore an order Darrin deemed natural and normal, one very different from the arena where she was raised, a space where women had more direct power. She was, thus, a good wife. But she was only barely a mother. Sociologists William Douglas and Beth M. Olson, studying a variety of domestic sitcoms, found that Bewitched had fewer parent-child interactions than the others in their study (Douglas and Olson, 252), since Samantha mostly ended up mothering grown-ups. Still, Samantha was not exactly a 1950s sitcom mom. She occupied two separate worlds, the suburban world where she physically lived and the storybook world of witches, warlocks, leprechauns, and trolls. In the suburban world, she looked and acted more like Laura Petrie than a 1950s wife and her show was more marital comedy than family one. In her other world, women had the power to reduce a mortal like Darrin to nothing. The audience got to revel in that world; Samantha did not. Instead, she had to keep secret her powers and play the role of an ordinary housewife, a role that, as her mother constantly reminded her, didn’t allow for the full scope of her individuality. Samantha, meanwhile, had an evil twin figure, her cousin Serena, also played by Elizabeth Montgomery, whose interest in pleasure translated to feminism and a sort of hedonistic hippiedom that needed to be contained (Humphreys, chapter 2). On Bewitched, as on most of the fantastic sitcoms, being different was only acceptable so long as it didn’t disrupt social norms and you kept it secret. Samantha was not only wife and mother; she was also a daughter and, less frequently on the series, a daughter-in-law. Bewitched was one of the first series to rely on a mother of an adult to disrupt the status quo. The families celebrated in 1950s sitcoms were nuclear. Thus, when an elderly relative came to visit, that visitor became the disruptor who drove a single plot, paying homage to the notion that the automatized nuclear family was the new normal. Samantha’s mother Endora was a serial disruptor, rejecting the series’ conservative premise, that Samantha should give up her powers and witch life for a husband and children in the suburbs. While an advocate of Samantha’s freedom, though, she also presumed to know what was best for her. As David Marc has pointed out, “Darrin is determined that Samantha remain a contented suburban wifette” to satisfy “his incorrigibly puritanical

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Bewitched featured what would become an increasingly common, and difficult, character, the mother of a grown character, in the case of Endora (Agnes Moorehead), a literal witch. Such characters practiced versions of what was known as “Momism,” the too-powerful mother who derived pleasure and status from their offspring’s compliance. ABC/Photofest.

vision of what a marriage ought to be” (Marc, Comic Visions, 111) and she was, for the most part, inclined to meet his expectations. Endora’s disruptions could be seen as her advocating for her daughter and liberating her from the housewife’s drudgery, but a 1960s audience generally read her through the context and conventions of a stock character of the era, the mother-in-law. “The most venerable cliché in US humor is the mother-in-law joke,” observed Time magazine in its review of December Bride (1954–1959), a comedy about a young couple who lived with her mother (“The Mother-inLaw Joke,” 62). Star Spring Byington explained that advancing age detached women from family obligations, making them “free to do ridiculous things,” a satisfying comedic premise (Byington, as quoted in “The Mother-in-Law Joke,” 62). Byington’s Lily, unencumbered by household duties or a spouse, was all of those things that women weren’t supposed to be, including “interloper and fault-finder” (David C. Tucker). Endora, a literal witch dressed in flowing capes, her red hair and exaggerated blue eyeshadow signaling her garishness as the series shifted to color in later seasons, connected the sitcom

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mother-in-law with the carnivalesque crone or hag figure who “has cackled at the margins of Western history for centuries” (Rowe), someone who might be accused of casting spells and torturing innocents in another time. Thanks mainly to Endora, the sitcom mother-in-law also became an unruly woman, an archetypal character. As Kathleen Rowe explains, an unruly woman “creates disorder by dominating” and, like Spring Byington’s Lily, was unconstrained by propriety. She was neither selfless nor modest. She called attention to herself with her costume, her demeanor, her size, even the amount of physical space she occupied. She engaged in spectacle (Rowe). Her main purpose, bearing and raising children, over, the mother of an older character became someone without a place in traditional society, someone who in medieval times could have been accused of witchcraft. Endora meddled, which is to say challenged the status quo, a classic mother-in-law trope, and when she couldn’t get her way legitimately, used magic to claim power. She directed much of her dissatisfaction against Darrin, whom she never called by his actual name; however, she also interfered with Samantha’s life, denying, in effect, her personhood. Endora, like any unruly woman, was selfish, even narcissistic, precisely the opposite of the selfless sitcom mother. Mothers of adult characters were not only unruly disrupters; they possessed qualities coded as difficult. Many manifested elements of “Momism,” Philip Wylie’s complaint that American mothers had too much power, smothering their children and not letting go as they aged, because it gratified them as mothers to continue to feel needed (Plant, 19–21). Mothers-in-law inevitably disapproved of their sons’ marriages. Clara Petrie, for instance, talked about Rob’s old flames when she first met Laura and made snide comments about not being invited to the wedding, while Sam Petrie thought Laura attractive and fun (The Dick Van Dyke Show, “Pink Pills and Purple Parents,” 1964). Darrin’s on Bewitched developed a sick headache each time she visited and had to be taken home. Mothers-in-law never thought their son’s or daughter’s partner good enough; they wanted to control; they lived in the past. These were character traits associated with bad mothers. These were character traits a host of sitcoms associated with older mothers. Mothers-in-law appeared far more frequently in 1960s programs than their 1950s sitcom counterparts. Rob’s and Laura’s always threw their household into disarray, whether it was over cemetery plots or a family heirloom. Maxwell Smart (Get Smart) had one and Gomez Addams (The Addams Family) lived with his. The irascible Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies was Jed Clampett’s, a shotgun wielding, moonshine-making Confederate one. The actor Mabel Anderson played mothers or mothers-in-law on at least six 1960s sitcoms, including Hazel, The Andy Griffith Show, That Girl, and Bewitched. There was a whole series about them, The Mothers-in-Law, which featured Kaye Ballard and Eve Arden as bickering next-door neighbors who became

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in-laws when their children married. “Naturally they interfere with the lives of their married children,” the Los Angeles Times reported, also, Arden noted, as they fought with one another and with their husbands (“In-Laws Make Old Home Weak” and Reed). The series did little to dispel the stereotypes of aging mothers as troublemakers and busybodies who refused to treat their grown-up children and their spouses as adults. Shows with older adults as stars “drew an audience less desirable to advertisers” (David C. Tucker), or so programmers believed, but could be used as secondary characters who caused problems and disrupted family harmony in ways that capitalized on the emergence of the generation gap of the 1960s. Granny was the closest thing to a mother figure on the decade’s most popular sitcom, The Beverly Hillbillies, a contrarian who resisted, even violently, the affluent ways of the town where her son-in-law relocated the family. She barely got a name; virtually everyone called her by her family role. Her misunderstandings of the family manse’s fancy accoutrements made her funny, while her willful rejection of modern urban life hinted at the generational disputes within sitcom families still to come. She promoted very old-fashioned values, sometimes with a shotgun. She was determined to bend her granddaughter, Elly May, into an old-fashioned woman, trying to get her out of blue jeans, teaching her to cook and clean, and shifting her interest in animals to appropriate men. She meddled and resisted, lacking such stereotypic maternal qualities as empathy, nurture, and modesty. Although small in stature, she was an unruly woman, so much so that it was easier to imagine her boxing with a kangaroo—which she did—than ever being a mother at all. Yet her unruliness enabled a lot of the more fantastic elements in The Beverly Hillbillies while her stubborn rejection of all things modern allowed the series’ creators to champion what they regarded as old-fashioned rural values. While traditional sitcom moms hovered in the background, Granny insisted on being at the center of the action. A wide range of viewers could enjoy Granny without feeling any guilt. Children loved her outbursts and resorts to violence, much as they might a cartoon character’s. Adults watching her might agree with her insistence that much of modern life was arbitrary, snooty, or just absurd, and appreciate her refusal, as an older person, to be silenced or ignored. Or, they could go in the opposite direction and see her as annoyingly old-fashioned and meddling, qualities they might resent in the authority figures in their lives. Nobody watching actually had a mother or grandmother like Endora or Granny or even The Addams Family’s Grandmama, prone to spells and cackling. They were so comically exaggerated and removed from reality that nobody ever felt sorry for them. They were just funny. Still, the depictions devalued older womanhood and perpetuated older stereotypes. The same older women who seemed ditzy or meddling, in real life, were of a generation who might have

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sacrificed their youthful ambitions because of the Depression and helped their country during World War II, selfless and strong acts. On 1960s sitcoms, though, they were out of control, clueless, and unwilling to concede the myriad of ways they gummed up their children’s’ lives. Plenty of elements signaled their problematic nature, most serving to remind viewers that they were old. Nobody could ever regard Granny as sexy or appealing; she looked shriveled and wore clothes better suited to the 1860s than the 1960s. The 1960s sitcoms made sure their audiences understood that older women were grotesque, just as they made clear that their resistances and interventions were misplaced and unwelcomed. Granny and so many other older mothers lacked knowledge of the modern world, including the standards and expectations they imposed on the next generation. They were judgmental or daffy. They did not have to be treated with respect. The increasing presence of exaggeratedly difficult older women interfering in their grown children’s life was a safe way of acknowledging the generation gap and so many younger Americans’ rejection of their parents’ ways of being. The generation gap was becoming an ongoing challenge for programmers, who might finesse it, but generally avoided confronting it directly, even as baby boomers found better expressions of their values elsewhere (Kutulas, “Who Rules the Roost,” 20–22). Toward the end of the decade, however, it was becoming increasingly obvious to sponsors, if not programmers, that audiences were dividing by age. Surveys of viewing habits commissioned by sponsors found the nation split between “Geritols” (the name of an iron tonic) and younger ones, “blue jeans” whose TV choices failed to align. The shows with the highest Nielsen ratings often turned out not to be as popular with “rich young northerners whom sponsors wanted to court” (Gerard Jones, 188) and the “millions of teens and preteens” less interested in the status quo than “a culture much different from the one in which they had been raised” (Samuel, 206). Network executives started to notice. ABC, the least watched of the three major networks, first acknowledged the value of the boomer audience with series pitched at the middle of that generation like Gidget and The Patty Duke Show. In the fall of 1968, it decided to go full-out “unconventional” and pursue youth more assertively (“Programming Idea”). NBC followed. By 1970, CBS would famously shed its still-popular hayseed comedies for “literate” sitcoms like All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. One way of transitioning away from the “Geritols” and toward the “blue jeans” was to foreground women, particularly what seemed like modern women. If bachelor fathers proliferated in the earlier 1960s, “here come the merry widows,” warned Time magazine about the 1968/69 season (“Here Come”). The widowing gave sitcom mothers license to step out of their kitchens and into a changing world. It allowed them to have jobs and suitors, the sorts of things that made single characters like Ann Marie (That Girl) appealing to

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the younger demographic. Much of the desperate undercurrent of husbandhunting that was part of the single gal stereotype of the 1950s disappeared as widows got on with their lives, striking a balance between motherhood and personhood. Being a widow didn’t carry the stigma of divorcee, thereby not offending what programmers worried was a viewing audience sensitive to such family discord, but it did reflect a demographic reality, that a small, but growing, number of women single-parented. Stories about widows were safe ways to move the family sitcom beyond its older conventions. Yet, unconventionality and sitcom motherhood did not so easily coexist. The Brady Bunch, launched by ABC in the fall of 1969, had an aura of faux hipness, including its mother of a blended family, Carol Brady, who wore pantsuits and had a then-fashionable shag haircut. Carol, however, was a classic sitcom mother, always supportive and always at home. Since Carol and new husband Mike blended their family in episode one, the audience never did find out how Carol supported her three daughters, kept house, and still managed to be so supportive without a male breadwinner and the housekeeper Mike brought to the marriage. Broadway star Shirley Jones was offered the role of Carol, but declined because she didn’t want to be a standard sitcom mother stuck “at home doing the domestic stuff” (Jones, as quoted in Abramovitch). Instead, she played a widow with five children on The Partridge Family, which started in 1970, the story of a family pop band that blended stories about their gigs with typical teenage stories about proms and braces. Widowhood did open up Jones’s dating possibilities as her character had a lot of suitors. In the end, though, even if the particulars of plots seemed different, the maternal attitude was the same: sacrifice and selflessness. Meanwhile, Jones’s teenage son—and real-life stepson—David Cassidy became the latest “teeny-bopper” idol, popular with preteen and early-teenage girls. Jones, a talented singer, didn’t even get to perform the songs included in every episode; everyone but Cassidy was dubbed. The series’ ventures into contemporary issues like feminism were inauthentic, while the songs the group performed fell into the category of bubble-gum pop, saccharine-sweet and minus the harder edges of contemporary rock ‘n’ roll. Positioned on Friday nights, a time when a lot of the young-adult audience was off doing something else, neither series did spectacularly and neither could be called an unconventional programming choice, especially not where mothers were concerned. NBC’s Julia, which premiered a year before The Brady Bunch did, seemed much more likely to appeal to those viewers whom sponsors imagined would buy their products: younger, liberal, hip, and urban. The story of a Black nurse trying to raise her young son alone, the series had the potential to explore Julia’s intersectionality, but didn’t. Its creator, a White man, Hal Kanter, envisioned a color-blind story about “an attractive gal raising a small

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Carol Brady (Florence Henderson) was a throw-back mother at a time when women’s roles and expectations were changing, but also a character who became a symbol of the perfect mother for many members of Generation X precisely because she was only superficially modern. Paramount Pictures/Photofest.

son to whom she’d have to play both mother and father” (Kanter, quoted in Humphrey, “Controversy”). He conceptualized his lead, Julia Baker, played by Diahann Carroll, as the female version of the sort of super-figure Sidney Poitier played in films, which made the series “hardly more than a smallscreen version of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” as the Time magazine reviewer opined (“The New Season”). Julia “spoke the right way,” scholar Donald Bogle has noted, “dressed the right way, behaved the right way, thought the right way, and even looked the right way,” as “a light-skinned Black woman with keen features” (Bogle, 150). She lived in a “a white milieu,” which seemed synonymous to Kanter with “the mainstream of American life” (Kanter, as quoted in “The Wonderful World of Color”). In

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the pilot, anticipating rejection that never came, she even referred to herself as “colored,” a word Kanter himself would use when describing series’ plots (Kanter, as quoted in “The Wonderful World of Color”), a word Carroll found offensive. Kanter’s product was inauthentic and Julia’s widowhood trafficked in an ongoing stereotype about the Black family, that it was female-headed and, thereby, unhealthy. Carroll tried to explain to Kanter about the language, the problematic set-up, as well as challenge dialogue or plot points that didn’t resonate with her, but wasn’t able to persuade him to change much of anything (Bogle, 145–49). In his mind, widowhood made Julia an exemplary character acceptable to Whites, who were the only audience he really cared about. Julia as mother was perfect and she provided for her son economically as well as psychologically, but with little reference to racism or even Black identity (Shabazz, 94). The series did well initially, attracting what Time described as an “upscale” audience without prompting any boycotts by Southern stations, but critics found it “trite, sugary, and preposterous” (“The Wonderful World of Color”), and so, ultimately, did the audience. It was not just critics who “castigated” Kanter for creating a show “extraordinarily out of touch with and silent on the realities of African-American life in the late 1960s” (Bodroghkozy, “Is This What You Mean?” 130). The very White liberals Kanter sought as audience rejected his paternalistic assumptions about women and race. Heretofore, White men had the cultural authority to create female characters and the occasional character of color, but as more Americans questioned the legitimacy of those hierarchies and expected less idealism and more realism in their cultural products, Kanter’s depictions did not go unchallenged. Black Americans weighed in about Julia as well. Scholar Aniko Bodroghkozy, examining their letters, found that when judged by a criterion many employed—“tell[ing] . . . it like it is”—the series failed. Black academics and what Time described as “Negro militants” complained about the ways that the show, as one scholar noted, “accommodated more to the white power structure” than challenging stereotypes (“The Wonderful World of Color” and Marilyn Diane Fife, as quoted in Bodroghkozy, “Is This What You Mean?” 146). Fantasy sitcoms might still captivate millions of Americans, but the tide was beginning to turn toward realism, and on those grounds, most 1960s family sitcoms would fail. A contemporary of Julia, another series about a widow with children, The Doris Day Show revealed an essential truth about the 1960s sitcom mother, that without some serious updating beyond mod clothing and a job if she was widowed, she was likely to be an endangered species. Day played Doris Martin, a widow with two young sons, who relocated her family to her father’s ranch, in Marin County, across the bay from San Francisco. In the first season, stories focused on the intergenerational dynamic and the family’s adjustment

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to rural life, featuring Doris’s crusty old father (Denver Pyle) and, of course, a cute dog. By the second season, Doris had taken a job in San Francisco, commuting from the ranch, which shifted plots to an office as well as the ranch. By the third season, Doris and her sons had moved to San Francisco to live in an apartment over a pizza parlor, centering the series in a city and attempting to dazzle viewers with guest stars like Tony Bennett and Henry Fonda. Her father, meanwhile, was absent. By the fourth season, 1971–1972, with the success of CBS’s comedy about a single working woman, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Doris’s sons also disappeared without explanation, along with the dog, liberating her from family obligations altogether. Yet, however much the network tinkered with the format in the hopes of attracting an audience, not enough younger Americans found any version of Doris’s life compelling and the series was canceled. One then teenage skeptic recalled the incongruity of Day “pushing 50, in false eyelashes and falls, high fashion and soft focus” as the mother of young boys (Rick Gould). Directors shot her with a special lens, confusingly contrasted with the rest of the presentation, actually calling attention to what they were trying to hide. Day not only represented an older generation by 1970, but her cultural persona reflected a model of womanhood baby boomers rejected,, the perennial virgin, the “middle-aged star,” and the “uptight career woman” (Lehman, 65), whether or not she played those characters in her sitcom. Her series did last longer than those of two other older movie stars who came to television in the 1971–1972 season, Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart, whose heartwarming-but-socially-conservative ventures into family stories disappeared in less than a year. Young-adult viewers were increasingly in the driver’s seat and they were no more interested in seeing Day or Fonda or Stewart function in cutesy or moralizing series than they were in watching genies, witches, or hillbillies. Both seemed like fantasy worlds that insulted their intelligence and promoted values and relationships with which they disagreed. Whatever their political views, baby boomers chose to organize their personal lives differently and the sitcom reference points of their childhoods with their idealized, White and middle-class suburban portraits of gendered family roles, including selfless mothers, didn’t resonate with them or, in many cases, even speak to their realities. Rejecting authority could take many forms in the late 1960s, anything from sartorial rebellions to planting bombs; the family sitcom was an easy target, especially for a generation of women whose greatest fear was that they would end up like their mothers (Breines, 77). If the networks didn’t adjust and adapt, they stood to lose a lot of viewers.

Chapter 3

Reality in the “Fantasy World of Television” New Moms—and Some Old Ones—in the 1970s

At the end of the opening credits of One Day at a Time, newly divorced Ann Romano put down her suitcases on her way out the door and jumped for joy, free of a bad marriage and ready for liberation, a 1970s idea that bespoke freeing oneself from the past. Soon she would reclaim her maiden name and add a new title, Ms. Tempering her liberation, however, were her responsibilities as mother to teenage daughters Julie and Barbara, who had their own ideas about their liberations, which often included freedom from Mom and her rules. Episodes focused on their journeys, emphasizing family change and character growth, a sometimes-fraught process for all of them, but especially Ann. There was considerably more contention on One Day at a Time than on the two-parent sitcoms of the 1950s, as well as more drama and, sometimes, tragedy. While One Day at a Time included some traditional family-comedy plots, like Barbara having two dates for a dance, the larger number of episodes involved more consequential stories that engaged with modern mores and values, like Julie running away with her boyfriend or Ann being sexually harassed at work. Producer Norman Lear and creators Whitney Blake and Alan Manning employed some new sitcom conventions to focus on Ann’s reality: cliffhangers, multi-part episodes, longer story arcs, and unresolved tensions. The humor was different too, with less physicality and more jokes about contemporary affairs and trends, as well as character development rather than one-liners. Ann as mother changed too. She doubted and questioned what might have been her instincts, or at least her inclinations, adjusting to an evolving society (Dow, chapter 2). In the 1970s, motherhood was less an innate condition and more a process of trial and error. The great social upheavals and movements of the 1960s trickled into ordinary lives in the 1970s. Millions of Americans experienced what Ann did, 53

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unsettling disjunctions between how they were raised and how they wanted to live, “very much a period of transition” full of “clash[es]” as well as “coexistence” (Von Hodenberg, 6). Did the 1960s revolutions liberate Americans or just put them on selfish and immoral paths? That question, first posed in the 1970s by pundits like Christopher Lasch, continues to shape our culture wars, culture wars with the American family at its center. Family roles, so clearly mapped for 1950s sitcom viewers, seemed neither natural nor desirable to many anymore. Demographic changes told some of the story, declining birthrates, declining marriage rates, rising divorce rates, and a small, but growing, number of American couples living together without being married. Equally important to the American family was the number of mothers entering the workplace, nearly two-thirds of whom worked at least part-time by the end of the decade. Conservatives began to see a nation weakening because its family traditions were (Self, 11–14). What drove the demographics were shifts in values and experiences. The people forming families in the 1950s had been raised on the idea of collective sacrifice, which led them to marry young, have a lot of children, and rely on complimentary gender roles to manage their families. Girding their choices was the trade-off, at least for White Americans, that following social rules and conforming would bring them comfort and prosperity. In the 1960s, people excluded from that implicit pact, people at the bottom of the hierarchies it created, and people who just didn’t believe in the bargain pressed for change. That didn’t mean, however, that Americans had given up on families and were, instead, selfishly pursuing their own agendas, as conservatives sometimes complained. Rather, it meant that families were differently constructed, or reconstructed, that newer families were less patriarchal, smaller, more designed to launch individuals, and less sacrificial, especially for nationalist enterprises, like the war in Vietnam (Zaretsky). A faltering economy also impacted family roles, sending more mothers into the workplace and affecting many men’s identities as providers. The stagnant job market failed to accommodate the large number of new workers joining the economy in the 1970s. People who might have defined themselves in the past, at least in part, by their family roles or their careers had to find other identities (Cowie). In the 1970s, Americans lacked confidence in their country, but not themselves. In the face of what often seemed like a lot of obstacles, they mustered resilience and determination so that they might, as the famous line from The Mary Tyler Moore Show theme song suggested, “make it after all” (Schulman; Zaretsky; Jenkins; Cowie; Kutulas, After Aquarius Dawned). It was, however, a motto with what could seem like selfish overtones in an era critics would label the “Me Decade.” By the 1970s, the ideas of mainstream second-wave feminism echoed through the culture, songs, novels, newspaper articles, movies, ads, a new

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magazine, Ms., and new products talking about liberation. Television too explored it. The well-established sitcom roles for women, nurturing mother or competent-but-desperate-to-be-married secretary, just didn’t work any longer. Instead, stories about younger women—baby boomers—trying to find their ways in a still-changing world garnered critical acclaim and high ratings. Although such renderings were rarely created as models, they often were as there were so few other examples (Kutulas, After Aquarius Dawned, 103–4). Even the shrinking number of sitcom wives and mothers offered different ways to be. They asserted themselves sexually and left bad marriages. They ran for public office. They joined women’s groups. And they voiced feminist ideas. Like Ann Romano, they took more control over their lives and their families. Black power and identity movements also impacted the sitcom, expanding whose stories got told. As Christine Acham has noted, “African American images on network television proliferated throughout the 1970s in prime-time sitcoms” and other forms of scripted TV. Most were created by White men, so, Acham notes, “followed the integrationist theme” (Acham, 170, 171), but with considerably more cultural identity than Julia had a few years before. The characters they depicted enabled Black viewers to see someone who looked like them negotiating the world, bringing “pleasure” (Acham, xii) to many, even while attracting White audiences. So too did such series as Good Times, initially about an intact Black family, tentatively explore the intersectional nature of Black womanhood, although creators were often distracted by what they regarded as more important stories about Black men. While there was only imperfect authenticity in stories about people of color, there was far more inclusion than there had ever been before, a commitment by network executives and creators alike, itself a suggestion that the medium was growing less conservative and bolder in the stories it told. Two words defined the networks’ strategy in the 1970s, demographics and counterprogramming, and both affected the television comedy and its representations of motherhood. Networks are profit-making enterprises, but their circumstances changed considerably in 1970 when the Federal Communications Commission imposed the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules on networks, benefiting independent production companies, like the two that would dominate 1970s sitcoms: Norman Lear’s Tandem Productions and MTM Enterprises. The new rules created a “golden era of independent production” by limiting what the networks could make and show on their own. The new rules made programming a more competitive business (Lotz, 99), as did cable TV, further destabilizing network practices and profitability (Streeter). The democratic potential of independent creators and more channels made for more experimental television just as 1960s revolutions altered the lives of viewers.

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Competition for what, potentially, seemed like a scarcer resource caused the networks to rethink their strategies, aligning programming with particular segments of the audience rather than TV’s heaviest viewers, seeking quality over quantity, those sponsors regarded as strong potential buyers of products. The most desirable segment, or demographic, was Americans aged eighteen to thirty-four, baby boomers with money they were willing to spend, individuals trying to establish themselves (Marc, Democratic Vistas, 14–16), a group that included single women. Sitcoms telling stories about their struggles garnered accolades and audiences. Third-place ABC was the first network to court younger viewers with “relevant, ‘with-it’ programming” (Bodroghkozy, Groove Tube, 204). NBC followed, and then CBS, traditionally the network with the oldest audience, purged its schedules of fantastic stories and rural sitcoms like Mayberry RFD. Single longer, with more disposable income than their parents had at their ages and with more willingness to spend, particularly on leisure and entertainment, baby boomers were a highly desirable segment of the viewing population for advertisers. Consequently, stories about generational conflict and old-versus-new ways of living proliferated on 1970s television (Von Hodenberg, 3). Seventies dramas often presented modern life as troubled, condemning the 1960s changes for threatening the family. Many employed actors more familiar to older viewers than younger ones, like Karl Malden or Robert Stack. The actor who played Jim Anderson on Father Knows Best, Robert Young, for instance, returned to television in the medical drama, Marcus Welby, M.D. Dr. Welby’s practice was set in the home space he shared with his motorcycle-driving, impulsive young colleague, played by James Brolin. Welby dispensed fatherly wisdom to his patients, healing families disturbed by working mothers, divorces, gay fathers, and drugs. Brolin was there to attract the younger audience, and for a while he did. Welby occupied the top spot in the ratings during the 1970–1971 season, doing particularly well with older women and teenage girls, sponsored by cosmetic and health care companies. When better options opened up, however, the show’s popularity declined and it was displaced at the top of the ratings by a new-style sitcom about the generation gap, All in the Family. Two years later, it was out of the top ten entirely (Kutulas, After Aquarius Dawned, 146–49). Sitcoms eclipsed dramas as a popular and lucrative form of television in the 1970s, growing from 14 percent of all programming in 1968 to 20 percent a decade later. They did so by remaking the genre into something that was relevant and resonant with younger viewers, the older half of the baby boom and World War II babies. In these stories, a different narrative existed, telling of newer and older lifestyles, stories about young single women working or young people clashing with their parents and questioning older ways. Seventies sitcoms tended to position younger people in central roles, not as

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the perfect exemplars represented by 1950s sitcom parents, but as individuals with the potential for growth trying to figure out their lives and their principles. Their parents were no longer perfect; often they were emissaries of outdated and flawed ways of thinking and doing. With young adults at the center and stories exploring their personal and professional aspirations, there were almost no traditional families on 1970s sitcoms. As generational strife replaced family harmony as a sitcom theme, however, motherhood became a more complicated set of choices. Sitcoms shaped by the new oeuvre tended to privilege the views and values of the younger generation, although All in the Family demonstrated that even a character constructed as bigoted and ignorant as Archie Bunker could be a hero to some viewers (Cullen, 42–44). An episode of WKRP in Cincinnati, about a radio station that converted from easy listening to rock music in its pilot, characterized the generation gap as “the dungarees versus the suits” (WKRP in Cincinnati, “The Contest Nobody Could Win,” 1979) aligning youth with a more casual, anti-establishment viewpoint. Unlike 1960s network executives, who were said to aim for the lowest common denominator with their programming, at the networks in the 1970s, executives believed that the viewers who mattered most to them—younger, well-educated, and willing-to-spend—wanted television that made them think and that referenced contemporary issues, values, and etiquettes (Gerard Jones, chapters 14 and 15; Feuer, “The MTM Style”). Those viewers also enjoyed a different style of humor, less slapstick and cutesy, more ironic and satirical, the sorts of things that prevailed on the ultimate boomer product, Saturday Night Live, which premiered in the fall of 1975. Baby boomers joined creative staffs, bringing their tone and sensibility to productions. Marilyn Suzanne Miller (born in 1950), for instance, wrote her first script, for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, while she was still living in her parents’ home after graduating from college (Armstrong). She would go on to write for Rhoda, Maude, and Saturday Night Live. She was a member of a new generation writing for television, bringing a new sensibility and set of concerns to the genre of the sitcom. Overall, a common set-up for sitcoms was the dungarees versus the suits. In the workplace, that meant people like WKRP’s central figure, Andy Travis, in form-fitting jeans, trying to work around old-timers Arthur Carlson and Herb Tarlek, the former in a traditional suit and the latter in that 1970s symbol of faux-hipness, the leisure suit. At home, especially in hybrid (home and work) sitcoms, parents were the problem, the people keeping the next generation from fully developing their own distinctive and authentic identities. This was a classic battle on Sanford & Son, the story of a father and son who ran a junkyard in Los Angeles’ Watts neighborhood. Son Lamont worked hard to define himself as a modern Black man rather than a junkman or his father’s son. Father Fred met his every attempt with ridicule. But 1970s

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sitcoms often took as a given what 1950s sitcoms tried to hide, that fathers were often peripheral figures in families, that mothers had “nearly complete female control over childrearing” because there was so much “male distance from the domestic world” (Jessica Weiss, 92). The larger number of generational battles on sitcoms, then, didn’t involve fathers, but mothers, mothers who judged, smothered, or otherwise impeded identity quests. Even sweet Mary Richards (The Mary Tyler Moore Show), found her mother a little too eager to interfere in her life. It was Mary’s best friend, Rhoda, who hailed from New York City and therefore, the audience might read her as a more abrasive character, who parried with the mother of all 1970s sitcom mothers, Ida Morgenstern (Nancy Walker). Ida lived in the Bronx in an apartment, with her husband, Martin, but not her daughters. They were unmarried, yet they violated the cultural tradition of women moving from their parents’ house to their husband’s. Younger daughter Brenda moved to a studio apartment in Manhattan and Rhoda, who, in Ida’s words, “ran away from home” to Minneapolis, at least until she got a spin-off series of her own. Ida was the alpha parent, dominating her husband Martin as well as her daughters. She did so, Rhoda explained

Rhoda turned the stereotypical Jewish mother, played by Nancy Walker, into a universal symbol of the generation gap between baby boomers affected by the sexual revolution and second-wave feminism and their mothers, who were not. CBS/Photofest.

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to Mary, via guilt. So effective was she at guilt that by the end of the first episode in which she appeared, she had even managed to guilt Mary into calling her “mama” (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, “Support Your Local Mother,” 1970). A mother who would “drive .  .  . [you] crazy with guilt,” generated much “neurotic acting out” in their offspring, a classic 1970s sitcom plot (Feuer, “The MTM Style,” 64). As Rhoda and Brenda negotiated their careers and their personal lives, including their relationships, Ida undermined their self-confidence, passive-aggressively pointing out their flaws, zeroing in on their insecurities or planting insecurities where they hadn’t had them before. She pushed, they resisted, the core of many a 1970s sitcom plot. Ida was an unruly woman and a smothering mother. She was a newer and more developed version of the mother-in-law of the 1960s, assertive and conniving. Mothers of adult characters on 1970s sitcoms might not all be Idas, but even at their most charming, they could seize control, like Edith on All in the Family, whose ability to hijack a conversation prompted husband Archie to command her to “stifle” herself. More assertive was Edith’s cousin, Maude (Maude); tall, imposing, and caustic, a feminist who bossed around her husband and grown daughter alike. “God’ll get you for that,” she threatened anyone who crossed her. These 70s unruly mothers were definitely past childbearing age; Edith’s and Ida’s menopauses were the subject of episodes. They were not crones or hags and they had no magical powers, although Ida could awaken her younger daughter merely by uttering the phrase “French toast.” Still, they were definitely women hell-bent on squashing their children’s independence as well as their cockamamie modern ideas about living life. While Endora from Bewitched, the scary 1960s symbol of the unruly 1960s mother, dressed garishly and wore bright blue eye shadow that conveyed a grotesque version of femininity, 1970s mothers of adults’ greatest fashion faux pas were that they dressed for the past. They wore the uniform of the 1950s TV mother, a nice housedress, often with an apron, with hair shellacked into place. Viewers who were, by the 1970s, already starting to make jokes about June Cleaver vacuuming in heels and pearls, could easily deconstruct the significance of those dresses and hairdos. When older mothers tried on something more modern, like a pantsuit, the results were deemed unnatural by their daughters, who tended to police their mothers as much as their mothers policed them. Further enhancing the message that these were women out of sync with the times were their homes, with sofas covered in plastic and baby pictures decorating mantels. When Rhoda stayed at her parents’ apartment, her room looked exactly as it used to, objects that younger viewers might have spotted in Gidget’s room a decade before, but were associated with their outgrown pasts, a portable record player, stuffed animals, and a vanity table. Older sitcom mothers of the 1970s didn’t believe that times changed; older arrangements suited them just fine. Bob Hartley’s

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mother on The Bob Newhart Show consulted him about what color to repaint a bedroom he hadn’t lived in in decades. When he told her “I don’t care,” she delivered a classic mother warning: “it’s your room; you’ll have to live with it” (The Bob Newhart Show, “Fathers and Sons and Mothers,” 1975). But he didn’t have to live with it because he was a grown-up who lived in a place of his own, something his mother tended to have trouble wrapping her brain around. Mothers like Ida regarded feeding people as a sacred part of motherhood and, just like with their clothing, comedies had them cooking things that the Andersons or the Nelsons might eat, like pot roasts and casseroles. Older sitcom mothers clung to mealtimes as central responsibilities and demonstrations of their worth. They celebrated milestones and holidays with big productions, bringing out the lace tablecloths and airing out the dining room. Martha on The Bob Newhart Show put her own daughter and daughter-in-law Emily through their paces to duplicate a set of Thanksgiving rituals, including decorations, the menu, even a seating chart, because there could be no skimping on traditions. When Emily’s parents showed up unexpectedly on Thanksgiving eve, challenging her dominance, Martha made a huge show of her insignificance: “I’ll just stand here [by the front door] out of the way.” Rather than merge two sets of family practices—and types of stuffing—she declined to come at all (The Bob Newhart Show, “An American Family,” 1974). The mothers of adult characters on 1970s sitcoms couldn’t use 1960s magic to disrupt, but they had plenty of ways of holding others hostage to their old-fashioned ways. Sitcom mothers so firmly believed in the past as depicted on family sitcoms that they wanted their children to duplicate it, as though nothing had changed since the 1950s and their grown children had no opinions of their own. They opposed sex before marriage and simply assumed that new families would live in “enormous ranch house[s]” in the suburbs (Alice, “Alice’s Big FourOh,” 1981). Martha cried each time she thought about how Bob and Emily had no children. “Heaven knows,” she told Emily just before the tears came, “I get enough pleasure bouncing other people’s grandchildren on my knee” (The Bob Newhart Show, “Fathers and Sons and Mothers,” 1975). When Mary opined that Rhoda wasn’t pining away for marriage, Ida told her to “butt out.” What mattered was not what Rhoda wanted, but what her mother did (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, “Rhoda’s Sister Gets Married,” 1973). When Rhoda finally did marry, Ida disregarded the bride-to-be’s preference for a small wedding, inviting seventy-nine people and providing Rhoda with a white wedding dress with a veil. “Only a mother would understand” why she did it, she explained, doubling down on Rhoda’s objections with more guilt (Rhoda, “Rhoda’s Wedding,” 1974). The hour-long episode garnered one of the largest audiences of the decade, suggesting that the story about a

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traditional milestone in a woman’s life, guaranteed to come with generational conflict, spoke to a lot of viewers. Unruly sitcom mothers of the 1970s came in a variety of races and ethnicities, but many of their behaviors were associated with a single one, the stereotype of the Jewish mother. Ida’s identity as someone who was culturally Jewish and heaped “Bronx love” on her family (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, “Support Your Local Mother,” 1970) couldn’t have existed earlier on television. Except for Gertrude Berg’s Molly Goldberg (The Goldbergs, 1949–1955), sitcom mothers had been WASP-y and mainly associated with a generic American heartland and small towns. The 1970s, though, were a moment of more ethnic and racial pride (Kutulas, After Aquarius Dawned, chapter 4) and steeped in a different sense of Jewish identity. The character of the Jewish mother already existed elsewhere in the popular culture, in plays by Neil Simon and movies adapted from Philip Roth novels, opinionated, kvetching, often with a lot of Yiddish expressions. The sort of literate audience Rhoda creators James L. Brooks and Allan Burns courted understood a Jewish mother to be over-involved, passive-aggressive, “self-sacrificing,” or “manipulative and demanding” (Antler, 2), the older sitcom mother in a nutshell. As Rhoda showrunner, Charlotte Brown, herself Jewish, pointed out, on the series, a Jewish “sensibility” was as crucial as “Ida’s brisket, her plastic on the furniture” to establishing a particular maternal type that the eighteen to forty-nine demographic would recognize, whether or not they were Jewish (Brown, as quoted in Brook, 55). Yet Ida almost didn’t make it onto the air. The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s programming liaison with CBS, Frank Barton, told series creators Brooks and Burns “you cannot shoot this episode,” referring to Ida’s first appearance, because good people didn’t treat their mothers as badly as Rhoda seemed to treat hers (Barton, as quoted in Armstrong). Brooks and Burns did anyway, and Ida became a fan favorite. Whether or not viewers were Jewish, many saw familiarity in the interplay between smothering Jewish mothers and their frustrated offspring. This was not a Jewish dynamic, but a universal one; the Jewishness just added a dimension of humor and a license to be a bit more over-the-top in their generational clashes. Ida was often written by younger female writers. Part of what attracted Treva Silverman to the writing staff of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, in fact, was the possibility of creating interactions like those between Rhoda and her mother (Armstrong). As a younger generation of women writers entered the television industry, the place where they most commonly landed was on the plethora of sitcoms that featured lead females: Rhoda, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Alice, One Day at a Time, Laverne and Shirley, and Maude, as well as more short-lived series like The Betty White Show, the Nancy Walker Show, Phyllis, and Diana. In those capacities, they gave voice to younger female characters and

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presented mothers as they experienced them, emphasizing the generational divides. Those writers might write from their own lives, telling stories about ugly bridesmaid dresses or lecherous dates; however, they, like male writers their age, had grown up with television and brought a television-literate sensibility to their depictions of families. While the first generation of sitcom writers might make radio and film references, writers who had watched a lot of television wrote with older series in mind. “Mrs. Knows Best,” as Rhoda called her, was part of a collective set of stereotypes shared by younger writers and privileged audiences alike. While they might have enjoyed the families they watched on sitcoms as children, as adults they saw them differently. The questioning of authority and norms that was part of the 1960s helped to reshape comedy, emphasizing satire, black humor, and parodies that commented on the past. Thus, The Mary Tyler Moore Show made fun of a fictional sitcom called The Clancy Clan that sounded suspiciously like The Brady Bunch, with “all these kids” where “everybody laughs a lot,” as Mary’s preteen neighbor Bess explained (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, “Baby Sit-Com,” 1972). The offhand remark reflects what Jane Feuer calls the “MTM style,” leaving the audience to draw connections and catch references in ways that sparked “little chuckles of identification” (Feuer, “The MTM Style,” quotation from 62). And not just chuckles of recognition, but character “roundness” that made characters feel “real” because they experienced versions of what audience members did (Feuer, “The MTM Style,” 57). When Martha Hartley temporarily moved in with her son and daughter-in-law, Bob and Emily, while her house was painted, so many of the little touches that, taken all together, indicated that she still treated him “as a child” resonated, each designed to escalate Bob’s frustration until it would finally explode. Martha claimed the Hartleys’ marital bed, called Bob “Sunny,” reminded him to brush his teeth “up and down” and wash his hands before lunch, tucking a napkin on his lap. She even undermined his professional expertise as a psychologist by interfering with a patient. Throughout the episode Bob disregarded Emily’s advice that he tell his mother to treat him like an adult. The studio audience roared through each gesture Martha made. Then, finally, came the cathartic release, signaled by what the audience would recognize as Martha’s step too far as Bob informed her that if she didn’t stop, there would be no grandchildren (The Bob Newhart Show, “Fathers and Sons and Mothers,” 1975). The episode presupposed that most viewers, studio or otherwise, had at some point had their mother refuse to acknowledge their adult identity, recognizing the elements that, together, signaled Martha’s infantilization of her son. In programming terms, the theme of Bob against Mom was universal, but particularly resonant with the 1970s sitcoms’ most desirable viewers, younger women and their mothers. The experience of separating from family

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to become one’s own person was an ordinary part of life that could be exaggerated and played for laughs, but was especially profound for baby boomer women who, statistically speaking, made different choices than their mothers did. They could relate to Rhoda’s fight with her mother over just how traditional her wedding should be or Mary’s evasive answers to her mother’s questions about her sex life (Feuer, “The MTM Style,” 56–62). They constituted a new category of consumers, women who were not buying for their families, but were independent purchasers of cosmetics, compact cars, singleserving meals, and clothing. Their mothers were unlikely to see themselves in the older characters, but might, like their daughters, relate to the put-upon younger women manipulated by their mothers. The “central tension” of many 1970s sitcoms, David Marc noted, was “embarrassment and guilt” (Marc, Demographic Vistas, 12) about one’s relation to seemingly ever-shifting norms, situations, and reactions that could trigger a knowing wince from the audience and a bond. Mothers were a big cause of embarrassment, bearers of guilt, but so too were they reminders that one wasn’t quite as cool as one imagined. The options older 1970s mothers provided undermined the central role parents were supposed to play, helping their children grow up, which in the self-actualizing 1970s meant developing an independent identity. A mother like Ida offered the security of childhood as an alternative to having to deal with difficult adult responsibilities or used guilt to manipulate a child into adulthood as she defined it. Television scholar James Chesebro has argued that the 1970s were the heyday of what he called “mimetic” leads, characters who felt like “one of us” and who were capable of growth. Rhoda was such a character, someone who moved from New York to Minneapolis and back again to find herself, who started her own business, who married and divorced. Ida, by contrast, was what Chesebro would call an “ironic” character, one who couldn’t “assess reality” and the ways it might have changed, so clung to rules or traditions (Chesebro, 21). Her interferences, thus, impeded the main character’s attempts to form her own unique identity. Mimetic characters would grow, developing independence and resilience, but their ironic mothers had to stay more-or-less the same. It was part of the formula. Older mothers and even younger stay-at-home mothers tended to be flatter characters, objects rather than subjects, visually differentiated from their daughters with their more-formal clothing and old-fashioned home furnishings, the targets of jokes. When they did get to voice their concerns, they generally appeared petty and selfish. Mary’s neighbor, Phyllis, on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, a stay-at-home wife and mother to a teenage daughter, embraced aspects of the sixties revolutions, but also resented that the “tables had turned,” undermining the satisfaction she derived from feeling superior to a single woman like Mary as a “secure, confident married woman” with

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a family (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, “Phyllis Whips Inflation,” 1975). Phyllis’s family life, though, was unstable; her husband had an affair and her daughter idolized single working-woman Mary. It fell to conservatives, not generally liberal sitcom creators, to defend traditional housewives in the 1970s, making them key components of the traditional family in the culture wars brewing in the second half of the decade. On some of the most popular sitcoms of the era, mothering like 1950s sitcom mothers did was not something to be proud of, but something lesser. Fathers got more sympathy on family sitcoms than traditional mothers did because a lot of younger sitcom writers had experienced what earlier shows worked so hard to hide: mothers with more influence over their children because, as Rhoda’s father recalled, “You came home late from work, kids are all asleep, you never get a chance to see them enough” (Rhoda, “Rhoda’s Wedding,” 1974). Older 1970s fathers, moreover, had the ability to fade from the scene when their wives got too smothering. They ignored their wives’ worst behavior and, often, quietly sided with their offspring. Rhoda’s father, Martin, for instance, was much hipper than Ida was, gentler, tolerant, and considerably more confident that Rhoda would make good choices, even if they weren’t the choices Ida imagined for her. He, though, eventually succumbed to the call of 1970s individualism, leaving Ida to “find himself” (Rhoda, “Martin Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” 1978), devastating to both Ida and her daughters. Fathers might be excused for their absences from the traditional 1950s family ideal, but sitcoms suggested those absences had consequences, and one of the biggest was when fathers were gone altogether. While mothers and daughters fought to define daughters’ adulthoods on sitcoms like Rhoda and One Day at a Time, sons faced the fallout of missing fathers, which 1970s television characterized in Freudian terms. Single mothers of grown sons were depicted as much-too-powerful and selfish, Philip Wylie’s “momism” in a nutshell. They got little sympathy for partners who deserted them or celebration for raising children alone. Instead, they got the blame for sons like mean Louie on Taxi, unwilling-to-commit Clifton on That’s My Mama, self-absorbed Ted on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, timid Arthur on WKRP in Cincinnati, and cocky George on The Jeffersons. Their mothers knew what kinds of emotional “blackmail” would induce them to do what they wanted (The Jeffersons, “Lunch with Mama,” 1975). These sweet old ladies could teach Ida a thing or two about wielding guilt. That’s My Mama excepted, however, they had relatively limited story arcs, so they remained flat characters, all sweetness on the outside, but disruptive and selfish at their cores. Interfering mothers of grown characters popped up on a lot of 1970s sitcoms because they facilitated stories about changing mores. Younger mothers, by contrast, were fewer and farther between, and many of those that

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existed were single mothers, telling a different story about changing times. In 1970, when James L. Brooks and Allan Burns proposed making Mary Richards a divorcee on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, an executive vetoed it, arguing that audiences wouldn’t stand for it (Armstrong). Yet One Day at a Time ran for nine seasons, beginning in 1975, spending most of those seasons in or near the Nielsen top ten. Other single mothers followed, some divorced and some widowed, generally in circumstances that reflected single mothers’ realities. While the two most prominent single fathers of the era, Tom Corbett (The Courtship of Eddie’s Father) and Phillip Drummond (Different Strokes), had wealth and housekeepers to look after their children; single mothers didn’t. Elaine Nardo on Taxi worked in an art gallery by day and drove a cab on weekends and evenings to support her children. No wonder the one episode that highlighted all her juggling was titled “Nardo Loses Her Marbles” (1979). Alice, based on the film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, told the story of a widow who relocated to Phoenix with her son, dreaming of a singing career. By her visiting mother’s standards, she wasn’t living so much as “dying,” a waitress who slept on the pull-out living room sofa so her son could have the one bedroom she could afford. But Alice was proud of herself: “I pulled myself together, Ma, and made a good life for me and Tommy. I’m a survivor” (Alice, “Alice’s Big Four-Oh,” 1981). Her attitude captured the spirit of single sitcom mothers, who might struggle, but also regarded their escape from the 1950s housewife role as success. What particularly separated these mothers from 1950s ones—aside from the lack of husbands—was that they worked. As the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics noted, the number of mothers in the workforce in the 1970s grew at an “unprecedented pace,” so that by 1980, nearly two-thirds of all mothers worked (Grossman, 50). Women alone on contemporary shows matched their real-life counterparts in many ways. They didn’t work at glamorous jobs, for instance, and, like most American women after divorces, their economic trajectories were at least initially downward. Ann Romano held a series of badly paying jobs on One Day at a Time, including Avon lady. When she finally landed a decent job at an advertising agency, daughter Julie pointed out that the family had at last achieved lower-middle-class status (Margolis). Working women with children fared less well than their childless counterparts, who might not have truly glamorous jobs, but clearly had better options, like Mary Richards’s TV-station job on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Series showcased the dilemma of mothers seeking to return to the workplace after stopping out. “I have no training. I have no skills. I have nothing to contribute to society,” lamented Mary’s neighbor Phyllis, when the tough economy meant she had to find a job or learn to budget. Phyllis gave up looking, protected by her husband’s paycheck, not something single mothers could do. Yet Phyllis, the housewife, was both unrealistic and naïve, her

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special skill being her ability to pick “the right wine for dinner” (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, “Phyllis Whips Inflation,” 1975), while single mothers were resilient. They were heroic characters, especially when contrasted with housewives with too much time on their hands, “mere frill[s],” as Phyllis said, and not the celebrated wives of earlier shows. But in praising the single working mother who got by on relatively little, sponsors lost the equation of happy families with consumer splendor, the fantasy of plenty. Granted, as Phyllis discovered, times were tough economically speaking and many successful shows were set in less-elevated circumstances, like Good Times or All in the Family. Heretofore, sitcoms’ few widows lived, like Julia did, in a “posh” apartment that defined her as middle-class (Shabazz, 94). The set designer for One Day at a Time explained that Ann’s apartment reflected her “very thrifty” reality (Michael Brittain, as quoted in Friedman, 59), with a small kitchen, mismatched living room furniture, and two single beds tightly squeezed into Julie and Barbara’s room. There were no new appliances provided by sponsors to highlight or new car in the driveway. Such shows didn’t model the aspirational models that sponsors might like so much as believable circumstances. As the theme song to One Day at a Time explained, these were stories about people “muddl[ing] through.” Yet if the environments of single mother sitcoms seemed sometimes dreary, the overall message of single-mother series was liberation. Alice, for instance, fled, as the theme song said, a life lived “with blinders on,” one specifically defined by housewifery as she “cooked and cleaned and went out of my head.” Ann appreciated the opportunity to make decisions, once her father’s prerogative and, later, her husband’s, scary, but also, a step in becoming “an independent woman” and encouraging her daughters to “think for themselves” (One Day at a Time, “Ann’s Decision,” 1975; “Father, Dear Father,” 1978; and “The College Question,” 1977). Ann, scholar Bonnie Dow has argued, was a “transitional” or “emerging woman” who happily left behind the stereotypical happy housewife role, stumbled sometimes, but gained confidence as a mother and a breadwinner (Dow, 60, 62). When compared to superficially modern Phyllis, Alice and Ann were truly modern women negotiating the post-1960s social landscape. Both One Day at a Time and Alice were long-running and successful sitcoms, suggesting that they connected with broad swaths of the 1970s audience. So too were they stories about women who weren’t just mothers, but other things too. There were work stories, stories about friends, and stories about romance. Their children grew up. By the end of One Day at a Time, both daughters had married and moved out and Julie had a daughter, making Ann a grandmother. While her story was set in the “fantasy world of television” (Phyllis on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, “Phyllis Whips Inflation,” 1975), it offered much resonant reality for a lot of viewers, whose specifics

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Ann Romano on One Day at a Time, played by Bonnie Franklin, was a classic seventies single mother struggling to find herself and help her daughters forge their own modern identities during rapidly changing times. CBS/Photofest.

might be different, but who saw themselves as Ann did, scared sometimes, uncertain, but ready to tackle change. She and Alice were authentic, maybe not in the sense of representing all or even most real women; but because at their center was the broader 1970s quest for identity. Norman Lear, who created One Day at a Time, was the most prolific generator of successful sitcoms in the 1970s and a great believer that characters needed to be rooted in reality and that series should tell a lot of different people’s stories (Lear). Some of his most famous characters were

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working-class and Black. Just as the second wave of feminism prompted the television industry to explore the lives of single women, so too did the civil rights, Black power, and Black identity movements push the networks to include stories about Black and Brown people in their offerings. Feminism, though, was less on the minds of Black Americans than racial matters, including the long-standing emasculation of Black men by the culture. Consequently, in several series with Black male leads, Black women could end up as stereotypes, even if Black men created them. Black media specialist Donald Bogle complained that several were “slightly updated overstuffed mamm[ies]” (Bogle, 218). On the family sitcom, The Jeffersons, wife Louise played second fiddle to husband George, the more sensible wife to a foolish man, the classic working-class sitcom family structure, even if the Jeffersons had “moved on up,” as their theme indicated, from poverty. She did have a touch of a cinematic mammy’s sass to her, although most of the sass in their household came from her maid, Florence. Florida, the maid on Maude, was also sassy and skeptical of her liberal-but-privileged employer. When Lear, who produced Maude, proposed giving Florida a sitcom of her own, the actor who played her, Esther Rolle, wanted to be sure “to give Black women dignity.” She declined the initial script, though, because she didn’t want to head a “matriarchal Black family” that 1960s experts regarded as one root of many social pathologies (Rolle, as quoted in Acham, 129; Smith-Shomade, 20). With input from Black writers, the Evans family was born, two thoughtful parents struggling with the intertwined challenges of poverty and racism as they raised their children in the projects of Chicago. Florida looked and acted with the same no-nonsense style that critics would laud in The Cosby Show’s Clair Huxtable a few years later. But Florida was not a lighter-skinned, educated, upper-middle-class Black like Clair; she was darker, hadn’t finished high school, and lived in poverty. She was a Black sitcom mother at a time when comedy was commonly rooted in authenticity. What gave Florida authenticity was not the intersectionality of her story so much as the ways racism, injustice, and discrimination affected her family. Husband James was often unemployed and angry about it. Donald Bogle, writing in 2001, thought that she sometimes “appears to go overboard to stand by her man,” and “make his home . . . his castle” (Bogle, 2001, 199) in order to compensate for the ways the world treated him. While her race and her economic status might have caused her to make some different calculations about her marital partnership and interactions with her children—speaking to a Black audience—her fierce love and support for her family were universal good-mother qualities that made her an appealing character. Within the limits of the times, the medium, and the genre, Florida was as close to a fully fleshed-out Black mother as Rolle was likely to manage. Episodes found her addressing a range of family issues not encountered by

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White sitcom mothers, like school busing, a gang shooting, or her older son being arrested for a crime he didn’t commit. A lot of what Florida dealt with, though, was familiar to much of the audience, whatever their color, stretching a dollar as prices went up, children who bickered, housework that didn’t get done like it so magically did on 1950s shows. But then a funny thing happened to the Evans family: older son J.J., played by Jimmie Walker, took off as a character. Tall, skinny, and loose-limbed, the stand-up comic, in his first role, played J.J. broadly, “mugging, clowning, and flashing his teeth,” uttering a catch-phrase, “dy-no-mite” (Bogle, 201). After the first season, most of the Black writers—all men—left the series, replaced by White ones. While the White executive producer of the series, Allan Manning, hoped for “meaningful” programming that expressed “the reality of the Black community,” such relevance, he noted, had to be balanced against “what worked comedically” (Manning, as quoted in Hazziezah), and J.J. worked comedically, while the inner-city reality was not as funny. The writers quickly turned him into a stereotype, gullible, self-important, confident of his sexual allure, and relatively ignorant about the world. Good Times was never a so-called literate 1970s sitcom, but one that “relied on typical television-style humor,” stand-alone jokes, and insults (Bogle, 200). J.J.’s popularity pushed the series farther toward “a quick laugh” (Rolle, as quoted in Acham, 127) instead of continuing to explore the pressures facing a poor Black family. Soon, the family lost James, who left the series, as would Rolle, complaining to the press that “they have made him [J.J.] more stupid and enlarged the role,” a depiction she feared “says to black kids that you can make it by standing on the corner saying “dy-no-mite” (Rolle, as quoted in Acham, 139). The show did well in the ratings initially, but even better as its focus shifted away from the parental generation to the younger one. While Lear was eager to depict “the reality of Black life” for Black audiences as well as tell some “very serious stories” of interest to White liberals, Lear conceded that J.J.’s “easy laughs” gave him more centrality in a series initially about his elders (Lear, “Interview”). Walker’s presentation might conjure racial stereotypes, but his reliance on physical humor appealed to children, a somewhat underserved part of the audience in the 1970s. They enjoyed the stumbles and bumbles of shows like The Beverly Hillbillies and Gilligan’s Island during the era of more fantastic sitcoms, but far less in evidence in the 1970s. Children loved J.J.’s insults and his swagger, just like they later enjoyed the putdowns and overdrawn characters on Happy Days or Welcome Back, Kotter. Christine Acham, who writes about Black television programming, remembers that as a child, she identified with Michael, J.J.’s younger brother on Good Times, because he was the youngest in his family, like she was in hers, not because of what he represented, a more informed Black cultural identity (Acham, xi). As critics noted, Good Times, at least initially, offered its audience a slice

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of some Americans’ reality, including a nuanced mother. But not everybody wanted to see reality. The realities that 1970s television brought into people’s homes alarmed some Americans. Police shows abounded, full of violence. The sexual revolution brought sexual matters to a variety of shows as even sitcoms explored abortion and impotence and featured gay characters. Television was considerably less censored in the 1970s than ever before, leading to an industry “wallowing in sex,” as one unnamed TV executive noted (as quoted in Elana Levine, 3). Concern grew over the content of television and its impact on children during the decade. After the 1974 made-for-TV movie Born Innocent, which featured the rape of a teenage girl in a juvenile detention facility, prompted a copycat real-life case, the three networks acted because they feared Congress would, establishing a Family Viewing Hour for the 1975/6 television season, self-censoring programming. The practice disproportionately affected sitcoms, which usually ran earlier in prime time, especially those like Rhoda aimed at young adults. It would only last a year. However, by the second half of the 1970s, “relaxed” social attitudes prompted a full-out “child protection movement” that would impact sitcom content (Jenkins, 109, 118; Elana Levine, chapter 3). If the threat of regulation was the stick that moved the networks to act, the possibilities of counterprogramming was the carrot that lured them to add programs that might appeal to underserved audience segments in an environment when the tastes of young adults, particularly women, so often shaped programming. Children might not have much direct consumer clout, but they still counted in the Nielsen rating system as viewers and their needs and desires continued to shape much consumer spending. They also liked tie-ins, products related to series or favorite characters, whose rights could be marketed. Good Times’s J.J., for instance, not only attracted younger viewers; he also sold lunch boxes and shirts. He helped to bring Good Times into the Nielsen top ten in 1974. He helped to remind CBS of the value of children as an audience. Seventies children, however, lived in a different era. Child actor Clint Howard, born in 1960, caught Leave It to Beaver in syndicated reruns, for instance, and found it “dated” and “corny” (Howard and Howard, 114). Certainly, Beaver’s circumstances didn’t reflect a lot of 1970s children’s real lives. Several years before J.J. appeared, third-place network ABC had already started to deliver family-friendly, but intentionally more modern family stories on Friday evenings, counterprogramming family sitcoms against adult dramas and films, hoping to get a splinter audience to watch. Neither The Partridge Family nor The Brady Bunch was ever in the Nielsen top ten, but both were popular with younger audiences, who eagerly bought the records made by The Partridges’ David Cassidy or the toys, games, or lunch

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boxes connected to either show. And just as Leave It to Beaver would be rebooted in a later decade for an older-boomer audience hungry for nostalgia and curious about whatever became of Beaver, Wally, and their friends, so too would their slightly younger siblings, the youngest boomers or the oldest members of Generation X (born 1964–1981) watch any number of Brady Bunch syndicated reruns, reboots, and specials going forward, suggesting a program whose impact might not be wide but was certainly deep. How, though, to render mothers? Contemporality was a crucial element for both The Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch’s successful wooing of their younger audiences because Clint Howard wasn’t alone in finding Beaver and company dated. Music was one way of signaling hipness to 1970s children, poppish, inoffensive music at a time when their older siblings might be listening to the Rolling Stones or David Bowie. The Partridges were a family band; increasingly so were the Bradys’ musical performers, a series’ direction the younger cast requested and the older cast members disliked (Potts). While traditional family sitcoms had been intended for family viewing, those creating The Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch assumed that the bulk of its audience would be children, preteens, and teens. Consequently, children and teens were central actors, always dressed in stylish clothes and trying to establish themselves as popular and cool in innocent ways. Characters were one-note: Danny Partridge was a schemer, for example, just as Greg Brady always tried to connect with pretty girls. As an actor with an Oscar, Shirley Jones, who played the widow Partridge, got some centrality in The Partridge Family and as a single mother, she was possessed of some of the power Ann and Alice had in single-mom shows. Carol Brady, by contrast, was much more of a throwback character, the nurturing mother whose own life was not nearly as interesting as her children’s. Which is precisely why she ranks high on contemporary lists of favorite sitcom mothers (Pennington, Beachum, and Holland), as symbolic of motherhood to a slightly younger group of viewers as June Cleaver was to their older siblings. Like June, Carol was never at the center of the action; her children and step-children were. The younger Bradys strove to establish themselves as individuals, fighting over who got a room of their own or access to the family car. Carol sought no such independence and grappled with none of the challenges that so plagued Ann on One Day at a Time. She looked modern, but like the first generation of sitcom mothers, stayed mostly tucked away in the kitchen, consulting with the family housekeeper, Alice, who saved her from all the things that drove another Alice “out of my head” (Alice theme song). Many an actual mother in the early 1970s in the room while her children watched might well have pointed out the unlikeliness of Carol’s situation, a stay-at-home mother with a live-in housekeeper. For children, though, she

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represented what a growing number lacked, a stable daytime presence in the home. She was “there” (“June Cleaver, Clair Huxtable”). Carol Brady helped to perpetuate the ideal of the perfect sitcom mother for a new group of viewers, viewers too young to question her artificiality or, as their older brothers and sisters were beginning to do about June Cleaver, Harriet Nelson, and the 1950s mother stereotype more generally, mock her. Carol was a sitcom motherhood in a pantsuit and a shag haircut who nevertheless embodied the good old days. She, like her series, one young viewer recalled, was “so warm and fluffy” (“Erin” in Owen, 19). Some of the vibe that the Carol Brady represented, Marion Cunningham of Happy Days amplified, a series that expanded the appeal of the old-fashioned family. Happy Days was set in the past, enabling nostalgia for the 1950s, the heyday of the idealized sitcom mother. It was part of a 1950s revival, including Grease and American Graffiti that attracted not just children as viewers but also people who were themselves teens in the 1950s, older viewers who might not be so interested in stories about 1970s single mothers. Happy Days featured the Cunningham family, White and middle-class, who lived in a large two-story house just like 1950s sitcom families. Howard Cunningham went off to work each day while Marion, played by Marion Ross, stayed home. Ross looked the part in her cheerful housedresses and aprons, offering a lot of bromides to her children about behaving like young ladies and gentlemen. But as it was the 1970s, her tongue could be tart and she actually referenced sex, even if she used the euphemism “getting frisky,” which likely went over the heads of the show’s youngest viewers. When the series began, the Cunningham family had three children: jock Chuck; well-behaved Ritchie, whose teen angst and pursuit of girls would be at the show’s early center; and eager-to-be-older Joanie. Chuck quickly disappeared and Ritchie’s friend Arthur Fonzarelli—the Fonz—became the show’s most popular character, especially with children. Fonzie had an outsized personality and was even a bit magical, at least with the jukebox at Al’s diner. Children mimicked his gestures even more than they said “dy-nomite” and carried their lunches to school in boxes decorated with him on his motorcycle. Ross, like other characters, lost screen time to the Fonz, but continued to function as the reassuring mother-figure, sometimes befuddled and sometimes the voice of propriety, particularly when policing her daughter’s behavior. Ross did not regard the role as “much of a challenge” (Cochran), but she continued to rank just below Carol Brady in polls of favorite sitcom mothers (Savage). Like Carol Brady, it was what Ross’s character represented that resonated with the audience. Most of the time, she did “what you’re supposed to do,” as husband Howard once said, all the “cooking and cleaning,” but occasionally an episode made clear that such assumptions might be a part

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of the past, but wrongheaded in the 1970s (“Marion Rebels,” Happy Days, 1977). Happy Days’ unexpected audience comprised children who liked the stability and security of its norms, but especially enjoyed Fonzie’s disruptions and challenges to its nostalgic rendering of their parents’ pasts. At a time when edgier sitcoms were sending their leads into gay bars or to onenight stands, parents and children could enjoy this sanitized version of the past together, with an occasional double entendre thrown in for the older generation and the occasional wink to suggest the creators knew this was all a fantasy. As Doyle Greene has pointed out, “Happy Days offered the disillusioned Silent Majority a nostalgic retreat from political turmoil by recreating the 1950s in all its idealized history” (Doyle Greene, 1999), pleasing another underserved audience in the 1970s, older viewers. One of the key parts of that retreat was to resituate mother in the home in an apron and as a helpmate. The show had no particular political agenda. It was not meant to be supportive of the conservative Christian backlash against social change that emerged in the second half of the 1970s. But its depiction of motherhood was often consistent with that movement’s beliefs. Challenging the Equal Rights Amendment, conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly asserted “the right of a woman to be a full-time wife and mother and to have that right recognized by laws,” ensuring that the man-of-the-house provide “primary financial support and a home” (Schlafly). Happy Days and The Brady Bunch affirmed those values without being political, the way M*A*S*H or All in the Family were. They suggested that homemaking and childcare were ways women could serve their families, but sometimes hinted that they didn’t have to be the only ways. Far more important at the time, though, were the feelings of safety and security that shows like Happy Days or The Brady Bunch generated. Scary things didn’t happen on those series. There were no deaths or abortions or old football buddies turning up as trans women, plots on other sitcoms of the era. The soothing reassurance of these programs was just as important to some audience members as the innovation of series like All in the Family was to others. This was not the way television—or even the sitcom—was headed in the 1970s, though, as evidenced by several late-decade trends, shows about workplaces, shows about singles, and more sexual content wherever the setting. Sitcom mothers, already a small number of characters, competed with a host of other more enticing creations, like space traveling Mork (Mork and Mindy), the lovable gang at the Sunshine Cab Company (Taxi), Jack Tripper and his oh-so-sexy roommates (Three’s Company), or two assembly-line workers from Milwaukee who were Lucy-like physical comics, Laverne and Shirley (Laverne & Shirley). Family sitcoms as they had existed before didn’t exist at the decade’s end, but had become the stuff of nostalgia.

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A 1979 skit on Saturday Night Live revealed how baby boomers, who were most of the writers of SNL and nearly all of its performers, felt about the shows of their youth. The program made television, especially past television, a common target for parody, including Star Trek and I Love Lucy parodies, indicative of how the generational lingua franca was pop cultural. Making use of the host that week, Rick Nelson, aka Ricky Nelson, the younger son on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, who had evolved from sitcom costar to teen idol to folk-rock singer, the show took aim at the show that enabled his success, as well as other 1950s family sitcoms, and, by extension, their conventions. The skit opened with SNL regular Dan Ackroyd playing Twilight Zone host Rod Serling, introducing the sort of story at which the Twilight Zone had excelled, reframing the ordinary as frightening. Ricky entered into the same kitchen set to a different theme song repeatedly, greeted in each by a different 1950s woman, June Cleaver, Margaret Anderson, Lucy Ricardo, and the Black maid Louise on Make Room for Daddy. Ricky helped himself to a glass of milk, and was offered brownies or cookies by June, Margaret, Lucy, or Louise, each of whom was welcoming, well-meaning, but, in classic sitcom form, a little confused. He confessed to each mother or mother-figure his problem: stuck in the sameness of 1950s sitcoms, he couldn’t find his way home. Even when sitcom dads got called in, nobody could figure out how to get Ricky home. Finally, the sketch ended, as most SNL sketches do, without a resolution, just Ackroyd playing Alfred Hitchcock to cement the idea that this nostalgic fantasy version of family life was actually a horror. The skit summarized what was starting to happen to sitcom mothers in the 1970s. As constructed by a growing number of writers trying to reconcile the 1950s fantasy, their own experiences, and 1970s realities, they were easy targets to be challenged, questioned, or mocked. As they crafted stories, they focused on a central tension of the era, the clash of generations as baby boomers sought to establish themselves as adults. Mothers were especially easy targets in those circumstances since 1950s sitcoms had reinforced their saintedness. Younger sitcom mothers weren’t so perfect, but written to be real, making them less the butt of jokes and more heroic figures celebrated for their persistence and adaptability. The decade’s fondness for 1950s settings, meanwhile, was ambiguous, capitalizing on nostalgia, affirming for some older or more conservative viewers the value of older ways, while reassuring other viewers that America was moving forward to better times and more opportunities for women and people of color, including women. Sitcom mothers, thus, played contradictory roles in the 1970s, as emissaries of a more-equal future as well as symbols of a harmonious, if hardly realistic, past.

Chapter 4

Here Comes Clair Having It All—or Trying to—in the 1980s

At the end of the 1970s, the decade’s most famous domestic comedy, All in the Family, morphed into Archie Bunker’s Place. The Bunker family— Archie, his wife Edith, daughter Gloria, her husband Mike, and their son Joey—had experienced many of the family problems 1970s shows highlighted: marital woes, sexual ones, economic setbacks, health challenges, and a great many battles, both generational and gendered. But as the new series moved into the 1980s, two changes were particularly noticeable. The first was that the Bunker family had come undone. Jean Stapleton, who played Edith, didn’t want to continue in her iconic role, so Edith died between the first and second season of Archie Bunker’s Place, although she had only been present for a few first-season episodes. Mike and Gloria had already exited All in the Family in the late 1970s, moving to California, where, during a Thanksgiving visit, Archie and Edith discovered that Gloria had an affair and she and Mike were separated (All in the Family, “California, Here We Are,” 1978). When they returned to Archie and Edith’s for a later Thanksgiving, Mike had lost his job and the marriage continued to crumble (Archie Bunker’s Place, “Thanksgiving Reunion,” 1978). Once Edith died, Archie was left to tend the distant relative the two of them were raising, Stephanie, just like Mr. Drummond on Diff’rent Strokes, only without the female housekeeper and a bigger bankbook. If the Bunker-Stivic family turning into individuals was one change, the second was a change of venue. As he “ain’t no good at none of this” (Archie in Archie Bunker’s Place, “Archie Alone,” 1980), the new series shifted focus to his bar, a “middle-class” workplace setting like in several sitcoms successfully negotiating the 1970s/80s divide, Taxi, WKRP in Cincinnati, and Barney Miller, as well as a new 1980s one that would start slow, but build successfully across the decade, Cheers (quotation from Ozersky, 133; Cullen, chapter 10). 75

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Accommodating “social change” had been hard on the “sitcom domesticus” in the 1970s (Horowitz, 107). Series explored the demographic consequences of 1960s revolutions, the divorces, the women living alone, and the generational and economic difficulties of the decade, wearying circumstances that, in the end, seemed to wear down more than just the fictional Bunkers. By the decade’s end, a lot of the more socially relevant comedies like Good Times and Maude had ended, replaced by more feel-good shows like Three’s Company, Laverne & Shirley, and Happy Days. Some of the social relevance that distinguished All in the Family and similar series from their predecessors, moreover, encountered resistance from conservative watchdog groups that challenged LGBTQ-themed episodes or other overt sexual themes. The 1970s marked “the dawn of a new era,” not just for women’s sense of their own possibilities, but how they wanted to see themselves depicted in the popular culture (Wandersee, chapters 7 and 8, quotation from 170). The 1980s, however, also saw a backlash against feminism that would reinforce women’s traditional roles as wives and mothers. Ronald Reagan enthusiastically championed a nostalgic version of the American family, one that the family comedies of the 1950s helped the onetime actor, whose home life hardly mimicked Father Knows Best, imagine. His favorite TV family in the 1980s, the Keatons of Family Ties, were intact, nuclear, and for much of the series run had a work-from-home mother. Conservatives contended that the American family was endangered (Lasch), although what they really meant was that feminism, in their eyes, threatened it by weakening men and their roles. They often blamed “mass culture” for indoctrinating Americans about what they considered unnatural attitudes about sexual identity, gender, and women’s roles (Lassiter, 15), the beginnings of a culture war whose battles may have changed, but whose primary goal was to recreate the norms depicted in 1950s shows, with clear gender roles, fathers in charge, and mothers bearing and raising the next generation. The backlash wasn’t just about reviving older understandings of what family meant; there were very real attempts to turn back time, including, as Susan Faludi explained in her bestseller, Backlash, a “political assault on women’s rights,” including workplace rights and reproductive ones (Faludi, 57). “The cultural and political landscape changed,” historian Lee Ann Wheeler noted, affecting women’s rights as sexual beings and workers, the result of “a conservative, overtly antifeminist administration” (Wheeler, 196). The Moral Majority, founded in 1979 by Jerry Falwell, molded evangelical Christians into a conservative force with political and cultural clout, as evidenced by sponsor boycotts of Soap, a sitcom parody of a soap opera, and Love, Sidney, the story of a gay man constructing a family with a single mother and her child (Kutulas, After Aquarius Dawned, 156–66). And the public divided. A majority favored women’s equality, yet, as historian Robert O. Self has noted,

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“feared concrete changes in family life,” such as shifting gender roles in the household (Self, 331). Most American women did not consider themselves feminists, a statement that was often followed by the word “but” and a list of feminist ideas they endorsed, like equal pay and affordable quality childcare (Douglas, Where the Girls Are, chapter 12; Wallis). At the same time, one new media-driven ideal was the young, urban, professional, the yuppie, whose standard of living generally required two incomes to support. Family circumstances had already changed significantly in the United States, but the ideology hadn’t yet caught up with a reality threatened from the political right. If the 1970s were the era of the scrappy underdog, the 1980s were more corporate and conservative times. Reagan was in the White House and his administration slowly revitalized the economy that was a source of struggle in so many 1970s shows. “Greed is good” proclaimed Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) in the 1987 movie, Wall Street, capturing the new corporate ethos in real life epitomized by the rise of entrepreneurial Donald Trump. Americans developed a love-hate relationship with the new persona of the decade, the yuppie. Few were actually young, urban professionals; few claimed to aspire to be them, but consumption patterns during the decade suggested otherwise (Hammond). The yuppie style was corporate and very buttoned-down as designer suits and preppy casual wear replaced the tie-dye tees, caftans, and Birkenstocks of a more countercultural era. TV dramas like L.A. Law and Thirtysomething brought yuppies directly into American homes, as did commercials that highlighted the lifestyle. New advertisers with expensive products looked to sell their personal computers and imported cars and preferred to associate their wares with good-looking professionals with attractive lives, not struggling divorcees or inner-city families. In the 1980s, even Ann Romano (One Day at a Time) traded up to a new husband and a new career. As if changing family patterns and conservative watchdog groups organizing boycotts weren’t enough for the television industry to contend with, the industry itself changed rapidly. Cable television and the growing number of stations available on it siphoned viewers away from the networks. Nickat-Night, nighttime broadcasting at the cable station Nickelodeon, began in 1985 and in the 1980s ran a series of family comedies from the 1950s and 1960s, including Dennis the Menace, Make Room for Daddy, The Donna Reed Show, and The Patty Duke Show, reminding viewers of the way sitcom family dynamics used to be. First-run syndication of shows filled the early hours of what had been primetime, giving independent stations, and more existed in the 1980s than ever before, competitive options. In 1986, Twentieth Century Fox launched a fourth broadcast network, Fox, initially limited in scope, but moving toward full market penetration by decade’s end, with its outlets available to all viewers. The video cassette recorder, which a majority

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of American households owned by 1990, altered the relationship between viewer and program, enabling the recording of programs that could then be watched at the viewer’s convenience, fast-forwarding past commercials. In the 1980s, though, programming a VCR to record a program was laughably difficult, so most Americans used them to watch rented movies. Either way, in-time network viewership—the crucial Nielsen measurement determining the cost of advertising and a program’s success—declined. Even the remote control, which a majority of American households also possessed by decade’s end, allowed viewers to mute commercials, giving them more power and advertisers less bang for their advertising buck. As a result, as TV scholar Jane Feuer has observed, broadcasters concentrated on “narrowcasting” (Feuer, Seeing Us through the Eighties, 3), seeking smaller-but-hopefully-valuable demographic segments. Networks employed focus groups and pre-showings of pilots to try and figure out what worked and what didn’t, who would watch and who wouldn’t. What they found was that women were disproportionate watchers of episodic television while men tuned in for sports and other unscripted special events. Consequently, women remained a target demographic, especially for sitcoms, as did children. Within the female demographic, however, programmers honed in on “‘role model’ professional women” (Leppert, 11) as yuppie influencers who informally affected what others, particularly working mothers, bought. What these viewers often wanted to see were reassuring meldings of the past and the present, stories of women who found fulfillment outside the home without disturbing a version of the domestic milieu depicted in so many earlier sitcoms. They wanted to see women having it all: intact families, careers, and neat, smoothly running houses. Narrowcasting, though, meant more than just chasing female influencers. In a declining market, children counted too. A new TV generation emerged, members of Generation X (born 1964–1984), who became the raison d’etre for ABC’s TGIF evening of family-friendly television (Francavilla). Gen Xers loved The Brady Bunch in syndicated reruns, too, often in the afternoon, where it reminded them, the author of Gen X TV notes, “of a happier, more simple time when families weren’t as dysfunctional” (Owen, 18), even if their own families were different. As children aged, if they had access to cable television, they were probably watching MTV, Nickelodeon, or Fox’s youth-themed programming, taking them away from the big-three networks altogether. Programmers at those networks worked hard to find ways to keep them interested in network comedies as they grew, often by giving more airtime to sitcom families’ teens. Even though it seemed an increasing impossibility to reach everyone, the networks sought the Holy Grail of programming in the 1980s, the sitcom that could appeal across smaller demographic segments, pleasing children, their parents, conservative viewers, and viewers

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seeking modern and realistic stories. The networks were, as NBC head Brandon Tartikoff noted in 1988, still “in the business of trying to achieve a mass audience whenever we can” (Tartikoff, as quoted in Gerard). The Cosby Show got that mass audience, becoming the most successful television program of the 1980s, reviving the sitcom, reviving the family sitcom, and providing the nation with a “full-fledged depiction of AfricanAmerican upper-middle-class life” (Bogle, 290). Bill Cosby was then regarded as a dream father, lovable, silly, and yet holding high expectations for his progeny. The show succeeded by reaching many demographic segments simultaneously. For the oldest viewers, it updated the domestic sitcom in a satisfying way, retaining that familiar core of feel-good family values and a modern version of older plots, stories where problems were small and there wasn’t automatic animosity between generations. For those boomers becoming parents, the show modeled parents in charge and not afraid to discipline or express displeasure at their children’s choices. Teens could identify with the show’s stylishly dressed and attractive teens, young people eager to sample life who felt sometimes burdened by their parents’ expectations and rules. For children, Cosby was just amusing with his funny voices and flights of fancy. For the Black audience, there was affirmative visibility. And for a nation in the midst of a Reagan-era economic rebound, the Huxtable parents were Black yuppies, buppies. They were Black, but not too Black; indeed, like Julia, the series was sometimes critiqued for not being Black enough (Bogle, 294; Jhally and Lewis, 2–8). As Malcolm-Jamal Warner, who played the Huxtable’s only son, explained, “practically every family, no matter the ethnicity or socioeconomic status, could find something to relate to” (“Ten More Groundbreaking TV Shows”). The Cosby Show successfully merged Black specificities with universal values and familiar television conventions. Bill Cosby played Cliff Huxtable, an obstetrician, married to an attorney, with five children ranging in age, when the series started, from kindergarten to college age. Like Ozzie Nelson, Cosby exercised a great deal of control over the stories and presentation, assisted by experts on child-rearing, which the series proudly listed in its credits (Tueth, 165), a return to the sort of aspirational model of Father Knows Best, which Cosby intentionally sought. Cliff believed in “parental authority, male primacy, old-fashioned sexual morals, monetary caution, respect for elders,” “the zeitgeist of the fifties,” “old wine in new skin” (Gerard Jones, 260; Stark, 256; Gerard Jones, 261), appealing to a lot of viewers. Only this time the boomers were the parents, a Black man was in charge, and the 1950s zeitgeist had been modernized for the 1980s. Cosby was, inevitably, the central figure in this family sitcom. Given that Cosby himself dominated The Cosby Show both behind-thescenes and in the fictional Huxtable family, wife Clair, played by Phylicia Rashad, was, in many ways, the more crucial character to create. She was

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the series’ modern element, a working mother with authority who could not eclipse Cosby. She represented the 1980s superwoman “moving ahead,” as sociologist Arlie Hochschild described the ideal: “there is nothing shy or passive about her. She is confident, active, ‘liberated’” (Hochschild, 1). She had it all, a supportive husband, a loving family, comfortable home, and a satisfying career. Clair’s “moral authority” allowed Cosby to be Cosby, “vacillat[ing] between the wisdom of fatherhood and a childlike, comic selfmockery” (Jhally and Lewis, 11). Viewers knew she was an attorney primarily because she dressed professionally. When she was home, she was often at leisure, not in a housedress, but in a track suit. As one New York Times critic noted partway through the series’ run, when Clair “comes home from the law firm with briefcase in hand to a picture-perfect house,” it might not be relatable (Horowitz), but that didn’t stop women from watching or reveling in Clair’s fantasy world of yuppie motherhood Clair’s parenting style was more direct than those fifties mothers who talked about discipline and childrearing techniques with their spouses, but left their husbands to do most of the truly hands-on parenting. She was not one of those cool parents like Phyllis on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, someone

Despite having five children and a career, Clair Huxtable on The Cosby Show, played by Phylicia Rashad, was often shown at leisure and in yuppie splendor, selling the notion that women could “have it all”: happy families, high-powered careers, supportive husbands, and successful children. NBC/Photofest.

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who aspired to be a pal to her children. Nor was she as unconfident about her choices as was Ann Romano of One Day at a Time. She had opinions and was perfectly comfortable dispensing discipline. Like Cliff, she reclaimed sitcom parental authority. For Black viewers, Clair felt “familiar,” a Black mother, whether it was her style, “some of the situations,” or how she expressed herself (unnamed viewers quoted in Jhally and Lewis, 51). The elder Huxtables were a partnership (Real, 232), even though Cliff got more screen time and more opportunities to express outrage or disappointment. The Cosby Show’s “other Huxtable effect,” contemporary commentators noted, wasn’t depicting a successful Black family, but showcasing a more color-blind one that recognized and accommodated women’s newer opportunities. Clair “smuggled . . . feminism into the country’s most popular family sitcom” (Jason Bailey), but she did so as a fantasy. While real American women struggled with the contours of having it all, the parts of Clair’s life fit together just as seamlessly as fifties sitcom mothers managed to keep big houses spotless and running smoothly without seeming to lift a finger. She met her husband at a historically Black college and had her children while going to law school, although viewers would have to assume that latter part since the series never explained it. Her children thrived, she and Cliff had sexual chemistry, the house looked perfect, and her career as a legal-aid attorney was meaningful and served humanity. One of the biggest challenges that actual working mothers faced in the 1980s was doing their jobs well without feeling like they were also failing their families (Wallis, 86). The Cosby Show allowed them to imagine “the harmonious combination of work and family” (Leppert, 17). Children got fed, rooms got cleaned, husbands got attention, and so did clients. The Cosby Show updated the family sitcom in ways that expanded notions of motherhood without revealing the complicated reality underneath. Clair had broad appeal, though, because she also demonstrated selflessness and nurture, just like older sitcom mothers (Salinas, 33). The most radical element in the series was its subject, an upper-middle-class Black family. Otherwise, a lot in the show was familiar; it was a throwback to fifties comedies with very little of the more dramatic elements of seventies ones. Nothing truly bad happened on The Cosby Show; it specialized in the little disruptions of life—dead goldfish, a bad grade—and family celebrations. Oldest daughter Sondra married a man with outdated opinions about women, giving Clair a straw man to lecture on occasion. The series addressed the elephant in a lot of sitcom rooms, the reality that the Huxtable children seemed in no hurry to move out, by having Cliff bemoan their continued presence, implying that it was no failure of parenting that kept them dependent. But it wasn’t just the yuppie accoutrements within the Huxtables’ Brooklyn brownstone that kept the children at home. Surely it was also the security and comforts of a loving

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father and a mother traditional and modern in just the right ways. Clair was especially popular with younger viewers, who would later remember her as their favorite sitcom mother (“June Cleaver, Clair Huxtable”). Clair was not just a modern mother; she was a modern Black mother, important to the African American audience more courted in a narrowcasting era. She looked professional, nothing like the rounded, servile mammy stereotype of past shows, although she had that element of sass a lot of White mothers lacked. Black viewers liked that Clair “talks just like a Black woman” or “chastis[ed] a child” like a Black mother might (unnamed viewers quoted in Jhally and Lewis, 32, 49, 54, 55). Those touches appealed to Black viewers, who, like other parts of the audience, accepted the conventions of sitcoms, that they would be looking at impossibly handsome people in tasteful surroundings. The Huxtables’ circumstances didn’t have to mirror their own. Indeed, as the creator of a later wealthy Black family, Kenya Barris, had his fictional alter ego, black-ish’s Dre, explain more than thirty years later, as an inner-city child of divorced parents, “I invested in the Huxtables; I saw the family I could be” (black-ish, “The Johnson Show,” 2016). Black viewers who saw familiarity in The Cosby Show and its depiction of a Black working mother did so while holding the same contradictions in their heads that other viewers did about a host of sitcom mothers, the recognition that series took license with “reality,” but conveyed possibilities nonetheless (Jhally and Lewis, 30). The Cosby Show’s success brought more family sitcoms to the networks in the mid-1980s. Family Ties followed it on NBC on Thursday evenings, the story of the Keaton family, creating an hour of upper-middle-class families who lived in spacious houses any 1950s mother might covet. Growing Pains, on ABC, featuring a journalist married to a psychologist, also appeared at the same time, highlighting another lovely house and modern family and another father, like Cliff Huxtable, who spent a lot of daylight hours at home. Like The Cosby Show, both focused on generational interactions, but not between boomers and their stuck-in-the-1950s parents, like on All in the Family, but between the oldest boomers and their children, who aspired to some version of yuppiedom destined to appall their parents, even while their parents lived in yuppie quarters. The elder Keatons were old hippies, while son Alex was interested in finance, strictly corporate in his proclivities, and politically conservative. Daughter Mallory loved fashion, hated school, and was entrepreneurial, imagining her own fashion empire someday. Both engaged Gen X viewers. Family problems varied from the same sorts of little ripples that interrupted the Huxtable household to message stories about drugs, first sexual experiences, or suicide. Both mothers worked, mostly invisibly. Just like the Huxtable household, the Seaver (Growing Pains) and Keaton households functioned smoothly and housework got done invisibly. In both houses, the

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kitchen was a well-used space, although mothers no longer stood and served. Both hid household hierarchies. Fathers like Cliff might help out, but mothers were the assumed household managers, even if the main things they did were delegate room cleanings to their occupants and babysitting of younger children to older ones. Early in its run, Growing Pains established the elder Seavers as modern parents in ways that the TV-literate audience would find entertaining, with a sitcom metaphor. The high school principal, Ward, summoned parents Maggie and Jason to a meeting along with the president of the PTA, June. In case audience members missed the Leave It to Beaver parental references, June actually intoned the line, “Ward, I’m worried about the Seavers.” What worried her was that Maggie went “back to work just when her children need her most.” The show hammered home its characterization of June as old-fashioned visually, with a shirtwaist dress, a bouffant hairdo, and a house where the couch was covered in plastic. She was played, moreover, by a pop cultural figure from the 1950s, Annette Funicello of The Mickey Mouse Club. The episode ended with a dance-off at a high school prom, with Maggie and Jason out-dancing June and her sedate husband (Growing Pains, “The Seavers versus the Cleavers,” 1986). Using images, phrases, and other symbols from their television past, the episode signaled Growing Pains’ intention to engage baby boomers with a flattering presentation of them as ever-young and modern, even as they became parents themselves. Viewers who got the references also got to feel like part of an ingroup or community with slightly subversive tastes. So too did the presentation indicate, as Alice Leppart has noted, “to women viewers that the series is in tune with liberal feminist fantasies of progress” (Leppert, 24). Lynn Spigel believes that the juxtaposition of the past with the present was crucial to imparting an important message to a “television-literate generation,” demonstrating the “‘progress’ of contemporary culture,” especially with respect to women’s roles (Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse). Modern-family 1980s sitcoms rarely positioned traditional mothers against working ones in quite so bald a fashion, but normalizing the working mother helped to secure the audience segment of working mothers and “plan-to-work housewives” who watched sitcoms (Leppert, 12). While studies showed that most women worried that their children suffered because they worked and ended up doing far more around the house when they got home than their husbands did (Wallis, 86; Hochschild), fathers like Cliff Huxtable picked up the slack and everyone had plenty of time to just be together. Planning-to-work mothers could imagine themselves heading out the door like Clair or Maggie did, in sleek suits, clothes that signified important and meaningful jobs rather than the sorts of traditionally female jobs most working mothers actually held. Commercials touted products that simplified life and still made kids

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happy, like the Jell-O pudding pops or home computers Bill Cosby hyped. This was comfort-food television for adults, with enough pop cultural references thrown in to reassure thirtysomethings that they were still hip while not really challenging them to think much about the juggling acts real mothers struggled with every day. Yet the yuppie family shows also sold the idea that a mother could work without much disrupting traditional gendered household roles. In order to do so, they mostly hid work and made fathers particularly available at home during the days, establishing that modern fathers carried some of the second shift work, even if most of what they did, at least if they were Bill Cosby, was make themselves sandwiches and entertain their children with funny faces and stories. Similarly, children groused and fought and teens asserted their independence, but rarely ventured farther from home than an apartment over the garage and a college in town. The rather formal sit-down dinners in the dining rooms of 1950s suburban homes were replaced by do-it-yourself meals in kitchens that allowed for individual comings-and-goings. Life was less formal and more individual. The visuals attested to cooperation, community, and happiness. Occasionally, yuppie family sitcoms tackled working mothers’ burdens, but dispatched them much as they might solve a sibling tiff or other minor disruption. On Family Ties, for instance, Elyse’s hard work on a large architectural project came to an end, much to her family’s relief. Her endeavor was so outstanding, though, that her boss immediately offered her a bigger project, which prompted a fight with Steven over who would pick up son Andrew from preschool. This was clearly a hot-button issue for Elyse, who interpreted Steven’s question as a demand that she “turn the clock back.” “I’ll go back to the 50s,” she vented at him in exasperation, “I’ll cook and clean” and wait for him to come home and “tell me everything that happens in the real world. I’d love that.” She tried bringing preschooler Andrew to work, which didn’t go well, especially since Andrew, primed by his older brother, asked her boss, “can you please fire Mom? We need her at home.” The episode ended inconclusively, with Steven reassuring her that Andrew would remember a happy and fulfilled mother, a lovely sentiment, but one that didn’t actually indicate who was going to pick up Andrew from preschool the next afternoon (Family Ties, “Super Mom,” 1987). Just like on a 1950s show, happily-ever-after seemed to have followed and feelings of comfort and nostalgia trumped the more-troubling logistics of the situation for the problem never resurfaced on subsequent episodes. Yuppie status was a significant lubricant of 1980s happy family stories, implicitly part of the security and basic camaraderie necessary to ensure that all family members appeared fulfilled. Parents like the Huxtables and the Seavers advocated for their children from positions of respectability and

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power. They had, as one of the producers of Dynasty said of well-off characters in the 1980s, “control” in ways poorer characters could not (Esther Shapiro, as quoted in Kaplan). Their children were inured from economic insecurity. Their homes, their clothes, and their family interactions functioned as lifestyle porn for some viewers. At a time when nighttime soaps like Dallas signified wealth without subtlety, yuppie family stories depicted more tasteful professional options. Bill Cosby himself dictated that the sets on his show be decorated for a family “pretty well-to-do,” even though the producers “didn’t want them to look too wealthy” (both positions characterized by Cosby production designer Garvin Eddy, as quoted in Friedman, 19). Viewers, though, saw typicality in the Huxtables’ “affluent, upper-middle-class life” (Press, 106) nevertheless, picking and choosing the elements to which they might relate. The milieu of Growing Pains, Family Ties, and The Cosby Show extended the suburban comfort and security 1950s sitcom households obtained in the fictional towns of the 1950s to more urban places like Long Island or Brooklyn. Clair and the other yuppie sitcom mothers earned their authority just like middle-class fathers who knew best did, by bringing home more-than-adequate amounts of bacon. They just did so invisibly. Yuppie careers went a long way toward establishing these mothers as modern and fulfilled. Seventies mothers worked as waitresses in diners (Alice) or drove cabs (Taxi), desperate to put food on their tables, but these were women with professional occupations, professional wardrobes, college degrees, and the gravitas that came with them. Clair Huxtable and Maggie Seaver, particularly, worked in professions, law and journalism, known to be demanding and, often, inflexible in their hours, not that you’d know it from watching any of the series where bosses seemed remarkably accommodating. On her way to becoming “Super Mom,” Elyse applied for and got a job at an architectural firm. On her first day on the job, she realized that she couldn’t work the computerized system, so to compensate, she did everything by hand in the evenings at home. The children whined; son Alex warned her that “tradition and biology” put women in the home for a reason. Elyse messed up a big presentation and fled for home, sure she was done. But her heretofore unsupportive boss, another woman, stopped by the house to urge her to ask for help. Elyse then apologized to her family for, in essence, trying to have it all and taking it out on them. The episode ended with everybody volunteering suddenly to do more around the house and to put fewer demands on good old Mom. Even Alex declared himself “willing to help out more” (Family Ties, “Working at It,” 1984). Nothing actually thwarted Elyse, not her boss and, seemingly, not her family. Instead, everyone accommodated her, a fantasy few viewers would ever experience in real life. Structurally, yuppie-family sitcoms of the 1980s diminished the stakes of any disruption necessary to the week’s plot, generally by tipping toward

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fantasy rather than trying to depict stories aimed at replicating someone’s reality, which had been 1970s sitcom hallmarks. No marriages came apart and nobody had a drinking problem, except characters imported for what became known as “very special” episodes. Contemporary dramas set among the wealthy demonstrated that the wealthy may have power, but their money didn’t buy happiness and actually weakened their families (Kaplan). Yuppie family sitcoms, by contrast, reverted to the older sitcom pattern of gentle disruptions to the domestic status quo, often with the disruptors themselves having an epiphany about behaving better, being nicer, or being more helpful around the house. There was much less character growth than in 1970s comedies, which made mothers like Clair and Maggie a little bit one-note, but that was often equally true of their offspring and their husbands, most of whom were defined by a few simple character traits. The message, though, wasn’t aspirational, but reassuring. Love, not to mention above-average incomes, guaranteed that everyone would thrive. Yuppie comedies hid what sociologist Arlie Hochschild called the “stalled revolution” of second-wave feminism in the domestic sphere. She documented the myths and strategies couples employed to disguise a reality in a lot of American homes, that women did far more of the second-shift than men did (Hochschild, chapter 2). Yuppie sitcoms simply glossed over the gap between the ideal of equal partnerships and the messier lived experiences. Family harmony, however, both before and behind the camera, was not always assured and a number of 1980s family comedies made adjustments midway through their runs that denigrated their maternal figures. Valerie Harper’s name graced the series created for her, Valerie, the story of a modern wife and mother trying to juggle a job, a husband, and three sons, but that didn’t guarantee her continued employment. When she asked for a salary increase, the production company squeezed her out, killing off her character and renaming the series, first Valerie’s Family and, later, The Hogan Family (Harper). Harriette Winslow on Family Matters, played by Jo Marie Payton, was a character spun off from the ABC comedy, Perfect Strangers. The network’s “intent was to create a star vehicle” for her (Michael Kennedy). But when a character added in the second season, Steve Urkel, scored with the show’s younger viewers even though he was “a walking cartoon” much like Good Times’ J.J. (Bogle, 332), he got more airtime and Winslow far less. Urkel’s dominance signaled to Payton that the creators “didn’t care that much about Black families” (Payton, as quoted on The E True Hollywood Story: TGIF). She, however, had signed an eight-season contract, so was stuck in the show until she departed midway through the last season. Sitcom mothers continued to hold secondary status in a number of series, whose adjustments to women’s changing circumstances were mostly cosmetic.

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As the trajectory of Family Matters suggests, the pull of Gen X viewers, particularly as a strong counterprogramming audience, affected programming decisions that had implications for maternal characters. Although they would never rate the sort of attentive catering as baby boomers got from the networks, in the 1980s, Gen Xers’ enthusiasm for watching people their own age tipped the balance toward the younger generation on yuppie family shows. This was particularly true of Family Ties and Growing Pains, where Michael J. Fox and Kirk Cameron respectively gained screen time while their sitcom parents lost out. Jason Bateman, playing the oldest son on Valerie, also landed more stories about his life. ABC continued to rely on Fridays as evenings to particularly cater to younger viewers. Its TGIF lineup included Family Matters and a motherless sitcom, Full House. Full House became the same sort of touchstone for 1980s youngsters as The Brady Bunch had for people a few years older, a fuzzy, feel-good program where fathers could do everything mothers were supposed to do, only they were funnier doing it. While a number of family shows used gloriously yuppie lifestyles or attractive teens to entice viewers to tune in, the new network, Fox, counterprogrammed by offering their opposites, losers one could laugh at. Fox’s The Simpsons, an animated series that began on one of the network’s first relative successes, The Tracey Ullman Show, as a series of shorts, featured the ultimate doofus dad, Homer, his blue-haired wife Marge, and their three children, including overachieving Lisa and underachieving wise-guy Bart. Their lives were magical only in the sense that, as cartoon characters, they never aged and never died from the radiation spewed by the nuclear power plant where Homer messed up regularly. The wholesome family next door, the Flanders, was mocked. Marge might have liked to live up to their ideals, but she dealt with the family she was stuck with. Nothing about the Simpsons said yuppie. The dysfunctional Simpsons first appeared at about the same time as Fox’s premier live-action dysfunctional family, the Bundys, on Married with Children. While Marge Simpson aspired to tiptop sitcom mothering and did her best against strong odds, Bundy matriarch Peg was trashy and lazy, a misogynist’s notion of what a wife might be. Played by Katey Sagal, she was crafted as a series of stereotypes that generally didn’t appear on family sitcoms as a main character: a housewife who did no work, a spouse who nagged her husband about everything, including his failure to meet her sexual needs, and an amoral mother whose greatest gift to her children was teaching them how to lift money from Dad’s wallet while he was asleep. Married with Children was part of media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to build his new network through provocation. “Other shows deal with families where Dad has a great job and Mom wears tasteful and expensive clothing,” explained one of the show’s creators, Michael C. Moye. “How about families where Dad has a

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go-nowhere job, Mom sits home all day, and the kids are constantly looking for money?” The Bundys were such a family, Moye argued, one “many people can truly identify with” (Moye, as quoted in O’Connor, “Farewell to Wit”). But Moye and company weren’t really interested in creating well-rounded and identifiable characters. Rather, they wanted to “reshape the elements of traditionally amiable sitcoms—father, mother, two kids, neighbors—with a chain saw” in order to shock and titillate (Rosenberg, “2 New Fox Shows”). Blatantly crude and minus any characters with whom to identify, Married with Children was full of insults, innuendos, and one-liners, the subject of a campaign against it that actually brought it more viewers (Marla Brooks). Executives at Fox gambled on controversy to bring them viewers who did not aspire to yuppie-dom, and one of the best ways to court controversy was to dress Mom in skin-tight animal-print pants, give her a massively high beehive wig, sit her in front of the TV with a pack of cigarettes and some bonbons, and let her complain about her sex life. Peg was always depicted in demeaning ways, as a bad mother you could laugh at in a family where nobody was a role model. Husband Al might have been selfish and boorish, but viewers had seen immature fathers before. On sitcoms, though, mothers weren’t supposed to be selfish, yet Peg was entirely self-centered. In the seemingly alternative universe Al called Bundy Land, feminism was something to be demeaned, but so too was the ideal of the nurturing sitcom wife and mother. Peg didn’t take care of her family. She took care of herself. She seemed to embody men’s worst nightmares about women, that they were leeches who counted on men to enable their trashy habits, women who were bold enough to take, take, take and still criticize the providers of the family income. Yet Peg could also be read as a parody, no more realistic than the idealized portraits in Leave It to Beaver, The Brady Bunch, or The Cosby Show, the dark side of the 1950s housewife, the woman who, as one post–World War II magazine characterized it, had “an easy racket” (Knowlton). Peg explained herself in what was becoming a common plot of a family sitcom, a story about a parent visiting career day at school. Peg brought her couch and posted a sign explaining what she did, “housewife.” Her skills, which she eventually shared with an enthusiastic audience of teenage girls and their mothers—including someone in a judicial robe—were spending the money her husband made, calling for delivery food, and controlling the TV remote. When she finished her presentation, the audience chanted her name like they might a sports hero. Her dim-witted, oversexualized daughter, too, was enthralled. “When I grow up,” she declared, “I wanna be just like you. I wanna do nothing. I wanna be nothing” (Married with Children, “My Mom, the Mom,” 1989). But while Peg’s dream of no responsibilities and no actual work might have sounded idyllic to some of the females who listened to

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her, the series didn’t set Peg up as a role model. Rather, she was constantly insulted and mocked by husband Al, just as she insulted and mocked him. Neither Bundy represented a good partner to the other. Both lived not just in Bundy Land, but also a land of bad dreams. Married with Children was not designed to explore changing expectations for women. Critics hated it; it never won an Emmy award; and it never registered on the Nielsen top thirty programs any of its ten seasons. The sheer outrageousness of all the characters could evoke indignant howls from viewers or shouts of laughter, and that was the point: to get a reaction. There was no redeeming social value to Married with Children, but many of its targets seemed to be women, and its message was conservative, assuming that women didn’t want to be equal, but just left alone with their selfish, baser pleasures. It drew a higher percentage of male watchers than other family sitcoms did, bringing a generally uninterested set of viewers to the sitcom. Its ongoing parodies of family life and domestic comedies spoke to viewers familiar with sitcom conventions and happy to see them mocked, and its biggest outrages could be dismissed as jokes rather than assaults on women, feminism, or family values. Still, Peg was at the extreme end of a trend in maternal representations, mothers who were problematic at best and just plain bad at worst. Elements of what motivated Peg, like her selfishness, would slowly creep into depictions of other sitcom mothers. If Peg represented bad mothering and Clair and her ilk mothers able to have it all without sacrificing anybody’s happiness, a third set of renderings in the 1980s featured feminists struggling to be good mothers in an era of backlash. Feminist TV, as it was sometimes known, courted women, particularly women who worked and who might enjoy the fantasy of smoothly having it all, but also wanted to have their more complicated modern lives validated. CBS counterprogrammed a number of programs particularly aimed at women against ABC’s Monday Night Football, anchored by the police drama, Cagney and Lacey, the story of two New York City female police officers and their professional and personal lives. Feminist TV featured female protagonists, often doing men’s jobs or competing against men in the workplace. Blair Brown, who played the title character on NBC’s The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, explained that the point of shows like hers was to avoid “a lot of perfect things that women were in TV” (Brown, as quoted in Du Brow) and show them as victims but also assertive people with agency who sometimes made mistakes. Indeed, feminist TV acknowledged the discriminations and struggles of the 1980s backlash against feminism as characters got harassed on the job, exploited by men, and objectified. Generally, though, they triumphed, albeit often in small ways or making incremental progress. Feminist TV tended to be created and written by disproportionately female staffs, ensuring a level of believability (Dow). These series showcased mainstream

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feminist values while depicting those who opposed them as the enemies of working women and hypocrites. Motherhood was only part of what Bonnie Dow calls “prime-time feminism” and rendered as just one element in a woman’s more complicated life. Molly Dodd, for instance, lived alone in Manhattan, was divorced, battled a sexist boss, had a number of romantic and sexual partners, and sparred with a generally critical mother. Only late in the series, when it migrated from NBC to Lifetime, which had “the highest viewer concentration of working women and women ages 18 to 49” (Wilson, 107), did Molly become pregnant, lose her partner, and tackle single motherhood. The more Molly was conceived as a woman’s show, the more the stories considered the many—sometimes contradictory—roles she had to play. On Molly Dodd, having a baby wasn’t a plot point added on to revive a show or accommodate a pregnant actor; episodes about Molly’s baby were about Molly, her concerns, ambivalences, and the mental adjustments she made to motherhood. Similarly, on Designing Women, Kate and Allie, Murphy Brown, and Roseanne, all feminist series, motherhood was only one element in a woman’s life, but one that threw a monkey wrench into the other parts. While yuppie moms had it all, feminist mothers fought for it all. It was a compellingly relatable set of stories, even for people who might not call themselves feminists. Designing Women, Murphy Brown, and Roseanne would all be Nielsen top ten shows. On feminist series, motherhood tended to be messier and less instinctive than on family shows. On Designing Women, divorced mother Mary Jo grappled with a son and a daughter pushing boundaries and playing one parent off the other. Her ex made more money than she did, but didn’t always meet his child-support obligations, forcing her to take on a second job to make ends meet, a job she was too embarrassed to reveal she had. Inevitably he took up with a younger woman, so, feeling she was competing for her children’s affection, she tried to be their pal and bribed them with things she couldn’t afford. Her children rarely had the kinds of clear-eyed epiphanies that moved the Keaton progeny to do better by their mother. Instead, they had to be shamed or disciplined or lectured into better behavior. “My kids won’t take children of the year and I probably am to blame,” she once explained, but she worked rather than accepting alimony after her divorce to be a model for her children. Whatever choice a mother made, she and her colleague, Charlene, who opted to stay home with her baby daughter, agreed, women felt “judged” and “guilty” (Designing Women, “Working Mother,” 1990), like a lot of their viewers did, by their husbands, mothers, mothers-in-law, and friends. Feminist shows balanced out depictions of victimization and agency, demonstrating that women might be right in feeling resentment and frustration at their families, but could also stand up for themselves and make their lives better. The main characters on series like Kate & Allie and Designing Women

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grew as they attempted to create themselves as individuals who were mothers but also other things. Allie on Kate & Allie, for instance, went back to school after her divorce, got jobs, and remarried, all on her own terms. At home, feminist sitcom mothers battled husbands and ex-husbands and even their ex-husbands’ trophy wives. In their workplaces, men hit on them, demeaned them, and sexualized them. Sometimes they didn’t win their battles, but, win or lose, they learned something. While Clair Huxtable and her yuppie ilk remained somewhat enigmatic as characters and static, feminist characters often got to evolve and their families, which often weren’t traditional twoparent sitcom families, did as well. And while Clair, Elyse, and Maggie were mostly atomized in their lovely homes with their nuclear families, the women of feminist TV leaned more heavily into other kinds of relationships, workplace families and, sometimes, sisterhoods. Still, a yuppie patina clung to Designing Women and Murphy Brown, which featured elegant home spaces, women in designer clothes who were well-educated, literate, and ambitious and had the wherewithal to ensure that their children had advantages and were themselves able to manage their work-life balances. As one Redbook short story noted, “those single mothers on TV made it look so easy” (Painter, 54), largely because they could afford nannies and maids and college educations for their children. Roseanne was the only feminist show that featured a working-class family. When both Roseanne and Murphy Brown rebooted in the 2010s, the next generation’s situations revealed just how much class matters, even in sitcom America. Murphy’s son Avery was a globe-trotting journalist; Roseanne’s daughters Becky and Darlene worked on the same assembly line as their mother had, each having married young, each later a single mother, and neither having gone to college. Class was a complicated part of 1980s family stories because television was a commerce-driven medium and modern motherhood, whether of the stay-at-home or working variety, required money. Although only 4 percent of Americans technically qualified as young urban professionals, the nation had a lot of aspirational yuppies who looked to TV and magazines to understand what defined the elusive yet blissful state. On television, “yuppie-class materialism,” a New York Times writer explained, seemed to make people happy, and served as a “vicarious pleasure” for viewers (Kaplan). A lot of Americans became skilled at reading class into what they saw around them, including on sitcoms, and more came to know yuppie brands, whether those items resided in their kitchens, like Cuisinarts, or their closets, like Izod shirts. Settings and costuming became more important on television, particularly influenced by the rise of music videos on MTV. The yuppie life commercials touted personal computers, microwaves, CD players, and VCRs, and pushed a lot of Americans into debt. The economic polarization that began in the 1970s

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and accelerated thanks to Reaganomics and the tech revolution of the 1980s, actually left a lot of mothers—and families—behind, but so long as television remained a commercial-driven medium, most of its stories would assume that those who didn’t live like the Huxtables or Murphy Brown had failed and it was their own individual flaws that explained those failures. Nobody on Roseanne aspired to yuppie-dom. They just wanted to survive. Indeed, Roseanne wanted to play a mother who was “not a supermom,” but a spokesperson for “the hopeless underclass of the female sex” (Roseanne, as quoted in Lee, 95, and in O’Connor, “By Any Other Name”). In a genre that had created a lot of “myths” about the American family, including its “idyllic, self-reliant, upwardly-mobile, suburban” nature (McLeland, 165), Roseanne instead featured a messy and imperfect working-class family, happily, the Time magazine critic noted, “puncturing . . . TV ideals of happy domesticity” (Zoglin, “Sharp Tongue in the Trenches,” 88). In order to do so, Roseanne had to wrench control of the series away from the writers and producers who, she felt, constructed a more conventional show, so that she could give the series that bore her name both a “female gaze” (Lee, 96) and a focus on an “overworked, flawed, but loving mother . . . rather than the bemused patriarch or Tiger Beat–ready teens” (McLeland, 165; Horowitz). The series wondered what the sitcom family might look like without “the rosy glow of middleclass confidence and comfort” (Barr), but also without the mean-spiritedness and misogyny of Married with Children. Her willingness to take on authority of various kinds was key to understanding both the fictional Roseanne and the real one. The character brought, New York Times critic John J. O’Connor noted, “blue-collar sarcasm and toughness” to the show (O’Connor, “In the New Season”), an “unmistakable expression” of the real Roseanne (Zoglin, “Sharp Tongue in the Trenches,” 88). The series initially made use of Roseanne’s “Domestic Goddess” standup routine, which related Roseanne’s experiences being a wife and raising children, quickly segueing into stories about the family’s economic woes and interpersonal conflicts. The performer loved sitcoms and, like most of her baby boomer cohort, had grown up with them, and it was often through the language of the sitcom that the series expressed itself, with sly references to characters, plots, tropes, and theme songs. Roseanne’s “proletarian feminism” challenged the “myth of the happy suburban family of TV Land” and “too much June Cleaver” (Lee, 93; Roseanne, as interviewed in Robbins, 103). Roseanne was the ultimate unruly woman, loud, large, imperfect, and difficult to contain, so defining of the type that she graced the front cover of Kathleen Rowe’s 1995 book, The Unruly Woman. She constantly challenged authority, including on the job. She was not always a good person, but meddlesome and manipulative. “Unlike most television moms,” Joy Horowitz

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noted, “Roseanne is flawed” (Horowitz). Her grammar wasn’t perfect, and her wardrobe seemed to come from a discount store. The opening credits ran over the Conner family sitting in the kitchen eating out of take-out boxes while the theme music played, stopping at the end so Roseanne could let out a loud laugh. Nobody watching the character could think they wanted to look or sound like Roseanne, but everyone wanted the vicarious pleasure of watching her, in part because the realities of the Conner household got at the essence of mothering, “problematizing and redeeming the role” by presenting an imperfect mother who learned from her mistakes (McLeland, 171). Roseanne was extremely popular, suggesting that the show appealed to a number of demographic segments simultaneously, like The Cosby Show did, even as her series represented “the flip side of the impossibly perfect Huxtables” (Zoglin, “Sharp Tongue in the Trenches,” 88). By its second season, it was tied with Cosby for the top Nielsen spot. Viewers enjoyed its imperfection; many appreciated that its star wasn’t svelte, perfectly coiffed, and perky, but “smart-mouthed and sloppy,” as Ladies’ Home Journal put it (Bettie, 131; Robbins, 102). It was hard not to feel some kinship with her as wife and mother. Everything about the show suggested settling, muddling through. Even the set with its ugly couch and littered coffee table felt familiar but maybe a tad less classy than your own (Friedman, 55). The Conners “clearly love[d] their television more than their vacuum cleaner” (McLeland, 168) and there were usually dishes on the kitchen table and scattered on the kitchen counters. The ethos was distinctly working-class, sometimes shaping stories of economic struggle, but also framing what Roseanne repeatedly called their “white trash” cultural tastes as deliberately rebellious ways. Roseanne liked nothing better than challenging school principals, her bosses, her mother, her children, and her husband. Roseanne always worked. After interviewing female viewers, Andrea Press found that her workplace assertiveness was a plus for female viewers (Press, 42). Her work life received a lot more attention than mothers’ did on yuppie sitcoms. She had to work, although even with two incomes, the Conners were always on the verge of economic disaster. Roseanne derived little pleasure or satisfaction from the series of low-wage jobs she held. None of her bosses ever accommodated her the way Elyse Keaton’s did on Family Ties. Instead, she had to fight for fairness and swallow humiliations. Her reality duplicated that of working mothers, who often settled for jobs that gave them flexibility rather than higher wages. At the same moment that sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s The Second Shift was published, Roseanne offered an accessible version of what Hochschild observed, that women were overburdened, did considerably more around the house than their husbands, and that families developed rationalizations to explain the inequalities (Hochschild; Horowitz). The imbalances in the

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Conner household revealed themselves pretty quickly when Roseanne took on a second job, helping around husband Dan’s new motorcycle shop. “The family is doomed,” she declared as they came home to piles of clothes on the couch and a son who didn’t speak for two days. Dan’s solution was to put older daughter Becky in charge of the house, which Roseanne knew wouldn’t work. And, it didn’t, leaving Roseanne feeling that she had no other choice than to do Dan’s job for him, selling a motorcycle so that he could afford to pay someone to do what she did for free in his shop, reducing her to one job and the bulk of the household chores (Roseanne, “Take My Bike, Please,” 1991). Dan’s dream made more work for Roseanne. She rarely got the luxury of pursuing one of her own. Television scholar Andrea Press believes that Roseanne’s feminism was less assertive about domestic inequalities than work ones, but others suggest that she fought against “patriarchal norms that saddle women with responsibility for the whole family’s accumulated grime” (Press, Women Watching Television, 43; McLeland, 170). Either way, she was still stuck with the second shift, grousing about it, making it as visible as she could and demonstrating some of its gendered dimensions as episodes emphasized how little Dan knew about the running of the house and how unwilling the Conner offspring were to pitch in. This was, New York Times’ critic Joy Horowitz explained, “the darker side of domestic life” (Horowitz). The millions of women who watched Roseanne each week could easily appreciate how little enthusiasm for housewifery the character had and find solace in the disarray that was the Conner household. Everyone could feel reassured that however much their home lives were less than perfect, the Conners’ were worse, and yet, everybody mostly stayed together. Roseanne also depicted raising children—and particularly teens—as emotionally wrenching work. Hers were not like the Keaton or Huxtable children, on their way to yuppie lives. Daughter Darlene spent more than a season depressed, lying on the couch dressed in black. Becky ran away with a boyfriend her parents disliked, marrying before she finished high school. Dan was detached from the daily goings-on, played favorites, and was quick to anger. Still, like the far-yuppier Huxtables, the elder Conners were firm and in-control parents, at least as much as parents could be. But Roseanne was a working-class feminist, and the working-class aspect dictated that she be less genteel, louder, and have a sharper tongue than yuppie mothers, be they feminist or more idealized. While Designing Women’s Julia Sugarbaker was given to feminist rants about pornography or sexism, Roseanne saved most of her rants for her loved ones, depicting a family dynamic that was argumentative and often angry. Viewers could simultaneously identify with some of Roseanne’s challenges and feel superior to her, a potent combination. She “transformed the legacy of television mothers from wimpy wives to spiky matriarchs” (Horowitz).

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For female viewers, especially, the 1980s could be a confusing moment, a time between two popular-cultural identities, one more liberated or feminist featured in advertising and one more traditional that conservatives touted as the cure for the nation’s many social problems. At a time when the press warned women about their fertility and the dire—potentially satanic—consequences of putting their children in daycare, the likelihood of ever finding a husband if they had a career, and the economic consequences of getting divorced (Faludi, introduction), motherhood had become politicized. Fewer women were becoming mothers in real life, though, and those who did tended to do so later in life than their mothers did and had fewer children. A much higher percentage of mothers also worked. But while families had changed overall, the family role least likely to have changed in social expectations was mother. Family sitcoms helped to normalize the idea that mothers worked, supported by advertisers eager to promote products that might simplify their lives, like microwavable meals or bags of prewashed lettuce. “Solution selling,” articulating a problem a product could solve, replaced the lifestyle or sexual depictions of the liberated 1970s (Kashtan). Women, generally more responsive to insecurity as a sales pitch and facing challenges their own mothers might not have experienced, looked to what was sandwiched in between halves of Murphy Brown, Family Ties, or Roseanne to select personal care items, packaged foods, telephone plans, or on-the-go dinners from places like Burger King or McDonald’s. The stories surrounding the ads suggested these were tools for working mothers of varying incomes and circumstances, as Roseanne might come home with a bucket of chicken or Murphy might try to dine at an upscale men’s club. Advertising pitched at women was designed to provide solutions to the clashes between roles that sitcoms generally promised could be resolved. And that was the implicit message of many family sitcoms of the 1980s, that mothers could be modern and still manage to be good mothers. The new generation of memorable moms, led by Clair Huxtable, worked without neglecting their families, true of many more unruly mothers as well, like Roseanne. Family members would pitch in as necessary and even dad-substitutes like Uncles Joey and Jessie on Full House could somehow change a baby’s diaper without incident. Families survived change and accommodated to women with careers or jobs. Yet while many sitcom mothers of the 1980s existed in yuppie fantasy lands, mothers like Roseanne introduced the possibility of less-than-perfect motherhood, designed to consider modern mothers’ realities and unmask the impossibility and unfairness of their juggling acts. They didn’t have it all; they just did it all.

Chapter 5

Single Moms and Man-Children Gender Wars and Motherhood in the 1990s

When Murphy Brown became a single mother in the spring of 1992, it was briefly a political issue, made so by Vice President Dan Quayle. He decried the yuppie-ness of it (“just another lifestyle choice”) as well as branded it an act that “mock[ed] the importance of fathers” (Quayle, as quoted in Alter). Whether or not his attempt to score points in the upcoming election by attacking nontraditional families had much to do with it, he and the incumbent president, George H. W. Bush, lost their reelection bids. Murphy, meanwhile, enjoyed “blockbuster ratings” and opened up the floodgates for single-mother pregnancies, delicate conditions that “replaced weddings as that special event used to perk up ratings” (O’Connor, “Politicizing of TV’s Prime-Time Comedy”; James, “A Baby Boom on TV”). In the 1990s, conservatives believed that there was a “war for the soul of America” (Patrick Buchanan, as quoted in Hartman, 1) even as liberals hoped that a Democratic president with a decidedly boomer sensibility, Bill Clinton, would finally support the “much more complex and varied landscape of American families” (Self, 328). Yet the war between liberals and conservatives over family values wasn’t the only cultural war raging in the 1990s. It was related to—but also distinct from—a gender war between men trying to hold on to privileges and women seeking change as well as a generational quarrel between second- and third-wave feminists, who might have shared some goals, but had different strategies for improving women’s lives. All three battles would affect sitcom depictions of motherhood. Third-wave feminism emerged from the contradictions of the backlash years of the 1980s so effectively captured in the early seasons of Designing Women and Murphy Brown. Third wavers were young women inspired by and raised to the ideals of the second wave of feminism in the 1970s. The third wave was more inclusive than the second, more global in conception, 97

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and less theoretical. It emphasized agency and empowerment over victimization. The voices of the third wave, as scholars and media commentators alike noted, rested on second-wave’s successes, but also existed in tension with them; the primary cause was generational. Contemporary commentators often characterized the third wave as daughters “signal[ing] a break” from their mothers’ feminism (Munford and Waters, 23; Henry). Third-wave feminists focused on issues more relevant to younger women, their sexualities, their objectification, and their intersectional realities. In popular culture, the edge of this new version of feminism bled into “girl power,” a cuter, safer ideology associated with youth, like The PowerPuff Girls, the Spice Girls, or Brittany Spears. HBO’s Sex and the City explored female sexuality in the modern age. On network TV, women slayed vampires and became warrior princesses, simultaneously liberated and sexualized. For a lot of younger women, sexual agency was a particularly potent form of power (Douglas, The Rise of Enlightened Sexism). For their mothers, it often was not. Meanwhile, what women like Murphy Brown, old enough to be associated with the second wave, shared with their younger sisters was the “transform[ation] of women’s personal consciousness” and their expectations. One did not need to embrace feminism overtly in order to reject the gendered premise of so many past sitcoms, not to mention American traditions “that women should always be the ones who make the coffee, watch over the children, pick up after men and serve meals” (Coontz, “Why Gender Equality Stalled”). Men, though, often didn’t get the memo. Tired of feeling they had to be superwomen because men wouldn’t change, American women came to resent them. Between the onset of the second wave of feminism in 1970 and 1990, growing percentages of women concluded that men weren’t kind people, but selfishly interested in their own sexual pleasure and themselves (Kimmel, “Issues for Men in the 1990s,” 671–72). While women often compared themselves to their mothers and saw gender progress, when men compared themselves to their fathers, they saw the opposite: a loss of privileges and power. The resentments would become a common sitcom premise, competent, forward-looking, often ambitious women clashing with child-like men who expected to be taken care of but also wanted to be the boss, all power, no responsibility. A lot of the networks’ target demographic, middle-class viewers aged eighteen to forty-nine, hadn’t grown up in the family structure made famous by 1950s family comedies, two parents with a stay-at-home mother. Many, as adults, didn’t live that way. Gen Xers joined their boomer elders in postponing the traditional markers of adulthood, if they got there at all. Just as a host of 1970s sitcoms explored boomers’ different paths into workplaces or single-parenthood, Gen Xers’ choices became the fodder for “mustsee TV” in the 1990s thanks to Friends, whose success encouraged more

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friends-as-family shows. The building blocks of adulthood on such shows were mentioned in Friends’ theme song: work, money, sex, and friends. In friends-as-family shows, the present both “sucked” and was satisfying, as Monica promised in the Friends’ pilot (Friends, “The One Where Monica Gets a Roommate,” 1994). Parents, especially mothers, though, were often part of what “sucked” to Gen Xers, the reason that so many of them turned to ersatz families of their peers rather than the families in which they grew up (Kutulas, “Friends”). Fathers bumbled, strayed, or disappeared on friends-asfamily stories. Mothers, though, like the mothers of other grown characters on sitcoms past, opined, interfered, and attempted to control their maturing children’s lives. Reruns of older sitcoms on cable stations like Nick at Nite and TV Land full of mothers baking cookies served two conflicting purposes during the era, functioning as a key piece of “nostalgia for an allegedly simpler, happier, and more prosperous time” (Meyerowitz, “Introduction,” 1) while implicitly telling viewers that they were “somehow more enlightened than the characters (and audiences) of the past” (Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse). They were part of a shared past, even if some members of the community of TV watchers only saw older shows in reruns. A number of contemporary series used allusions to older sitcoms for nostalgia but also to confirm viewers’ hipness for getting the usually snarky references. Parodies, flashbacks, and alternative story lines might contrast with the single-plot, often moralistic, family comedies of the past, but necessitated people knowing and appreciating the difference. On an early episode of Friends, for example, sarcastic Chandler invoked a 1970s family drama known for its wholesomeness after learning of the ways his roommate’s family situation didn’t match its wholesome norms: “things sure have changed on Walton’s Mountain” (Friends, “The One with the Boobies,” 1995). The past was something to be chased as well as fled, at least for some sitcom characters in the 1990s. Few parts of older family sitcoms carried more power to evoke strong feelings than mothers. Evoking the past was also a way to bond viewers to characters and stories, particularly on series eager to render the complexities of the present. With an ever-growing number of networks and viewing options, viewer loyalty was harder than ever to establish. One technique a number of successful shows used was to create parasocial bonds. A parasocial bond connects viewer and character in a way “akin to interpersonal relationships,” full of resonant shared references to older material objects and experiences (, Schiappa; Allen; Gregg, 302–4; quotation from 302; Rojek). Character backstories became typical parts of plots, emphasizing commonalities audiences and characters might have shared, everything from favorite TV shows to bad haircuts. Virtually every successful sitcom of the 1990s used the flashback at some point, revealing momentous events in characters’ middle-class pasts,

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proms and college parties, bringing a boyfriend home for Thanksgiving, meet-cutes. Mothers were featured characters in many of those stories, generally as antagonists, people making main characters’ lives more difficult or embarrassing. Along with multi-episode arcs, cliffhanger episodes, dream sequences, alternative storylines, and other departures from the classic sitcom structure, these were the elements that especially defined NBC’s success with sitcoms in the 1990s, the comedic part of its “must-see TV.” Mothers of regular sitcom characters represented part of the idealized past that Gen Xers didn’t get to have, mostly because of sixties revolutions. Certainly, those revolutions gave Gen Xer women especially broader opportunities, but Gen Xers still felt the sting of not growing up in a Happy Days or Brady Bunch family, which may not have served as norms but did still function often as ideals. The model of the two-parent family with a stay-athome mother described fewer and fewer American families. Mothers were supposed to be supportive but not directive; but that was not a lot of Gen Xers’ lived experience. Most friends-as-family shows featured mothers who didn’t measure up. On Friends, for instance, Chandler’s divorced mother was a romance novelist with an active and inappropriately shared sex life, embarrassing him and, at his wedding, forcing him to thank her lover “for pleasing my mom so” (Friends, “The One After ‘I Do,’” 2001). George’s mother on Seinfeld, “embarrassed and harangued” her son most of the time. The actor who played her, Estelle Harris, noted that people always approached her on the street to tell her that “you’re just like my mom” (Traub). Generationally, the parents of Gen Xers in friends-as-family stories were young in the 1950s, rooting a lot of their ideas, at least where their children were concerned, in that era. Costumers and set decorators signaled mothers’ fixation with the past with Formica-topped tables in their kitchens and their bouffant-ed hair. Sitcom mothers wanted to seem with-it and young, but weren’t. Whenever they visited, they dropped the names of childhood friends or old prom dates who were more successful, whether measured by careers, grandchildren, or merely how they treated their mothers. These were not emotionally fragile flowers who needed to be treated with kid gloves, the way Beaver and Wally treated their mother on Leave It to Beaver. They were bold, often conniving and a bit loud, clearly more powerful than their husbands, if they had them. The actors who played these mothers had associations with older television days and outsized personalities, like Grace Adler’s mother on Will & Grace (Debbie Reynolds), Jamie Buchman’s mother on Mad About You (Carol Burnett), or Rachel Green’s mother on Friends (Marlo Thomas). How they were presented clued knowing audiences into what to think about them: they were bound to be inappropriate. Often the generations clashed over sexual mores. Seinfeld’s infamous masturbatory episode, “The Contest” (1992), began with George’s mother

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catching him pleasuring himself, so shocking her that she fell over and hurt her back. Jackie on Roseanne hoped to give her always-disapproving mother a heart attack by oversharing: “I went out with a guy I hardly knew, we had sex for hours and I got pregnant” (Roseanne, “Be My Baby,” 1997). She didn’t succeed, but her mother remained disapproving. Story lines like “The Contest” or Murphy’s single pregnancy drew criticism from conservatives, who continued to identify television with the 1950s, when, as one critic noted, stories were “innocent and decent” (Michael Medved, as quoted in Hartman, 172). Mothers often played a role akin to conservative critics in friends-as-family stories, the women trying to hold the line on the indecencies they believed their children were committing, whether it was sleeping with inappropriate people or contemplating artificial insemination to have a baby on their own. Fathers, often as not, paid less attention, or responded like the father of one of Rachel’s dates, who stumbled upon her in her new lingerie and opined “I like her; she seems smart” while his mother assumed she was a prostitute (Friends, “The One with Rachel’s New Dress,” 1998). Mothers of grown characters were especially hard on their daughters. Daughters, after all, lived more liberated lives, which mothers, most of whom didn’t seem to, saw as repudiations of their values and their lives. Caroline of Caroline in the City left her home in small-town Wisconsin, moved to Manhattan, and drew a cartoon strip that chronicled her adventures. Anticipating her mother’s visit, she predicted her mother’s chief complaint, even mimicking her mother’s Midwestern accent: “If I wasn’t so picky about men, she’d be a grandma by now, doncha know?” (Caroline in the City, “Caroline and the Visit from Mom,” 1998). Grace on Will & Grace likewise knew exactly what her mother would say about her choice of roommate: “I’m ruining my life, that I’m never going to meet anyone because I’m living with a gay guy” (Will & Grace, “The Unsinkable Mommy Adler,” 1999). Most viewers, whatever their age, had probably gone a round or two with their mothers over a partner, a lifestyle choice, or what they wore to Grandma’s funeral, just as they might have learned that other women in their age cohort were living in big houses and having babies. Self-interested propriety to an older set of values was mothers of grown characters’ stock in trade. Thus, the sitcom visit from a mother demolished the confidence of many a regular female character. Even usually formidable Murphy Brown turned into a petulant teenager when her mother arrived. The interactions were tense, largely because the mothers were so judgmental. While viewer sympathy and identification were with the daughters, an episode of Friends suggested that a mother who was “critical of everything you say,” as Judy Geller said (“The One Where Nana Dies Twice,” Friends, 1994), might be a more timeless reality. Important in the generational motif were the 1960s and the ways they reoriented women’s lives. “I didn’t want to be like me either,” said Cybill’s

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mother after she overheard her daughter tell a friend that she never wanted to be like her mother. “My mama didn’t give me any choice . . . you have a career, you have your freedom, you have a life. I envy that” (Cybill, “Mothers’ Day,” 1997). Rachel went from angry to more sympathetic when her visiting mother explained that, unlike Rachel, who left a dentist who represented security but not love (Dr. Barry Farber) at the altar to pursue life in Manhattan, she had “married my Barry” and been stuck in an unhappy marriage with an overbearing husband (Friends, “The One with the Lesbian Wedding,” 1996). Characters like Cybill or Rachel’s mother helped to “construct . . . the past” in ways that affirmed the possibilities of the present (Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse), but that outcome still often ended up making a lot of older mothers villains more than victims. Friends-as-family sitcoms did very well in the 1990s by modernizing the basic concept of successful 1970s series like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, exploring the complicated roads to adulthood for the next generation. Shows like Will & Grace, Mad About You, and Friends were innovative for their time and engaged with elements of the culture wars, like sexual identity or single motherhood. They particularly appealed to middle-class viewers aged eighteen to forty-nine. They did well in syndication and came to represent American life in a host of other countries. Many left their marks on the culture. They were not, however, the only programming on network television, nor were they the only successful shows of the era. Versions of old-fashioned family sitcoms updated for the era also existed and the most famous of them, Everybody Loves Raymond, included at its center generational strife and mother issues. Ray had an assertive wife, Debra, who stayed at home with their children, but regarded herself as a modern woman. He also had a mother, Marie, who was the “most intrusive, overbearing, nosy woman” imaginable, played by Doris Roberts (Romano, as quoted in “Doris Roberts”). Ray tolerated his mother’s excesses because she spoiled him like a child while Debra expected him to act like a modern man. The two women represented two generations of housewives, bonding Debra to many married women whose husbands didn’t help around the house and turning Marie into a cultural symbol of the mother who couldn’t stop mothering. Marie “doesn’t give in; she doesn’t give up and she never takes no for an answer” Roberts explained about her character (Roberts, as quoted in “Doris Roberts”). Like the good 1950s mother on family comedies, she tended to her husband and sons, cooking, cleaning, and ensuring their comfort. Her sons, though, were in their forties and could take care of themselves. Marie didn’t hover quietly in the background. She continued to treat her sons like they were children. She wanted to boss everybody. She was more like Philip Wylie’s too-domineering mother, smothering and infantilizing her sons. She was very much the unruly older mother, well past childbearing age, a threat to

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the family order and a thwarter of individual development. Marie constantly sowed discord, pitting son against son, daughter-in-law against daughter-inlaw, and husband against wife. Marie regarded Debra with skepticism. She disapproved of Debra’s modernity, including that she wasn’t a “good girl” when she married Ray (Everybody Loves Raymond, “Good Girls,” 1998). Nor did she approve of Debra’s belief that a marriage was a partnership and that Ray ought to be expected to help around the house. She judged Debra a bad housekeeper and bad cook. When Debra contemplated going back to work part-time, Marie clearly disapproved, opining that the children already looked “so skinny” and noting that “most women would settle for having everything” (Everybody Loves Raymond, “Working Girl,” 1999). On occasion, she might side with Debra over a women’s issue, but generally she made snippy comments and gave backhanded compliments. She intruded where she wasn’t welcome. And she lorded her good cooking over Debra. Marie, like Rhoda’s Ida, was an ethnic mother, not a Jewish one, but an Italian one, which meant that her identity stereotypically revolved around feeding her family, evoking a past filled with Sunday roasts and comfort food. Debra, representing a different generation of women, didn’t see food as love. Marie’s culinary skill, however, gave her power over her family. The series began and ended with exactly the same scene: Marie barging into Ray and Debra’s kitchen bearing an old-fashioned culinary item like pancakes or chocolate cake that her son and grandchildren immediately sat down to eat, ignoring whatever Debra was in the middle of providing. Variations on the generational approaches to cooking and cuisine drove plots, Marie teaching Debra how to make her specialty, but deliberately sabotaging the recipe she gave her, Marie bringing her own food to a shower Debra threw, or accusing Debra of destroying her when she, as the episode title indicated, made something good (Everybody Loves Raymond, “Debra Makes Something Good,” 2000). In one Thanksgiving episode, Debra hosted the family dinner, serving fish instead of the traditional turkey, which Marie insisted on bringing and the women fought over whose protein had caused Marie’s husband Frank to choke, ignoring his plight (Everybody Loves Raymond, “Turkey or Fish,” 1996). Food became the measure by which Debra, a notoriously mediocre cook, fell short and Marie excelled, the difference between a woman who fancied herself as modern and one whose identity was very wrapped up in serving others. Like the visiting mother in friends-as-family sitcoms, Marie showed up at the worst times, only since she lived across the street, she showed up often. She watched the children, all the while undermining their mother to them. She told Debra how to clean, how to raise her children, and, worst of all, how to please her husband. Sometimes she didn’t even bother to judge, but just

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refolded the laundry or washed off the table. She lacked boundaries, entering Ray and Debra’s bedroom and, once, pushing her way between them on the bed. She almost inevitably sided with Ray when he and Debra fought. She was a woman who claimed way too much power, power that destabilized her family. She was the equivalent in a more traditional family sitcom to the meddling mother on a friends-as-family show. But if Marie was a sort of cautionary tale about 1950s mothering, Debra was no prize specimen of a mother either. She didn’t represent the traditional stay-at-home mother, but her 1990s sister. Floating in the media in the 1990s was the notion that “June Cleaver .  .  . had really been onto something.” Debra’s “choice” to stay home, thus, actually was a “modern, fulfilling, forward-thinking version of motherhood” according to Good Housekeeping and other traditional women’s magazines (Douglas and Michaels, 205 and 23; Coontz, “Why Gender Equality Stalled”). NBC Nightly News, Ladies’ Home Journal, and the Wall Street Journal all suggested that a number of married women, tired of trying to be superwoman, opted to stay home and enjoy their families (Douglas and Michaels, 203–6). Debra’s choice may have seemed fulfilling when she made it, but staying at home didn’t send her into the rapturous excitement women manifested on commercials when they smelled laundry detergent or made their floors shiny. Nor was Ray helpful around the house. Meanwhile, Marie loomed to criticize rather than help. Debra quickly learned that being a traditional wife and mother might be an ideal, but was more frustrating than satisfying in practice. She and Ray were always at loggerheads over precisely what her role was. She didn’t fulfill the role nearly as happily or efficiently as Marie did and she certainly didn’t do it quietly. As a modern woman, she assumed that Ray would be her partner, pitching in a lot around the house and with the children. He, however, believed in the older gendered roles of men and women, that fathers worked and mothers handled everything else, not so much ideologically as because it was convenient. “You just don’t want to do any work around here,” she complained to Ray (Everybody Loves Raymond, “Working Girl,” 1999), calling her husband out for what was obvious to everyone except Marie. The disproportionately male writing staff problematized either partner’s notion of the division of domestic labor, her sense that the person who earned the money should have to pitch in at home when she was there all day and had help in the person of Marie and his endless lies and evasions to escape the house. Still, the mostly male writing staff had sympathy for Ray’s experience as “the put-upon guy who fights with his wife and his parents,” as one said. “This is our lives” (Lew Schneider, as quoted in Stuart Levine). Consequently, Raymond might not get everything he wanted, but he also never seemed to concede much ground.

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Meanwhile, Debra often came off as mean, shrewish, or too emotional. She nagged, which feminists would argue happened in the Barone household “because of the power difference” between Debra and Ray (Marcotte). When she tried to get Ray to practice enlightened parenting or act like an adult, it often came back to haunt her. When daughter Allie wouldn’t behave, for example, Debra enrolled herself and Ray in Parent Effectiveness Training, to learn better parenting skills. She was eager to improve; he resented having to give up his TV time. “That’s supposed to come natural,” he whined, but he, rather than she, mastered the lessons and used them, not on the children, but on her (Everybody Loves Raymond, “Father Knows Least,” 1997). Like Marie, Ray didn’t change; he just doubled down on his position or weaseled out of what he didn’t want to do. The stories were often cringeworthy because there was no satisfying outcome. Implicit within the battling Barones’ marriage was a gendered reality of the 1990s: feminism created different frames of reference between men and women. Women like Debra had grown up during the second wave, absorbing its messages that they should seek opportunities and expecting to be treated as equals. Before she married Ray, Debra had a career, an apartment, and a sex life. Ray, by contrast, still lived at home and delivered futons for a living, his mother doing his laundry and cooking and telling him how great he was. “The privilege of privilege,” sociologist Michael Kimmel explained, kept men clinging to the idea that women were supposed to be like Marie (Kimmel, “Issues for Men in the 1990s,” 675). Sitcom wives like Debra expressed the hopes and the frustrations of real women (Wallis, 80–89) trying to remake family roles. But Everybody Loves Raymond, seemed to take its cue from John Gray’s popular 1992 book, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (Gabler), believing, as one space visitor told another on a series offering an out-of-this-world take on modern family interactions: men and women “are completely different life forms and it’s just some sick cosmic joke that we have to share a planet” (3rd Rock from the Sun, “Dick Is from Mars; Sally Is from Venus,” 1996). Baked into 1990s family sitcoms was a reality where most women grew up with expectations, plans, and values, excited about the opportunity to be more than their mothers were while men feared they would never be able to amass as much privilege or masculinity as their fathers had. It’s not just the contrasting backstories that explained why Debra might get so exasperated by Ray; so too was it his inability to be a grown-up. He couldn’t handle his children without his mother taking over, budget, cook, or keep a checkbook. He had grown up in a household where his mother did everything and that’s how he expected his household to run too. He spent his free time like his father did, watching sports, hanging with his guy friends, or golfing. His career, sportswriter, was a boy’s fantasy of a job. He was one of the best representatives

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of a new type of TV dad that had significant implications for sitcom mothers, the man-child. “Obnoxious slackers are common enough in male-centered TV comedy,” as Sarah Hagelin and Gillian Silverman have noted (Hagelin and Silverman, “The Lazy, Drunk, Broke Woman on TV”). Slacker, man-child, whatever he might be called, he was most commonly found in front of the TV watching sports or a show like Chandler and Joey’s favorite on Friends, Baywatch, where women in bathing suits ran along the beach in slow-motion. Football coach Hayden Fox (Coach) was another man-child, a man’s man who hunted and fished, lived in a log cabin, mocked his artistic son-in-law, and pitched a fit when asked to do something outside his comfort zone, like go to an opera. NBC’s Thursday-evening anchor for its must-see TV, Cheers, was a “manosphere” full of dubious mansplaining and wife putdowns (Oyola). When man-children worked, their jobs tended to be sports-connected, although some didn’t seem to work at all, like Kramer on Seinfeld, a show where “performative masculinity” was on display (Di Mattia). Characters like Friends’ Joey, Cheers’ Sam, and Seinfeld’s George were, New York Times reporter Anita Gates noted, “rude, crude, sex-crazed, sexist, and blindly egotistical” characters who seemed “proud” of their childishness (Gates). Shows like Seinfeld and Cheers were decidedly not family-centric in their orientation, but man-children also prevailed on many family sitcoms of the era, not just Everybody Loves Raymond, but also Home Improvement, The King of Queens, Evening Shade, Step by Step, Married with Children, and Full House. The men on these shows suffered from “Peter Pan syndrome” (Gates), the inability to grow up, a selfishness when it came to their leisure and pleasure, and obsessions with sports. Their wives had the unenviable task of reining them in and trying to make them act like grown-ups. A sociologist studying television marriages concluded that any progress toward gender equality “stopped” at Home Improvement, which another commentator characterized as “a throwback to the nuclear family of the 1950s” (Olson, 418; Brooks, 189). Indeed, Home Improvement featured a family of boys and an exasperated mother desperately trying to redirect her brood from less genderstereotyped choices that detracted from family life. Mother Jill was more patient and less angry than Debra on Everybody Loves Raymond, but, like Debra and so many other spouses of man-children, ended up mothering a lot of male adults as well as children. The appearance of the man-child in the 1990s was part of a “desperate attempt to lure male viewers (and all the dollars advertisers believe they are ready to spend)” to the family story (Gates). He allowed men the fantasy of trying to reclaim some version of what they imagined was a past norm, a time when they might be the men of the house and everyone catered to them (Elkind, 50). For boys, man-child sitcom characters were role models, as

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a 2000 poll of ten- to seventeen-year-old males found. The men they most admired and wanted to emulate in their adult lives included Home Improvement’s Tim and Seinfeld’s Kramer, whose irresponsibility was epic (Gates). The man-child extended the “common family sitcom cliché” of “a slob and a doofus, a man-child with harebrained schemes that blow up in his face” from the working class to other stories. Female viewers might find the set-up familiar and identify with the “smart, mature, grounded” wives who tried to put things right (Thornton). They might even appreciate what so many real-life wives felt: unsatisfying gender dynamics in their personal lives and having to pay the price in their marriages for wanting to be more than their mothers were (Hochschild). Man-children had power in sitcom families of the 1990s, however unfairly, leaving women like Debra or Home Improvement’s Jill to stew. In 2021, a dark AMC comedy, Kevin Can F*#k Himself, briefly gave female viewers a fantasy of their own. The show alternated between the sitcom-bright, laugh-track stories serious man-child Kevin lived and the color-muted fantasies of escape and murder of his much-more-attractive-butlong-suffering wife, Allison. The emergence of man-children on so many 1990s sitcoms resulted not only from the networks’ desire to attract men to sitcom watching, but also from the ongoing power of men in the television industry. Jerry Seinfeld, Ray Romano, and Tim Allen, each a stand-up comedian who got his own series, were among the first television stars to earn a million dollars per episode for acting like perpetual teenagers. They reflected what pundits described as a phenomenon of the era, the angry white male, angry because of political, economic, and social changes that took away what he viewed as masculine entitlements. The second wave of feminism and affirmative action policies made jobs more competitive. Suddenly, women were outperforming men in colleges and universities and, with the backlash of the 1980s behind them and the battle over Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation spurring them on, launched a third wave of feminism. Modern women were, as journalist Gail Sheehy noted, “resilient” and empowered, able to take care of themselves. White men, meanwhile, especially working-class men, resented their achievements (Sheehy). Sociologist Michel Kimmel explained that the transformation of post-1960s America, however imperfectly, from a hierarchical, patriarchal society into a more equal one provoked “aggrieved entitlement” in those who expected their lives to unfold in certain ways, including the depictions of families they grew up watching on television. Those grievances often led to sexual violence, extreme politics, and men’s rights movements (Kimmel, Angry White Men). The idea of the angry White man brought with it a dose of misogyny and condemnation of too-powerful women. Stand-up comics like Andrew Dice Clay and Sam Kinison railed against women in their acts. In the media, a

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“bitchification” of contemporary public women like Janet Reno and Hillary Clinton existed (Yarrow). Often written by men, mothers in family comedies like Debra and Jill reacted to their circumstances with sarcasm, anger, spite, stubbornness, and hints of meanness. Debra routinely called Ray “idiot,” occasionally cuffing him on the upper arm when she did so. “This is my house, that is my dishwasher, and I will rewire it if I want to,” Tim declared petulantly when his wife Jill wouldn’t let him soup-up the dishwasher. She replied with a resounding “NO,” while dangling a common implicit threat on many a 1990s sitcom, withholding sex (Home Improvement, “Pilot,” 1991). Indeed, it was often in the bedroom that the sitcom wife’s disdain for her husband found its fullest, albeit implied, expression. Thus, while some 1990s sitcoms acknowledged that the fictional TV wives of the past were hardly realistic, the replacement version, the frustrated and angry wife, failed to provide a satisfying alternative female character. Sociologist Beth Olson summarized the typical Home Improvement plot this way: Tim was “chauvinistic to his wife” and Jill “tolerates his behavior.” Her study found the show contained more stereotypic gendered behaviors than even 1950s family sitcoms like Father Knows Best, primarily because Tim was so narrow in his version of masculinity (Olson, 423). Children watching these shows, and there were many, often absorbed those family roles, with boys identifying with Tim, while scholar Lynn Spigel’s female students, like Blossom, dreamed of Clair Huxtable (Spigel, Welcome to the Dream House), practically guaranteeing continuing gender wars until, as the title of Tim Allen’s conservative successor family comedy to Home Improvement was titled, there was but a Last Man Standing. For the actors who had to perform these roles, their secondary status within narratives mostly defined by males also could be frustrating. Leah Remini, who played second fiddle to “a juvenile, heavyset Queens delivery driver” on a series aptly called The King of Queens, wished for a plot line that would give the couple a child, but he ruled that there be “no baby” lest it steal focus from him (“Maybe Baby”). Janet Huber spent three seasons playing Aunt Viv on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air as a college professor as well as a wife and mother. But she was abruptly fired and replaced with Daphne Maxwell-Reid, to play the same character only “as a homemaker” who “supported her children” rather than the active career woman she had been (fresh​.prince​.fandom​ .​wiki), a firing the title actor, Will Smith, demanded (Rosen). When Sheryl Lee Ralph, who played the stepmother on Moesha, objected to a late-series decision to have Moesha’s father reveal he had an affair during his first marriage, producing a son heretofore identified as his nephew, she left the series and her character was sent away to Jamaica for work reasons. For Ralph, the plot twist had racial as well as gendered implications. “It just broke my heart .  .  . [that the] great images of family, Black-American family” were

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besmirched by the stereotypic notion of a philandering Black man (Ralph). Like Esther Rolle (Good Times) and Jo Marie Payton (Family Matters) before her, she had little influence over plots and characterizations she felt diminished mothers’ roles in families. The disconnect between women benefiting from gender change and men clinging to older notions of masculinity and privilege was particularly complicated in the Black community, something captured, albeit sometimes unintentionally, by family sitcoms. The few Black-created sitcoms that existed wanted to avoid the stereotype of the Black family as female-dominated and Black men as shiftless, lazy, or altogether-absent. The Cosby Show succeeded in giving a Black father centrality and authority, along with a dose of childish narcissism smartly countered by ever-efficient, but to a degree secondary, Clair. Robert F. Moss, writing in the New York Times, suggested that by the 1990s, however, “the Cosby persona had been all but buried in the “Eddie Murphy revolution,” especially as sitcoms relied more heavily on stand-up comedians. Comics like Murphy brought “inner-city voices” and more “aggressive humor” to Black audiences (Moss), a version of racial authenticity that upper-middle-class professional Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable lacked. While counterprogramming on Fox and the UPN and WB networks sought Black audiences and employed Black creative staffs, those staffs were disproportionately male and created stories about single men with prestige jobs and active social lives. The consequence was that, just like on some other family shows, men and their interests, issues, struggles, and triumphs got more centrality and the women around them got less. Once even the family comedy featured an assertive and street-smart masculine lead (Bogle, 418–19), Black mothers sometimes lost their distinctiveness. While previous Black series like The Jeffersons relied on sensible and sharp-tongued women to keep cocky Black masculinity somewhat in check, 1990s Black women faded into the background, just like Harriette on Family Matters, always an admirable wife and mother but, increasingly, a secondary character. Yvonne Hughley (The Hughleys) was a stay-at-home mother by choice in a household defined by such traditionally male pleasures as beer and poker. The good woman who took care of both Carlton and Will on The Fresh Prince, Will’s aunt Viv, was restrained, elegant, light-skinned, and, ultimately, lacked the level of spunk Clair Huxtable manifested a decade before. Aunt Viv quietly mothered her whole family, including her husband, her son, and her nephew. In contrast to White wives who seemed dubious of their husbands’ and sons’ actions, though, she became a wife without attitude. Her job was to stand back and let Black men have center stage. As Kristal Brent Zook has pointed out about The Fresh Prince, Black authenticity on television remained a male endeavor, one associated not with yuppie whiteness, but with street-smarts and deep skepticism of White

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norms. Black women, by contrast, tended to be lighter-skinned, elegant, and exist without some of the brashness of previous Black sitcom wives. Stories about Aunt Viv and her daughters generally focused on “shopping, dating, marriage, pregnancy, child-rearing, aging, and beauty,” suggesting that Black women were somehow “predisposed” to fit into White norms and categories (Zook, 21; see also Salinas, 37–40). Their authenticity intersected less with Blackness than with wealth. Early on, Viv fought back against her children’s expectations that someone else—generally the stereotypically effeminate Black butler—would take care of their needs. Later, that concern was less on her radar than how her daughters presented themselves. When Black mothers were the stars of sitcoms, they existed more often in the very situation Esther Rolle hoped to avoid on Good Times decades before, as single mothers. Certainly, this was true of the short-lived dramedy South Central (1994), where single mother Joan grappled with the death of one son while worrying that the other would become involved with a gang. On The Parkers, a spin-off from Moesha, comedienne Mo’Nique played an unruly single mother, Nikki, returning to claim the college education she couldn’t complete because she became pregnant when she was young. Nikki was a pushy-woman stereotype in a flashy wardrobe who relentlessly pursued a professor just as surely as Connie Brooks pursued Mr. Boynton (Our Miss Brooks) forty years before. One theme on the show was her determination to horn in on daughter Kim’s college experience, whether it was sororities or housing. Her version of the stereotypic “Black mom” (Kim on The Parkers, “Reunited,” 2000) was controlling and demanding and bossy, a mammy for a new generation. Narrowcasting briefly made Black audiences a desired and courted audience segment, which is why comics like Mo’Nique and Martin Lawrence got sitcoms. The Cosby Show proved that Whites would also watch shows headed by Black stars, especially if the series strove for universal appeal. But once the creators of series with Black leads started to imagine their creations as distinctively Black and for a Black audience, White viewers mostly stopped watching. In 1980, Black Entertainment Television (BET) launched, a Blackowned and -operated cable network. Its initial reach was small as Black households were less likely to have cable than White ones (Zook, 3). Except for NBC’s forays into Black-made sitcoms like The Cosby Show, the other major networks didn’t court Black viewers. Fox, however, did; by 1993 it had more “Black-produced shows” than at any time “in television history,” since 25 percent of its viewers were Black (Zook, 4). The larger number of sitcoms available, though, focused on Black men. Even those series, however, had only brief success as Fox owner, Rupert Murdoch, acquired the rights to Sunday evening football broadcasting and the network shifted its attention to what would keep those men watching after the game, the short answer

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being The Simpsons. Two new networks, the WB and UPN, also briefly tried Fox’s strategy (Zook, 103), but by the late 1990s, there were no popular family sitcoms that Black and White viewers shared as preferences. Black sitcoms played to Black audiences, generally on smaller platforms, until black-ish premiered on ABC in 2014. White sitcom viewers, meanwhile, had little exposure to Black family dynamics and, instead, got often stereotyped notions of Black females in the few secondary characters on the big-three networks, like sassy Nina on 3rd Rock from the Sun or take-charge, mammylike Dr. Mary on a few episodes of Frasier. The Black-created sitcom, like the White-created one, often featured a stand-up comic in its lead role in the 1990s. While the larger number of stand-up comics getting shows were male, women benefited as well, including Mo’Nique and Ellen DeGeneres. Women also gained traction in production companies in the 1990s. Whether in front of or behind the camera, they offered more stories about women and their complicated, often intersectional identities. Women-created family series tended to be more modern in structure than a series like Everybody Loves Raymond, telling stories that were “diverse, fluid, and unresolved” (Stacey, 7). Single motherhood—or at least the consideration of single motherhood—became one way to explore women’s changing family circumstances. By 2000, a third of all births in the United States were to unmarried women and the relatively high divorce rate also made other women primary custodial parents. Since television tends to “reflect rather than create mores,” as Caryn James noted in the New York Times, the sitcom genre was “catching up with the social fact” of single motherhood in the 1990s. Still, their existence sent a “strong message” about American families (James, “A Baby Boom on TV”), which could make them, as Murphy Brown’s baby was, part of the culture war over family. Often, though, writers trod very carefully, having a character consider single motherhood, but decide that they didn’t want to parent alone, but have the more traditional elements of family, including a loving partner, a more conservative outcome. Friends’ Monica, Cheers’ Rebecca, and Designing Women’s Mary Jo, all single women, considered solo motherhood before discarding the idea. On The Golden Girls, Blanche’s daughter’s single motherhood wasn’t so much about the outcome as the process, artificial insemination, an opportunity that allowed for generational difference as Blanche, a mother “before bonding or personal time” could decry her daughter’s choice as “so unnatural . . . no daddy” (The Golden Girls, “The Accurate Conception,” 1989). As Blanche’s daughter wasn’t a continuing character, viewers weren’t confronted with her choices on an ongoing basis; they just learned some of the mechanics of modern family planning and, later, about modern delivery practices. That was equally true of the single pregnancy of Phoebe on Friends, who bore triplets for her brother and his wife. Like the option of

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abortion, which several female characters acknowledged as a choice, but not their choice, series approached single motherhood fairly carefully. Women on board behind the scenes on series, though, led to much greater attention to the process of becoming a mother than ever before, whether the woman was single or married. Long gone were the days when pregnant women got whisked to the delivery room and out of viewers’ sight. Pregnancy tests and the accompanying jokes about peeing on them and visits to the “gyno’s” office, as Hayden on Coach called it, ultrasounds, and the “hee, hee, ho” of Lamaze breathing were incorporated into Murphy Brown, Evening Shade, Coach, Friends, Mad About You, and Roseanne episodes (Kutulas, “Do I Look Like a Chick?”). Oh, Baby, a series created for the Lifetime network, by Susan Beavers, covered the whole gamut of its protagonist’s single pregnancy, including picking a sperm donor, attending Lamaze classes, and delivering her baby. As more women writers joined the ranks of series about women, they demystified—as much as one could on network television—reproductive biology. It was a far cry from the few episodes where women had babies before. Single mother stories, even the ones where women opted not to go through with having the baby, were stories of assertive and independent women. Throughout the backlash years of the 1980s, the popular culture reminded women of their ticking biological clocks (Faludi, chapter 3). Nineties stories, by contrast, showed women taking control over their own reproduction, trying to persuade their male friends to provide sperm, visiting clinics, and inducing their partners to follow in their wake. Rebecca on Cheers published her ovulation dates in the bar’s newsletter and Mary Jo on Designing Women carried around a cooler full of sperm. Sitcoms depicted 1990s women proudly and confidently in charge of their own reproductive destinies. Pregnancy and delivery stories on 1990s sitcoms, whether they featured married couples or single women, reflected a life stage that writers, actors, and a valuable segment of the audience shared. Millions of younger baby boomers had babies in the 1990s, as did millions of Gen Xers. The boomers were often, like Murphy Brown, older career women with money, highly desirable viewers from the perspective of sponsors. Seeing maternity stories that strove for accuracy and realism was another way of constructing parasocial bonds. Murphy’s older pregnancy was also “Diane’s [English, series creator and show runner] truth” as well as that of the series’ star, Candice Bergen, according to Murphy Brown producer, Barnet Kellman. Writer Korby Siamas had her child the season before Murphy did and found it “very personal to use things I had gone through and apply them to Murphy” (Kellman and Siamas, as quoted in Alter, “Emmys Flashback”). The two pregnancies on Roseanne accommodated those of the title star and Laurie Metcalf, who played Roseanne’s sister, bringing authenticity to their pregnancies and

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deliveries. Metcalf not only bared her very pregnant belly in the episode where she gave birth, but the end credits ran over photographs of her and her baby immediately after the birth, including the baby covered in vernix caseosa, affirming that even actors looked sweaty and exhausted but blissful after delivering a baby. Pregnancy stories on sitcoms intended for a mainly adult audience could get quite graphic. Their attention to as much detail as networks would allow them helped to demystify US birthing processes. They existed because more women created or wrote for sitcoms and more of the women in them were themselves pregnant and not eager, as Patricia Heaton, Debra on Everybody Loves Raymond, did, to hide their bellies behind couches. Maternity stories in the 1990s, though, were also part of the battles between men and women that so many shows incorporated into their narratives. Jackie on Roseanne wanted nothing to do with the father-to-be of her child, forcing him to contemplate suing “for custody of my stomach,” on an episode fittingly named after a 1950s sitcom (Jackie on Roseanne, “Don’t Make Room for Daddy,” 1994). On Coach, trying to get his wife pregnant threatened Hayden’s masculinity and his marriage as well as humiliating him on television when the sperm-cooling device he wore leaked (Coach, “The Stand-In,” 1994). In labor, Murphy screamed at her male coworker, “you son of a bitch, you man” as she squeezed his hand until he yelled with pain, a common trope in labor scenes since, as one delivering woman declared, “if I’m going through with this, some man must feel pain” (“Caroline and the Letter,” Caroline in the City, 1996). Contemporary sitcoms depicted childbirth as yet another battleground between competent women and incompetent men, women who were full adults and men who were still adolescents. Similarly, series indicated that the Mars-and-Venus characterization of men and women as very different translated into a host of childrearing battles as well. Even on a heartwarming sitcom that was the most successful TGIF comedy on ABC, one that avoided the details of childbirth, Full House, afterwards, Jessie and Rebecca fought over how to raise their infant twin boys. She wanted them to be “gentlemen”; he believed that she “overprotect[ed]” them, turning them into “mama’s boys” (Full House, “Yours, Mine, and Ours,” 1992). Frank on Everybody Loves Raymond worried that one of his twin grandsons had “homosexual tendencies” (Everybody Loves Raymond, “Left Back,” 1999). Ross on Friends panicked when his toddler son’s favorite toy was a Barbie doll, so much so that he kept trying to interest the boy in more manly toys, like GI Joe (Friends, “The One with the Metaphorical Tunnel,” 1996). Women, of course, knew all these concerns were crazy and so did the audience, but they led to fights between men and women about masculinity at a time when it wasn’t so clear what it meant any longer.

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Gender wars were particularly pitched when series featured working-class families. Ray and Debra Barone might have fought about everything, but they had the economic security for her to stay home, the family to live in a nice house, eat well, and enjoy extras like vacations. But, as Katey Sagal of Married with Children, observed, “not everyone out there is young doctors and lawyers and two-income families” (Sagal, as quoted in Steve Weinstein). True, perhaps, although the Bundys seemed inured from significant hardship, but a number of more realistically working-class comedies entered primetime in the 1990s, their premises finally deviating from the longtime TV assumption that “hard work always pays off” (Watson). Roseanne showed working-class people whose circumstances kept them from fulfilling their potential and who worked hard, but couldn’t get ahead. Making “an honest comedy” about “what real families say and do” (Chuck Lorre, as quoted in Parker), though, replaced the snappy insults sensible wives like Alice Kramden (The Honeymooners) lobbed at their less-sensible husbands with conflict, struggle, and resilience, more the purview of dramas than sitcoms. Violence, much of it gendered, plagued working-class homes. It was what drove the lead character of Grace Under Fire from her marriage and it had shaped Roseanne’s childhood, a father who hit his daughters that left her “distrustful of men” (Roseanne, “Wait till Your Father Comes Home,” 1992). Her husband Dan was a good man, but he could be quick to anger, acting “like a psycho” when daughter Becky ran off with her boyfriend (Roseanne, “Terms of Estrangement,” 1992). When he learned that his sister-in-law’s partner beat her, he beat him up and was arrested (Roseanne, “Crime and Punishment,” 1993). The men on Roseanne and Grace Under Fire felt thwarted, causing them to act out. Roseanne and Grace might also be angry, but were depicted as resilient and willing to do “stuff you thought you’d never do in a million years . . . cuz there’s nothing else you can do” (Roseanne on Roseanne, “Chicken Hearts,” 1990). Arlie Hochschild, studying families in the 1980s, noted that because working-class men didn’t bring in enough money for their families to survive without their wives also working, working-class family roles were sometimes more equitable than middle-class ones were (Hochschild, chapter 9). Sitcoms like Roseanne certainly didn’t confirm that idea. Dan might not be as juvenile or knuckleheaded as his predecessors, but he was just as fond of the couch and the television set as was Ray Barone and just as prone as was Home Improvement’s Tim to define his household responsibilities as being in the garage or the backyard. He saw links between “money, manhood, and leisure,” as Hochschild said of one working-class man in her study (Hochschild, 130), so as long as he was working, he figured he was entitled to leisure when not on the job or maybe a little one-on-one basketball with his daughter.

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Roseanne represented a pivotal moment for sitcom mothers as the title character was flawed and the actor playing her had a voice in how she was portrayed. Thereafter, few mothers would ever be as perfect or quite as beloved as those that came before, but they would be resonant and familiar to plenty of viewers. ABC/Photofest.

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Consequently, on working-class sitcoms, mothers had to be tough; their attitude, as the adoptive mother of the separated-at-birth twin raised in innercity Detroit said on the pilot of Sister, Sister, was “nobody mess with me” (“The Meeting,” Sister, Sister, 1994). They weren’t as feminine in looks; their clothing made clear that they weren’t professionals; their voices tended to be loud. They were usually opinionated. They definitely sacrificed for their families, but they didn’t do so quietly or graciously. They might love their children, but they generally didn’t treat them with respect. By the standards set by better-situated mothers, Roseanne was a “not so wonderful mother to her kids all the time,” as one article noted. The comedian’s signature line as a stand-up—“I figure when my husband comes home at night, if those kids are still alive, hey, I’ve done my job”—signified her attitude as a sitcom mother, although certainly not always her behavior (Joy Horowitz). Her “spiky” exterior (Joy Horowitz), large size, and general unruliness hid her vulnerabilities and her love of family. Like Grace and Cheers’ barmaid with many children, Carla, she was depicted as “one tough cookie” (Brooks, 193). They were practitioners of what would ultimately be known as “good enough mothering” (Wedge). Working-class sitcom mothers lacked the expectations or pretensions of their middle-class counterparts. They understood that their children had limited possibilities and adjusted their parenting accordingly. But they also taught their children that social rules were made to be broken in order to get ahead, a strategy that could backfire, as when Cheers’ Carla’s son ended up in jail. When her daughter announced her marriage at eighteen, nobody seemed surprised that she was also pregnant, least of all Carla. Roseanne’s children each exhibited elements of her attitude toward authority, bad-mouthing one another, their parents, their neighbors, and their teachers. The whole Conner family dynamic was anti-authority; everyone enjoyed challenging the status quo; everyone was sarcastic and angry. While daughters Becky and Darlene might pass through the markers of adulthood faster than middle-class sitcom progeny, they never quite seemed to manifest responsible adulthood because that was not how they were raised. The implicit assumption behind parenting on Roseanne, that working-class people had their own set of values, including questioning authority, was true of the show’s star as well, who got little respect from her peers, a gender war of its own. While the female creators of series like Murphy Brown and Designing Women came up through the ranks, were often in production teams with their spouses, and presented themselves with the same middleclass finesse—and wardrobes—as their fictional creations, Roseanne was both an amateur and a self-described sitcom revolutionary eager to blow up the genre. Her public behavior was deliberately provocative. She ultimately divided her potential audiences, alienating some, just as her later actions

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would get her fired from the revival of Roseanne. In the 1990s, as she fought for more power to ensure that her authentic story was part of her sitcom, she was ridiculed in the press and challenged by her production team, one of whom likened the experience of working with her to being in a war (Zoglin, “ABC’s Star Wars”). Viewers appreciated Roseanne’s authenticity as well as its many references to the sitcom as a genre, but when she brought her newfound reality of fame and wealth into stories, critics jeered and many viewers simply stopped watching. Yet, she was a very different sort of mother from the “wimpy wives” of yore (Joy Horowitz). The level of conflict and contemporary stories on a lot of sitcoms about things like birth control, abortion, and sexual identity left “parents and kids,” as the Hollywood Reporter noted in 1995, “at a loss as to what to watch” (as quoted in Douglas, Enlightened Sexism). Enter the next generation of traditional family comedies, series that offered superficially modern takes on family life without particularly departing from time-tested formulas, including gender stereotypes. On Nickelodeon, a lot of mothers were simply absent; others were quirky, strategies networks often used when designing kid-centric programming since being without a mother gave a child more agency as well as, sometimes, the responsibility to tend to a father. Mothers on Blossom, Sister, Sister, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, or Boy Meets World inevitably played lesser parts for the same reasons. Mothers were never treated as impediments to growth like on friends-as-family shows, but without them much around, main characters solved their own problems or met challenges on their own or with peers. The Leave It to Beaver kid-centric strategy where father knew best—aided by mother—was a solution that did not apply on most 1990s shows aimed at the younger generation. Of course, the distanced-but-sensible mother was a figure familiar to a lot of millennials, the newest generation to watch sitcoms. With more mothers in the workforce and more age-segregated after-school activities, many young people spent considerable time in the company of their peers than their parents, building the more independent identities child-rearing experts touted as useful in the real world. Helicopter and snowplow parenting might emerge as styles in the new century, but at a moment when the scariest computer game a child might play was the Oregon Trail and most people had no internet to access, parents were inclined to let their children make choices. No more contemporary mother than Clair Huxtable has ever rated as highly in polls of perfect TV mothers. Perfect or nearly perfect sitcom mothering ended with the 1980s. A 1995 episode of Roseanne parodied the classic 1950s family show by recasting the Conner family as though they lived in a Father Knows Best world. Poor Rosie, in her frilly apron, did everything, solving family crises as well as pausing a few moments to run the numbers on Dan’s “Anderson

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account,” the family surname on Father Knows Best; she also “worried about the Deej [son DJ].” She finally confessed to her wacky neighbor that she wasn’t happy: “it seems like I do everything in this family and Dan gets all the credit.” But even Roseanne couldn’t solve the gender inequity of the past. She was only pacified when Dr. Clean showed up with Beritol, an alcohollaced version of the tonic advertised on many a 1950s program, Geritol, that she was able, as the name said, to bear it all. The episode ended with the same sort of inconsequential ending as 1950s sitcoms featured, with a musical number by D.J. (Roseanne, “The Fifties Show,” 1995). The parody cleverly recombined the elements of a 1950s family comedy, including commercials, in a way that highlighted motherhood and confronted viewers with the underside of the ideal 1950s sitcom family. Of course, in an earlier time, Rosie wouldn’t have been the star of the show; she would have hovered, doing all that she did happily, willingly, and without resort to Beritol. It’s just that within the culture, the gap between the traditional American family ideal and the realities “we [have to] live with” had grown more visible decade by decade (John Gillis, as quoted in Stacey, 87). Sitcoms didn’t prescribe many remedies; but a variety of shows certainly dissected the problems families faced. One theme that came through with a vengeance was a gender war. Different sitcoms parsed it differently, whether it was whiny, childish men trying to hold on to status they felt owed them or feisty women wanting more who prevailed. There was a generational war too as young adults striving to establish themselves as adults struggled to overcome their smothering mothers who were sure they knew best. And there was also a culture war as some sitcoms sought to depict the realities of modern life while conservative cultural authorities zeroed in on women who transgressed their traditional roles, whether it was fictional single mother Murphy Brown or real Roseanne warbling the National Anthem in a mocking way. Toopowerful women were targets in parts of all those wars.

Chapter 6

Mama Don’t Care Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, Yummy Mummies, and Other New-Century Developments

Malcolm, whose birth-order designation was part of the title of a 2000 season Fox TV series—Malcolm in the Middle—didn’t seem to have a last name, the first of many sitcom conventions the series defied. Malcolm broke the fourth wall regularly, either with a voice-over or by looking directly into the camera and commenting, a strategy designed to shift away from the traditional omniscient point-of-view of a show and toward a subjective one, Malcolm’s. The series didn’t have a laugh track and wasn’t filmed before a live studio audience. Its visual style was dense and fast-paced (Frutkin), plunging the viewer, as promotions promised, into a sort of live-action version of The Simpsons (Schneider and Adalian). Malcolm looked nothing like the one family sitcom in the Nielsen top ten in 2000, Everybody Loves Raymond, and didn’t do as well. It was, however, a hit with the younger male viewers the networks had spent the 1990s chasing (Littleton). Lois, working mother to Malcolm as well as his brothers Francis, Reese, Dewey, and, eventually, Jamie, was angry most of the time and something of a bully. She was a decidedly imperfect mother who struggled to control a cartoon-like level of dysfunction within her household. Still, as a vice president on Raymond’s network—CBS—noted, Lois’s chaos was also “totally relatable” (Nancy Tellem, quoted in Schneider and Adalian), suggesting a bit of a paradigm shift. Lois was quite different from the long-standing sitcom mom ideal, distinguished both by her angry personality and her refusal to fade into the woodwork a 1950s mother might have dusted. In the 2000s, a growing number of sitcom moms were more like Roseanne than Clair Huxtable, imperfect, unhappy, and not shy about saying so. Malcolm in the Middle not only raised the level of maternal dysfunction in a sitcom, it also brought novelty to its structure. Everybody Loves 119

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Lois (Jane Kaczmarek) on Malcolm in the Middle might be cartoonish in some of her dimensions, but also captured the anger and frustration of many real mothers struggling with imperfect families, unsatisfying jobs, and domineering mothers. Fox/Photofest.

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Raymond rated higher than Malcolm in the Nielsens, but Raymond’s center of gravity was older, as was its model of family and its range of plots. Gail Berman, part of Malcolm’s production company, Regency TV, complained that even though families had changed, sitcoms had not. Malcolm sought a “sophisticated” audience, comfortable with a family comedy that challenged norms and taboos (Berman, as quoted in Frutkin). The truth was that in the 2000s, the audience for sitcoms was smaller, but also bifurcated, divided between loyal viewers happy with older formulas and those who were open to innovation. Since those open to innovation, however, were also more open to watching other screens, using their television sets as video game consoles, surfing the internet on their laptops and tablets, or watching YouTube videos, there was a tendency for the family sitcom to stagnate. Programmers did a lot of innovating in the new century to regain viewers, mainly with reality programs. Faced with recreating a genre critics found “anemic” (Stelter; also Alesandro), however, sitcom creators divided between those sticking to the longtime formula and those, like Malcolm in the Middle, that innovated. Either way, mothers were hard to create. Novelty occurred in workplace comedies before family ones as they were safer spaces for irreverence and tended to draw younger audiences. Scrubs, premiering in 2001, was set in a hospital, and, like Malcolm in the Middle, had no studio audience and no laugh track. Its characters were eccentric. Its style was choreographed, with a lot of slapstick, visual humor, fantasies, alternative perspectives, even musical numbers. It contained layers of meaning, inside jokes, and was self-referential (Savorelli, chapter 2). Although there were married couples in Scrubs, the central relationships were friendships. Parenthood came only later in the series. A few years later, the American version of The Office premiered, intriguing viewers with its ever-present documentary camera and constant breaking of the fourth wall so that characters could offer their subjective takes on events (Savorelli, chapter 3). The mockumentary style “allows viewers to feel clever while still being guided in their attention,” explained television commentator Saul Austerlitz (Austerlitz). In 2006, 30 Rock premiered, a critically successful workplace series that made fun of its own low ratings as well as the network (NBC) on which it ran. Its scripts were dense with parodies and commentaries along with imperfect, quirky, sometimes immoral characters. The “deeper layers of humor” and pop cultural references on such shows were aimed at a particular group of potential viewers, those regarded as sophisticated and literate (Da Silva, 182), people able to afford the products that workplace sitcoms tended to pitch, like automobiles or cell phone plans. Yet the style didn’t always guarantee success; 30 Rock struggled in the ratings while The Office was extremely popular, especially with teens and young adults.

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The sort of irreverence that The Office or 30 Rock was able to manifest was harder to do on a family sitcom, but another critical darling with low ratings, Arrested Development, challenged nearly everything about the standard domestic sitcom on the same network—Fox—where the Bundys (Married with Children) and Malcolm’s family lived. The family at its center, the Bluths, were, as the opening credits noted, a once-wealthy family who had “lost everything” due to their own malfeasance, putting them in crisis. If The Office was a mockumentary, then Arrested Development was more of a mock soap opera that included “copious self-referential touches, and reliance on exaggerated comic tropes like incest and homoeroticism” (Austerlitz). Arrested Development was not designed for a broad and undifferentiated audience; it sought a progressive one that would not be offended by family members’ choices and who would catch its many political and pop cultural references, a potential audience that spanned generations, especially as the Bluths represented all three, boomers, Gen Xers, and millennials. Both of the oldest Bluths were bad parents, but the family matriarch was an especially horrible mother, as she herself conceded, albeit only when looking for sympathy. While her spouse, George, was utterly selfish and scheming, Lucille found joy demeaning her offspring and thwarting their maturation. She “snipped away at her children’s self-esteem as if sculpting a topiary garden,” as New York Times television critic James Poniewozik noted in his obituary of the woman who played Lucille, Jessica Walter (Poniewozik, “Jessica Walter”), taking “pleasure from withholding love” (Ewing, 67). Lucille’s mantra was drawn from the musical Gypsy, the story of the ultimate stage mother: “mama’s all alone, mama doesn’t care.” Its premier performance occurred after a Valentine’s Day party as she danced around her apartment, drinking champagne and popping pink and red balloons with a lit cigar (Arrested Development, “Marta Complex,” 2004). Most earlier sitcom mothers would have been appalled. Lucille would stop at nothing to get what she wanted. In one episode, son Michael let Lucille, a notoriously bad driver, take the wheel after a dinner out. She spotted what she thought was her other son, Gob, on a Segway, and decided to give him a scare. The inevitable accident happened, but Lucille shifted Michael into the driver’s seat and then had the family doctor drug him to keep him from realizing the truth. It was finally Gob, about to go on the lam, who figured out what actually happened (Arrested Development, “My Mother the Car,” 2003). The episode was filled with pop cultural references, including its title, borrowed from the early-1960s sitcom whose theme song could be heard coming from the television set as several Bluths watched. There was a fake movie trailer inserted into the narrative as well as a reference to an invented—but relevant—Fox television program, The World’s Worst Drivers. As with all episodes, Ron Howard narrated, the child star from

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The Andy Griffith Show, playing against type by describing the exploits of such an immoral, even perverted, family. The episode was funny, but only if a viewer was comfortable with the convention-smashing inclusion of a very bad mother. Lucille’s relationship with her youngest son, Buster, introduced a worse version of Momism than Philip Wylie could ever have imagined. She infantilized Buster and kept him at her beck and call. In the first season, he dated his mother’s rival, known as Lucille 2, describing her as “replacing my mother,” but the relationship fell apart because he was afraid that his mother would find out (Arrested Development, “My Mother the Car,” 2003). When she did, she adopted a Korean orphan as revenge. Later, she signed Buster up for the army, as if it was summer camp and he was twelve. In an act of rebellion before being sent to Iraq, he did what his mother had never allowed him to do before: swim in the ocean. For several previous episodes, what happened next had been foreshadowed aplenty: a “loose seal” [Lucille] in a bowtie, trained by Gob to eat meat for a magic trick, ate Buster’s left hand (Arrested Development, “Out on a Limb,” 2005). Rather than feel contrite, she more or less banished Buster because she was afraid his hook arm would damage her furnishings. She was like no other mother on television. Lucille, like the rest of the Bluths and quite a lot of other sitcom characters created since 2000, wasn’t meant to be sympathetic or even remind viewers of someone they knew. Unconventional sitcoms tend to be peopled with less relatable characters. There was little constructing of parasocial bonds in Arrested Development. Characters were cartoonish, conniving, or without boundaries. Wicked characters—villains of a sort—had appeared on sitcoms before, even as regular or semi-regular characters. Mothers, however, were not despicable characters until Lucille. While critics loved Lucille and all the Bluths for their transgressive natures, plenty of viewers liked none of them. Arrested Development struggled for ratings. But for the parts of the audience who preferred their sitcoms edgy, she was a hilarious meanie, so much so that the actor playing her, Jessica Walter, would play variations on the role for the rest of her life. The Bluths were cathartic at a time when evil felt very much present in the world after 9/11, the Columbine school shootings, and the Gulf War. Watching an evil mother damage her grown children was especially fun, at least for those seeking something new from their viewing experience. TV’s most loyal viewers didn’t gravitate toward the Bluths. They stuck to favorites like Friends, Frasier, and Everybody Loves Raymond, at least until those shows left the airwaves mid-decade, leaving no top-rated sitcoms on the air. Particularly lacking were domestic sitcoms; workplace and friendsas-family shows gained strong enough followings to ensure that they stayed on the air for a while. The family sitcom seemed at another low moment around 2000, needing something or someone to revive the genre the way

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Norman Lear did in the 1970s and The Cosby Show did in the 1980s. This time that somebody was producer Chuck Lorre, fresh off of a frustrating stint working on female-centered Roseanne and Cybill. Lorre relied on the conventional sitcom presentation, shows filmed live before studio audiences and minus the embellishments of narrators or genre-mashes. His characters, however, were like many of those on workplace shows, immature or selfish, sometimes almost cartoonish, generally flawed. His families were fractured, each member at least a bit self-centered and mean. Male characters in the Lorre universe were typically versions of the man-child or, perhaps more accurately, the man-adolescent as their tastes ran not just to childish pleasures and leisure, but also sex. They were rarely role models, “wish fulfillment,” at least in Lorre’s eyes (Lorre, as quoted in Hibberd), and at least for men. Lorre’s female characters, though, especially the mothers he created, were difficult. They might not attempt to control their offspring like Lucille Bluth did, but they were nevertheless capable of driving them crazy. Lorre’s personality and experiences with women he deemed “tremendously demanding”—Roseanne and Cybill Shepherd (Shepherd, as quoted in Jerome)—affected the mothers he imagined on a new generation of family sitcoms. Because he was so successful, he had unusual power to shape mothers’ presentations. The press described him as angry, pointing out that he had an especially “nasty” attitude toward women (Flynn). On his highly successful Two and a Half Men, family consisted of two brothers, “promiscuous bachelor” Charlie and “high-strung” Alan. Charlie wrote advertising jingles for a living, lived on the beach in Malibu, drank a lot, and bedded a great many attractive women. Alan, a recently divorced chiropractor, moved in with Charlie, setting up a sort of Odd Couple scenario as he shared custody of his impressionable son, Jake, who saw a great deal of merit in Charlie’s lifestyle. Also part of the cast was their mother Evelyn, played by Holland Taylor, a mainstream version of Lucille Bluth, “narcissistic, alcoholic” and, one critic thought, “more disturbing than amusing” (Stanley, “Heir to Raymond”). On one level, Evelyn was the classic unruly mother of adults, but, like Lucille Bluth, she wanted control over her grown children, as well as service from them on her terms. Taylor, playing her, understood why Evelyn existed as she did; she was “a weapon to bludgeon the memory of how he [Lorre] was brought up” (Taylor, quoted in Rice, “Why Is Chuck Lorre So Angry?”) a woman who didn’t put her children first. Although critics called the sitcom “conventional,” its inclusion of a number of tightly wound or angry characters wasn’t. Nor was the inclusion of a particularly immoral mother. Evelyn had power and authority, a Realtor with a wealthy list of clients. Charlie and Alan’s father had died a long time before and their mother had burned through several stepfathers thereafter, never settling on good

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stepfather material. Both the weaselly Alan and the “decadent” Charlie regarded her as neglectful, mean, narcissistic, and domineering. Their viewpoint prevailed as the show highlighted the “wounds inflicted by a dictatorial mother” (Alesandro). Yet, when it came right down to it, Evelyn behaved much as Charlie did, drinking too much, pursuing sexual pleasure, being entirely selfish and mean. He, though, was the wish fulfillment, “nearly impossible not to enjoy” (Flynn), and so got away with his abhorrent behavior, at least until Lorre fired Charlie Sheen. She was a mother, so the same sort of oversexed selfishness wasn’t accepted. Instead, she was to be verbally insulted by her sons and laughed at by the audience, a despicable woman too mean to be pitied. Evelyn wasn’t just the classic sitcom mother of adults; she was something more sinister. Evelyn’s more working-class doppelganger Benny, George Lopez’s mother on The George Lopez Show, existed for the same reason Evelyn did, to exorcize the demons of her male creator. Lopez was raised by an “emotionally abusive” and withholding grandmother (Lopez, as quoted in Navarro) and he constructed a version of her for his show. Benny modeled many inappropriate behaviors, like drinking and stealing, although the most unforgivable for George was her failure to support, encourage, or even hug him. Like Charlie, though, he often manifested the same sort of behavior he decried in his mother himself. He had no concept of what being a family meant and sometimes believed that caring for another was for “sucker[s]” (The George Lopez Show, “George’s Grave Mistake Sends Him to a Funeral, Holmes,” 2007). Benny’s relationship to George was a “darker current” in what was otherwise “standard Cosby-ish sitcom fare,” as one reviewer noted (Navarro). Like Ray Barone, George would evade, lie, and connive to avoid responsibilities. But while Ray’s mother Marie was annoying but endearing, Benny was not. She was rarely treated with any kindness either by the writers or her family. Like Evelyn, she was a mean mother who enjoyed twisting the knife as she stabbed George in the back. Lighter versions of Lucille, Evelyn, and Benny showed up on a number of different sitcoms. Taken together, they represented mothers who utterly failed to meet the 1950s sitcom ideal and, because of it, their Gen X grown children were “screwed [up]” and “damaged” (Poniewozik, “Television”). Motherblaming was a common theme on a lot of sitcoms in the early 2000s. Ted on How I Met Your Mother resented his for being too busy with her new husband to pay attention to him. Pam on The Office was livid when her mother slept with her boss at her wedding. Angie called her mother a “selfish tramp” who had an affair, ending her marriage (Angie on The George Lopez Show, “George’s Grave Mistake Sends Him to a Funeral, Holmes,” 2007). Lois on Malcolm in the Middle—and the rest of her family—feared hers, a terrifying Eastern European played with gusto by Cloris Leachman. Mitch and Claire

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on Modern Family couldn’t contain their mother, who disrupted her exes’ wedding and her granddaughter’s birthday party, throwing punches. Christine called her mother “hateful, nosy, caustic, and withholding” and her exes “toxic and selfish and controlling” (The New Adventures of Old Christine, “How I Hate Your Mother,” 2005). Sooner or later, almost every show with Gen X characters had a mother drop by who could be blamed for something, whether it was a traditional domestic sitcom or one whose central bond was friendship. In most cases, mothers’ actions had consequences, affecting their adult children, making them angry, needy, or desperate for approval. In many cases, too, how their mothers treated them trickled down into their adult lives, affecting how they treated their partners and children. Consider, for instance, how Christine’s mother treated Christine and her brother Matthew and what her behavior meant to each. Although she only made one physical appearance in the series The New Adventures of Old Christine, her reputation preceded her. She had little use for Christine, whose childhood bedroom was the garage, and was particularly critical of Christine’s divorce. Adult Christine was needy, bossy, and well on her way to creating a mama’s boy out of her son because she relied on him too much for affection and validation, precisely how her mother handled her brother Matthew. Indeed, Matthew was their mother’s preferred child, spoiled, but also expected to interact with his mother in supremely inappropriate ways, like “date nights” and nightly phone calls to say “I love you” (The New Adventures of Old Christine, “Guess Who’s Not Coming to Dinner,” 2008; “Everybody Says ‘I Love You’ Except Ritchie,” 2008). Both siblings considered themselves psychological messes; both mostly were. Both blamed their mother. What branded a lot of these mothers as inappropriate was their free-flowing sexuality. While Gen Xers clearly benefited from the sexual revolution, when their mothers indulged, it was coded as creepy, cringey, or inappropriate. Dharma’s mother on a Chuck Lorre show about a hippie marrying a more strait-laced attorney, Dharma and Greg, believed in free love, astrology, and nudity. She did not hesitate to inquire about everybody else’s sex life and over-share about her own. The id-driven boomer mother of grown-up characters became a stock figure on early 2000s sitcoms, one who was a little too handsy, especially with forbidden fruit. Claire’s mother on Modern Family, for instance, slept with one of Claire’s old boyfriends. Matthew complained outright that his mother’s behavior was “not normal” (The New Adventures of Old Christine, “Everybody Says ‘I Love You’ Except Ritchie,” 2008). It did not take a degree in psychology to see that these mothers messed up their offspring. Much like on the early seasons of Friends, when mothers paraded through in all their anxiety-provoking glory in ways that helped to explain why the Friends needed to function as family was supposed to

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(Kutulas, “Friends”), the Chuck-Lorre-produced sitcom success, The Big Bang Theory, introduced several main characters’ mothers as identity foils. These were people who explained their offspring’s shortcomings, including Sheldon’s conservative mother who babied him and Leonard’s cold childrearing expert, who didn’t believe in unconditional love (The Big Bang Theory, “The Luminous Fish Effect”; “The Maternal Capacitance,” 2007, 2009). Howard’s boundary-busting, never-seen Jewish mother was on board from the beginning, treating her engineer son, who lived at home, sometimes like he was a child and, at other creepy moments, like he was her husband. None of these mothers got much respect from their offspring or from viewers. Problematic older mothers were to blame, often, for their children’s deficiencies as parents. Certainly, Benny’s failures explained George’s on The George Lopez Show. On Arrested Development, Lindsay Bluth, like her mother, was such an inattentive, self-absorbed mother that she didn’t notice for several months that her fifteen-year-old daughter had conned her way into a job as a studio executive. Lindsay was inappropriately sexual at times too, especially since the man she chose to marry was obviously gay. Christine slept in Ritchie’s bed, “a big, disturbing deal,” ostensibly for him, but really because she couldn’t bear to be alone (The New Adventures of Old Christine, “Everyone Says ‘I Love You’ Except Ritchie”). Whether constructed by Chuck Lorre or otherwise, a lot of sitcom mothers had really messed up their grown children. The era’s popular culture helped to remind mothers, real or imagined, that they were imperfect. So much new programming on television documented and scrutinized how women were supposed to look and be, putting pressure on them. The cable station, TLC (The Learning Channel), which once provided educational programming, offered a lot of programs in the early 2000s that taught women how to behave and diagnosed what was wrong with them. The staple of the popular reality show What Not to Wear was the mother who had let herself go, a problem remedied with some superficial psychology, shopping for a new wardrobe, hairdo, and makeup. Daytime TLC staples included A Wedding Story (2001–2005) and A Baby Story (1998–2007), allowing for voyeuristic looks into important moments in women’s lives, moments other women did with more pomp and thought. When Jon and Kate Plus Eight first began its TLC run, it showcased a supermom and her husband raising sextuplets and twins, not just diapering and feeding all those babies, but pausing to write family mission statements. Later, of course, Kate would be demonized for ruining her family through her own greedy run at celebrity and its perks. In the short-term, however, she was a supermom. Sitcoms helped to normalize growing cultural scrutiny of mothers’ looks and reminded them to look at themselves through others’—usually male— eyes. On shows, men looked and liked what they saw, especially another

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woman. When the Kyles encountered an old classmate of Michael and Jay’s, Susan “Sexy” Green (Michael’s phrase), Jay’s self-esteem plummeted. She got a makeover in response, fulfilling Michael’s fantasy that she look “slutty,” which ultimately made her feel worse about herself (My Wife and Kids, “The Make Over,” 2002). Even worse were women’s judgments about other women. The premise of The New Adventures of Old Christine, a vehicle for Julia Louis-Dreyfus, was Christine’s responses to her ex-husband moving on with another—younger, perkier, and more conventional—woman also named Christine. Already feeling bad about herself as the working mother of the scholarship kid at her son’s posh private school, Louis-Dreyfus got branded Old Christine by two blonde, rich, stay-at-home mothers with nannies, who instantly bonded with New Christine. Certainly, Ray counted on Debra believing that her fellow PTA mothers thought she dressed “trampy,” a lie he told her to deflect attention from his lack of grooming. Debra showed up at the next meeting in a tight leather skirt and a low-cut top, eager to shock and judge the women she thought judged her (Everybody Loves Raymond, “PT & A,” 2004). It wasn’t just fictional Debra who felt the pressure to look young and perky; moreover, so too did the actor portraying her, Patricia Heaton, who had a breast lift, a tummy tuck, and the wrinkles in her neck smoothed. Heaton claimed it was for her own satisfaction, but it was hard to miss the Ladies’ Home Journal interviewer’s admiration for her “terrific, thin, and toned” look or the magazine’s use of pictures highlighting her cleavage (Witchel, 28, 27). Once Heaton had been nipped and tucked, Debra’s look changed from flannel shirts and bathrobes to fitted cardigans over camisoles and tight jeans. Heaton claimed plastic surgery was “the big elephant sitting in the Hollywood living room” (Heaton, as quoted in Witchel, 28). Actors might not talk about it, but their fictional counterparts contemplated it in shows like The New Adventures of Old Christine, reflecting the “explosion in popularity” of cosmetic surgery in the early 2000s (Kita). It’s not like women never judged other women on sitcoms before, but since the second wave, stories about judgment often took a backseat to stories about sisterhood, women united, often against men. But in the early 2000s, a new type of woman emerged whose dual functions were to be perfect and call out others’ imperfections, often in a piteous voice, a trophy wife or yummy mummy who felt superior. Janice Min explained that “June Cleaver and Roseanne have been replaced by Sofia Vergara’s Gloria on Modern Family and Courtney Cox on Cougar Town and cocktail-swilling, Botox-frozen Real Housewives” (Min; also Skurnick). The yummy mummy or trophy wife, TV critic Alessandra Stanley explained, was a more-modern “version of the interfering mother-inlaw,” who cast her judgmental eyes on beta moms like Old Christine. She was also, to a degree, a helicopter parent, pushily determined that her children be

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pampered and put on the fast track of “baby-yoga” and “preschool SAT prep” (Stanley, “TV Moms without Pearls”). Helicopter parenting required hovering over children (Doepke and Zilibotti, chapter 2). For yummy mummies, it only lasted as long as it wasn’t too inconvenient or the nanny took over. The New Adventures of Old Christine had two of the most obnoxious yummy mummies on TV, Marly and Lindsay. They had nannies and housekeepers as well as rich husbands who paid for their Botox, their gym memberships, and their boozy lunches out. They hovered, not over their children directly but over the others who peopled their children’s school, a judgmental clique of skinny blondes. They made Christine feel inferior. “Put a couple of bolts on your neck,” she told her ex-husband, “and we’re the freakin’ Munsters” (The New Adventures of Old Christine, “Ritchie Has Two Mommies,” 2006). Christine thought them “really, really mean” as well as “catty, they gossip, they’re judgmental, they’re too skinny, they don’t work, but they’ve got nannies raising their awful kids.” But who were the actual “meanie moms” in the story? A new parent suggested it was Christine for talking down the other mothers and teaching him “how to get out of being involved” (The New Adventures of Old Christine, “Popular,” 2008). Indeed, Christine was just as judgmental and mean as the yummies who made her feel like “my life is so sad.” She also longed to be part of their clique and when she briefly was, discovered “they drink their chardonnay two glasses at a time, just like the rest of us” (The New Adventures of Old Christine, “A Change of Heart/ Pants,” 2009; “Popular,” 2008). The early-season rivalry between Claire and Gloria on Modern Family, a rivalry only Claire felt, also centered on the privilege Claire felt her father’s sexy and much younger trophy wife had. Claire struggled with three challenging children and a man-child husband while Gloria had a housekeeper and one son with very elevated tastes that the show repeatedly indicated had practically raised himself. Claire seemed to spend her days in a mini-van, running errands and driving kids. She dressed in button-down shirts she bought in the boys’ department and jeans. She manifested classic helicopter parenting traits, “surveil[ing] and interfer[ing]” with her children (Zeavin). Gloria, by contrast, wore wrap dresses that highlighted her more-than-ample cleavage and high heels that suggested she went nowhere in a hurry. Claire resented many things about Gloria, thinking her a “coal digger,” as her son innocently revealed to the family (Modern Family, “Coal Digger,” 2009), noticing how much attention her husband paid to his new stepmother-in-law, but also resentful that Gloria had things so easy. There were multiple ways viewers might read Claire and Gloria, but one was that Claire was insecure and a little bit jealous of Gloria, not to mention aggrieved at the ease with which Gloria seemed to pass through life. Gloria, meanwhile, felt Claire and the other mothers’ resentment of her and struggled to fit in.

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Yummy mummy Gloria (Sophia Vergara) and her type-A stepdaughter-in-law Claire (Julie Bowen) on early seasons of Modern Family had an uneasy relationship as each resented the other, depicting some of the competition between mothers during what some commentators called the “Mommy Wars.” ABC/Photofest.

Family sitcoms in the early 2000s presented a variety of often-conflicting ideas about women and their looks: that judging women by their looks was shallow, but was going to happen anyway; that men were supposed to judge them by their inner qualities, but still expected them to be “hot” (The George Lopez Show, “George Helps Angie’s Wha-Positive Self Image by Saying You ’sta Loca Good,” 2007), that skinny was good, but skinny-and-voluptuous was better. Yummy mummies upped the pressure women felt because, as Claire said as she glanced at Gloria’s cleavage, “God gave you so much thunder” (Modern Family, “Dance, Dance Revelation,” 2010). In the sitcom yummy mummy story, ordinary mothers struggled to keep up with the yummies, who often not-so-subtly lorded their status over them, although the stories generally emphasized the more ordinary mothers’ insecurity rather than acknowledging that standards had changed. Women watching at home might identify with the Claires and the Old Christines who struggled over their looks, but still saw a lot of yummy mummies whose very existence seemed to suggest that “no more carbs,” twice-daily gym visits, and Botox might solve all their problems (The George Lopez Show, “George Helps Angie’s WhaPositive Self-Image by Saying You ’sta Loca Good,” 2007). Sitcom yummy mummies and trophy wives told American women that they could all look like Gloria if they just worked hard enough. While 1950s

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sitcoms promoted appliances and cars, commercials on 2000s sitcoms emphasized looks and health, including ads for weight-reduction programs and liposuction. The Biggest Loser saw contestants scramble to lose the most weight while The Swan offered “ugly ducklings” extreme makeovers. Friends was one of several series that employed a fat suit to contrast Monica, who would become a yummy mummy in the series’ final episodes, with who she used to be, “fat Monica,” object of ridicule. When the actor who played Jay on My Wife and Kids returned after her maternity leave, on screen, writers treated her more voluptuous body as a joke. Riffing on her show’s explanation for her maternity leave, tending her mother in another town, her on-screen husband commented that “she left with the body of J Lo and came back with a body like Jell-O” (My Wife and Kids, “Through Thick and Thin,” 2001). If sitcom mothers didn’t look like the yummy mummies around them, they were fair game, people whose looks could be mocked; people who could be shamed. In an era when a sex tape could begin Kim Kardashian’s video career and when an entire HBO series was called Sex and the City, sitcom moms not only had to look sexy, they needed to be sexual in ways often defined by their husbands’ desires, especially if they were trophy wives. Even on Everybody Loves Raymond, stories about the Barones’ sex life grew in number after 2000. In 2001, for instance, they played an erotic board game in the bedroom and fell out of bed while having sex, which Ray boasted about to all his friends (Everybody Loves Raymond, “No Roll!” and “Frank Goes Downstairs,” 2001). Eventually, sex became a power struggle between the couple as each tried to gain control over the other by withholding sex (Everybody Loves Raymond, “The Power of No,” 2005). On Modern Family, the audience caught a glimpse of Claire and husband Phil in the act (“from behind, too!”) noted a vulture​.c​om reviewer (Kurp), as did their children, by accident, on an episode (Modern Family, “Caught in the Act,” 2011) that won an Emmy for the screenwriters. Modern sitcom couples didn’t just have vanilla sex anymore, but mixed it up in the bedroom, and there were a lot of sexual references and jokes. By 2000, the days when sitcom couples slept in separate beds were long gone, but it was husbands who tended to be the initiators. When a mother did have a sexual appetite, she got slammed for it. Wanting sex and seeming to find it with inappropriate men was part of those two famously bad mothers of the era, Two and a Half Men’s Evelyn and The George Lopez Show’s Benny. Probably no sitcom mother of the era was so regularly slut-shamed, though, as Frasier’s Roz, an otherwise smart, attractive, and very competent radio producer with an active sex life, both before and after she became a mother. While her boss, Frasier, was mocked for the many ways he self-sabotaged romantic relationships, she was ridiculed for being too successful at romance. Soon-to-be yummy mummy Rachel on Friends tried to date while pregnant and afterward, but the father of her child

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thoroughly disapproved, even though he was dating. Even as comedy series included more and more sexual content, there was a clear double standard between mothers’ and fathers’ sexual behaviors. Yummy mummies didn’t just raise the standards for ordinary wives in the bedroom and with respect to their looks; so too did their standard of living serve as the norm on a lot of sitcoms. There were fewer working-class sitcoms in the early 2000s, and the funky Manhattan apartments on Friends and Will & Grace would disappear a few years into the new century. Yummy mummies and trophy wives lived in large contemporary houses, and nasty older mothers got luxury condos. For every mother living day-to-day, like on Malcolm in the Middle, there were two or three who lived in suburban homes with kitchen islands and multiple staircases. An Architectural Digest spread on the homes of Modern Family named the “upscale” stores where the set decorator found items for Claire and Phil’s house (Richard Berg, as quoted in Whitlock), and the house featured in exterior shots sold for over two million dollars. Yet, just like those lovely 1980s houses that the Huxtables and the Keatons lived in, the Dunphys’ stayed remarkably clean. Part of the lifestyle press that turned the 2000s sitcom mothers into mistresses of domestic plenty was a shift in the way advertising was delivered within programming. Because it was possible by 2000 for viewers to avoid watching most ads, potential sponsors would “broker deals with popular shows” to show their wares to best advantage (Russell), a return to the embedded selling of the 1950s. Although the trend began with food stuffs like Coca-Cola or Kellogg cereals, linked in ads and product-placed in sitcom kitchens (Bjelskou, chapter 2), over time, the products became bigger and pricier. Friends quickly went from Oreos to a living room filled with Pottery Barn furniture, designer shirts for Joey secured by Rachel, who worked at Ralph Lauren, and the Porsche that Monica’s father gave her. It was not just yummy mummies, but ordinary sitcom moms who lived fairly luxurious lives, adding to the insecurities of plenty of viewers, who, sponsors hoped, would buy their products to enhance their looks and lives. Earning and spending, though, could be at least briefly contentious issues on sitcoms, places where some old stereotypes came into play. Long ago on I Love Lucy, Fred once explained that there were two kinds of people, “earners and spenders, or as they are more popularly known, husbands and wives” (I Love Lucy, “Job-Switching,” 1952). In the early 2000s, many a sitcom husband still seemed to believe that it was true. Husbands assumed that since they made the money, they determined how it was spent. Ray Barone once invested in a go-cart company without checking with Debra, but when Debra wanted to buy daughter Ally an expensive party dress so she could fit in, he objected. He didn’t say so after the argument about the dress, but defended his go-cart investment as money he had “earned” and was therefore entitled

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to spend (Everybody Loves Raymond, “Party Dress” and “Net Worth,” 2004 and 2001). Similarly, Angie and George fought over daughter Carmen’s over-the-top quinceañera plan, which brought up some thorny issues about earning and spending in their household since George wasn’t working and Angie was (The George Lopez Show, “Bringing Home the Bacon,” 2003). Stories about party dresses or investment strategies existed because sitcom writers extended old stereotypes about women as materialistic, economically unrealistic, and spendthrift. Sitcoms confirmed another old assumption, that worthy men earned enough money to support families so women didn’t really have to work. Only on Roseanne did a married couple really need two paychecks to survive. Otherwise, men earned the bulk of a family’s money, which wasn’t true in about 40 percent of US families according to a Pew study (Fry et al.), but did seem to be true in most of sitcom-land. Mothers like Angie held nearly invisible part-time jobs. Angie’s was wedding planner, something she did out of the home, just as Jay Kyle kept books from her kitchen table and Christine’s absence from the women’s gym she co-owned was a running joke on The New Adventures of Old Christine. Few yummier wives also had careers of the caliber of those 80s and 90s power-suited mothers, like Clair Huxtable or Murphy Brown. Instead, their jobs were cute and womanly. A number were stay-at-home mothers who, like Claire on Modern Family, volunteered at their children’s schools. Consequently, fathers earned leisure, at least in their eyes, and golf, the expensive sport of the richer classes, was the symbol of their leisure, something that took them away from their families and happened someplace luxurious and exclusive, like a country club. Golf was an indulgence shared by Ray Barone, George Lopez, Lindsay’s and Marly’s husbands on The New Adventures of Old Christine, and Modern Family’s Jay Pritchett. Lindsay’s and Marly’s husbands, in fact, happened to be golfing in Scotland when their wives went into labor, so entitled were they. Golf was expensive, sometimes involving away trips or country clubs that served as men’s sanctuaries; they certainly represented time spent away from wives and children. Mothers, meanwhile, seemed to spend most of their leisure at the gym or the yoga class, maintaining their sanity as well as their figures so they could keep on looking yummy. It wasn’t just the presentations of leisure and spending that seemed to revert to an older era; sitcom men audaciously expected a lot of privilege. “I like to be taken care of,” Ray confessed after Debra complained that getting him to do anything around the house was “such a battle” (Everybody Loves Raymond, “Counseling,” 2002). That expectation, which Debra pointed out was the job of a mother and not a wife, was implicit and pervasive on early 2000s sitcoms; housework was women’s work. When Jay on My Wife and Kids decided she wanted to go back to school, she buttered up Michael much

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as Lucy might have buttered up Ricky in 1950, serving him a nice dinner. They fought; he literally forbade her from returning to school. She insisted that she could do it all, handle the house, the family, her part-time bookkeeping job, and her studies, so she went back anyway. He complained that her choice made his life “a living hell” because the house was a “shambles.” That he might interrupt his expansive leisure time to do something about the house, though, never occurred to him. It was only when he found Jay studying late into the night that he agreed to compromise about getting the kids to do more around the house. In exchange, she agreed to prolong her degree by becoming a part-time student. While the Kyles imagined themselves a modern couple, both assumed that she was in charge of the domestic sphere. The writers might have poked fun at his sense that their marriage wasn’t a partnership, but “about me,” but until his ungenerous compromise at the end, that’s exactly how the story was constructed (My Wife and Kids, “Jay Goes to School,” 2003). No wonder British scholar Rebecca Feasey borrowed the name of a popular American dramedy when she characterized a common British and American sitcom trope of the moment, that of the “desperate housewives” haunted by “the feminine mystique of the contented homemaker” (Feasey, 51). It wasn’t just husbands and their expectations that made so many sitcom mothers of the era seem desperate; so too was it parenting. Parenting was a lot harder than it used to be (Stechyson, “Parenting in America”) and, like Michael on My Wife and Kids, fathers weren’t necessarily stepping up to the challenges. “Quality time” as a concept came into vogue beginning in the 1980s, time parents, mostly mothers, were supposed to spend with their children in enriching ways. The internet, video games, and cell phones—new technologies, in short—challenged parents to be more mindful of how their children spent their leisure time. “Doesn’t anyone want to run around and ride bikes and be kids anymore?” Claire lamented as daughter Haley had her first boyfriend over and quickly brought him to her room, where they could stream something on her laptop and sip their Starbucks’ drinks away from Mom’s prying eyes (Modern Family, “Pilot,” 2009). Husband Phil was no help, as he loved new and expensive technologies, installing things that Claire couldn’t work. When she decided to unplug the family from technology for a week, he was on board her “horse and buggy to yesteryear,” but only because he’d already taken care of his fantasy football league arrangements for the week (Modern Family, “Unplugged,” 2010). Mothers spent more time with their offspring than fathers did in real life as well as on sitcoms like Modern Family or The New Adventures of Old Christine. Phil was also unwilling to address something that worried sitcom mothers, their teens’ sexuality. George might have given his son “player lessons,” but was horrified when his daughter wanted birth control pills for her sixteenth

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birthday. His solution was to buy her a car if she promised to remain a virgin until she was eighteen (The George Lopez Show, “Prescription for Trouble,” 2005). As censorship practices eased, sitcom teens expressed more interest in sex, making more work for mothers, since dads equated a girl’s sexuality with being “broken” and simply could not cope (Phil, reacting to the news that his daughter has had sex on Modern Family, “Virgin Territory,” 2012). Part of the premise of Eight Simple Rules (for Dating My Daughter), starring John Ritter and Katey Sagal, was the gender gap when it came to handling teen sexuality; he couldn’t deal and she was perfectly practical. On one episode, Sagal, a nurse, was invited to provide sex education to her daughter’s health class. As she prepped her presentation, Ritter urged her to tell the class that “sex is bad, that if they have sex, they’ll go to hell. Or go blind.” Later, when both talk to their daughter, he curled up in a fetal position (Eight Simple Rules, “Sex Ed,” 2003). Reba’s ex-husband was shellshocked when he found out their thirteen-year-old was dating. “Oh, God, here we go again,” he moaned, so she got to have another “mother-daughter moment” (Reba, “Safe Dating,” 2002). Well into the twenty-first century, some sitcom fathers were still floating that comedic staple, that daughters ought to delay dating until they were decades beyond the age of consent. That left mothers to take the lead on the sex talk and related matters. Sitcom fathers in the 2000s shirked a lot of other responsibilities as well. Some, like Claire’s father Jay on Modern Family, figured net worth, age, and a difficult first wife entitled him to leisure-time pleasure while his yummy wife handled the home front. Others were, as Debra said of Ray, “immature teenager[s]” rather than “regular, grown-up[s]” (Everybody Loves Raymond, “Who Am I?” 2002), a case, critic Neal Gabler said, of “arrested development” (Gabler). Indeed, fathers like Ray or Modern Family’s Phil tended to continue indulging in their teenage passions, like trampolining, magic, or video gaming. Their wives sighed heavily and approached them as an additional child to manage, which Ray suggested as a deliberate strategy so Debra could “feel su-per-i-or” (Everybody Loves Raymond, “What Good Are You?” 2001). Debra fought back; Claire took out her frustrations at a shooting range. Critic Joel Keller opined that watching TV marriages would “make a cynic out of you,” in part because the “TV sitcom husband archetype” was “an oversexed man-child who wants to shrink his parenting and work responsibilities” (Keller), which left their frustrated wives stuck coping. At their extreme, on According to Jim, defined by its star, Jim Belushi, as a “straight up family show,” his character “fib[bed] his way through child rearing” (Belushi, as quoted in Rice and Rice, “According to Him”) and left all the domestic duties to his far more attractive wife. Critics had some names for such shows: “fat guy with a hot wife” (Martin) or the “schlubby-hubby/hot-wife paradox” (Rice). They were, as Belushi

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suggested, variants of the old-fashioned family sitcom formula, only because times had changed, it took more work to make what had once seemed like a natural division of housework still seem convincing. Men with agendas often helmed these shows, men like Chuck Lorre, with his mother issues, or Belushi, who had antiquated ideas about gender. Thanks to the success of Two and a Half Men’s Charlie (Charlie Sheen) in an “alarmingly anachronistic” role as a hedonistic bachelor (Stanley, “Heir to Raymond”), so too could there be other self-centered men on sitcoms, “jerky sitcom dad[s]” with “frat-guy deliver[ies]” who weren’t very kind to anybody as they circulated among the TV set, the golf course, and their local bar, selfishly indulging in what made them happy because they brought home a paycheck (Flynn). On Belushi’s show, the old-school set-up was a script requirement; on other shows, wives pushed back. Some of the pushiest, though, were women of color, another set of stereotypes from the past. Fiery Black and Brown women, quick to anger, were staples on a number of programs: Jay on My Wife and Kids, Yvonne on The Hughleys, Gloria on Modern Family, and Angie from The George Lopez Show. Theirs were often “old-school” shows (costar of Men Jon Cryer, as quoted in Weisman). While series like 30 Rock and Arrested Development were critical darlings, they weren’t necessarily popular successes, leaving untapped audiences in their wakes. ABC went after those audiences, returning to what TV Guide’s Matt Roush called its “family-friendly” brand of the past (Roush, as quoted in Sepinwall, “ABC at 50,” A2). “Family-friendly,” in ABC’s imagining often meant shows that better fit the more old-fashioned version of family, with mothers in secondary positions. But, again, times had changed and a more cynical eye might notice that the person benefiting most from older family dynamics was Dad, since he got relative freedom from household responsibilities and license to be snarky rather than nice. Belushi instructed his writing staff that “the men can’t be dumb and the women can’t be bitches” (Belushi, as quoted in Rice, “According to Him”), keeping Jim’s wife on According to Jim from nagging too much or making fun of him. Sponsors of family-friendly products liked to place their wares with “family values’” programming, programming that might not draw Cosby-like audiences, but did well, especially in certain time slots (Carter, “ABC’s Sitcom Recipe”). But in order to redeem fathers from their sitcom stupidity, the deck had to be stacked against mothers. Consider what happened on The George Lopez Show when teenage daughter Carmen wanted to spend more time with her boyfriend than George and Angie thought appropriate. Angie consulted a parenting book so that she and George could together plan a reasonable response. George, meanwhile, acted alone, telling Carmen that if she didn’t like his rules, she could move out. Naturally, she ran away and it was left to Angie to reassure him that it wasn’t his fault. When the boyfriend returned and

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revealed that Carmen had ditched him in San Francisco, Angie, again, tried to discuss their options, but George headed north to “drag her home, kicking and screaming.” When Carmen finally did come home, though, she turned to him for solace, regarding Angie as the bad parent because she held the line (The George Lopez Show, “Now George Noah Ex-Zackly What Happened” and “George Looks for a Needle in a Haight-Stack,” both 2004). So long as it was George Lopez’s show, George Lopez got to be the more important parent and Angie got the thankless role of supporting him. It was a family dynamic that redeemed paternal authority but still let Dad be goofy, lazy, disengaged, or just mean. While men were usually the stars of such shows, some also reinforced the value of the traditional role for wives and mothers. Yvonne on The Hughleys didn’t resent being “just a mother,” a stay-at-home, until working mothers made her “feel bad about my choices.” So, she tried to have a home-based business that looked, husband Daryl thought, like “an episode of I Love Lucy.” Because Yvonne was bad at business, she faced an impossible delivery schedule, which left her family “falling apart”—largely because no one else stepped up to do what she usually did. In a moment of epiphany, she quit, concluding that “raising our kids” was her most important job and the one she liked best (The Hughleys, “So What Do You Do, Mrs. Hughley?” 2000). Notice, though, that Daryl’s failure to perform anything more than minimal and symbolic second shift tasks, just like circumstances at the Kyles’ house (My Wife and Kids), was the assumed norm that merited little examination or questioning. Because of that norm, women’s work outside the house “had to fit in around family life” and particularly not disturb husbands, just like in the 1960s (Jessica Weiss, 59). With the bulk of family sitcoms of the era featuring men in lead roles, their views got privileged. Like Michael, they got to cast themselves as the heads of families, all perks, no responsibilities. Still, it was hard not to notice that there were a lot of strains within this assumed norm, and one was civility. While the first generation of family sitcoms was heartwarming, the vibe on shows where husbands tried to exercise masculine privilege was frequently snarkier, derived from Seinfeld and other man-centric 1990s shows. Shows like My Wife and Kids suggested that modern masculinity was partly about denigrating others, especially if your son seemed too soft or your wife a little overweight. Wives, then, might solve kids’ crises and accommodate their adolescent-like husbands, but also make it clear that this was not what they signed on for when they got married. “Are there any TV clans that like each other?” wondered a critic (Flynn). That was a fair question, as a lot of what purported to be family comedies were, like Everybody Loves Raymond, more battle-of-the-sexes marital comedies with a family dynamic that endorsed as “normal” Dad’s shirking of domestic responsibilities, leaving Mom to fulfill the traditional sitcom-mom

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duties, only sometimes not so invisibly or sweetly. Certainly, in the real world, American women assessed marriage as a fraught option. The percentage of women who were single in their midthirties tripled between 1970 and 2000, reflecting expanded possibilities and less social stigma about their single status, even if they had children. Real men, meanwhile, tended to feel as put-upon as sitcom husbands, doing more than their fathers had and feeling a loss of the invisible privilege that permeated 1950s sitcoms, whatever their race. Schlubby hubby/hot wife sitcoms, in creating a sort of male fantasy comedy that many women might argue veered uncomfortably close to the reality of white male privilege, engaged male viewers, just as they might ruefully confirm to female viewers that the things they struggled with were somehow normal, or at least common. A new generation of children, meanwhile, got a fantasy of their own: two-parent families living in relative comfort with moms who stayed home. Single mothers on 2000s sitcoms, meanwhile, offered a fantasy of single yummy mummy-hood by suggesting that having and raising children on your own wasn’t all that difficult, despite what the never-reliable Janice told Rachel on Friends (Friends, “The One Where Rachel Has a Baby,” 2002). Rachel, probably TV’s most famous single mother in the decade, made single sitcom motherhood look easy, with nice places to live, a nanny, grandparents to watch her daughter seemingly on-demand, a paid maternity leave, and a career when she returned from her maternity leave. On Frasier, single mother Roz didn’t find that daughter Alice cramped her style and, like Rachel, her career continued on an upward trajectory after she was born. Alice’s father, a college student, disappeared almost immediately after Alice’s conception, never needing child support. Rachel had Ross, and, like Roz, continued to have a robust social life. Both got their figures back right away, too. They embodied yummy single motherhood on TV as well as suggesting that the nuclear family model wasn’t the only way to raise a child, even while their lives were hardly realistic. Indeed, babies fit into friends-as-family stories because they were mostly invisible and disrupted virtually nothing of the yummy mummy’s life, including her dating life. At the same time, though, some version of a more traditional nuclear family tended to be part of the end game on friends-as-family shows, suggesting that women were truly grown up when they had husbands and children (Kutulas, “Friends”). On both How I Met Your Mother and Friends, babies signaled moves out of New York City and into the suburbs, symbolic cocooning in safer, more child-friendly spaces. Friends-as-family stories explored a life stage made possible by sixties revolutions, reveling in stories about the long process of maturing into adulthood, but often ended by setting up their characters for traditional adulthood without really filling in the details about how these modern no-longer-so-young people would make

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everything work. Once Ross and Rachel decided to be together with their daughter, would they follow the blueprint he sketched out earlier in their relationship and move to Scarsdale, where the taxes were higher but the schools were better, the scenario that had alarmed her back then (Friends, “The One Where Old Yeller Dies,” 1996)? As some commentators and plenty of fans pointed out, at the end of Friends, Rachel “sacrifice[d]” her own dreams [a fashion job in Paris] to fulfill Ross’s (“Why Friends’ Ending is Actually Sad”). Perhaps it was telling that the original run of Will & Grace ended with both of them having children (Will & Grace, “Finale,” 2006), but the series’ reboot in 2017, those children were not in evidence and the two lead characters continued to explore romances, career options, and lifestyle choices, staying unencumbered by family. Friends-as-family sitcoms wanted to reconcile the post-sixties emphasis on individual growth with older notions of the family sitcom, but, in the end, most couldn’t, so they didn’t. Mothers’ perspectives lost ground in the early 2000s for a number of reasons. For one thing, men continued to dominate behind-the-scenes, writing, directing, and producing many family sitcoms. Everybody Loves Raymond and Modern Family might have both employed female writers within their mostly male stables, but few lasted more than a season or two. Raymond show runner Phil Rosenthal expressed an eagerness to employ women, but assumed their voices were present in a writers’ room because his writers had wives, assuring that Debra and Marie would be male-constructed characters (Scarborough). As perhaps the pre-eminent creator of successful sitcoms in the era, Chuck Lorre’s feelings about motherhood were bound to have their impact on shows other than the three he created, Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory, and Mike & Molly, each with at least one difficult mother. Difficult mothers were all over the popular culture, moreover, especially, by 2010, on reality TV. Sitcoms operated on formulas and conventions, but in the early 2000s, a lot of men seemed to set those up. The men creating so much of the programming of the era, moreover, grew up watching programs that modernized versions of the traditional family, whether in its Cleaver or Huxtable formulation. By 2000, virtually everyone making television programs had grown up watching them. Some had found in them comfort for their less-than-ideal situations growing up and wanted to recreate the happy-family vibes of earlier eras. Many absorbed family sitcoms as histories of gender relations, but struggled to reconcile pasts where mothers facilitated everybody else’s aspirations for presents when mothers had aspirations too. Like the writers of Everybody Loves Raymond, the lines blurred for them between their own lives and “normal” as well as the pasts they had seen on TV and the stories that they wrote. Nostalgia, along with a lot of male gazes, pervaded early 2000s sitcoms.

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When George Lopez had a fight with his wife about his irresponsibility, he retreated to the couch and changed the channel to find something comforting. “These shows were like my family,” he explained to his son. “I used to pretend they loved me.” What followed were parodies of Leave It to Beaver, The Munsters, and The Jetsons, with wife Angie serving as the voice of reason and the parent who knew best in each story (The George Lopez Show, “Leave It to Lopez,” 2004). Whether June Cleaver, Lily Munster, or Jane Jetson, she demonstrated the same combination of efficiency, responsibility, and a bit of nagging. But the sitcom George didn’t live in was not those cozy realities; he lived in more complicated gender times. Still, whether in his sitcom world or the sitcom within the sitcom, he expected his wife and mother to be as good as sitcom mothers of the past, but also didn’t want the responsibility of doing what sitcom fathers of the past did. At a time with so many networks and such a variety of program types, we might expect a host of different kinds of sitcom mothers. To a degree, that was true. There were, for instance, more bad mothers, and they were not necessarily evil characters, just funny ones. So too were there yummy mummies, single ones, and working mothers. But despite all the variations, the essence of the sitcom mother remained rooted in what older sitcom mothers stood for: nurture, sacrifice, serving others. Mothers who tried to evade those expectations ended up frustrated, angry, or unfulfilled. Lucille Bluth or Evelyn Harper might scheme, but they never fully got what they wanted. It was, sitcoms continued to remind viewers in many subtle and unsubtle ways, still a man’s world.

Chapter 7

“When Did This Become My Life?” Recent Sitcom Motherhood

It was a classic Claire Dunphy spiral, one of many that occurred on Modern Family. After husband Phil’s presentation at son Luke’s career day had technical difficulties, the teacher asked Claire, a “stay-at-home mom,” to tell the class about her “very important job.” Claire gamely launched into the classic contemporary explanation of what stay-at-home mothers do, explaining that she had “a bunch of different jobs” that she then listed: chauffeur, chef, house manager, and nurse. The class was unimpressed. “Is that what you always wanted to do?” one girl asked. Claire conceded that it was not, defensively offering up her work résumé before adding that she “just wanted to be there” for her kids, wiping noses, changing diapers, and putting kids to sleep. The girl persisted, “why haven’t you gone back to work?” adding that her mother had. And that’s when Claire really started to fall apart; angry at being judged and found wanting, she lashed out at the girl for having no manners. Another visiting parent, a father, stepped in, although his way of fixing things didn’t help much since he explained that “if I had to do that job, I’d probably drink myself to death.” Later, feeling valued only “because I cook and I clean and I pick up dirty underwear,” Claire’s ego was bruised. Phil offered validation, but his next question—“what’s for dinner?”—suggested that he too couldn’t think of Claire apart from her role as wife and mother (Modern Family, “Career Day,” 2013). Claire was not the only recent mother to melt down as she considered her role as a modern mother. Katie on American Housewife once lay down in a school parking lot after trying all day to squeeze in a nap, screaming “I can’t take it anymore. I have a marketing degree from Duke. When did this become my life?” (American Housewife, “The Nap,” 2017). Frankie on The Middle spiraled like Claire after she ate the last crumbs from a bag of “Fauxritos” that also contained her son’s toenail clippings, fleeing to her mother’s 141

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house to reevaluate “my whole life” (The Middle, “Major Changes,” 2011). When her son wanted to stay at his father’s place, Christy on Mom refused. “No,” she ordered him, “you’re staying right here with your mother, who friggin’ loves you” (Mom, “Fun Girl Stuff and Eternal Salvation,” 2015). If one word described contemporary sitcom mothers, it’s stress. They are stressed if they work outside the house and stressed if they don’t, stressed by their children and their husbands, their ex-husbands, their extended families, and their friends. They are so tightly wound that something small can easily push them over the edge, turning them into “wild-eyed . . . and not always rational” forces to be reckoned with, as critic Neil Genzlinger said of Speechless’s Maya, who often waged an over-the-top battle on her disabled son’s behalf (Genzlinger, “This Show”). Motherhood, once shown to be the most natural of paths for sitcom women, something women desired and embraced, something for which they were lauded and celebrated, today is mostly stress and its byproducts, insecurity and anger. Motherhood is other things too on sitcoms, of course, but recent sitcoms have delved far more deeply than ever into its undersides. Sitcom mothers are on edge for some pretty good reasons. They live in a world full of things that the first sitcom makers never imagined were appropriate for happy family stories. Today’s sitcoms are set against a backdrop of endless wars, mass shootings, ongoing climate disasters, crazy politics, racism, antisemitism, and assaults on women and LGBTQ individuals, issues a more diverse set of sitcom creators want to explore and emphasize. Often, though, it isn’t the larger world that so freaks out modern sitcom mothers, but matters closer to home. “I’ve never thought of Mom as a person before,” one of Frankie’s children conceded after the toenail-eating incident (The Middle, “Major Changes,” 2011), an all-too-common realization. Mothers have been told by the culture that their job is important; they are keenly aware of the damage mothers can do to their children’s psyches. All too often, though, “good” mothering exists in a nostalgic past, maybe not the past of Harriet Nelson (The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet) or June Cleaver (Leave It to Beaver), but an updated version of the past that includes the last generation of sitcom mothers to be much lauded by the culture, 80s mothers epitomized by Clair Huxtable (The Cosby Show) and Elyse Keaton (Family Ties). Modern sitcom mothers live in fraught times, however, and don’t react like those mothers on comfort-food sitcom reruns. So too, though, do they often have the voices to explore the chasms between their realities and those cultural ideals. Sitcoms reflect who makes them and who watches them within a particular cultural moment. In the 1950s, that meant better versions of middle-class White people solving little family predicaments (Haralovich, 116) in stories crafted by White, heterosexual men, living in a conformist culture with very

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clear hierarchies that benefited them. Sitcom makers today are more diverse, as are the stories they tell. The hierarchies of the past and the present are these days far more visible and contested than the ones reinforced in those first stories. In a world with vastly more entertainment options than the era of three major channels, there is room for a lot more people to present their experiences and points of view. When sitcom makers “tackle issues that are happening in people’s lives,” as Chuck Lorre noted (Chuck Lorre, as quoted in Birnbaum, “Lessons Learned”), motherhood turns out to be a contested, confused, and contradictory identity. Mothers on sitcoms today have to do a lot more than “kissing boo-boos” (Genzlinger, “Issues”). While the classic family sitcoms of the 1950s presented idealized and aspirational stories, today’s shows present a varied set of families confronting problems. Most modern sitcom mothers are underdogs, or at least see themselves that way. While a number live in big houses and seem like the successors to the yuppie sitcom families of the 1980s, their wealth might not be the most critical part of their identities, as the Johnson family of black-ish reminded their audiences. Single mothers have abounded on recent sitcoms, as have poorer families and families with challenging children. The Middle purported to tell the story of an average American family, which included a spectrum of problems that might plague a middle-class family, especially finances, something that never seemed a problem to purportedly middling sitcom families in the past. While The Middle’s end-of-episode voice-over summaries, by mom Frankie, were usually homilies about family togetherness or strength, the ordinary challenges she faced as a mother were significant as she worked outside the home, advocated for her children, including one who was “special,” tried to maintain a house always on the brink of disaster on little money, kept her marriage strong, and did all those things she believed mothers were supposed to do, like make family memories. As mothers like Frankie struggled to stay on top of their massive to-do lists, “more mama drama” (Christy’s phrase in Mom, “Quaaludes and Crackerjacks,” 2016) tends to ensue. Much of that drama concerns the uncertainty of mothers’ roles in the modern era, clashes of expectations, and judgment from others. Modern mothers tend to be defensive and overreactive, mostly because they keep confronting what Claire experienced at career day, the vast gap between what motherhood is supposed to be—both valued and fulfilling—and its grubbier realities. Television mothers feel trapped between a “a potent, inescapably visual and emotional” picture of what family ought to be like and lives that bear little resemblance to Leave It to Beaver or The Donna Reed Show (Stacey, 102). As parenting expectations ramp up and as TV mothers, like real mothers, can see a variety of good and bad mothers on social media and in the public eye, they struggle to find their way. A modern focus on trauma and its therapeutic

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language presents the individual as both “empowered and frail,” with people claiming the right to diagnose others and to expect support for their own traumas, a trend some psychologists see as narcissistic (Waldman). “Screaming on the inside” is how Jessica Grose characterized modern mothers’ lives (Grose). Sitcom mothers, though, are more apt to scream on the outside. Today’s family sitcoms bear little resemblance to the first ones. They are filmed and delivered differently and, in some cases, constructed outside the traditional network structure. Most, though, still have the same premise, that family is a place of growth that facilitates the launch of a new generation. That idea takes on new meaning as American society has slowly shifted toward individual fulfillment and identity as a family goal. What were once considered “selfish goals” that disrupted “the [family] group” (Jones, Honey, I’m Home, 4) are now stories about learning to be adults, finding autonomy, and learning to assert one’s self. Those new goals conflict with mothers’ traditional roles as the family members who provide the emotional bonds of the family unit. Modern sitcom mothers, like many sitcom mothers across time, are shown to have strong maternal instincts that particularly reveal themselves around babies. Like Clair Huxtable, who caught a whiff of baby powder and contemplated having a sixth child, there still seems to be an almost-instinctive urge to cuddle. Claire and Gloria, both smarting after their teens deserted them for friends at the mall, fought over who got to spoil and cuddle baby Lily. “I need babies,” Gloria explained, “they never tell you to go away” (Modern Family, “Benched,” 2010). On The Middle, Frankie relished taking care of her teens after they had their wisdom teeth removed, imagining it would be like when they were babies and she could snuggle them at any time (The Middle, “Wisdom Teeth,” 2016). Babies provide, in short, the opportunity to mother without any pushback. Sitcoms continue to endorse the idea of a maternal instinct, but loving babies is often characterized these days as a selfish desire as well or, like Gloria’s and Claire’s responses, a compensation for other things missing in a woman’s life. Where things get complicated for sitcom mothers is when babies turn into children. Hovering over a lot of modern-day comedies is parental nostalgia for the sort of childhoods 1950s sitcoms children seemed to have, freedom to roam and imagine and play. That is how most sitcom parents claim they were raised and how they wish they could raise their children, but the women are well aware that they can’t. Just as older comedies reflected the ideas of what was known as permissive parenting, symbolized by the ideas of Dr. Benjamin Spock, today’s shows take as their norm a style that a lot of modern experts tout, intensive parenting. Intensive parenting sets up children for their futures—like 1980s yuppie parenting—and protects them from the dangers of modern life, like helicopter parenting. Intensive

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parenting requires “more time, more attention, more money.” “The cost of screwing up,” as sociologist Philip Cohen notes, is big. The style assumes that parents have “a huge impact on our children’s lives (positive or negative)” (Cohen as quoted in Claire Cain Miller). In this scheme, successful parents inculcate personal habits historically associated with the middle class: moderation, deferred gratification, self-discipline, and hard work. Education, particularly higher education, is generally the end goal, setting children on upward trajectories (Pinsker). Since so many family stories today are set in upper middle-class enclaves full of expensive pre-schools, enrichment activities, and internships at Daddy’s office, sitcom typicality doesn’t match American reality, although series like The Middle or The Conners address how less-well-endowed families struggle to ensure that their offspring have the best opportunities too. Sitcom mothers bear the larger burden of intensive parenting. In fact, they understand themselves to be the alpha parents because fathers aren’t doing ”their fair share” of parenting (Shearn). Family sitcoms reproduce and reinforce gendered parenting as a norm. Modern sitcom fathers rarely have the same level of interest and availability as mothers. A father like The Middle’s Mike planned to take son Axl out for a beer on his twenty-first birthday like his father did for him and to give him his grandfather’s watch when he left home. He got the meaningful and symbolic moments of parenthood, and Frankie got the grind of carpools, meals, and the PTA. Sitcom fathers are generally immune to criticism about their skills as parents and have less knowledge or interest in what experts have to say, which is equally true of real fathers (“Parenting in America”). Mothers, though, constantly evaluate their performances as mothers against others. After talking to her neighbor, Frankie on The Middle worried that she had been “lazy” and had “slacked off” on building family bonds. Mike had no such insecurities, blaming the neighbor for planting unrealistic ideas in her head, ordering the children “to start loving each other right now because that’s what your mother wants,” and bailing on the one activity the kids seemed to enjoy together, playing touch football after dinner (his suggestion), when he got tired of it. Frankie persisted, but the kids didn’t think it was fun without Dad. In frustration, she spiked the football, which hit her in the nose. They laughed, and the family memory she created literally grew out of her pain, as she ruefully noted in her end voice-over (The Middle, “Siblings,” 2009). Since sitcoms establish that managing day-to-day family life is mothers’ work, and mothers pay attention to experts’ advice and care about what others think, they are the lead parents, the psychological parents, the bad-cop parents, and, sometimes, the only parents. “What isn’t a Mom thing?” wondered Frankie in exasperation after Mike blamed her when they both forgot son Brick’s birthday (The Middle, “Steaming Pile of Guilt,” 2015).

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Although recent sitcoms are as disinclined to show mothers actually performing most household tasks as earlier ones were, one stereotypic modern mother task several have highlighted is driving children places, revealing how children get transported to whatever facilitates their future and what it costs in human capital. Advice literature tells mothers that car rides are excellent places for conversations about difficult subjects, neutral zones where children and teens might open up. Sitcoms immediately challenge this notion by placing children in the backseat, fighting if they are siblings and chatting if they are friends, while mothers strain to enter conversations and redirect fights. Sitcom mothers might try to use the minivan ride to offer advice or attempt to squash their teens’ problematic impulses, but the riders are generally having none of it. Driving their offspring around reminds mothers that too much of what they do all day is thankless work that their partners find reasons not to perform. They have a lot of meltdowns while driving children, whether it’s Frankie responding to the stress of riders convinced she’s going to make them tardy (The Middle, “The Carpool,” 2014) or Claire, who ended up in zip ties after she mocked the resource officer at the high school (Modern Family, “Phil on Wire,” 2011). Trapped in close quarters with their children and their children’s friends, sitcom mothers discover how little of what they say and do seems to matter. The invisibility sitcom mothers feel driving carpools is symptomatic of the larger trials of their roles. They clearly understand just how dangerous the world seems and how many possibilities there are for making mistakes. They are ready to parent intensively, but their children aren’t interested in their advice, their instructions, and especially not their discipline. Modern sitcom mothers worry about losing control. With some exceptions, most are quite confident they know how to fix situations and solve problems, if only people would listen to them. “Don’t they realize that without my strong hand guiding them,” Katie wondered about her two teens, “they’d end up pregnant at sixteen and running the front desk at Just Tires?” (American Housewife, “Bag Lady,” 2017). “I would love to be wrong,” Claire said in her defense when her family pointed out just how obsessive she could be. “I just don’t live with the right people for that” (Modern Family, “When Good Kids Go Bad,” 2011). Mothers on today’s sitcoms not only see themselves as the important parent, but on many shows judge their partners as underperforming their roles. “I’ve done our job,” as Claire said pointedly in the Modern Family pilot (2009) when Phil suggested they coparented. More recent sitcom fathers have rarely been the self-centered man-children of the 1990s, although most do have some elements of him in them. Plenty of fathers make the effort to parent; most fail to live up to their wives’ expectations. Some, like Phil, want to be pals with their kids, not disciplinarians. Others emphasize entertainment

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over enrichment, taking their children to scary movies or to play golf, things that will never get them into a good college and might even set them back emotionally. Whatever fathers do, though, is never enough in their partners’ judgment. Sitcom writers usually ascribe the differences between the parenting and household chores mothers and fathers do as “the result of . . . two personalities,” as sociologist Arlie Hochschild noted about many of the real couples that she observed for The Second Shift (Hochschild, 54), family stories that reference individual psychologies rather than gender roles that rest on long cultural traditions. A host of individual mothers on recent programs— black-ish’s Rainbow, Modern Family’s Claire, American Housewife’s Katie, The Conners’ Darlene, The Big Bang Theory’s Bernadette, and Fresh Off the Boat’s Jessica—have been characterized as control freaks, not just about their children, but about everything, their homes, their marriages, and their jobs. Julie Bowen, who played Claire, described her as a “type A” personality (Freeman), tightly wound, while Katie was a classic unruly woman, loud, large, and occupying too much space for a polite woman. Darlene’s history of pushing people around predated The Conners, dating back to her teenage years on Roseanne. Sitcom mothers often justify their intensity by citing “desperate times” (Claire in Modern Family, “iSpy,” 2014) or with phrases like “mama bear” (Christy on Mom, “Xanax and a Baby Duck,” 2016). But even on series where mothers get to provide their own perspective via voiceovers, narrations, or mockumentary commentary, they still often come off as overly controlling. What Katie’s husband once called her “cuckoo-pants” behaviors (American Housewife, “Blond-tourage,” 2018), like other sitcom mothers’, don’t go unnoticed. They get called out a lot, including by their husbands. School authorities complain they are “overreactive, mildly threatening, demanding special attention . . . creat[ing] a hostile learning environment,” as Frankie’s “file” at her son’s school read (The Middle, “The Math Class,” 2011). She was not the only mother called to the principal’s office; Claire and Gloria (Modern Family), Katie (American Housewife), Christy (Mom), Mary (Young Sheldon), and Nalani (Never Have I Ever) have all also made the trip. They are constructed to appear intense, and their actions are implied to have a selfinterested motive as well as the more legitimate one of helping their children become good adults. As Becky explained as she made her young daughter put on something more appropriate on picture day than the dog suit she’d chosen, others needed to see that “Mommy’s doing a great job. Otherwise, what’s the point?” (Becky on The Conners, “The Dog Days of Christmas,” 2022). Certainly, sitcom children don’t make mothering easy. Unlike the innocently mischievous children and slightly willful teens of sitcoms past, some of this generation have the sorts of problems comedies didn’t explore in the past, like teen pregnancies, physical disabilities, or mental health challenges.

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They crave autonomy. They are eager to assert their independence. Some are addicted to social media, curating their lives. To attract younger audiences and encourage family viewing, family sitcoms continue to highlight teen voices and perspectives and explore the stressors in their lives. Sitcoms today also focus on a more diverse range of children and teens, including characters of color, LGBTQ characters, and characters with disabilities. Like their real-world counterparts, sitcom teens experience depression or anxiety. Their families are sometimes fractured. They love their mommies, but often don’t think they need them. They don’t want to be intensively parented. Consequently, modern mothering on sitcoms is a more adversarial process than it used to be. The family harmony that was the briefly disturbed norm on traditional sitcom episodes rarely exists today on family shows. Instead, teens plot their ways around their mothers, who are perfectly willing to fight back. There are many more confrontations than there used to be on family sitcoms, angry ones rather than moments where mothers offered comfort, cookies, and milk. Because mothers are coded as so controlling and perfectionist, they have very strong ideas about their children’s choices, ideas they don’t hesitate to express because, as Katie said, they sometimes secretly regard their teens as “idiots” and “I’m Mom” (American Housewife, “It’s Not You, It’s Me,” 2018). Their children have been known to fight back or work around their mothers as best they can, but, often as not, can’t figure out why their mothers are so tightly wound. While much of mothers’ traditional saintliness relates to their scrupulousness, today’s sitcom mothers don’t necessarily play fair, since they have discovered that “the low road works” (Katie on American Housewife, “The Playdate,” 2017). They lie to their children and guilt-trip them. They use modern technologies to track and surveil their teens, doing whatever it takes to gain control. An entire episode of Modern Family, for instance, ran through Claire’s MacBook Pro as she snooped through daughter Haley’s Facebook page, tried to hack into her iCloud account, and tracked her phone to find out where Haley was. With each step, she further invaded Haley’s privacy—as sister Alex pointed out—and spiraled deeper into her panic. Ultimately, Haley wasn’t, as Claire surmised from her delve into social media, pregnant and eloping to Las Vegas, but sleeping in her bedroom (Modern Family, “Connection Lost,” 2015). Like so many other sitcom mothers, she overreacted. Stories also show that children are themselves devious in these ongoing skirmishes with their mothers. They might not spy, but they know how to deceive their mothers and think they know how to manipulate them. Especially as they age, they take evasive steps to protect their privacy and autonomy, includingas they approach milestone moments, like turning twenty-one or leaving for college. Sometimes they even manage to fool their mothers. Rarely do they listen to them. Fathers, meanwhile, sometimes become

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accidental allies with their offspring when they either don’t agree with a mother’s fiat or are blissfully ignorant of a fight. Children today also seem to practice an age-old sitcom ruse, trying to pit one parent against the other. Mothers might be prepared to confront their offspring head-on, but they don’t always win these battles. While there are some obvious differences between parenting a young child in 1950-something and the new century, mothering a younger child seems to have changed less than mothering an older one. Indeed, there are plenty of family-togetherness moments. Play, however, is not sitcom mothers’ métier, but dads’, leaving mothers to enforce good habits, like cleaning rooms and doing chores. Children, moreover, have changed, requiring interventions by doctors, psychologists, and school officials to deal with quirks or disabilities. Katie on American Housewife, Mary on Young Sheldon, and Frankie on The Middle have each tried to help a socially awkward child navigate school and extracurriculars, generally without much success and, generally, little appreciation from their children. Those failures, moreover, can just as easily trigger a maternal meltdown as a meditation on trusting that everything will work out okay in the end. Still, mothers get much less pushback when they parent children than teens. Mother-child relationships quickly head south when their children reach puberty. Sitcom mothers know what every child-advice manual says, that preteens might love their parents unconditionally, but teens are both critical and resistant to their advice as they attempt to forge their own identities. Episodes of The Middle, Modern Family, black-ish, and American Housewife have all addressed that moment when “just like that, my baby became a teenager” (Claire on Modern Family, “Benched,” 2010), a sullen, uncooperative, embarrassed-by-Mom teen. That’s the moment when teens start lying to their mothers, sneaking around, and, from their mothers’ perspectives, bringing shame to their families and dooming their future successes. Mothers like Claire step up their surveillance while a few others, like black-ish’s Rainbow, strive to be like they remember their mothers being to them as teens (“best friends”) only to reverse course when they discover they have been lied to, disobeyed, or disregarded (black-ish, “The Peer-ent Trap,” 2015). Ironically, sitcom mothers today can’t win, however they choose to parent. How, for instance, might a mother react to an expectation like Axl’s that Frankie should be on top of “important stuff” so he didn’t have to bother, but tolerate his dozens of selfish habits, like guzzling milk out of the jug or leaving his dirty socks on the kitchen table? (The Middle, “The Test,” 2011). Sitcom teens are today depicted much more realistically than they were back in the days when they were “citizens-in-training” (Marc, Comic Visions, 49). Their emotional instability and their sometimes-foolish choices are shown. Violet on Mom was sure she could handle her life, until it all came crashing

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down, but even then, she wanted sympathy, not advice, from her mother, and certainly not her mother’s “tough love.” They fought, she fled to live with a boyfriend. “It’s official, I don’t like her,” Christy concluded, but the guilt lingered on because “I’m her mother; I’m responsible for her” (Mom, “Blow and a Free McMuffin,” 2016). Like other recent mothers, she struggled to figure out what a mother owed her child. Modern sitcom mothers simultaneously do and don’t understand their teens, a change from the past, when mothers were naturally empathetic. They feel conflicting emotions about their growing children, guilt and fear as they worry that they are missing problems or being conned. Christy, who had a history of addiction, for instance, couldn’t tell the difference between ordinary teen experimentation and addiction and was afraid her son was lying to her about only trying marijuana once. She went “past mothering into smothering,” as her ex-husband said, monitoring his every waking hour and taking away any privileges in ways that alienated him from her (Mom, “Xanax and a Baby Duck,” 2016). Similarly, Mary took back her house “from the devil” after her newly employed teenage son started throwing money around, confiscating music, posters, and the television set in order to “keep my family safe” and maintain some control, driving them across the street to Grandma’s house for sanctuary (Young Sheldon, “The Sin of Greed and a Chimichanga from Chi-Chi’s,” 2019). When such panicked overreactions occur, fathers or stepfathers might step in to calm the waters, voices of sanity and logic that counterbalance mothers’ traditional emotionalism, only their emotionalism often seems excessive given whatever the problem might be. Mothers on a mission to protect or redirect their teens seriously disrupt family harmony and life for everybody else, something past—clearly more sainted—sitcom mothers rarely did. Family sitcoms tend to be conservative television, comfort food where everything works out in the end and family life is depicted as satisfying and harmonious. Little things used to temporarily interfere with family harmony on programs. Today’s TV families are more unstable and fragile overall, with more fighting, more bad behavior, and in a few households, more economic instability, storylines necessary in an era when sitcom creators understand viewers want reality rather than aspirational stories. Within the classic sitcom formula, “Mom is the sanest character” usually, the moral center around which any zaniness revolves (Kaiser). These days, though, mothers are more commonly the crazy ones, the people frantically trying to make something impossible happen. As maternal figures have been given more character depth in recent years and more agency, the tension between the images they carry of good mothering and their daily lives produces sporadic moments of intensity, lunacy, or anger. In consequence, their other relationships can be fraught. Several of their marriages have, at points, teetered on the brink of collapse, often because,

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like Mary on Young Sheldon, they made family decisions alone for selfish reasons. Their relations with their children are tempestuous. Mary’s two less-bright children, Georgie and Missy, were well aware that their mother favored Sheldon. Darlene on The Conners fought with her ex-husband and her current one about daughter Harris and son Mark; she was also estranged from Harris for a few episodes, and her relationship with her father and stepmother wasn’t always that great either. Because mothers so often encounter resistance when they try to do what they regard as their jobs, they sometimes seem to practice the mantra, “by any means necessary,” which can have enormous consequences. Most especially, modern sitcoms suggest that whole families struggle with mothers’ changing identities. Stories confirm that family members really do view their mothers as all those things Claire recounted during career day: cooks, cleaners, and chauffeurs, not to mention people who handle anything dirty or unpleasant, the unseen underside of the classic sitcom mother. When asked by their father what their mother liked, the Heck offspring mustered “driving us places,” “doing our laundry,” and “making us soup,” entirely selfish services that suggested that, to them, Frankie meant nothing more than their housekeeper (The Middle, “Mother’s Day II,” 2011). That tends to be true of how most sitcom children view their mothers, as keepers of the home in the narrowest sense. Occasionally they celebrate their mothers for other things, like their work selves; but they more commonly want to consign their mothers to the secondary status of some previous generations of sitcom mothers. Yet all of them rely at moments on the emotional support and unconditional love their mothers provide. And that’s how psychologists and child development experts suggest real children regard their mothers as they slowly come to see them as real people in their own right. Sitcom husbands, meanwhile, often waffle between the secret wish that their wives would be like stereotypic 1950s housewives and the lip service they pay to a modern vision of motherhood as part of a woman’s fulfilled life, but not all of it. They support their wives’ working, but do little around the house to facilitate it. They take issue when their wives spend money and resent and resist it when their wives exert power. They don’t think communally, putting their own needs first. Many spend a lot of time on the couch, watching television, or indulging their hobbies, Mike on The Middle, Murray on The Goldbergs, Phil and Jay on Modern Family, Greg on American Housewife, and George on Young Sheldon. Most modern sitcom mothers face the insidiousness of the classic 1950s sitcom mother’s lack of identity, even though modern shows almost never reference those series anymore. So entrenched is the stereotype that they don’t have to. One way that the older sitcom norm hovers over mothers’ lives is in the way many of the most famous recent mothers are like the classic sitcom

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mother, as stay-at-homes. Those mothers represent what is now an anomaly, two-parent families with a working father and a mother who handles domestic duties and childcare. Sitcom stay-at-homes are well-educated and middleclass, not struggling and stuck, like a lot of actual stay-at-home mothers today (“Parenting in America”). Sitcom mothers choose to stay home, which demonstrates both their agency and their willingness to sacrifice on behalf of their progeny. Most, like Modern Family’s Claire, want to believe their choice is the right one, but harbor creeping doubts, especially when contrasted with working mothers. Normally snarky Katie acknowledged the conflicting set of emotions that often lead sitcom mothers to choose housewife over other choices. Having complained about how exhausting it was to be in charge of the house, having a meltdown volunteering at her daughter’s school, taking heat from her son for not having a job, she ended the episode with the observation that “being a stay-at-home mom really does suck and it’s really important” (American Housewife, “The Nap,” 2017). Maternal sacrifice, thus, becomes the name of the game for stay-at-home sitcom mothers. Sitcoms make clear that mothers make the choice to stay home not because it’s normal, natural, or a biological drive but because it’s mothers’ service to their loved ones. Shows explain the staying-at-home as Katie characterized it, frustrating and unpleasant sometimes, nearly always unfair, but valuable. End-of-episode narration or last scenes often depict the satisfying, happy-family moments, everyone sitting around the dinner table or contentedly being together on vacation or watching a movie while mothers muse on the delights of community. In the episodes themselves, though, mothers act like Katie, complaining, being so overwhelmed that they get angry or weepy or panicked, and feeling taken for granted by their spouses or children. Occasionally, they push back; “I’m done mommying you,” Mary told Sheldon after he got angry that she took away what she regarded as inappropriate comic books. In true modern-mommy fashion, she overreacted. She stopped feeding him, driving him places, and doing his laundry (Young Sheldon, “A Mother, a Child, and a Blue Man’s Backside,” 2018), a tactic Beverly Goldberg also used when her son failed to celebrate Mother’s Day. In Sheldon’s case, it was the threat of a tornado that got Mary acting like a mother again, and for Bev it was some appreciation for all she did. In many different ways, sitcom mothers negotiate the gap between the idealized version of staying-at-home and the drudge work it seems to involve. They do so, however, uneasily, angrily, and, sometimes with tantrums. Working women, including mothers, give stay-at-home mothers little respect. They seem immune to the mystique of maternal sacrifice and domesticity. Claire’s single and successful former work friend “pitied” her rather than admired or longed to be like her (Modern Family, “Moon Landing,” 2010) and anesthesiologist Rainbow called the neighborhood stay-at-homes

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“lad[ies] of leisure” and “day drinkers” (black-ish, “Working Girl,” 2018). Husbands, though, like stay-at-homes because it resets the house norm to the good old days. Children don’t seem to care one way or the other whether their mothers are available all day and sitcom teens would definitely prefer circumstances that give them more freedom, although they expect to reap the perks of Mom running their errands, just like Patty Lane (The Patty Duke Show) and her family did in the 1960s. While mothers might see staying home as a service for their families, that’s generally not how others see what they do. Rather, at a time when plenty of mothers also work outside the home, staying at home is regarded as having it easy, especially since the stay-at-homes on recent sitcoms live in families that sometimes also employ nannies and neverseen cleaning services. Stay-at-homes, thus, have often become the yummy mummies of the era, even when they are depicted as Katie was on American Housewife as the more ordinary mother in a bastion of yumminess, upscale Westport, Connecticut. A lot of recent stay-at-home sitcom mothers meet many of the criteria for yummy-ness. They are young, mostly skinny, and lovely. They do yoga. They spend considerable time out of the house, shopping and driving, but also meeting with other mothers at coffee shops where they can vent about their children and husbands. They judge one another. And they fight over status. Gloria on Modern Family once even got into a dodgeball fight with another yummy as part of an escalating war to secure a perk for their sons that ended up with both being sent to the principal’s office (Modern Family, “Under Pressure,” 2014). Yummy mummies remain difficult characters on sitcoms, women who are a little too mean-girl to get along well with others. Nothing better conveys the conceit that staying-at-home is akin to being a yummy than stay-at-home mothers’ drinking habits. Alcohol becomes their way of blowing off steam, even though little in stories where continuing characters’ yummier sides come out suggests their lives are particularly stressful as they hit the gym or boss lessers around at a volunteer event. Their book groups and lunches out include lots of wine. At family get-togethers and dinners out, they are the first to order drinks. Claire’s family on Modern Family knew when she started drinking and could distinguish how much wine she’d consumed by the tone of her voice. Never, though, did Claire’s accelerating drinking veer into the territory staked out by Mom, addiction. Was Claire an alcoholic? A Reddit thread devoted to that question mostly concluded that her fondness for alcohol was a way to get a cheap laugh by playing with the stereotype of the desperate housewife who drank all day. And that’s precisely how the “day-drinkers” who don’t work outside the house are portrayed, a little desperate and maybe a tad too eager to smooth some sharp edges with wine as they live in paradise. Shows present working or not working as choices mothers have, but the guilt that sitcom mothers feel when they join the workforce suggested that

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staying-at-home is the natural way for mothers to be. Claire felt it, as did Katie, who simultaneously “like[d] working,” enjoyed “using my brain,” appreciated getting out of the home front, but worried she was a “bad mom.” “Feeling guilty is part of being a working mom,” someone at her office explained (American Housewife, “Mom Guilt,” 2018). “I love my job. I save lives,” Rainbow, a doctor, declared in a black-ish episode that explored her decision to return to work after having her fifth child. She ping-ponged between despair and pride as she “rocked surgery” but “miss[ed] everything” at home (black-ish, “Working Girl,” 2018). Claire struggled with being the “perfect mom and the perfect boss,” “outsourcing” the drudge work that had so often made her angry and resentful when she stayed at home, drudge work she reimagined once she wasn’t doing it as “the one job that means the most to me” (Modern Family, “I Don’t Know How She Does It,” 2016). Sitcom mothers in the 1980s managed to have it all without much guilt. The same cannot be said about more modern mothers. Sitcoms today better acknowledge the challenges of working and having a family, but the lenses are still pretty rosy. Just as series always have, modern ones characterize sexism on the job as individual, not institutionalized, so easily remedied when the one bad apple is either fired or has his mind changed. The burdens of the second shift are similarly explored, as fodder for an occasional plot where family members vow improvements audiences never see in future episodes. One way that mothers seem to cut corners is on their jobs. Christy was a self-confessed bad waitress on Mom and Claire botched elements of her job at her father’s closet company in various episodes. Darlene on The Conners was terrible at a variety of jobs, thinking herself too good for an assembly line and too moral for a job in management. She was not even good at the food service job she took at a local college so her son could get a discounted tuition. Husbands like Phil hope that their wives will continue to handle all the domestic tasks they used to before they worked and, like Dre on black-ish expected Rainbow, when she was a stay-at-home, to “do the things I want her to do when I want her to do them” (black-ish, “Un-kept Woman,” 2018). There’s a typical amount of sitcom invisibility about jobs like cooking and cleaning on recent sitcoms, but there’s also evidence that mothers feel anger about trying to have it all (Shearn), suggesting more cultural willingness to consider the challenges of working motherhood. Still, more than sixty years after Betty Friedan pointed out the deep problems of identifying the housewife only in service and sacrifice to her family, that norm continues to exist on most sitcoms. Fathers might “help” or temporarily take over running a house when their wives are sick or away, but running the house remains women’s work on television. Bolstering the implicit assumption that the home is women’s domain are the visual pleasures invoked by so many recent sitcom homes. Only a few

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sitcom homes are less-than-perfect these days; even most of the ones that belong to less-than-middle-class families look pretty good. When The Middle left the air, gone was one of the last sitcom homes designed to “look awful” (Burg and Fanton). While The Conners recreated the set from Roseanne and on several occasions had the family fretting about meeting the mortgage, the Conner daughters and their families moved into a new house built by their father, one that, despite them having no money, featured stainless-steel appliances, a stackable washer-dryer, and a brand-new white couch that heretofore anti-materialist Darlene coveted. Christy and her family on Mom managed to bounce from homelessness to a multi-leveled apartment with arched doorways. Those shows might have at least made some attempts to make living spaces believable while the homes of more prosperous families like the Dunphys (Modern Family), the Ottos (American Housewife), or the Johnsons (black-ish) were sumptuous inside and out. The size of the Johnson family home became “a running joke” on the series (Shepard, 63). Inside, those houses brim with technology. Driveways hold enough new cars that nobody fights over them. Outside, gardeners maintain lush lawns; inside, nannies (or mannies) tend young children, and mostly unseen housekeepers keep things spotless. While today’s sitcoms generally attempt to explore real family problems, their settings tend to be fantasies. Programmers still assume that disproportionately female audiences are watching, audiences who will find pleasure in luxury and will buy products associated with their shows, delivering what sponsors hope for. But as the number of people watching commercials has declined, production companies and companies making products have tightened their connections, intensifying product placement even from a decade before. Black-ish and Modern Family have promoted automobile brands and Modern Family had one episode that was “like a half-hour Apple commercial” (Bishop) that allowed Claire to surveil her daughter while on the job. Haley got a new car for her twenty-first birthday, a Toyota Corolla. As part of its promotion of black-ish, the Disney Company invited twenty-five mombloggers to tour the Johnson house, hoping mom-influencers would get the word out about the show via its accoutrements. Everything these days is fair game for a visual audience. Mom’s Christy was a struggling mother who wore a lot of flannel shirts and hoodies, reasonable clothes for a woman of her situation. Those outfits, though, have all been cataloged on a website, including their pedigrees so that viewers might spend more than Christy could afford to look like her (https://wornontv​.net​/mom​/christy​-plunkett/). Mom also employed a device common on sitcoms to enable characters to live beyond their means, a rich friend able to treat Christy and her mother to designer duds as well as give the audience luxurious settings to look at. Sitcom mothers have always lived beyond their means. Today, though, it’s

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a lot more branded, enabling the audience to, if they can afford to, duplicate it. Sitcoms also paint a pretty glamorous picture of family leisure, one both expansive and involving no work for mothers. Unlike when June Cleaver anticipated a vacation, knowing that the family trip would also involve cooking and cleaning the cabin where the Cleavers stayed, today’s families stay at all-inclusive resorts. ABC TV, part of the Disney franchise, has included episodes set in Disney theme parks on black-ish, Modern Family, and The Middle. The extended Dunphy-Pritchett family also visited Hawaii, Paris, and Australia. Once more-or-less confined to the family kitchen, sitcom mothers these days also get out and about town to malls, hikes, movie theaters, yoga classes, and coffeehouses, sites enabled by the shift away from three-camera shows filmed before a studio audience, but also sites of leisure where yummy mummies might gather. Women shopping, a cliché, has been branded and packaged as something mothers enjoy and are good at. An episode of Modern Family featured Claire and daughter Haley making a rapid pre-Christmas run through Target; another had Claire and Gloria shop at Costco (Modern Family, “Express Christmas,” 2011 and “When a Tree Falls,” 2012). The first generation of sitcom mothers might have been known for hovering in the kitchen with a spatula, but a lot less cooking and more eating out or takeout goes on today. Evenings might find couples out for drinks or dinners at elegant restaurants or for an extra “fun night out”; Claire sought the company of gay men to provide her with “music, dancing, and second-hand smoke” (Modern Family, “Go Bullfrogs!” 2011). Overall, modern sitcom women enjoy a lot of free time away from the responsibilities of motherhood, most of it coded as luxurious. One place, though, when more traditional notions of motherhood kick in is when mothers seek to create or reenact rituals, like Thanksgiving or elements of their racial or ethnic heritage. Mothers have long been keepers and transmitters of the culture, which has become all the more complicated because modern sitcom mothers are more diverse and must balance what are popularly regarded as elements of American culture with ethnic or racial ones. Mothers like Gloria on Modern Family or Jessica on Fresh Off the Boat fought to make sure their offspring embraced their ethnic or racial heritages. It was especially complicated for Rainbow on black-ish because her children faced institutional racism and potential violence, stories the series didn’t shy away from documenting. Today’s mothers often have elaborate ideas about holidays, generally with an eye toward making memories or maintaining family cohesion as children grow. Poor Frankie was reduced to negotiating an agreement when Axl returned from college for Christmas, making him promise to participate in a set number of family activities, one that, as he pointed out, made “no mention” of him enjoying himself or caring (The Middle, “The

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Christmas Tree,” 2013). Few rituals or holidays, though, end up smoothly orchestrated, which often causes mother meltdowns, generally resolved by episode’s end. Still, in the meantime, it’s Mom who is the disrupter, whether it’s cashing in a lifetime of Mother’s Day coupons all at once because she’s tired of her children’s meager efforts (Beverly on The Goldbergs), providing chicken feet as an after-school snack when her sons don’t seem “Chinese enough” (Jessica on Fresh Off the Boat, “So Chineez,” 2015), or trying to make a streamlined “Express Christmas” for the extended family work (Modern Family, “Express Christmas,” 2011). The situations might be varied, but the mothers’ actions are not. They disrupt, driving plots, and the more they disrupt, the more central their characters become. Given that mothers of children and teens have become more unruly over time, it should come as no surprise that plenty of mothers of grown characters have gone from unruly to full-blown bad mothers. As children grow into adults, sitcom mothers on long-running series have adjusted, becoming more intense over time and trying to exert control. While always a smothering mother, for example, Bev on The Goldbergs felt the stakes grew much higher as her teens became adults. She took control over her daughter’s wedding until it was “over-the-top,” became an “intensely overzealous” grandmother, and posted missing child posters when her adult son stayed out all night (The Goldbergs, “The Wedding,” 2022; “DKNY,” 2022; and “Million Dollar Reward,” 2022). Noting the pattern of her extreme overreach followed by her concession that repeated episode after episode, one critic concluded that she was a “terrible mother,” that created a “co-dependent” family (Rowles). Another commentator also used the language of emotional dysfunction to describe another Beverly, Beverly Hofstadter, Leonard’s mother on The Big Bang Theory, suggesting she was the show’s “main villain,” even though she only appeared in sixteen episodes because of her significant “mental hold” over her grown son (Hansen). The same could be said of Leonard’s friends’ mothers, Mary Cooper and Debbie Wolowitz, both of whom, one philosopher noted, were “morally blameworthy” for their sons’ “social and psychological shortcomings” (Barkman, 229). In the 1960s, when mothers of grown characters first appeared in large numbers, they might be annoying, but their childrearing practices had not scarred the next generation for life. Samantha on Bewitched, for instance, simply carried on, undoing her mother’s witchcraft and standing up to her mother as necessary. Seventies mothers like Ida Morgenstern (Rhoda) wielded guilt like they wielded food, but the generational divide of the 1960s established most mothers’ expectations as old-fashioned and narrow, undercutting mothers’ power to guilt. In the 1980s mothers of regular characters were more benign, a pattern that shifted thereafter and has deepened, the idea that mothers can inflict a lot of harm on their children due to their neuroses

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or insecurities or, in the case of Mom’s Christy, a predilection for addiction. Along the way, sitcom psychologists like the Crane brothers (Frasier) and Beverly Hofstadter (The Big Bang Theory) have helped to familiarize the audience with the terminologies of psychology, therapy, and addiction as well as make any psychological damage mothers might have caused their children growing up sound significant. Especially when it exists in the past, sitcom motherhood can have elements that verge on the pathological, a development consistent with American society’s embrace of trauma and victimization as shaping factors in individuals’ lives (Waldman). Consider the impact of bad mothering and childhood trauma on Mom, an ongoing series’ theme explored, both via a therapist and Bonnie and Christy’s Alcoholics Anonymous group. Bonnie, mother to thirtysomething-year-old Christy and grandmother to Violet and Roscoe, suffered a traumatic childhood as her mother abandoned her at the age of four and Bonnie ended up in a series of foster homes. Bonnie had Christy young; Christy’s father abandoned the two of them at the hospital. Thanks to Christy’s colorful descriptions, viewers heard about the “years of neglect” Christy experienced as Bonnie used drugs, drank alcohol, and sometimes sold drugs to survive (Mom, “Blow

On Mom, three generations of one family lived together in dysfunction, ex-addict and generally bad mother Bonnie (Allison Janney), her ex-addict daughter Christy (Anna Faris), and Christy’s daughter Violet (Sadie Calvano). Bonnie and Christy slowly came to trust and support one another, but the audience’s last glimpse of Violet was her hosting a podcast called “The Mother of All Problems.” CBS/Photofest.

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and a Free McMuffin,” 2016). Christy drank and did drugs beginning in middle school and got pregnant as a teen because “I didn’t know how to live any other way” (Mom, “Pilot,” 2013). Before she got sober, she was a stripper and a drunk who would disappear “for days,” leaving Violet and Roscoe to fend for themselves, things “you may not want to remember,” Violet told Christy, “. . . but I do” (Mom, “Soapy Eyes and a Clean Slate,” 2014). Violet also seemed poised to follow the family pattern of “bad decisions for three generations” by getting pregnant young, then “lying, drinking, staying out all night” (Mom, “Blow and a Free McMuffin,” 2016 and “Free Therapy and a Dead Lady’s Yard Sale,” 2014) and, later, “steal[ing], cheat[ing], ly[ing]” (Mom, “Blow and a Free McMuffin,” 2016). But after much fighting and some dubious decisions on her part, she simply cut Christy out of her life. The last time the audience saw her, she was hosting a podcast called “The Mother of All Problems,” hardly surprising since each woman regarded her mother as the root of all her problems. Not all mothers of grown characters on contemporary sitcoms might be described as “pure evil,” as Christy said of Bonnie (Mom, “Pure Evil and a Free Piece of Cheesecake,” 2016), but they do seem to excel at manipulating or embarrassing their children, continuing to meddle, undercutting their confidence and self-esteem. Often their children are afraid of them. Many seek—and don’t often get—their approval, which they crave, no matter how much they resent their mothers. Like their predecessors, difficult mothers of grown characters send their sons and daughters into downward spirals, only theirs are often more maligned. DeDe, mother to Claire and Mitchell on Modern Family, was, according to Claire, “an actual crazy person” who knew how to push her buttons, “the guilting, the shaming, the number of times I heard ‘where did I go wrong’” (Modern Family, “Mother!” 2018). Penelope’s mother on One Day at a Time also knew exactly how to extract sympathy from her daughter when she resisted Mom’s control, wailing “don’t put me in a home,” the second Penelope tried to stand up to her (One Day at a Time, “No Mass,” 2017). On American Housewife, Katie’s mother was “crazy and that makes me crazy” (American Housewife, “Family Secrets,” 2017). The actors who played these older mothers, like Rita Moreno, Swoosie Kurtz, or Shelley Long, brought additional feistiness to their roles based on previous roles or reputations or, like Allison Janney on Mom, used physical humor to accentuate their presumed craziness. Further cementing their reputations as women out of control is their age cohort. These are women of the 1960s, baby boomers, representing an audience segment that has passed out of the prime demographic category for television and so can be mocked without much audience insult. While the baby boomer generation once embodied modernity and hipness on shows like Family Ties or Murphy Brown, more recently its members are just embarrassing

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as old hippies, flower children, and sexual libertines, people stuck in another era. Stories emphasized how mothers’ living in the past affected their grown children, whether it was DeDe’s new age values or Alicia’s talk of goddesses and yurts (black-ish). Worst—but funniest—of all is the ardor with which older mothers continue to embrace the sexual revolution and then overshare to their offspring. Even prim and deeply Christian Mary Cooper succumbed, traumatizing Sheldon because she had “naked sex” on the living room couch, explaining “I’m not perfect . . . and that man’s booty is” (Sheldon and Mary on The Big Bang Theory, “The Mommy Observation,” 2014). Elsewhere in the popular culture, older women with sex drives have been the source of good-natured humor. On family sitcoms, the idea remains funny, but on mothers, it undermines their moral authority, enabling dismissal, mockery, and rejection by their offspring. As their sexual attitudes might suggest, these old-sixties mothers also embody the rebelliousness of the era. They are naturally anarchistic and resist authority, both in the past and the present. Marjorie, the spiritual leader of Bonnie and Christy’s AA group, and mother to a grown son from whom she was estranged for most of Mom’s run, felt invisible as an older woman, which made her so angry that she wanted to shout “I’ve robbed a bank. I took a bath with Jimi Hendrix. I’ve lived” (Mom, “Spaghetti Sauce and a Dumpster Fire,” 2018). Although she looked and sounded like a stereotypical older woman, keeping cats, wearing track suits, and dispensing homilies about sobriety, she remained rebellious, leading her AA friends on new age-y retreats and into prison to inspire the women there. Bonnie on the same show had never followed rules, lying, stealing, and selling drugs. Connie on Young Sheldon lacked Marjorie’s sixties credentials or Bonnie’s chutzpah, but smoked, drank, gambled, and slept with her boyfriends, much to her pious and straitlaced daughter’s disgust. Of course, she also kept an illegal gambling den behind a laundromat, so she was hardly a novice at skirting the law. These older mothers had little respect for authority or rules, including their sons and daughters, which made them fun to watch, but also made them characters who got little respect. Many of these women channeled their rebelliousness toward their grandchildren, undercutting their own children to help the next generation grow up according to their values. Even Bonnie had a rapport with her grandchildren that she lacked with Christy. Recent sitcom grandmothers have been the ones who reveal their sons’ and daughters’ past mistakes to their children, provide extremely lenient babysitting, and emergency shelter for wayward teens. Connie was the one who got her granddaughter Missy a spot on a Little League team by arguing with the coach after Missy’s father failed (Young Sheldon, “A Parasol and a Hell of an Arm,” 2019). She also got a date with the coach. Few sitcoms in the past featured grandmothers in continuing roles,

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but Young Sheldon, Fresh Off the Boat, Mom, black-ish, The Middle, and One Day at a Time have, as have streaming dramedies The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Never Have I Ever. In the past, when grandmothers did exist on sitcoms, they were typically convenient, mostly off-camera babysitters. Today they are allies with their grandchildren, united against the generation in-between. Their more-extreme behavior helps to put main-character mothers’ unruliness in context, although so too does it facilitate more meltdowns. Looking beyond their upbringings, their family situations, and all that they have to do all day, a final factor making today’s sitcom mothers so unruly is endless scrutiny, true of mothers of any age. “It’s like a freakin’ Miss America pageant out there and I’m being judged at every turn,” Frankie complained (The Middle, “Heck of a Ride,” 2018). Their children—young and old—judge them; their partners do as well; the cabal of yummy mummies they often see are “super-judgmental” (American Housewife, “The Playdate,” 2017); teachers and school administrators shame them; and social media and technology trip them up. A variety of people, institutions, and media, in short, lie in wait to trap them and gleefully celebrate their shortcomings, failures, their fashion disasters, and even their pain. Sitcoms today pair maternal unruliness with the pressure that comes from all the scrutiny. They confirm what a number of recent authors have found, that motherhood is nearly “unsustainable,” as the subtitle of Jessica Grose’s book declared, because the expectations are so high and the possibilities of meeting all of them so low (Grose). The complex of elements contained within stories about mothers’ guilt, competitions, and internalized fears of being judged are consistent with media messages about motherhood. From commercials to “real” housewives, television, including streamed television, counts on the competition and the judging to engage viewers and keep them feeling insecure enough about who they are as to make them vulnerable to advertising pitches. At the same time, much of the point of mother-watching is to feel superior even to the rich and semi-famous characters on reality TV. When sitcom mothers do something foolish, crazy, or stupid, the parents watching get to feel better about something they usually feel insecure about, parenting. Viewers, thus, participate in the process of judging. Caryn James of the New York Times suggested that at some point “the dark mirror of the classic good family series” took over, replacing the “classic domestic comedy” of yore with shows that often featured “dysfunction overload” and continuing drama (James, “Dysfunction”). Once that happened, mothers changed. Facing sometimes weaselly husbands, children who managed to get themselves into deeper trouble than ever, a lot of judgment, and impossible to-do lists, they found ways to cut corners. In this dark mirror of the sitcom, chaos is but one step away even for the most White, middle-class, and suburban mothers and no character, male or female, mother or not, can

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have the luxury of perfection. Most aren’t even intended as role models. Still, the fantasy of the perfect sitcom mothers continues to intrude on their—and our—realities. At their core, though, whether mama grizzlies or merely harried and frustrated by all they have to do, recent sitcom mothers, like their predecessors, still see it as their mission to do for others, to make sure their families get to live the best lives possible while helping to prepare their children for their adult futures. That dark mirror of the real world just makes it a lot more complicated to get there.

Conclusion

Leave it to Roseanne to go meta on the sitcom mother. In a 1995 episode, the actor broke the bounds of sitcom-land to expose the Conner home as a set. Entering after promising the crew that she’d lock up, Roseanne the actor encountered a “sitcom mom welcome wagon,” of June Cleaver (Leave It to Beaver), Joan Nash (Please Don’t Eat the Daisies), Ruth Martin (Lassie), Louise Jefferson (The Jeffersons), and Norma Arnold (The Wonder Years) in her fictional alter ego’s kitchen. After complimenting June on her pearls, she learned that these paragons of motherhood past had “heard a few things” about the show and come to investigate. Their conclusions were not favorable: “We’ve worked very hard to promote the image of motherhood,” Joan explained, and Roseanne didn’t make the cut. She insisted that she was “just as wholesome as any of you,” but then a series of clips suggested otherwise, giving June a headache. Joan observed, “that’s the wrong image for a TV mom.” Yet as the sitcom supermoms started deconstructing the sacred image, they realized they had their own sets of grievances, especially Ruth, played by June Lockhart, who played second fiddle to a dog, leaving them more open to Roseanne’s strategy, once she explained—using a sitcom reference point—that on her show “I’m the boss and father doesn’t know squat.” Even June, upon hearing Roseanne’s salary, opined that she’d act like Roseanne did “for that kind of dough.” In the end, they all headed off, as Roseanne said, to “toss back a few, raise some hell and give ’em something to make a movie of the week about” (Roseanne, “All About Rosey,” 1995). The episode neatly summarizes the differences in sitcom mothers and the series they lived in pre- and post 1960s and pre- and post-Roseanne. So much changed after the 1960s, and sitcom viewers saw so little of it initially reflected in sitcoms. Their subjects might have changed in the 1970s 163

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as creators like Norman Lear focused on families of color, working-class families, and families headed by women, but when the subject shifted back to those comfortably middle-class families in big houses slightly fancier than the ones where some of the earlier sitcom families lived, how those mothers had it all remained something of a mystery. Certainly, in plenty of cases, stories were intended to reflect realities, but mothers’ realities were often secondary to other family characteristics, like race or economic status. It wasn’t until Roseanne came along that a mother’s life was parsed in all its good and bad moments, struggles, and triumphs. Since Roseanne, more shows have paid attention to mothers and, particularly, their struggles and their grievances as they cope with expectations and institutions better suited for the 1950s than their modern realities. The outcome isn’t always favorable to them; a lot of shows suggest that mothers smother, mothers manipulate, and mothers are selfish. Others presume that the mothers are sensible and well-meaning, but the situations dealt to them are not and, often, neither are their families. “Mother-bashing” coexists with sentimentalized motherhood, the cautionary tale alongside perfection. Either way, it all “casts a long guilt-inducing shadow over real mothers’ lives” (Thurer, quoted from 271, xi). Sitcoms reflect both social norms and social challenges, the latter only so long as the problems are easily solved with no obvious losers except bad people. Social norms and challenges, though, change over time, and sitcom mothers have proved to be a particularly good barometer of changes affecting American women. The sitcom mother, as the Roseanne episode suggested, used to be a character defined by others’ needs, her status so naturalized that a lot of real women, like the mothers in the episode, never really contemplated that there might be any other way to be. This perfect nurturer and domestic goddess served many purposes when she was first established after World War II, helping to protect the nation from communism, giving up her independence—and job—to help men, and shopping her way into national prosperity. Yet that perfect sitcom mother represents only a brief snapshot moment in American history. As women changed, so did their understandings of motherhood, and so did the renderings in sitcoms. As sitcom mothers have become more realistic, realism turns out to be in the eye of the beholder. So long as the sitcom mother was an ideal, she was interchangeable, as Ricky Nelson discovered in the 1979 Saturday Night Live sketch where he roamed a 1950s neighborhood looking for home. Once reality entered the sitcom family, mothers became more individualized, some angry, some frustrated, some earnest. So too were their circumstances more individualized, whether it was their race, their marital status, or their class. They live in real times, moreover, affected by trends that might make them yummy or helicopter or soccer moms.

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Once series shifted from idealized mothers to real ones, who creates the show and who it is about matters too. Roseanne fought to assure her character’s authenticity, which made her a hero or a really, really bad employer, depending on who you ask. Men continue to exercise disproportionate power over the creation of mothers, which can make mothers more male-defined, but doesn’t have to, just as we can’t assume that a female producer or show runner will make only shows with sympathetic and relatable female leads. Even who plays the mother matters. When Jeffrey Tambor, a cisgender man, played the “moppa” in Transparent, the story of the impact of a father transitioning to female on their family, creator Joey Soloway—then Jill—thought Tambor made sense. A few seasons later, they changed their mind (Melas). Authenticity, more and more, governs renderings of sitcom mothers, even if whose authenticity varies. Yet, sitcom mothers are also constructed as archetypes and stock characters, and older mothers are some of the best examples of characters pigeonholed because of their relations with others. Dating back to hags and crones during the Middle Ages, older women have been stereotyped as dangerous because their biological role has expired, comic but threatening to the established order because they don’t know their place. That the stereotype continues to exist, embroidered, often, with a Betty White–like twinkle of insouciance or some inappropriate sexuality, suggests that Americans aren’t entirely comfortable with their mothers but sometimes see them as having a too-viselike grip over them as they age. The mother-in-law or older mother is a manifestation of Philip Wylie’s “momism,” the domineering mother who selfishly manipulates for her own benefit, as well as cultural studies’ unruly woman, who gender disrupts. Which takes us right back to the ideal, the sainted mother, the mother we might wish we had or believe we deserved. She is a cultural construct, but one that serves an older society. She hovers in our minds, in part thanks to sitcoms, magically understanding and supporting us and invisibly cleaning up all our messes so we don’t have to. It’s what mothers do, after all. Even if we become mothers and know this is not how mothering works, she still hovers. So too does she create guilt. From Lucy Ricardo (I Love Lucy) to the present, sitcom mothers have felt “kinda bad” (Roseanne on Roseanne, “All About Rosie,” 1995) about not measuring up, whether the failure is only noticeable to themselves or comes in the form of a fairly public meltdown before tenyear-olds on career day. Whatever else sitcoms tell us about how mothers should be, the most important thing they communicate is the ubiquity of guilt and insecurity in women’s lives. These serve to isolate and pacify women, acknowledging their struggles without daring to suggest that society—not to mention family members—might change. Sitcoms are a conservative genre within a conservative form of media.

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Still, the picture isn’t all negative. As the mothers of family sitcoms have evolved, their identities have become complex and, in many cases, intersectional. Sitcoms might deny them much agency beyond endless nagging, but they also grant them voices to speak out in ways that resonate with a lot of audience members. That resonance also brings many different kinds of pleasure: the reassurance of not feeling alone, the vicarious joy of unruliness and spectacle, and the satisfaction of difficult, mean, or evil people being put in their places. However perfect so many 1950s sitcom mothers might have been, few were very central to the action and the story was almost never theirs because their social role was to help, nurture, or support others, not be actors in their own right. Today’s sitcom mothers virtually never measure up to the standards epitomized by June Cleaver and her generation of sitcom mothers, but their difficulties, their woes, and their triumphs are visible in glorious variety. Sitcoms and their mothers exist not just in the present, but far more exponentially, in the past, as reruns. They are comfort food and, just as a sitcom mother soothed Blossom at the frightening moment in her life at the beginning of this work, so too do they comfort us. Wanda on WandaVision, superhero in a Disney TV mashup of superhero plots and sitcoms, “created a fantasy world inspired by Rob, Laura [The Dick Van Dyke Show] and all the other sitcom husbands, wives, and kids” as a comfort when her partner died (Sepinwall “WandaVision”), just as we might turn to a sitcom rerun today because it reminds us of a happier time or we find the predictable and familiar outcome soothing. Within the comfort of the rerun, though, is the image of mother, who might also make us feel better in another way, as a statement about a more problematic past. Rerun sitcom mothers reassure us that the present is better than the past (Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse). When television first became the dominant media in the United States, most of the families Americans saw beside their own were on the sitcoms that joined them in their domestic spaces. Today, family stories are everywhere, from TikTok videos to Prince Harry’s fractured family fairy-tale memoir. Our culture has fragmented and so have our stories about mothers. Within different structures and different delivery systems, they emphasize diversity, individuality, and imperfection. Still, within those diverse stories, mothers or mother-figures continue to hold special, symbolic places. Mothers continue to represent comfort, but so too are they people who can really mess up your life. It’s a burden that millions of American mothers carry around in their heads every day, whether they model their lives after June Cleaver, Carol Brady, Clair Huxtable, or Claire Dunphy.

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Index

ABC television network, 48, 49, 56, 70, 82, 86, 87, 89, 111, 113, 136, 156 According to Jim, 135–36 Acham, Christine, 55, 69 The Addams Family, 38, 41, 42, 43, 46, 47 The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, 10, 17, 19, 23, 37, 74, 142 advertising, 12, 14, 25, 40, 78, 95, 132, 161 Alice, 61, 65, 66, 67, 71, 85 All in the Family, 48, 56, 57, 59, 66, 73, 75, 76, 82 American Housewife, 141, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 159, 161 angry white men, 5, 107–8 Archie Bunker’s Place, 75 Arrested Development, 122–23, 127, 136 audiences, 12, 26, 28, 33, 48, 57, 79, 93, 121; baby boomer, 29–30, 33, 52, 56, 57, 62–63, 79, 112, 160; Black, 28, 51, 69, 79, 80, 81, 110–11; children, 15, 40, 41, 70, 71, 78, 79, 107, 148; female, 16, 62–63, 78, 83, 89, 130, 155; Generation X, 78, 82, 87, 99, 112; “literate,” 48, 61, 91; male, 78, 89, 106, 119, 138; millennials, 117, 122

baby boom(ers), 3, 12, 29, 30, 33, 39, 41, 52, 55–58, 63, 74, 83, 87, 92, 98, 112, 159 backlash, 5, 73, 76, 89, 97, 107, 112 Ball, Lucille, 12–13, 39–40 battle-of-the-sexes comedies, 13, 15, 27, 138 The Beverly Hillbillies, 12, 38, 40, 41, 46, 69 Bewitched, 38, 41, 43–45, 46, 59, 157 The Big Bang Theory, 127, 147, 157, 158, 160 Billingsley, Barbara, 10, 24 Black family dynamics, 51, 79–81, 86, 108–9 Black identities on sitcoms, 50–51, 55, 68, 79, 109–10 Black masculinity, 57, 68, 108–9 Black stereotypes in media, 50–51, 68, 69, 81, 111, 136 black-ish, 81, 111, 143, 147, 147, 149, 153, 154, 155, 156, 160, 161 Blossom, 1, 2, 5–6, 108, 117 The Bob Newhart Show, 60, 62 Bogle, Donald, 50, 68, 79, 86 Brady, Carol, 49, 70–72, 166 The Brady Bunch, 49, 62, 69, 70, 71, 73, 78, 87, 88, 100 Brooks, James L., and Burns, Allan, 61–65

179

180

Index

cable television, 55, 77, 78, 99, 110, 127 Caroline in the City, 101, 113 Carroll, Diahann, 50–51 CBS television network, 14, 61, 70, 89 censorship, 13–14, 32, 35, 61 Cheers, 75, 106, 111, 112, 116 Cleaver, June 9, 20–24, 34; as symbol 9–10, 15, 20, 25, 28, 59, 71–72, 74, 92, 104, 128, 142, 163, 166 Coach, 106, 112, 113 Conner, Roseanne, 92–93, 114, 116, 117–18, 119, 164 The Conners, 145, 147, 151, 154, 155 Connolly, Joe, and Bob Mosher, 10, 42 consumerism, 3, 12, 15, 25–28, 35, 66, 70, 77 Cosby, Bill, 7, 79, 84, 85 The Cosby Show, 1, 6, 68, 79–81, 85, 93, 109, 110, 124 counterculture, 4, 33, 39, 43 counterprogramming, 55, 70, 87, 89 culture wars, 5, 54, 64, 102 Cybill, 6, 101–2, 124 The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, 89–90 demographic segments and demographics, 6, 15, 49, 55, 56, 61, 78, 79, 93, 98, 159 Dennis the Menace, 36, 42, 77 Designing Women, 6, 90, 91, 97, 111, 112, 116 The Dick Van Dyke Show, 34–38, 46, 166 The Donna Reed Show, 10, 23, 24, 25, 39, 43, 77, 143 The Doris Day Show, 51–52 Dow, Bonnie, 66, 90 Eight Simple Rules (for Dating My Daughter), 135 Evening Shade, 106, 112 Everybody Loves Raymond, 6, 45, 102– 5, 113, 119, 121, 123, 131, 133–35, 138, 139; Marie 102–4; Debra 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 128

Faludi, Susan, 76 Family Matters, 86, 87, 109 Family Ties, 81–82, 84, 85, 95, 142, 160 fantasy sitcoms, 31, 40–44, 48, 51, 52, 56 Father Knows Best, 10, 17, 18–19, 20– 25, 27, 34, 43, 56, 79, 108, 118 The Feminine Mystique, 3, 6, 10, 24, 37, 134 feminism, 5, 6, 37, 43, 44, 49, 76, 80, 88, 89, 90, 92, 94, 98, 105; secondwave, 5, 46–47, 54–55, 58, 86, 97– 98, 107, 128; third-wave, 97–99, 107 feminist television, 7, 89–92 Feuer, Jane, 62, 78 Fox television network, 77, 78, 85, 87–88, 109, 110, 119 Frasier, 123, 131–32, 138, 158 Fresh off the Boat, 147, 156, 157, 161 The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, 103, 109, 110 Friedan, Betty, 3, 10, 24, 154 Friends, 99, 100, 101, 102, 106, 111, 112, 113, 123, 131, 132, 138–39 friends-as-family sitcoms, 6, 99, 100– 102, 117, 123, 138–39 Full House, 78, 87, 106, 113, 119 generation gap, 33, 37, 47, 45, 48, 56–57, 58 Generation X, 71, 78, 98, 100, 125 The George Lopez Show, 125, 127, 130–31, 135, 136, 137, 140 Gilligan’s Island, 41, 42, 69 The Goldbergs (1949–1957), 10–11, 12, 61 The Goldbergs (2013–1923), 151, 152, 157 Good Times, 55, 66, 68–70, 76, 109 Grose, Jessica, 144, 161 Growing Pains, 82, 83, 85, 87 Happy Days, 69, 72–73, 100 hayseed comedies, 40, 48, 56 helicopter parenting, 17, 129, 144 Hochschild, Arlie, 4, 80, 86, 93, 114, 147

Index

Home Improvement, 106, 107, 108, 114 The Hughleys, 109, 136, 137 Huxtable, Clair, 1, 2, 6, 68, 79–81, 91, 108, 142, 144, 166 I Love Lucy, 12–15, 16, 25, 39, 132, 165 intensive parenting, 144–45, 146, 148 James, Caryn, 111, 161 The Jeffersons, 64, 68, 109 Jewish mothers, 61, 103, 127 Jones, Gerard, 2, 18, 41, 48, 57 Julia, 49–51, 55, 66, 79 Kanter, Hal, 49–51 Kate & Allie, 91 Kimmel, Michael, 105, 107 Lassie, 163 Lear, Norman, 53, 55, 67–68, 69, 124, 164 Leave It to Beaver, 9–10, 20–23, 25, 29, 32, 33, 35–36, 42, 70, 71, 83, 100, 117, 143 Leibman, Nina, 17, 23, 26 Lopez, George, 137 Lorre, Chuck, 124, 125, 126, 127, 136, 139, 143 Mad about You, 100, 102, 112 Make Room for Daddy, 15, 74, 77 Malcolm in the Middle, 119–21, 125, 126, 132 mammy stereotype, 4, 68, 81, 110, 111 man-child, 105–8, 124, 135 Marc, David, 33, 40, 63 marital comedies, 12–15, 16, 17, 25, 34–35, 44, 138 Married with Children, 87–89, 106, 122 Mary Kay and Johnny, 12, 13 The Mary Tyler Moore Show, 48, 51, 52, 54, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 80, 102 The Middle, 141–45, 146, 147, 149, 151, 156–57, 161

181

millennials, 117, 122 mimetic characters, 63 Modern Family, 6, 126, 129, 131, 134, 135, 139, 141, 149, 152, 153–55, 159; Claire, 128–30, 131, 133, 141, 144, 146, 147, 148, 152–53, 154, 166; Gloria, 129–30, 136, 144, 153 Moesha, 108 Mom, 142, 143, 149, 150, 153, 155, 156, 158–59, 160, 161 Moore, Mary Tyler, 34–35 Moral Majority, 5, 76 Morgenstern, Ida, 58–60, 61 Morreale, Joanne, 3, 24, 25, 33, 38 motherhood, 1–4, 20, 104, 143–44, 163–66 mothers-in-law, 45–46, 59, 128, 165 The Munsters, 41, 42, 43, 129 Murphy Brown, 6, 90, 91, 92, 97, 98, 112, 116 must-see TV, 98, 100, 106 My Mother the Car, 31, 42, 122 My Three Sons, 20, 27 My Wife and Kids, 128, 131, 136, 137 NBC television network, 31, 48, 49, 56, 89, 90, 100, 106, 110, 121 narrowcasting, 78, 110 Nelson, Ozzie, 79 Nelson, Rick(y), 37, 74, 164 The New Adventures of Old Christine, 126–27, 128, 129, 133 Nickelodeon television network, 77, 78 117 Nielsen rating system and ratings, 16, 32, 40, 48, 65, 70, 78, 90, 93, 119, 121 One Day at a Time (1975–1984), 53, 61, 65, 66, 67, 77, 80 One Day at a Time (2017–2020), 159, 161 parasocial bonds, 99–100, 112, 123 The Parkers, 110

182

Index

The Partridge Family, 49, 70–71 The Patty Duke Show, 37, 48, 77, 153 pearls, 10, 35, 37, 59, 163 Petrie, Laura, 34, 35, 44 Petticoat Junction, 40–41, 48 Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, 36, 163 Press, Andrea, 93, 94 product placement, 132, 155–56 reruns, 2, 36, 70, 71, 78, 99, 142, 166 Rhoda, 58, 60, 61, 63, 64, 70, 157 Rolle, Esther, 65, 69, 109 Romano, Ann, 53, 65, 77, 89 Roseanne, 90–94, 95, 101, 111–18, 124, 133, 147, 155, 163–64, 165 Roseanne (Barr, Arnold), 92, 112, 114, 116–18, 124, 163 Rowe, Kathleen, 46, 92 Sagal, Katey, 87, 114, 135 Saturday Night Live, 57, 74, 164 second shift, 84, 93–94, 137, 147, 154 Seinfeld, 100–101, 106, 107, 137 Sex and the City, 98, 131 sexual revolution, 4, 31, 33, 38, 39, 58, 70, 126, 160 silent generation, 11, 16 The Simpsons, 87, 111, 119 sitcom children 15, 22 sitcom fathers, 12, 21, 25, 64, 114–16, 132–33, 135; centrality in families in the 1950s, 17–18, 19, 22; goofy fathers, 6, 16, 17, 19, 37, 41, 107, 137; “schlubby hubbies,” 136 sitcom humor, 57, 62 sitcom marriages, 27–28, 104, 151; sexuality 36, 38 sitcom mothers, 1–3, 163–66; alcohol consumption of, 122, 124, 129, 153, 159; anger of, 94, 106, 108, 116, 119, 140–42, 148, 150–51, 164; bad mothers, 4, 46, 88, 122–24, 125, 131, 140, 143, 157, 158; Black mothers, 49–51, 55, 68–70, 79–81, 86, 108–10, 111, 136, 154, 156;

clothing of 19, 24, 38, 39, 59, 63, 116; cooking and kitchens, 23, 60, 84, 93, 103; economic status of, 12, 41, 91–95, 114–17, 145; grandmothers, 160–61; guilt, 59, 60, 63, 64, 90, 145, 150, 154, 157, 159, 161; homes of, 12, 16, 19, 21, 23, 26, 59–60, 66, 82–83, 84, 85, 91, 93,132, 155; housework and, 24–25, 26, 37, 83, 134, 136; judged and shamed, 90, 103, 128, 131–32, 137, 141, 161; maternal instincts, 20, 37, 144; objectification of, 39, 128–31; older, 46, 48, 63, 100, 125–27, 157–61; secondary status of, 6, 20, 23, 37, 86–87, 108–9, 136, 151; selflessness, 10, 16–17, 20–21, 22, 24, 49, 81, 116, 140, 152, 154; sexuality of, 38–39, 126, 165; single mothers, 38, 48–52, 64–67, 90, 91, 110–13, 138, 143; stay-at-home, 10, 30, 63, 72, 91, 98, 104, 109, 128, 133, 137, 141, 152–54; widows, 48–52, 66; working, 51, 65–66, 84, 92; yuppies, 79–86, 91, 97, 110 sitcom pregnancies, 13–5, 111–13, 114–17 sitcom structures and conventions, 12– 13, 34, 53, 62, 67–68, 89, 99, 118, 119–21, 123–24, 144 sitcom teens, 21, 33–34, 36–37, 71, 79, 84, 94, 144, 146, 147–50, 153, 160 sitcom writers, 25, 57, 139–40; Black, 68–69; female, 54, 57, 61–62, 90, 112; male, 20, 139–40 sixties revolutions, 4, 33, 53–54, 63, 100, 139 Spigel, Lynn, 83, 108 Spock, Dr. Benjamin, 3, 16, 22, 35, 144 sponsorship and sponsorship models, 14, 15, 16, 18, 23, 25, 26, 32, 33, 40, 48, 49, 56, 77, 112, 132, 136, 155 stand-up comics, 69, 107, 109, 110, 111, 116

Index

suburbs, 3, 11, 12, 151–56, 19, 28, 30, 44, 60, 139 supermom, 92, 127, 163 Taxi, 64, 65, 73, 75, 85 TGIF programming (ABC), 87, 113 Two and a Half Men, 6, 124–25, 131, 136 unruly women, 4, 45–47, 59, 92–93, 102, 147, 161 video cassette recorder (VCR), 78, 92 WandaVision, 166 Weiss, Jessica, 19, 22 Will & Grace, 100, 101, 102, 132, 139

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WKRP in Cincinnati, 57, 64, 75 women as sitcom creators, 112, 113, 161 The Wonder Years (1988–1993), 163 working women on sitcoms, 26, 38, 64, 103, 152 workplace sitcoms, 34, 121 World War II, 3, 4, 9, 11, 15, 28, 48, 56, 164 Wylie, Philip, 3, 46, 64, 107, 123, 165 Young, Robert, 17, 18, 56 Young Sheldon, 147, 149, 150–53, 161 yummy mummy characters, 128–32, 153 yuppie comedies, 78–86, 90, 91, 93, 94, 143, 144

About the Author

Judy Kutulas is professor emerita of History, Film and Media Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies at St. Olaf College. She is the author of numerous books and articles on media and popular culture, including After Aquarius Dawned: How the Revolutions of the Sixties Became the Popular Culture of the Seventies (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), “Friends: Anatomy of a Hit” (The Journal of Popular Culture, 2018), and “Who Rules the Roost: Sitcom Family Dynamics from the Cleavers to Modern Family” (The Sitcom Reader, 2016). At St. Olaf College, she taught courses on recent American history and culture and was a founding member of the college’s Media and Film Studies Program.

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