March 28, 2000

Unpleasantville: The awful truth about old-time TV families

By ROGER ANDERSON Scripps Howard News Service

They live in grinding squalor, unable even to afford a refrigerator and barely making the rent each month. He is grossly overweight and lies obsessively to his wife, forever hatching shady plans with his upstairs pal to make a million dollars - plans that always blow up in his face.

He often threatens his wife with physical violence.

We're obviously talking about one of those men on one of those alarming new TV sitcoms, right? Shows where the American family is held up as a kind of germ smear in which every sort of sickness thrives - "The Simpsons," "Malcolm In the Middle," or, a few years back, "Married ... With Children." Right?

Wrong. We're talking "The Honeymooners," one of the most beloved relics of TV's first golden age, often cited as an example of pre-Vietnam War innocence and optimism, like "Leave it to Beaver" and "The Andy Griffith Show."

Critics and pundits make much of the recent TV trend toward showing the American family - warts and all - in programs like the new "Titus," in which a comedian reminisces about his drunken, intimidating father, and 'Malcolm," in which the eternal TV Mom is presented as an overbearing, neurotic harridan whose family lives in fear of her.

Over against these latter-day examples of family, psychopathology pundits hold up your "Beavers," your "Donna Reeds," your "Fathers Know Best" and other programs in which the family, they say, was extolled and idealized.

Maybe in some cases. But if you spend any time looking back into the kinescope past, you'll discern some family dynamics that were never anything to write home about.

'I LOVE LUCY'

While Ralph Kramden and his wife, Alice, are eking out a childless New York existence one notch above poverty level, across town a nightclub performer and his delusional wife are having their own problems.

An interracial couple, they apparently have a hard time forming social bonds. The only friends they have are completely unsuitable - their elderly landlord and his dowdy wife. All the four of them do together is play cards, gossip and engage in petty feuds.

The performer's wife, exceedingly dissatisfied with her lot as a hausfrau, is always trying to break into show business despite her manifest lack of talent. These efforts necessitate that she lie to her husband constantly. She vents her frustrations and resentments by mocking his foreign accent; he treats her as though she were a mentally retarded child.

'THE ADVENTURES OF OZZIE AND HARRIET'

We bid Lucy and Ricky Ricardo adieu and travel from Manhattan to Anytown, U.S.A., where we find a middle-aged couple and their two rapidly growing boys.

Everything looks pretty idyllic here - the boys do well in school, the younger son plays the guitar, the mom is capable and sane, and dinner is always on time.

The problem is Dad. Perhaps older than he looks at first glance, he seems to have retired early - at least, he's always hanging around the house with nothing much to do. He appears to be very much at loose ends. Also, he - like Ralph and Lucy - is always getting involved in harebrained schemes that don't work out.

But the biggest problem is his obvious lack of self-esteem. Many of his schemes are designed to win the respect of his family, which he seems to feel is lacking. At the end of each show it is borne in upon him that his wife and sons love him no matter how lame he is, but the next week he's right back acting out on the same old insecurities.

'BACHELOR FATHER'

What's that again? Well, OK, it's not about an unmarried man raising his out-of-wedlock child - it's about an unmarried man raising his deceased relative's perfectly legitimate orphan daughter. But he's not much of a role model for the poor girl, always gadding from one attractive lady to another, and with a positive phobia for commitment of any kind.

'LOVE THAT BOB'

You know perfectly well what it means to be a handsome, successful fashion photographer, and this show bears that out.

With scarcely a thought for the impression he'd making on the nephew who lives with him, the lensman spends every episode dealing with a dizzying array of well-favored women, the unmistakable implication being that he enjoys sexual relations with every single one of them.

Meantime, his homely Gal Friday carries a torch for him while doing all the dirty work his carefree bachelor life requires.

'THE MANY LOVES OF DOBIE GILLIS'

Here, the nephew from "Love That Bob" turns up as a 25-year ­old high school student (he looks at least that old) who obsesses out loud before a hallucinatory audience about the trouble he has forming connections with girls.

Small wonder that his father, proprietor of a grocery store, is perpetually at his wit's end with frustration and anger over the boy's aimless, irresponsible ways, to say nothing of the company he keeps - a scruffy beatnik, the only bearded, 35-year-old high school student in America, with a marked aversion to gainful occupation in any form.

Indeed, the father is so disturbed by his son's lack of character that he often talks to himself out loud about killing him.

'THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW'

But as we fly over the hills to rural Mayberry, we've finally come home - or, at least, so it appears. What could be healthier, mentally and socially? Dad is a widowed sheriff living with his kitchen-savvy aunt and his adorable young son, who will likely go far in the movie business. The barber and other townsfolk are always ready to lend moral support in an emergency.

But wait. Really, the entire milieu might have been crafted by William Faulkner or some other Gothic Southerner, not so much because of town drunk Otis, whose alcohol addiction is so incorrigible that he is permanently assigned a cell at the jallhouse, but because of Dad's cousin.

What's wrong with this guy? Is it a glandular disease, or an anxiety disorder, or both?

He imagines himself a legendary police officer as opposed to what he is, a lowly deputy sheriff who is only issued one bullet at a time and must carry it in his shirt pocket and whose job clearly is the fruit of nepotism. His dreams of grandiosity are almost frightening in their persistence and intensity. Best thing will be never to leave him alone with the aunt and the boy. You never know when he's going to snap.

Roger Anderson is arts and entertainment editor at Scripps Howard News Service.

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