MovieChat Forums > Family Affair (1966) Discussion > How come this show is so bizarre?

How come this show is so bizarre?


I notice when I watch Family Affair that many really bizarre things happen.

Such as:

- The kids turn a biohazard dump into a park, and Uncle Bill and the community endorses this but has no concerns at all for the children's health.

- A hamster is strong enough to bust open the closed top door of it's cage. How it even got that high in the first place I'll never know. Perhaps it was bitten by a radioactive spider in the aforementioned biohazard dump/park and thus acquired webcrawling and super-strength abilities. After it busts out the first time, they find it in the sofa and then put it back in the same cage. It later busts out again in the park. Why didn't they get a better cage after the first time it busted out?

- A heir to a foreign country's throne who is just a kid is whisked away to America with a woman who is protecting him, and hidden by Uncle Bill until his family puts down the uprising in his country that ousted his family from power. In the mean time the kid and the woman have to be conscious of agents who are following them around Bill's neighborhood and trying to kill them. As if all that is not bizarre enough on it's own, but also at first the woman does not wanna reveal the secret of who she and the boy are. But Uncle Bill says "I have children to think about therefore I must know". However, when the answer is one that is guaranteed to put the children at great risk - agents going around the neighborhood trying to kill the women and boy - Uncle Bill then says "Sure you can stay with us." What happened to thinking about the children?!

- Sissy is going out with a boy. Then a hotshot other boy comes to visit who works in the Peace Corps. Sissy immediately starts treating the boy she is currently dating like total crap, and then changes their scheduled date. She actually dates the new Peace Corps boy instead, at the time she was scheduled to date the boy she was already dating. And she drags that boy along with her on the date. Immediately after that, Sissy wants to marry the Peace Corps boy. Then the other boy complains to Uncle Bill about how the new boy is ruining his life by stealing Sissy from him --- shouldn't he instead be complaining that Uncle Bill raised a tramp and he is disgusted by her and hopes to never hear from her again? But no - he actually still wanted Sissy to be with him! I don't understand this; even if he ended up marrying Sissy she would just cheat on him, so what's the point? And how come Uncle Bill never talked to Sissy about the immorality of treating boys like slabs of meat as she was doing?

- In one episode a window washer with no harness who cleans the very-high apartment unit's windows always opens the window to Bill's apartment where the kids are. It is like you see in the classic vampire movies where the windows of a young woman are opened all the way at night so that a vampire can come in. He teaches them how to do new math whilst sitting on his bench many, many stories up, with no harness on him. Not only is this extremely bizarre, but also it was posing a huge safety risk to the children who could easily have fallen to their deaths when interacting with him. Especially because they had to hand him their textbooks with the windows completely open and nothing to stop the children from falling out. At the end of the episode Bill comes by and tells the window cleaner not to talk to the children any more - which seemed to to imply something even worse than the sheer bizarreness of it all already had going on.

I have not seen all of the episodes otherwise I'm sure the list could be much, much larger.

How come this show is so bizarre?

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[deleted]

What's that supposed to mean? I have never ever done any drugs. All the stuff in the original post actually happened on this show, I wasn't making it up or anything.

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There is nothing "bizarre" about any of the points you made. This show is anything but "bizarre". It's rated G!

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Dude,you seriously need to get a life if you have the time to disect a freaking show from the 60's, type it all up on here and then seriously even ponder all the crap you wrote? Whoa.

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You've hit on something that happens in a lot of shows, especially the shows from the 50's, 60's and early 70's. You'll find a lot of inconsistencies, actions that would be pretty unbelieveable in real life and obvious jumps in story lines that just leave you scratching your head. On top of that, Family Affair was really a unique show in that it was a lot more of a Dramedy- sure it was a sitcom, but there was a lot more drama there than in the usual ha-ha-ha, joke-a-minute sitcom.

I love this show, so this is not an attack on it when I say I think I know where you're coming from. When you watch television, especially some of our favorite classic shows, it is best to not overthink any of what you see. The window washing situation you described- yeah, obviously there were a lot of unrealistic details- a guy way up high with no harness and just kibitzing with kids through the wide open window. In real life, this would hardly happen, but this is television where the overall story and lesson comes first.

Overall, in televison, nobody really talks or reacts or behaves entirely as they would in real life- besides, when you have a story to tell in some 20-plus minutes, often you throw out total realism for the sake of drama or comedy.

So when you watch this or any show, expect that you're going to see a lot of stuff that just isn't completely true-to-life. In other words, don't think so hard about it. You'll get a major headache!

Oh, and don't dis my girl Cissy! The way you describe her behavior in that episode is usually the standard televison writer's idea of what a girl does to make her boyfriend jealous. Or they wanted to show Cissy as just a young girl who, like most any girl-or guy- can sometimes easily fall for the person who seems exciting and new, but later they learn the lesson that flashy isn't always better. It may have been out of character for Cissy, but hey, the character can only behave as the writers pencil her in.

So don't be calling her a tramp kiddo!

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Thanks for the interesting post, highwatermark9.

However, Cissy did not learn that new is not better in that episode. She just ended up not marrying the new boy because she realized she'd be stuck in the Peace Corps alone for 2 years or more, and he would be finished his term in the Peace Corps just as hers is starting up. If they were able to do it at the same time she woulda went right ahead and married him.

I was shocked at Cissy's behaviour in this episodes as prior to this episode I thought she was a respectable girl. If your girlfriend did that to you what would you call her? I thought tramp was one of the more polite terms that fits the situation. :)

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I apologize for my flippant remark about the drugs, it wasn't called for. I guess I just couldn't believe that you were getting so worked up about a show from an era when people weren't so sensitive about things like toxic waste.

I'm in the process right now of watching Seasons 2 and 3, and really, a lot of things in this show aren't realistic, but you just have to remember this is from a different time.

For instance, the episode where the little gang of boys called the Daredevils show up at the door looking for Jody and they really aren't very polite when French first answers the door, and the fact that Uncle Bill nor French seemed concerned about Jody wanting to join a gang just isn't very realistic by today's standards.

Sissy goes off to Viena and thinks she's going to marry the guy and live happily ever after there. Not only does she not even really know him, it's totally unreal that his parents would accept the marriage. If they really are some kind of royalty or landed gentry, they would expect their son to marry equally, not some silly girl from NYC.



"You can't tell me nothin' if you ain't had an 8-track." -Sinbad

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Cissy is MY GIRL!! I met Kathy Garver at the 2002 Pomona Fair!

MAGIC=Sarah Silverman.

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[deleted]

My gir,too! Don't dis her!

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As much as I liked this show, there were a couple of things that totally annoyed me:

1) Mr. French taking EVERYTHING the kids say so seriously! Come on, kids do say things they don't mean or far-out stuff, but don't overreact to it. "CHILDREN!"

2) Cissy's attitude towards various boyfriends she had. I'm talking about the episode where she gets a makeover to get the older boys to like her when there was an equally nice boy who liked her as she was.

3) the various guilt trips from either the kids or their friends. I'm like, "Oh lord, another guilt trip, don't fall for it"

4) Uncle Bill seems to mumble a lot, does he? I had to turn up my Tv just to hear waht he says

5) The sense that they had to be these PRACTICALLY PERFECT PEOPLE ALWAYS, as Mr. French stresses. "I will have you looking like a raggamuffin" or "You must always wear a dress to dinner". That same edict goes for the people they associate with, for example: The episode where Cissy and a group of kids are dancing in the apartment and Uncle Bill was like "you need to be a high-class lady" when he is talking to her later on. I totally rolled my eyes and was in plain disgust.

6) Things or situations the kids should have figured out for themselves without having to have Uncle Bill step in.

7) the fear of break-ups in the family or no one getting loved. Stop trippin! Nobody's going anywhere and no one's gonna take the other's place in your hearts. Examples: the ballerina buffy episode and the rodeo cowboy visit episode.

These are just things I noticed by watching the 3 seasons on DVD.

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[deleted]

First, this is a TV show--not real life.
It was set in the 1960's and some things you did then, people do not do today.
Mr. French was supposed to be a proper English gentleman's gentleman and he expected a certain level of behaviour and decorum. For that matter, girls didn't wear pants to school, or anywhere but the playground after school. Women might wear pants to go grocery shopping and around the house, but if you were going out to eat, church, school, you wore a dress. So Mr. French was not unusual about making the kids come to the table dressed properly.
Some things people did let children do earlier such as go get a newspaper or go to the store alone--it was a safer time.
But even as a child watching the show, you knew some of the plots were a bit far-fetched--but you knew it was TV and not real life.

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Well hey ThreeFingerMary, glad I sold the show to you. My criticisms aren't meant as a "don't watch this crap" kind of way, there are merely observations worth discussing.

Although I do think it would be unwise to let young children watch the show unsupervised lest it teaches them to go play in a biohazard dump and thus gives them some weird terminal diseases from that.

I myself enjoy the show solely for Sebastian Cabot who does an immaculate job, however I don't see how anything else on the show is entertaining. But for those who do, good for you, doesn't bother me that you do. :)

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MOST people still do most of those things today...and that still should be the way it ius. BTW going out earlier is better than going in the evening, even back then especially in Manhattan..would Buffy and Jody even on TV be safe walking around NYC instead of in the penthouse (Cissy, being nearly adult, IS a different matter..) PS The pic of modern actress Brittt Robertson in IMDB shows her wearing a dress and same with some other modern females so it is not being replaced, heck, on the other even girls's current 1960s/70s fashions included bell bottoms as much as guys (and ironically in the early 60s Mary Tyler Moore popularized Capri Pants on the Dick Van Dyke Show...Judy Jetson on the Jetsons wore BOTH hot mini skirt before it was fashionable AND slacks!!! LOL)

Good point .. anyway, what was mentioned is actually what majkes it a more timeless kind of show as all of this is in...

..you should have said, and sadly..since people should still do that....

Amanda Bynes is hot and Lindsay Lohan is not.
Profile pic: Courtney Thorne-Smith.

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Oh, this show had a lot of bizarre stuff, whether it was Uncle Bill dictating a letter to his secretary stating that he wanted to get rid of Cissy, or the fact that Jody develops a huge crush on his teacher, and Cissy actually has to point out to Bill that the woman is a dead ringer for the children's late mother. It was kind of the "Little House on the Prairie" of family sitcoms, supposedly made for young children, but with all kinds of dramatic weirdness.

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Hahaha, I know exactly what you mean. You left out the most bizzare episode that I've personally seen (I havent watched them all yet) --- I challenge anyone to say this WASN'T a bizzare episode. #88. Season 3 - "My Man, the Star" First aired: 4/14/1969

Mr French is tricked into starring in an adult XXX film. These filmakers come up to French in Central Park and say he's a dead ringer for Henry the Eighth, and beg him to play the role. He completely refuses to have anthing to do wth it, but those other British Nannies and Gentlemen as well as the kids and Uncle Bill convince him to do it.

He arranges a premire screening for the NY British Community, but Uncle Bill sees the film and discovers the Henry the XIII scenes cut into an Adult film.
Meanwhile all the Brits are excited to see this distinguished piece of Cinema.

Uncle Bill has to threaten the sleazy producer and pay a few thousand to buy up all the prints, and lie about how the negative burned up.

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It wasn't an "adult" film. It was a silly comedy.

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Now if ALL of you LOSER are done DISSING one of my ALL TIME FAVORTIE show then the lot of you can STFU !

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It was 1966-1971 era. What is bizarre? Kids rode bikes without helmets, skateboarded, roller skated etc without helmets , knee or elbow pads. There were no infant/toddler car seats and rode in laps of adults or laying on the seat of the car and cars didn't even have seat belts. Oh here's one, kids actually played outside and stayed there all day long. It was bizarre that the children roamed NY city alone and roamed in the Park. Remember Jodi doing odd jobs for the market as a bag boy and Buffy walking dogs?

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