this american life

Forgive me for stealing the title of this post from my favorite NPR radio program, but the analogy seemed too apt (check out their site if you have no idea what I’m talking about). For a while now, I’ve been fascinated by how the American family is portrayed on contemporary television, from the tendency of coupling overweight husbands with skinny wives in sitcoms to the favored trope of the families we choose trumping those we’re born into in many dramas (particularly those of the adventure, action and sci-fi genres). Surely, a comprehensive study of American families on television warrants a book: starting with something like I Love Lucy (1951-1957) and moving through other landmark shows featuring families--both nuclear and alternative--like (get ready for a pretty random selection) Bewitched (1964-1972), The Odd Couple (1970-1975), All in the Family (1971-1979), Kate & Allie (1984-1989), The Cosby Show (1984-1992), and Boy Meets World (1993-2000). Not to mention more recent offerings like Gilmore Girls (2000-2007), Arrested Development (2003-2006), and Family Guy (1999-present) and a few wildcard shows like Gilligan’s Island (1964-1967), Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001), and Lost (2004-present), in which wildly incompatible people (sometimes actual enemies) are thrown together and forced to rely on each other to survive.

Naturally, there’s a lot I could say about television families and, chances are, I’ll revisit this topic with a gentler example as my subject matter in the near future, but, for now, I want to think about the American family as dystopia. Last week I closed with a question—“What if motherhood is no longer a choice but an inevitability, and your facility as a mother is the only thing that stands between humanity and an apocalypse?”—asked in regard to Fox’s Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008-present). As an action-adventure drama, this show may not be the cream of the crop, but there’s something compelling about the characters and their interactions that keeps drawing me back into the story. And I think I’ve figured out why. (I should also say, by way of a disclaimer, that despite the following analysis I actually really enjoy the show. In spite of myself, perhaps, but I do.)

Taking up where James Cameron’s 1991 film Terminator 2 left off, The Chronicles follows Sarah and her teenaged son John (ostensibly the eventual savior of mankind) as they fight for their lives against cybernetic assassins from the future (the eponymous terminators) while trying to stave off a technological apocalypse. Actually, Sarah does most of the fighting, along with Cameron, a cybernetic terminator-girl sent to help them, while John gets into trouble and has to be rescued over and over again. John’s relative weakness compared to Sarah’s strength provides an interesting reversal of the lady-in-distress trope, but this apparent subversion loses some of its feminist clout if you consider that John is just filling the role of the child in need of protection and guidance and that Sarah is his Mother, “naturally” inclined to protect him at all costs.

Of course, Sarah is also a working mother, in two senses of the word: first, she has to maintain a waitressing job to keep up appearances while providing for the household in superficially nurturing ways (having breakfast ready in the morning, cooking dinner, doing laundry, not allowing John to skip school, and hiding 9mm guns and semi-automatic rifles behind toasters and under drywall). Secondly, being a mother is her raison-d’etre—the only reason she keeps fighting is her need to keep John alive and safe so he can, in turn, deliver humankind from the destruction of an imminent machine uprising (an obvious Mary and Christ re-visioning if I’ve ever seen one). While the narrative of The Chronicles changes the stakes of the game a bit when John insists that he’s not capable of becoming a resistance fighter and pleads with his mother to avert the apocalypse before it happens instead, this doesn’t really change Sarah’s character or her place in this dystopic rendering of the American family. While it’s made quite clear that Sarah loves John deeply, the premise of the show (and the films before it) dictates that she didn’t want him, that she didn’t chose him or their life together. Rather, in the age-old tradition of the long-suffering, accidental hero, this life was thrust upon her and she’s just risen to the occasion. Motherhood, for Sarah, was not a choice, but is more of a burden—whether she openly says as much or not.

And let’s not beat around the bush: Sarah is kind of a bitch, which is not to say that her determination isn’t impressive or her heroism admirable. She does what she has to do in order to get things done. Once Sarah has hardened herself into this role of reluctant, but quite capable, mother-savior-warrior-martyr (a personality that is fully formed by the time of The Chronicles’ pilot episode), she bristles at any possible intrusion into her compact family unit of two. She bolts from a man who loves her when he asks her to marry him, and she generally eschews outright affection in favor of abject concern, tough love and anger with the world. When Cameron, a reprogrammed terminator sent from the future, ruffles Sarah’s Weltanschauung by coming to their rescue, Sarah accepts her—and allows her to become part of the family with an air of deep mistrust (Cameron masquerades as John’s sister)—only because Cameron is a useful tool in the fight against Skynet and the terminators. And you’ll remember that in the first Terminator movie, Sarah slept with Kyle Reese (John’s father, sent back to the past by future-John himself to protect his mother) out of the kind of desperate affection that comes with life-threatening, imminent-apocalypse types of situations (in film, at least). Sarah’s is a family built, from son to “daughter” to mother to the absent (dead) soldier/hero father, out of necessity—a family born of fear, not love.

It is clear at every turn that Sarah’s family is only a fragile metaphor for life never being what we expect of it, that extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary measures and a certain degree of sacrifice. Instead of the utopian idea that differences can be overcome through love and trust, The Chronicles confronts difference with distrust and violence. This is not dissimilar from another American dystopian vision of the future, but one we’ve been facing now for years in the real world. The morals espoused implicitly by The Sarah Connor Chronicles are as follows: protect your children at all costs, openly distrust outsiders because they may be the enemy, allow help from your allies only on your own terms (and distrust them, too, only keep it to yourself), prophecies of future devastation sanction preemptive violence, and all is fair in war.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but does this rhetoric sound familiar to anyone else? And who better than someone masquerading in the utopian, wholesome guise of an American Mother to carry this message to us viewers, innocently seeking entertainment in a world of turmoil. But sometimes a mother is just a mother. And sometimes she’s not.

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(IN TWO WEEKS: “The Talking Cure.” Television as escape. Television as entertainment. Television as therapy?)

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the pilot (an introduction)

There are probably several ways to do this: by “this” I mean explaining the impetus for this blog, introducing myself, defining my frame of reference and the scope of my interest in television. The quick and dirty way is to lay things out point for point. I am compelled to write about television because it is one of the quintessential mediums of the 21^st century. I am a child of the information age. Television fascinates me because of its ubiquity, its seamless insinuation into American visual culture; in America (and many other places), television is, like it or not, de rigueur.

That’s one way, laying things out succinctly. To wit, in this blog, I intend to assay the implications of contemporary televisual experience in its many forms. But this is a blog about television, and so I’d rather introduce myself televisually; I’d rather introduce myself over time, protractedly, because three explanatory sentences cannot convey why I want to think about television or what in fact there is to think about television.

So, let’s start again. Let’s imagine the screen is blank. A blue screen or a test pattern. But let’s watch closely, or we might miss something. You never know.

In the pilot episode of the eminent Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77), we are met with a rapid-fire progression of information. In the first five minutes, viewers know that Mary has moved to Minneapolis to escape a commitment-phobic boyfriend and that she’s in the market for a new apartment and a new job and a new life. By the end of the first fifteen minutes, we know all the major characters, introduced and encapsulated in brief moments of dialogue: Phyllis, the meddling friend and landlady; Rhoda, the zany upstairs neighbor; Mr. Grant, the gruff boss with a hidden soft side; Murray, the sarcastic news-writer; and Ted, the vain, charmingly-dimwitted anchor. In a mere twenty-five minutes, The Mary Tyler Moore Show pilot offers us all we need to know while simultaneously revealing a narrative field ripe with further possibilities. This give and take of what’s offered to us versus what’s left to discover is the modus operandi of a good pilot.

True, some shows—ABC Network’s Lost (2004-present), for instance—may begin with an extraordinary event that sets the narrative in motion. And most pilots begin with some sort of upheaval, big or small: a new job, a new city, a new relationship, a plane crash, a jail sentence, a death. However, pilots are not about world-making. Like television itself, always “on” even when we’re not watching, a good pilot does not create a new world but welcomes its viewers into an already-existing one. To sell a show, pilots need to make us believe that the characters have been going about their daily business and we are only now, suddenly, voyeuristically privy to their lives. Naturally, this format varies from show to show, genre to genre. Sitcoms like Mary Tyler Moore introduce viewers to the world of the series through the eyes of a character who is also new to her surroundings or whose surroundings have suddenly changed. Dramas like Lost are often predicated on a life-changing (sometimes life-threatening) upheaval. Perhaps ironically, crime procedurals follow the in situ staging methods, if not the content, of sitcoms, setting the stage for their weekly repetition of similar scenario in which only the details change. Certain shows immediately break the fourth wall and address the viewer with a protagonist’s voice-over or conspicuously lay out a conflict that must be addressed through the run of the show. Dead Like Me (2003-2004) and Grey’s Anatomy (2005-present) come immediately to mind as examples of the former, and The Fugitive (1963-1967) and Quantum Leap (1989-1993) are two examples, chosen randomly from a vast sea of possibilities, of the latter. Still, through all these variations, the most important element remains the same. A pilot must, in order to succeed, engage in a tenuous balancing act between giving the viewer enough information to understand what’s going on and leaving enough out to compel the viewer to come back for more.

So, what is this blog? Not an out-and-out drama, as no major event preceded its inception (I could say my impetus was the writer’s strike, but that would be a lie). Certainly, this is no sci-fi show, nor is it a soap opera or a domestic tragicomedy. It’s also not a sitcom, even though I am perhaps a new character in the televisual universe; networks and alliances already drawn, I can only observe and offer my interpretation of what I see. In that sense, this is my voice-over. Hello.

No, this blog is a procedural, an endless repetition of similar-yet-different, a persistent attempt to find answers for questions that may or may not even exist—a detective narrative. However, whether or not it is a crime procedural remains to be seen (what death might merit investigation? The death of television? I hope not, though the threat is on the horizon—in the form of bit torrent sites, the inevitable fallout of the writer’s strike, and reality tv).

I, like many viewers, watch television because I am looking for pleasure, a moment to relax, a break, but I always come away with so much more: the good, the bad, the ugly, and the indefinable.

Through and in the medium of television, we (viewers) are always looking—for pleasure, for entertainment, for intellectual engagement, for titillation, for meaning, for someone with whom to identify, for escape, for love, for money, for amusement, for information, for companionship, for validation—but what do we find?

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(Next Week, Fame, Reality and the Philosophy of Andy Warhol: “Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there then all-there—I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. […]Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it’s all television.”)

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