With all due respect to the latest Springsteen criticismh I should have been less surprised by the rise of Trump because Married With Children” became a hit while I was still in high school.
.I didn’t watch it a lot at the time, I think my early goals for entertainment were annoyingly high-minded(I was often looking to be Inspired) which left me unprepared to watch the Bundys take it in the skid- marked shorts on a weekly basis. At the time, I think I might have read the show’s determinedly scruffy smuttiness(In early seasons they are careful to add a last scene to remind us these people love each other, which reminds me of my mother’s reaction “Why do these people bother? Divorce is a thing.”) as a reaction to the sitcom tradition of family perfection, with the wise, loving parents that say the right thing even if Wally and The Beaver or Denise and Theo aren’t ready to hear it, the comfortable, yet ill-defined job that meets all needs and more than wants despite never being enough to take parents from the domestic action, and all the rest of that stuff. That ls true, but it could also be seen as rejecting the modern world…the Bundy teens are even shown as missing medical care and vaccinations from time to time, but that may be more of a combination of parental indifference and Al’s job not providing benefits than some concerted effort to not believe in science, but it did catch my attention given who’s currently in charge.
On a somewhat related note, if they bring achieving kids back to TV shows, will that be a sign that society's expectations are on the up-swing again? I've noticed since Bud and Kelly it's become more acceptable for the children on family shows to be screw-ups or even have a diagnosis of some sort...given the preoccupation with representation here, I'm not complaining as such, but I'm wondering if that reflects greater acceptance of people who are not lettering in three sports or the prom queen, which might be good, or a resignation that people get what they get, even in America, which might be sad. I'm not sure. Thoughts?
(I suppose that you could say “Married” is also the anti-workplace sitcom as well- Al has friends at work, but they are not a close unit that won’t turn on each other and they struggle with arbitrary demands from their female boss, Gary.) Al struggles with a modern world full out automated hold messages, cancelled television shows and tax and auto-insurance bureaucracy that won’t lead to the wide-open spaces no matter how often Al watches “Shane” and cries. Instead of the dad we wish we had, maybe Al is the id for the dad many of us actually got, which might be why my mother remains not fond of the show
Personally, I prefer the Rhodes are the neighbors, even though the D’Arcy relationship is somewhat fascinating both due to Marcy’s dominance and McGinley’s triumph overthe show-killing legend. But by the time the second marriage happens, the show is well on the path that so many other shows take of becoming a sort of live-action cartoon. You might think Jefferson’s needy-gigolo act is funny, if somewhat contradictory, but I don’t think very many of us have really met that person in the same way we might have met Marcy and Steve. (Maybe a lot of us have some Marcy and Steve in us, though I mostly don’t mean that in a dirty way.)
Marcy and Steve are fairly politically correct for bankers(“woke” wasn’t a thing for white people to say at that point, but they might have still loved to hear it about themselves someday. They are kind of the people that buy those signs that say “In this house, we believe” but they are probably too distracted by their separate mommy issues to really be an effective ally for anyone, at least in the long-term. I think their biggest wish, more even than money or toys is to Get it Right. Steve spends a lot of time thinking about what it means to be a man, but for much of the series he uses that energy to go along with what Marcy wants, or play-acting that Al is a bad influence that he can’t ignore(Al is powerless in general, but has a lot of sway over both Marcy’s guys…probably from appealing to buried worst instincts. Steve later abandons Marcy to live out a boyhood dream to be a forest ranger, and for a while Marcy thinks that materialism will drive her husband back to her.
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