The Ten Best FAMILY TIES Episodes of Season One
https://jacksonupperco.com/2021/12/01/the-ten-best-family-ties-episodes-of-season-one/
It is often lazily repeated that the sitcom in the 1980s was “dead” until The Cosby Show debuted in 1984. Although such a statement is obviously hyperbole, ignoring some key shows that had premiered prior (like Cheers), this pithy remark does speak to a few truths — one being that The Cosby Show was indeed the most popular sitcom of the 1980s, and it has since served as the fulcrum around which we perceive the rest of the era, just like I Love Lucy is our primary point of reference in the 1950s, and the 1970s hinges around the transition from Norman Lear to Garry Marshall. Additionally, like the culture at large, most decades in TV tend to take a few years to settle into the identities that most define them, shedding the remnants of the previous era’s shows and values in the process. So, it’s fair to say that the early ’80s’ landscape was riddled with aging ’70s comedies that were no longer as good as they once were, and it wasn’t until 1984, with the arrival of an obvious smash hit like The Cosby Show, that it become possible to track a new trend, one that would naturally accelerate because of The Cosby Show but had actually been percolating before it — Family Ties being the most visible predictor — thereby giving the sitcom new direction. I’m referring, specifically, to the traditional family comedy, with parents and kids, a home setting, and uncomplicated stories about growing up and learning relatable life lessons. This, as you know, is not my favorite subgenre of sitcommery, for I think shows in this category are often loaded with storytelling clichés that both undermine character and aren’t great for comedy. Exhibit A is the form’s over-reliance on kids, for unless a young player is defined with a consistent, individual perspective — and typically they’re not, because they have to be maneuvered to support all different kinds of weekly morality tales, forcing a certain broad-brush malleability to their depictions — they tend to become more plot device than character, as we’re not able to ascribe a clear decision-making process to their choices, and if we can’t do that, we’re also not able to attach to them a pattern of behavior, which means they can’t believably motivate stories or laughs. (Immaturity is a fine justification, but it’s not a personal impetus that makes a driving force; it’s just a blanket excuse for otherwise cookie-cutter plots.)share
Indeed, many of these shows have a formulaic blandness, with a lack of humanity because of impersonalization and minimal humor because of a mitigated concern over building characters for comedy. So, again, these sitcoms tend not to be my favorite. But they were widespread in the 1950s (and even the ’60s), and saw a renaissance in the 1980s, following a decade more defined by an expanding number of workplace comedies and the fairly new “hangout” subset, as the biggest family sitcoms of the 1970s were outliers: All In The Family and Happy Days — the former dominated by its political ideology and the topical stories for which the family structure was merely a conduit, and the latter an overcorrection, with unserious nostalgia informing its use of everything — intentionally throwing back to an unthoughtful representation of the ’50s/’60s. Updating this subgenre would be up to the 1980s — the most conservative era in this country (politically) since the ’50s, sparking a new baby boom and a renewed commercial case for reinforcing the nuclear family unit. Like the 1960s, these thematic interests weren’t strictly reserved for shows with two-parent households and a set of biological kids though — often there might be some wrinkle, like a single-parent design with another proxy figure (a butler, a nanny, a relative, etc.), or some other slightly higher concept trapping to provide a hook for story (like a rags-to-riches or fish-out-of-water yarn). However, many of these “modified family” sitcoms were still largely adherent to the “traditional family” ethos, with the “wrinkle” not providing much by way of week-to-week differentiation, just a theoretical nod that might give some cover to the shoddy character work. And, as with the 1960s, this emphasis on family — with The Cosby Show epitomizing the trend in 1984 — also led to a backlash in the latter half of the decade, when more shows began to lampoon or comment upon domesticity, adding a more genuinely comedic disruption, via high-concept supernatural gimmicks (see: Alf), an overt sense of satire (see: Married… With Children), or even a general trend towards metatheatricality, as the entire genre became keener on telegraphing awareness about its limitations than upholding the falseness that family sitcoms of the ’80s seemed to exemplify, with their trite morality tales featuring unfunny, undefined, and unbelievable leads.