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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vast wasteland (part 2)

I still can’t decide whether it’s encouraging or terrifying that my biggest complaint from my twenty-four hour television viewing extravaganza was that I developed a stiff neck. I never found myself forced to watch infomercials. I was never mind-numbingly bored, although there were, of course, a few moments of “oh god, when will this end.” Neither my brain nor my eyes bled (although my eyes were feeling a bit strained by hour fourteen or so). And I’m fairly certain I didn’t kill any brain cells or lose any IQ points. In fact, I was surprisingly pleased by the ideas those twenty four hours generated; there’s seemingly always something on worth watching (although I guess that depends on your definition of “worth”), and I was able to give shows a chance—and find that I enjoyed them—that I would never usually give a second glance during the course of a normal day.

For the record, Roland Barthes was right: “Boredom is not far from bliss, it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure.” Sure, I wafted in and out of boredom, but moments of entertainment or insight or (tele)visual pleasure were never far behind. That’s not to say I would recommend watching television for twenty four hours become a weekly or even monthly activity. I think someone might have to pay me to get me to do it again, but not because I was bored. I felt mostly content, if a little cramped, until around hour twenty, when I became incredibly, irreparably sleepy and never fully recovered (i.e. never fully regained consciousness). The rules of inertia dictate that a body at rest stays at rest and while earlier in the day I moved around the room and stretched and even danced to keep myself from turning into an uncomfortable heap of stiff muscles, it eventually became nearly impossible for me to drag myself off the couch, which I think contributed to my later lack of alertness. Besides chronic exhaustion, the other hazard of televisual gluttony is literal gluttony: I consumed twice the daily recommended calories and twice the maximum recommended grams of fat for my age and gender in little under fifteen hours (since the last ten hours or so I didn’t eat much). Sedentary viewing breeds hunger—not that this is huge news flash to any of us—especially when every other commercial is telling you to order Papa John’s or drink Miller Lite. One thing this experience did leave me with is a vast inventory of comments and observations from which to draw on in the next weeks and months, so in lieu of an extensive account today, here’s an overview of my day and evening. It was sunny on Friday, when I scheduled myself to undertake this marathon, a fact which I initially resented as I could have been outside flying a kite like Mary Poppins (but then I realized that the likelihood of that happening was slim to none, so my resentment ebbed).

The experiment began at 11:30am with the second half of The Today Show (NBC). After half an hour, I was not only insanely jealous of their frolicking ‘winter-break edition’ in Miami, but also knew the entire NBC line-up for the rest of day by heart. Apparently around lunchtime NBC prefers to promote itself rather than have actual advertisers. From there I moved on to Randy Jackson Presents America’s Best Dance Crew on MTV; I didn’t even know this was a show, but I was pretty impressed by the dancers (plus, it’s hosted by Mario Lopez, formerly of Saved By the Bell—alas, yon Slater, I remember him well). This show, though kind of cool, begged the question of what they’ll think up next in the “America’s Best…” genre of television: America’s Best Carpenter? So You Think You Can Scuba Dive? Seriously, where will it end?

The subsequent few hours were occupied with an episode of Family Matters on ABC Family (another blast from the past), Ten Years Younger on TLC (because nothing says “the learning channel” like veneers, Lasik surgery and a new wardrobe—although I do appreciate the attempt at a mind-body-soul approach to the makeover genre: i.e. better looks begets better lifestyle begets better overall health and happiness), a Law and Order rerun on TNT (ah, Law and Order, it’s like chicken soup for the televisual soul—such a comforting constant of the TV landscape), and an episode of Stargate Atlantis on the SciFi channel (a show I’d never seen before; hence I was very, very confused). The Ellen DeGeneres Show brought me back to NBC at 4pm and will fuel a more lengthy discussion next week about talk shows, the American Dream, free stuff and philanthropy.

After an hour back in the land of the thousand reality shows with The Discovery Channel’s It Takes a Thief (apparently going to jail is a good career move, one that can be parlayed into a reality show where you prove to people how easy it is to burglarize their homes and then provide them with better security systems), I drifted back into narrative television with Will and Grace on the CW (a show I sorely miss) and King of the Hill on Fox (a show I’ve been unfairly prejudiced against until now). From there I moved on to CSI: Crime Scene Investigation on Spike (an enduring favorite, and the only time I accidentally ended up watching an episode I’d seen before). CSI segued nicely into Fox’s Bones (which will certainly fuel its own discussion one of these days about perception versus reality and rational thought versus emotional appeal) which, in turn, segued nicely into CBS’s The Ghost Whisperer (which I enjoyed but will probably never be able to watch again because there were too many, well, ghosts).

Done with my parade of crime shows for a little while, I moved on to Family Guy on the CW (always entertaining) and Out of Jimmy’s Head on the Cartoon Network (surprisingly confusing/weird even for a kid’s show or perhaps I just couldn’t have cared less). TLC’s What Not To Wear brought me back briefly to the makeover genre (one reality show that I absolutely adore, as shamed as I am to admit it). After that, two more sitcoms—reruns of Frasier on Lifetime and The Jamie Foxx Show on BET—made for rather entertaining counterpoints to each other, and not only because of the tension between race, class and each of their perceived audiences. At 1am, my television and I had a strange moment of synchronous exhaustion during an episode of CSI: Miami on A&E. At some point during the episode, I drifted off, and, when I awoke, my television had turned itself off as well. Perhaps I rolled over onto the remote or perhaps my television is sentient and was just looking out for my best interests—all I know is that I had to completely reset my cable box before my television would deign to provide me with programming again. The ghost in the machine.

After that eerie-yet-minor lapse, things progressed swimmingly again with an episode of Good Eats with Alton Brown (the Bill Nye of food) on the Food Network and learned how to make olive bread, followed by a strange episode of The Jefferson’s on TV Land (actually, I find The Jefferson’s just generally strange). The History Channel’s Prostitution: Sex in the City provided a rather fascinating account of the world’s oldest profession, although I was disturbed by the implication that Greek slave women preferred prostitution to other possible tasks. Oh really? Yeah. Okay. In the “and now for something completely different” category of channel flips, I moved on from prostitution to The Cosby Show on Nick-at-Nite (more thoughts on race and perceived viewership may result eventually) and then from wholesome family togetherness to VH-1’s Top 20 Video Countdown (which was possibly the most boring program all evening—the videos I watched were supposedly from the top 6, but they seemed incredibly facile and sluggish).

A rerun of Dawson’s Creek on TBS reminded me how young Katie Holmes and Michelle Williams looked and seemed in the late nineties, and a rousing episode of Little House on the Prairie on the Hallmark Channel reminded me how idealistic television used to be in the 19^th century (okay, fine, the mid-seventies). After that, things start to get a little blurry and Sesame Street on PBS merges in my memory with ABC’s Good Morning America and Bravo’s The Millionaire Matchmaker to form a highly unlikely scenario: Elmo and Zoe fight over who will marry the next Democratic presidential candidate. As I’m sure this didn’t actually happen, let’s just say that by the last few shows I was more than a little tired.

The stats: 24 channels, 29 programs (mostly reruns), 20.5 alert hours, 3.5 hours half-asleep, 3795 calories and 119 grams of fat consumed. The verdict: I think I can safely say that television is far from a vast wasteland. But I wouldn’t say it’s a vast utopia either. Vast is entertaining—and apparently only boring in the best of ways—but we shouldn’t necessarily be satisfied with quantity over quality. Still, after all that, I’m mostly left with the same ruling as last week: television is vast. End stop.

But at least now I have even more to say about it.

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(NEXT WEEK: “A Helping Hand and the Greater Good.” Talk shows, philanthropy, talent contests, and the American Dream.)

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