Television and Everyday Life

FAMILY TEXTS
Lynn Spigel (1992) traces the rise of the situation comedy on the television
screens of post-war America. In doing so she provides an account of the ways
in which this particular genre, a hybrid product drawing on both legitimate
and vaudeville theatrical traditions, became a staple of American television of
the time. It offered family entertainment within an increasingly formulaic mould.
The formula claimed a certain kind of aesthetic realism in terms of its ability
to provide recognisable images of contemporary family life, but it also preserved
a self-conscious and reflexive theatricality, reflecting on the artificiality of
everyday life, and preserving the screen as a proscenium arch. In doing this
television created a genre which had a much wider historical resonance. As
Spigel points out, it preserved something of the same kind of domestic culture
that had been established by Victorian middle-class households. In an echo of
Benjamin’s observation which began this chapter she also points to the
bourgeois sitting room as the site for the theatrical construction of the family:
In fact, at midcentury, bourgeois Victorians were so fascinated with
theatricality that they literally turned their parlors into theatres, staging
plays with friends and family members in their homes…these ‘parlor
theatricals’ were sold in books that people purchased and adapted to their
own use at parties. Using their front parlor as a proscenium space and
their back parlor as a backstage area, Victorians constructed theatrical
spaces, even adorning entrance and exit ways in the home with curtains
and other decorations.
(Spigel, 1992, 162)
The home as theatre is an idea that survives on and through television, but it is
a family theatre, in which families participate both as audiences and players.
Spigel comments too on another aspect of the reflexivity of the genre. These
programmes offered an opportunity for Americans to see how the fictional TV
families came to terms with television, both as performers (Burns and Allen
were enormously inventive in their taming of the new medium) and as
consumers (episode after episode of family sit-coms included scenes around
the television set, and discussions of its significance for family life).
I have already referred to Mary Beth Haralovich’s (1988) analysis of the
ideological significance of family sit-coms during a sightly later period (the
late fifties), linking their popularity to the specific historical demands to
reestablish family life in the US after the war, and to provide models of
appropriate domesticity, particularly for the housewife (or homemaker)
newly ensconced in suburbia. These family sit-coms provided a less
theatrical and more realistic version of family life, offering a kind of
naturalism which would demand a less self-conscious identification of
viewer to screen, and a version of the suburban family increasingly
represented through the lives of the young.

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42
Television and Everyday Life
There are a number of different issues raised by these examples, apart from
the obvious problems of periodisation. The first is one that Spigel (1992, 163)
herself raises when she suggests that: ‘Postwar Americans…must, to some
degree, have been aware of the theatrical, artificial nature of family life’. Maybe,
maybe not. At issue, of course, is the methodological and substantive question
of being able to read ideological implications from the analyses of texts, as
well as making assumptions about how they will be read and the values and
attitudes of those reading them. But it is also a question of being able to recognise
a more complex representational world than might at first be imagined. This
complexity resides in the variety of images of the family even within the sit-
com genre; it resides in the genre’s historical development and its responsiveness
to a wider set of ideological concerns; it resides in the representation of families
outside the genre and the skewing of the image of the family relative to the
world of real families; and it resides in the way in which idealised models of
family life have provided an invisible structuring of sit-coms based in other
settings.
All these issues are addressed, in one way or another, in the literature. With
respect to the first and second, Ella Taylor (1989) has analysed the interrelationship
of social, political, industrial and ideological factors that in the post-war years
resulted in the particular and changing character of the episodic series and situation
comedy. She identifies both the industry’s increasing need for a middle-class,
middle-brow, mass audience, as well as the chronic but differently focused
anxieties about the status of the family in American society as key determinants
of the emergent genres. Their politics, as well as the politics of the TV families,
fluctuates too between a solid and reflective reinforcement of middle-class white
values, to ones which, either in the espousal of alternative family structures 
(The
Golden Girls, My Two Dads)
or in other ways 
(All in the Family),
provide a more
critical gloss on the status of the family in American society.
The genres too have become increasingly blurred in outline, as family series
and sit-coms take on, both seriously and parodically, versions of feminism or
versions of ethnicity. Taylor’s analysis and critique of 
The Cosby Show,
to take
a case, exemplifies the complex dialectics of politics, ethnicity, domesticity
and generalised anxiety, that appear relevant to an understanding of its particular
leached blandness. 
The Cosby Show
offers one version of family that can really
be understood only through an analysis of its place within contemporary politics,
its relationship to a generic history, and its function as one element in a mythic
television discourse (Lévi-Strauss, 1968) which has the problem of the family
at its centre.
With respect to the third dimension of the family’s representation on
television, Gunter and Svennevig (1987) review a number of studies that have
attempted to chart the degrees of distortion and exclusion that mainstream
television images generate relative to the variety of family types and experiences
present in contemporary society. In reporting on research conducted in the

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Television and a place called home
43
US, the UK, Hungary, Australia and Denmark, they point to a number of
predictable conclusions, pertinent, for example, to the under-representation of
working-class and black families; the continuing manifestation of patriarchy
within family life; the ideology built into the differential representation of
wealthy families, who are usually unhappy, compared to poor families who,
(surprise, surprise) are usually seen as contented; and the presence of family
conflicts which tend to be between spouses or siblings rather than cross-
generational.
The problem of course with this and other analyses of content is that of their
interpretation. As Gunter and Svennevig (1987, 49) themselves point out: ‘the
significance of television families for the audience and the lessons about family
life which they present, can only be inferred’. There is no guarantee, as many
analysts have recently noted (esp. Liebes and Katz, 1991), that audiences will
see programmes, or families on programmes, in predictable ways.
The final dimension of the family’s representation on television is that of
its structural presence in other settings. Ella Taylor (1989) and Paul Kerr (1984)
have both pointed to the ways in which families have provided a model for the
social organisation of the workplace. 
The Mary Tyler Moore Show, M*A*S*H,
Lou Grant, Hill Street Blues
and many others have seen in the family a version
of social life that has wider relevance. The family is a mechanism for humanising
the otherwise alienating worlds of work. But there is more to it even than this.
In the transition from home to work family becomes community in which the
gemeinschaft
values that have their origin in the family are extended and
transformed. In this transition, Ella Taylor appears to be suggesting, the tortured
complexities of the family are being left behind in a compensating image of
the workplace as home.
Once again it would be pointless to try and adjudicate between these
competing images of family or their ideological significance. What I want to
stress is that television’s status as a domestic medium and its role in our own
perceptions of domesticity—especially in this case of the family—are
inextricably, though always inconclusively, linked to the images and narratives
that appear on its screen. Situation comedy, especially, has offered those images
and narratives. What we do with them of course is still an open question. I will
return to it.
I want now however to focus on the final dimension of television’s role in
our domesticity, and that is in relation to the economics, politics and culture of
the household.