From the Nelsons to the Huxtables: Genre and family imagery in American network television

From the Nelsons to the Huxtables: Genre and Family Imagery in American Network Televis ion

Ella Taylor University of Washington, Seattle

ABSTRACT: Television genres must be understood within the sociohistericaI context in which they are created and received. Television's classic genre, the episodic series, which is defined by the imagery of family, evolved out of the commercial imperative of the industry as well as earlier aesthetic forms. In the 1950s and 1960s, "least objectionable programming" strategies generated bland, consensual comedies such as Father Knows Best and My Three Sons. With the social changes of the late 1960s and early 1970s and a shift to "demographic" programming, episodic series changed in form and content. Workplace and domestic family shows explored controversial issues and experi- mented with narrative form. In the 1980s, we see an opening out of the series both in form and content, generating a plurality of family forms. Yet this relativism is undercut by the rigidly fundamentalist nuclear families depicted in popular new comedies such as The Cosby Show and Growing Pains.

From Alice and Ralph Kramden in The Honeymooners to Clair and Cliff Huxtable in The Cosby Show, family themes have dominated American network television. Even when programs are not ostensibly about families, they are often structured by familial imagery. The power of Lou Grant, Hilt Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, and L.A. Law derives from the family cameo in which the central characters play out. weekly dramas of intergenerational and sibling unity and separation. Television is the most relentlessly domestic of our mass media.

Of all television's prime-time genres, it is the episodic series (includ- ing half-hour comedies and one-hour dramas) that fosters a gradual build-up of viewer attachment to individual characters and their relationships, generating the fullest possibilities for continuous medita- tion on domestic themes. Television adapted the series format from genres developed in radio, vaudeville theater, and film. That format has evolved over four decades from a traditionally plotted narrative

This article is drawn from a larger project on television genres which will appear in a forthcoming collection of essays about television edited by Chad Gordon and Ken Tucker of Rice University. Address correspondence to: Ella Taylor, School of Communications, DS-40, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195.

Qualitat~ve Sociology, 12(1), Spring I989 13 v 1989 Human Sciences Press

14 QUALITATIVE SOCIOLOGY

into a continuous chronicle of domesticity, an opening out of both form and meaning that provides audiences with a changing commentary on family life. By turns, the manner can be reflective, utopian, or dys- topic, the mood now euphoric, now anxious, now redemptive.

Genre and the Sociology of Television

Neither form nor meaning can be fully understood outside the social contexts-commercial, organizational, historical, political, cu l tura l - in which television is produced and received. Genre, accordingly, cannot be interpreted statically as a textual form with immanent structural properties. Rather, it represents the outcome of social practices, received procedures that become objectified in the narratives of television, then modified in the interpretive act of viewing. Television artic- ulates social values; presenting shifting pictures of the ordinary frames of family and work that are filtered through rules of form emerging from the changing world views, daily priorities, and routines of producers, network executives, and advertisers, and then filtered again through the varied perceptions of viewers. Thus, genre consti- tutes a link between producers and audiences consisting of provi- sionally agreed upon codes. Genre analysis allows us to point out the conventions for the construction of television meanings that are shared by producers and viewers, without assuming a necessary symmetry between the interpretive readings of these two groups, or indeed, those of critics.

Genre also functions as a regulator of difference (Feuer, 1987). It shapes textual meaning and disciplines the interpretive activities of creators and audiences. However varied their specific interpretations, viewers respond within the boundaries imposed by genre conventions. Audience response, for example, is bounded by canned laughter, commercial breaks, musical and visual cues, character and plot types, as well as by the viewer's involvement with television over time. Indeed, the generic structures of television may be better understood by its viewers than other cultural forms are known by their respective audiences. Television audiences are much more likely to "know" a situation comedy than most fiction readers are to recognize a realist novel or filmgoers to identify a film noir. The seasoned television viewer may, however inchoately, '~place" Archie Bunker (A tl In The Family) not just as a sociological t ype - the working class bigot-but as the direct de- scendant of Ralph Kramden (The Honeymooners), or in his quarrelsome exchanges with his wife, Edith, as a televisual realization of the Punch and Judy show.

From the Nelsons to the Huxtables 15

American television explicitly organizes its genres in the service of efficiency and rationalization of a commercial product. 1 An early alli- ance between broadcasters and advertisers installed television, like radio, in private homes as a domestic appliance, used to sell other appliances to audiences conceived as family units. Domesticity was thus, from the beginning, integrated into the structures and forms of network television. The medium's technical structure, also specified by the commercial requirements of advertisers, leans toward the familial. With its small screen, "talking heads" format, and interior sets, television combines the looming proximity of film with the constraining space of the theater. It fosters the portrayal of character and relationship rather than action; the routinized intimacy of domestic life, rather than the melodramatic, one-time intensity of the live performance or the big screen.

Commercial and organizational pressures also facilitated the domi- nance of the episodic series over the early drama "anthologies" or variety shows. The transition from live production in New York City to filmed production in Hollywood in the early 1950s removed television from the more innovative orbit of theater into the rationalized world of the movie industry. From a production standpoint, the anthology, variety, and game show formats were not sufficiently formulaic for an industry in which profitabitiW superseded all other criteria. Reliable success, as measured by audience ratings, became a primary goal. The rapid turnover of variety show stars, the self-enclosed narratives of weekly theater anthologies, and above all, the spontaneity of live television lacked the continuity and predictability that encouraged program and "brand name" loyalty among viewers. The episodic series, built upon the twin principles of plot repetition and character continuity, answered to broadcasters' efforts to find recipes for success that would regularly deliver a mass audience to their corporate sponsors.

Television is often criticized on aesthetic grounds as "formulaic." But all genre conventions, whether in the novel, the epic poem, or television, are formulaic. They all build upon and address prior cultural forms and must be related to those forms in order to be understood. Modern popular culture, because of its wide diffusion through the mass media, must achieve simplicity of appeal and ready comprehensibility. Broad brush strokes of plot and character invite instant recognition. As art, television possesses at best an ambiguous status in the eyes of its creators and the public. "Formula" thus represents an industrial as well as a strictly aesthetic category, referring to the rationalization of conventions to achieve product efficiency.

In the first two decades of television, the Nielsen ratings, however crude and unreliable, supplied producers and network executives with


virtually their only data about audiences. The Nielsen system was constructed to represent audiences, not as a diverse population, but as an undifferentiated ~mass" watching in family units. However, as Raymond Williams (1958) has observed, there are no masses, only ways of seeing masses. Similarly, there is no such entity as a "typical viewer," any more than there are ~typical families." The creation of ~'Nielsen families" during this period exemplified television's search for a mass audience of ~average" families with predictable viewing habits. The episodic series contributed by fashioning monolithic ira- ages of "normal" domestic life.

Domestic Images in American Television of the 1950s

By the 1958-59 season, nine of the top ten shows in the Nielsen ratings were episodic series. Emerging from a marriage between Hol- lywood movie production and network radio genres, the series evolved into two major forms, the half-hour family comedy and the one-hour drama. As in radio, both comedies and dramas were produced in short segments wrapped around commercials. In both, too, the stars usually became more central than the plots. A show often took its star's name for its title, a practice that underscores the significance of regular characters and recognizable stars for viewer identification. Each weekly episode carried a complete story. The plot (often with a subplot) centered on a formula around the star's character. This format offered audiences both the satisfaction of narrative closure and the pleasure of a continuing relationship with favorite characters. Since this formula assured broadcasters of regular audiences, maintained by a steady relationship with central characters, they were well-pleased with a recipe that promised reruns, making it ideal for future syndication.

Benign, consensual domestic comedies, such as Leave It To Beaver, The Adventures o f Ozzie And Harriet, and Father Knows Best, emerged in this production climate from the motto of the successful network careerist-"least objectionable programing." The magically spotless kitchens of those "least objectionable" wives and mothers, June Cleaver, Harriet Nelson, and Margaret Anderson, amply stocked with all the latest durable goods, encouraged viewers to become model consumers and, by extension, model families. Taken together, these shows proposed family- life as a zany, conflict-free adventure. The stable continuity of weekly episodes flattened past and future into an eternal present in which parents love and respect one another, and their children, forever. The children would grow up, go to college,


marry, and assume lives identical to those of their parents, only wealthier.

The economic impulse to forge a mass audience translated into bland entertainment intended to offend no one. It also accorded perfectly with, and indeed promoted, prevailing postwar beliefs in the ~end of ideology." It is unlikely that such grand visions circulated at network programming conferences or percolated through more immediate commercial imperatives. In phasing out not only the anthologies but also the "ethnic" sitcoms like Amos 'NAndy and The Goldbergs in the early 1950s, the network producers may have thought that they were repro- ducing the typical American family; if not of the present, then cer- tainly of the near future. What they reproduced, in fact, was not the reality of most American family lives, but just the kind of consensus desired by advert isers-a postwar ideology breezily forecasting steady rates of economic growth that would produce abundance sufficient to eliminate ethnic and class conflict. The Nelsons and Cleavers were advertising and embodying the American dream, portraying the middle-class family as an essential building block of a benign social order.

Familial Imagery and the Drama*ic Series

Television genres are no more reducible to technical structure or production routines than any other narrative form. Like other genres, they grow away from their creators' intentions and become objectified as stories or as "imaginative works built out of social materials" (Geertz, 1973). Genre analysis offers the potential of understanding the television narrative as social practice and as aesthetic and ideological text, without sealing off the links between creators and audiences. Compared to contemporary television series, the 1950s and '60s situation comedies appear static and wooden. The same plots unfold over and over again and characters remained largely caricatured and unde- veloped, while dialogues evoked the rapid-fire banter of vaudeville standup comedy. Gradually, though, the continuity embedded in the weekly episodic format shifted the emphasis from plot to character, from event and outcome to emotion and relationship. The ensemble cast triumphed over the individual star, offering viewers' identification with a familial Gemeinschaft. Similarly, the dramatic series, in crime and detective shows such as Dragnet, and The Adventures of Ellery Queen and Westerns such as Gunsmoke, pulled the basic structure of the domestic comedy into portrayals of life in the public sphere (Newcomb, 1974). The dramatic series reproduced a domestic haven


within the workplace, integrating the individual and the primary group into a benign society whose legitimate representative was the professional himself. Despite important structural differences between the comedies and dramatic series, their common reliance on family allegory is striking.

Differences in generic form shape audience expectations in a variety of ways, but all television genres are structured to some degree by the language of realism. Like all representational narrative, the television medium strives to convince us that its words and images reproduce our own experience, or that of people like ourselves. In this respect, television is a child of the realist novel more than of other 20th century media. With its visual naturalism, its attention to the quotidian de- tails of life in recognizable domestic and work settings, television disguises its interpretive character, inviting the viewer to forget that a story is being constructed. The force of that disguise varies from one set of genre conventions to the next. The documentary claims an absolute fidelity to reality. The docudrama, though it blurs the line between fact and fiction, nonetheless presents itself as ~truer" than the series. However, it lacks the power of the continuing series to mobilize identification with characters who are ~realistic" in being ordinary folks with plausibly familiar lives that go on ~just like ours. "2

Within the more general format of the television series, comedy is stagier and more disclaiming than the earnest television drama. This makes it both less '~real" and potentially more subversive, since comedy can create multiple, conflicting, and oppositional realities, safely sheltered within the joke. During the first two decades of television entertainment, that subversive potential was contained by ~middle ground" programming designed to attract mass audiences. But it is not surprising that the major changes in form and meaning in early 1970s television would first emerge in the comedy series.

Transformat ions in 1960s and 1970s Televis ion

By the mid-1960s, the dream of a harmonious, middle-class America was fraying visibly at. the edges. Latent schisms of class, race, gender, and generation erupted into open conflict in the world outside television entertainment. But programming executives in the 1960s, for all their declared sensitivity to changes in public mood, continued to produce mild, consensual series like The Donna Reed Show and My Three Sons. If television news was preoccupied with urban unrest, an unstable economy, the escalating Vietnam war, and a generation of


college students rebelling against their parents' values, the episodic series blithely suggested that nothing uncomfortable was happening.

In 1970, a decisive shift in ratings policy reshaped the industry's perceptions of its audience. The new policy encouraged new kinds of family-based shows, ones modifying and extending the series genre while remaining commercially successful. Bob Wood, incoming presi- dent of top network CBS, realized that his network's most successful shows (Gunsmoke, The Beverly Hillbillies, Hee Haw) attracted older, rural viewers rather than younger, urban audiences. Wood recognized that sponsors cared less about how many people tuned in than how much they earned and spent. So he focused his programmers' attention on younger, more educated, and more affluent urban viewers who, at least in the eyes of the burgeoning information media, were fast be- coming opinion leaders. "Demographics," the new ratings strategy, broke down the audience by age, sex, income, and other variables to isolate the most profitable television markets. Scheduling now became an elaborate strategic exercise no longer designed merely to reach the widest possible audience with any given show, but to group programs and commercials in various time slots to target specific audiences.

Through "demographics," changes in the form and meaning of prime t ime enter ta inment accelerated. Although the episodic series, still framed in the imagery of family, remained television's dominant genre, both comedies and dramas moved away from benign, consensual themes toward open confrontation with contemporary social issues. The turn towards "relevance," as industry executives called it, grew out of a complex interplay between emergent social trends and pressures for changes in network ratings and programming strategies.

The "age of relevance" was ushered in by Norman Lear's All In The Family. After a rocky start, it shot to number one in the ratings and reigned over the top three positions for much of the decade, spawning numerous spinoffs and clones. The Bunkers (and later, the Jeffersons, Findlays, and Romanos) quarreled, stormed, and suffered their way through the 1970s. Their adventures blazed a trail for the panoply of social problems that have since become standard television fare. In their early years, the Bunkers remained a resolutely intact family unit, confining their squabbles to highly formalized public issues of race, class, gender, and government corruption. But, as the decade went on, their problems-menopause, infidelity, divorce, alco- hol ism-became steadily more private in nature. Humor intermingled with drama as the underlying issue became the painful f~agility of marriage and the family unit. Many episodes in the later years were barely identifiable as comedies. All In the Family set the tone for domestic comedy of the 1970s. The vast majority of series with domes-


tic settings now featured troubled, fractured or '~reconstituted" families.

The new domestic comedies echoed an anxiety about the erosion of domestic life that began to punctuate the rhetoric of politicians, policy- makers, social scientists and therapists in the early 1970s. From more visible problems, such as wife or child abuse, divorce, or teenage pregnancy, to less focused areas of marital and generational conflict, social trouble was increasingly being defined as family trouble. The women's movement was raising critical questions about the compati- bility of traditional family forms with female emancipation. Since women are also television's most prized viewers and consumers, a ~prime-time feminism" developed among television's new single wom- e n - M a r y Richards (The Mary Tyler Moore Show), Rhoda Morgenstern (The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda), and Ann Romano (One Day At A Time)-cobbling together all kinds of new family forms from the remnants of distressed nuclear units.

If television's domestic scenes became a repository for family anxiety, more benign images of family and community surfaced in the workplace series, a subgenre also designed for younger, upscale markets. The success of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and M*A*S*Hin the CBS Saturday night hneup in the early 1970s led to a wave of shows with occupational settings, WKRP In Cincinnati, Taxi, and Barney Miller. The emotional center of these shows was not work, not even the star, but the relationships among colleagues whose own family attach- ments were severely attenuated or nonexistent. M*A*S*H's medical team, the television producers of WJM in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and the detectives of Barney Miller, displayed the claustrophobic test- iness and warm solidarity experienced in families. If television was portraying a communal workplace that compensated for the ravaged instability of the domestic shows, it may also have suggested to a career-oriented generation that emotional support might be found in the workplace, if no longer in the family. This trend was echoed in occupational dramas such as Kojak and Lou Grant.

In many ways, the new shows were firmly rooted in the traditions of situation comedy. They, too, relied on absurd escapades and misunder- standings uncovered or resolved by the end of each episode. M*A*S*H's bouncing repartee recalled standup comedy as well as earlier army comedies, such as The Phil Silvers Show. Archie Bunker's blustering pratfalls and malapropisms echoed those of Ralph Kramden. Sweet, accommodating Mary Richards (The Mary Tyler Moore Show) emerged from the chrysalis containing Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show. The familial frame of the sitcom, whether at home or at work, remained as fundamental as ever.


There were also significant changes of style and mood. Humor in the new shows was more verbal and less action-dependent. No longer were comedies filled with the happy mirth and the affluent, untroubled homes of the American Dream. If mirth and solidarity were anywhere to be found, it was more likely to be in the growing numbers of series with workplace families. What viewers could see in episode after episode were individuals negotiating, in a muddled haphazard way, new but increasingly familiar t roubles-and also surviving them with a cheerful, ff bemused, resignation.

From the 1950s to the late 1970s, the episodic series evolved in both form and meaning: continually shifting from situation to character, from tightly structured to looser narratives, from harmonious to troubled families, from an emphasis on the home to a split between home and work, with the workplace providing the satisfactions of family. "Relevant" shows also began to display greater structural ambiguity, especially the elision of drama and comedy into 1980s "dramadies~" with more open endings, greater character complexity, and shifting perspectives from one character to the next. The potential of comedy for generating multiple and dissident voices had been released by commercial considerations that targeted specific groups of viewers. Yet, comedy's subversive potential was also contained by the simul- taneous need to attract a broader mainstream audience.

The Evolution of Familial Themes in the 1980s

The 1980s witnessed new challenges for network television. Cable, pay-per-view, and home video competed with the networks for viewer loyalty. By 1987, 50% of American homes had a VCR. Viewers could tape their favorite shows and "zap" through commercials. Advertisers and programmers were faced with perhaps the most serious challenge in television's history. Viewers, particularly more affluent ones, could choose to use their television sets solely as video receivers.

The television industry responded by accelerating the programming trends of the 1970s. The episodic series were given more fluid boundaries and were recombined with other genres, so that they approached the more ambiguous, unresolved form of the serial. This is particularly true for one-hour workplace dramas, such as Cagney and Lacey, Moon- lighting, Hill Street Blues, and LA. Law. With multiple storylines, often left unresolved for several weeks, large 'Tamilies" of characters, and characters leading chaotic lives in which heroism and villainy collapse in ambiguity, approximated the conventions of the soap opera


more closely than the conventional episodic series. Indeed, the soap opera, with its shifting perspectives and endless narrative uncertain- ties, may speak more aptly to the fragmented relativism of modern social consciousness than could the older more absolutist episodic series.

The contemporary workplace drama is hip, self-consciously parodic, and urbane. It gestures knowingly toward and plunders freely from other television shows as well as film, theater, and radio. One Moon- lighting episode, for example, recapitulates and parodies The Taming of the Shrew. The actors address the camera in mid-plot, violating the tacit agreement between viewer and creator that the story is ~'real." Another episode ends with cuts of failed takes, inviting audiences into the production process and thereby discouraging the viewer's suspen- sion of disbelief. Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law are peppered with arch allusions to pop culture, when a parodic ~Captain America" character is introduced. An episode of Cagney and Lacey evokes the 1950s television quiz show scandals. Comedy tumbles into drama and back again without warning. Though most marked in dramatic series, these pat- terns are increasingly incorporated into comedy series as well. The ¢~girls" of Designing Women watch Shere Hite on The Oprah Winfrey Show and begin a discussion of women hating men.

This reflexive style is quite self-conscious. It marks the sensibility of a younger generation of television writers and producers, such as Gary David Goldberg (Lou Grant, Family Ties), Stephen Bochco (Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law), and Michael Mann (Miami Vice, Crime Story). Their work appeals to younger, more sophisticated viewers who have grown up with television, movies, and rock and roll. These viewers move smoothly between one medium or one generic category and the next, aided, of course, by the ubiquitous reruns. The growing opportunities for viewers to experiment with schedules and commercials, and to reshape their viewing habits through home video technology, adds to the fluid intertextuality of contemporary television. It also promises to disrupt the disciplinary activity of genre boundaries, pluralizing (and relativizing) meaning and subverting television's claim to realism.

In comedy, too, where domestic routines are rehearsed weekly and the meaning of family worked over and redefined, substantial change has occurred in the 1980s. The top ten shows for the 1982-83 season featured only two comedies (M*A*S*H and Three's Company), for the 1983-84 season only one (Kate and AUie). Critics began declaring the sitcom, for years the centerpiece of prime time, dead o1" dying. NBC's glittering partnership of The Cosby Show and Family Ties in 1984 in fact, rapidly ensured that the sitcom was alive and well. Once again,


the formula changed in the first instance as a response to shifts in industrial practice. The format of the new series suggests an exquisite refinement of"demographics," as well, perhaps, as a renewed ability to avoid offending viewers. Several markets are laced together to create a broad audience. Whole strips or evenings of prime time are now explicitly designed for particular aggregates of markets. Scheduling becomes a key craft in network competition. The Thursday night lineup that catapulted NBC to first place began with The Cosby Show and Family Ties, which secured the mass audience. After children's bedtime, it moved smoothly into adult markets with the work-families of Cheers, Night Court, and Hill Street Blues, now replaced by the glossier L.A. Law. In short, the evening schedule became an advertiser's paradise. 3

By the middle of the 1980s, the domestic sphere had reasserted its supremacy in the Nielsen ratings, but a marked proliferation of family forms had emerged. The flow of television generates an excess of meanings (Hartley, 1984). Genre may, in principle, function to contain that excess. But when genre boundaries become blurred, the potential for alternative meanings increases. Recent television seasons have dramatized the single-parent community (Kate and AUie), the all- female household (The Golden Girls, Designing Women), the all-male household (Dads, My Two Dads, You Again), the mixed-race family (Webster, Difflrent Strokes, Gimme a Break), the all-black family (Amen, 227), and the role-reversed, reconstituted family (Who's The Boss?). From the television industry's point of view, this innovation may represent a slightly different spin on the same old production formulas. But the diversification of family structure also carries the potential for a more pluralistic family sensibility.

In many series, however, this potential for alternative meanings is undercut or diluted by the level of generality and by a cheery politics of adjustment to change. This is true even of shows which experiment self-consciously with gender and family roles. The family comedies of the 1980s tend to be less adversarial than those of the early 1970s. "Do I have to be a relative to be family?" a confused little boy asks his mother in Who's the Boss?, a comedy about a role reversed household of two single parents (she the breadwinner, he the housekeeper). "Not necessarily," his mother smiles down at him, "a family means people who share each others' lives and care about each other." While this definition may encompass the variety of domestic arrangements repre- sented in current census data, its blandness is designed to offend no one. With the sting of divorce, family poverty, and other problems removed, single parenthood and step-parenting become a romp, a per- manent pajama party. Even Kate and AUie, originally a witty comedy


of divorce manners and single life the second time around, has slipped into a didactic '*parenting psychology ~' mold. It now focuses more on children's rites of passage than on adults reinventing normative life.

The true locus of family flux on television, in the 1980s, however, may be the night-time soaps. These shows are prime-time's closest approximation to the serial. Nothing else matches the seething ambiguities and flaring passions of the clans on these melodramas. On Dynasty last season, Blake Carrington struggled to contain both his current wife and his former wife. His son Stephen oscillated between gay and straight sexual preferences as the plot required, while son Adam turned out not really to be his son at all. So Blake adopted him. Meanwhile, Leslie, Blake's niece, discovered that her lover was actu- ally her brother. Season after season, the elastic boundaries of the night time soaps stretch and contract to admit or expel undiscovered relatives, bogus and genuine. It is likely, however, that many viewers receive this sub-genre in the "high camp" spirit in which it is typically offered.

If the most popular television shows express dominant ideas and limit alternative readings (Fiske, 1987), it is on The Cosby Show, whose phenomenal success set a trend for a new wave off'intact family" comedies, that we must focus. 4 Like All in the Family, The Cosby Show attracted considerable attention from critics and public interest groups, as well as a vast and devoted audience. But the similarity between the two shows ends there. The robustly working-class Bunker household was never a model of consumer vitality, nor did it aspire to be. If Archie was dragged, kicking and screaming into the 1970s, the Huxtable family embraces modernity with enthusiasm. Surrounded by material evidences of their success, the Huxtables radiate wealth, health, energy, and up-to-the-minute style. The Cosby Show offers pleasures similar to the television commercial-a parade of gleaming commodities and expensive designer clothing, unabashedly enjoyed by successful professional families. Cosby himself is a gibed promoter of the goods and services that finance his series, from JeU-O Pops to E. F. Hutton.

It is tempting to conclude, as many critics have done, that The Cosby Show and its clones simply signify a return to 1950s-style consensual domestic comedy. Week after week, The Cosby Show supplies the same rewards as the family comedy of the 1950s and 1960s, the continuity of orderly lives with no major trauma, stretching back into an identical past and forward into an identical future. But where 1950s television families took harmony for granted, indeed, took the institution of the stable nuclear family for granted, the Huxtables work strenuously and self-consciously to persuade us how well they get along. Given the


troubled condition of many American families in the 1980s, The Cosby Show must be palpably compensatory or redemptive for many fans. It answers to a sense of distress about family life while articulating the fundamentalist rhetoric found in many areas of public and private life today. If, in the 1970s, the family was acknowledged to be a primary arena of social conflict, by the early 1980s, it had become the focus of a fierce backlash led by the religious right. The failure of many states to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, struggle over abortion rights and contraception for teenagers, the calls for a "return to basic values," all became major issues in the media. Television leaped onto the ideological bandwagon, not just in news, talk shows, and the solemnly didactic television movies, but also in domestic comedy. 5

Nothing ever really happens on The Cosby Show, in the classical dramatic sense. A virtually plotless chronicle of small, quotidian de- tails of family life, it portrays a moral etiquette of parenting and developmental psychology. Narrative resolution, far tighter than in most domestic comedies since the early 1970s, involves a learning experience, a lesson in social adjustment for the children. The relentlessly cute Rudy learns to stop bossing her friends around; Theo learns not to embark on expensive projects he won't complete. Even Cliff and Clair who, despite high-powered careers as physician and lawyer, respectively, have all the "quality time" in the world to spend with their children, and teach each other parenting by discussion as well as by example.

Unlike the Bunkers, for whom almost every problem generated an all-out war of ideas, the Huxtables never scream or lose control. True, beneath their beguiling mildness lurks a casual hostility in which they all trade insults. But there's no dissent or real difference of opinion, only vaguely malicious banter that quickly dissolves into sweet agreement. The busy manufacture of consensus overcomes all disagreement.

Undercutting the warm color and light, the bonhomie and impecca- ble salutes to feminism, is a persistent authoritarianism. The tone is set by Cosby himself, whose prodigious charm overlays a subtle men- ace: Father knows best, or else. The cuddly overgrown schoolboy becomes the amused onlooker and then the oracle. As a master of the strategic silence or the innocent question, Clifflets a child know she or he has done something "dumb," or tells his wife that her independence has slipped into bossiness. Through the democratic veneer of family meetings and insistence on "communication," Cliff practices a thor- oughly contemporary politics of strong leadersh/p. Potential conflicts are managed with all the skill of a well-socialized corporate executive. So, too, does his lawyer wife, who, in an episode during the 1987-88 season, staged a kangaroo court at home for son, Theo, whose "crime"


was not only arriving home 15 minutes late, but, worse, refusing to tell his parents why.

The Cosby Show displays none of the generational warfare that rocked the Bunker household. Parental authority has already been internalized by the children. The Huxtable offspring put up token displays of playful resistance, then surrender happily to the divine right of parents whose facile knowledge of rights and wrongs irons out the inconvenient ambiguities of contemporary life. Since the Huxt- ables are a supremely intact nuclear family, those ambiguities rarely come up, or if they do, they are kept outside the charmed circle. A teen pregnancy, a drug problem, a worker laid off-occasionally one of the problems that bedevil other families casts a brief shadow, but then slinks away, intimidated by the fortress of Huxtable togetherness. Unlike the situation comedies of the 1950s, whose vision of the social terrain outside the family was as benign as that inside it, the world outside the Huxtable family seems downright perilous, to the degree that it exists at all. The Huxtables have friends, but no discernible community, indeed no public life aside from their jobs, which appear to run on automatic pilot. And they inhabit a visibly black world, whose blackness is hardly ever alluded to. All social and moral choice is subsumed within domesticity, suggesting not only that family integ- rity transcends politics, but that political affiliation is reducible to being nice to other people-especially relatives.

When he isn't playing the heavy.handed father, Cosby is the charm- ing child, and this dualism caters to the ~child" in adult viewers. Cosby attempts to satisfy the yearning for a perfectly synchronized family or community that provides for the needs of all members and regulates itself through a benevolent dictatorship. But its aggressive closure of all open endings, relative viewpoints and ethical ambiguities, its ener- getic repression of the sources of distress that afflict many families (especially black families) suggests a political retrenchment born of cultural exhaustion, a fearful inability to confront current reality and imagine new forms of community.

Conclus ion

This article has traced the ways in which shifts in the cultural construction of family flow through the forms of television entertainment, mediated by the changing rituals of industrial practice. Four decades of prime-time programming have seen significant develop- ments in both form and meaning in network television's dominant


genre, the episodic series. Since the 1970s, the transition from "mass audience" into specialized demographic markets has allowed a new flexibility and diversity to flourish in network programming. The growing elasticity of form fosters a plurality of meanings within television's central al legory-the fami ly-and extends the possibility of new and conflicting definitions of family and community.

The struggle over ideas in the new television families is also a struggle over form. If the malleability of generic form creates a space for conflicting and even oppositional meanings, and so disrupts the discipline that genre imposes on viewer interpretation, it also relativ- izes the absolutist language of television, undermining the complicity of the viewer with television realism and weakening its claim simply to reflect a fixed social world. When the boundaries between genres grow more blurred, when comedy and drama interrupt each other, when programs call viewers' attention to the manner of their construction, a naive reading of narrative becomes impossible, and the viewer is no longer encouraged to suspend disbelief. 6

Nevertheless, the "massffication" of the audience remains a central concern for network programmers, who must still demonstrate through ratings to sponsors that their shows draw large audiences. The ~Tamily phwalism" suggested by 1980s episodic series is weak and tentative, acknowledging more the variety of family forms than the struggle over meanings at the level of gender, race, class and generation, and at the intersection of family and workplace, v With their eyes firmly fixed on the mass audience, The Cosby Show and its imitators threaten to short-circuit the quarrelsome liveliness of 1970s shows and the diversity of current television families by burying their heads in the nostalgic sands of '~traditional values."

Reference Notes

1. Feuer (1987) argues that television genres may be understood respectiveIy as ritual (organizational) categories, aesthetic categories (texts fulfilling artistic expression), or ideological categories (instruments of social control in which dominant ideologies are reproduced). These categories are clearly interrelated, but in television it is useful to begin with the l~itual aspect, the paramount exchange between industry and audience.

2. This may be one reason why programmers, public interest groups, and media re- searchers alike are often so preoccupied with the degree to which television is "realistic."

3. The power of the lineup is illustrated by the recent success of The Cosby Show spineff, A Different World Though widely panned by critics, it has been carried in the ratings by its position immediately following The Cosby Show.


4. The Cosby Show was paired with the marginally less successful Family Ties. Their popularity gave rise to ABC's Growing Pains and Valerie's Family, both series about intact nuclear families.

5. For a discussion of family themes in television movies see Taylor and Walsh (1987). 6. The most extreme example of this progression is music video, with its shifting,

opaque images, ambiguous meanings, and chopped-up narratives. 7. I have discussed this tension more fully elsewhere. See Taylor (1988, forthcoming).

References

Feuer, J. 1987 "Genre study and television." In R. C. Allen (Ed.) Channels of Discourse: Television and Contemporary Criticism. Pp. 113-133. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Fiske, J. 1987 Television Culture. New York: Methuen.

Geertz, C. 1973 The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic.

Hartley, J. 1984 "Encouraging signs: TV and the power of dirt, speech, and scandalous categories." In W. Rowland and B. Watkins (Eds.), Interpreting Television: Current Re- search Perspectives. Beverly Hills: Sage.

Newcomb, H. 1974 TV: The Most Popular Art. Garden City: Anchor Press.

Newcomb, H. 1984 "On the dialogic aspects of mass communication." Critical Studies in Mass Communication 1:1, 34-50.

Taylor, E. & Walsh, A. 1987 "And next week-Child abuse: Family issues in contemporary tv movies." In Sari Thomas (Ed.) Culture and Communication-Methodology, Behavior, Artifacts and Institutions. Pp. 168-177. New Jersey: Ablex.

Taylor, E. 1988 (forthcoming). All in the work-family: Imagery of family and work in television entertainment. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Williams, R. 1958 Culture and Society. London: Chatto and Windus.

From the Nelsons to the Huxtables: Genre and family imagery in American network television

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