#106 Saul Austerlitz: Homer Simpson and The History of Sitcom Dads

NICK FIRCHAU: You know, from time to time I'll get an email or someone will shoot me a text about this show. Not always about the episode or the topic itself, about that intro segment you just heard. If you're a regular listener to Paternal, you know that we sprinkle in different lines from television or films about fathers and men.

And the reason we do that is because one, it's fun, and two, it never ceases to surprise me how many of those lines are out there or how many characters we see in popular culture Most of the men who have complicated relationships with their fathers that stuff is everywhere So that's why you'll hear clips from shows like succession or a Paul Newman film like Hud Or even a Judd Apatow movie like The Forty Year Old Virgin.

But one of the real gold mines for these kinds of clips, and more generally speaking for portrayals of father son relationships, is the genre of television that I grew up with: The American Family Sitcom. 

Now, full disclosure, this is an episode I've been wanting to make for a while. Because it's my contention that if you're like me, a guy who grew up in the 1980s or early 1990s, and who watched a lot of television, the men you saw on the family sitcoms of that era weren't just good for funny clips for a podcast intro.

In some cases, they probably helped shape what you thought a father should look like, and for better or worse, what a family can be. Saul Austerlitz is the guest on this episode of Paternal and he's the man tasked with helping us look back on all of these sitcoms and trying to break down what they meant.

He's a comedy historian and a faculty member at NYU, who teaches courses on writing about American comedy and writing about television drama. He's also the author of six books, including one on the history of sitcoms. One on the history of the hit show, Friends, and most recently, one that looks at the cultural impact of the hit Will Ferrell film, Anchorman.

He's also a husband and father of two kids living in Brooklyn, and the author of a recent essay in The Atlantic entitled, “Dad Culture Has Nothing to Do with Parenting,” which piqued my interest when it came out earlier this year. In that essay, Austerlitz outlined his stance against pejorative terms like dad Dad Rock, Dad Jokes, and Dad Bod, arguing that while the mom prefix often insinuates someone who's busy, but ultimately competent or nurturing, think of mom brain or mom friend, the dad adjective “hints at someone shorn of all responsibilities, end quote.”

Like a dad who is forgiven for being dorky, clumsy, or removed from the day to day responsibilities of being an engaged father. And that, Austerlitz argues, is completely out of line with his experience as a father or the experiences of his male peers. But that dad term, and what it implies, is stubborn.

Ideas and examples of what an engaged dad really looks like are lagging way behind, and Osterlitz argues that one of the problems is due to what we see from dads in popular culture, specifically, Television. “Just look at TV fathers,” Austerlitz writes, “who tend to be either mournful absentees like Ted Lasso, neglectful workaholics like Kendall Roy, or scatterbrained, incompetent sitcom dads Cultural conceptions of what a dad looks like still seem to reveal a lingering discomfort with masculine caregiving, the central work of fatherhood.”

Now, maybe another time we can talk about Walter White or Tony Soprano or Logan Roy, but on this episode, we're going to stick strictly to sitcom dads and how they've evolved over the years. Because in many cases, those dads were some of the first examples of fathers I saw as a kid. And I'm sure it's the same for many people listening.

But I want to start this episode with Austerlitz's essay about dad culture. Austerlitz can embrace the lack of cool associated with that dad adjective. He told me almost immediately that he's perfectly fine being an uncool dad. But that's not the problem. The challenge is how we can break down some of these cultural conceptions of what a dad looks like.

“I've come to believe that clinging to this outdated version of fatherhood prevents us from envisioning a new one,” Austerlitz writes. “One that can both be silly and serious, but that, most important, centers caretaking above all else.”

Here's Saul Austerlitz on Paternal.

SAUL AUSTERLITZ: Yeah, so the specifics of the article, like the discussion about dad bod and dad rock and all of that, that actually came from my terrific editor at the Atlantic, Kate Cray, who had that sort of initial idea. And then for me, the sense that fatherhood or the notion of dads has been diminished or treated as if it's some sort of ludicrous joke is something that irritates me.

It irritates me, I think, in part because it's so not reflective of what I see all around me. And don't get me wrong, I see lots of dads who are not necessarily pulling their full weight. It's not like we have achieved full equality of parenthood in the United States by any means, but I see so many fathers who are really committed to doing the work of being a good parent.

And I think the lack of seeing that reflected in popular culture, whether it's, you know, sort of meme culture on social media or whether it's watching movies and TV shows and seeing how dads are still depicted as, you know, some sort of 1970s or 80s throwback for men, there's still this sense that even when you do become a father, you're still somehow like lying in a hammock or, you know, puttering around in your garage.

And like, there are never any kids there. They're just doing whatever your oddball hobbies are. And that does not at all line up with my life. And it doesn't line up with most of the lives of the men I know who are fathers. The notion of dads as, like, well meaning, bumbling buffoons still is really prevalent and sticks around far past its, its sell by date and just does not seem to really engage with the ways in which contemporary fathers, you know, even by the data, spend so much more time engaged in the actual work of raising their children.

It just felt like there was a gap in the culture that hadn't been filled, where we all know from our daily lives that fatherhood is different than it was for a previous generation. We still don't really see all that many depictions of it in culture, and we're still sort of stuck with older models of fatherhood in some ways.

NICK FIRCHAU: Okay, so where did all these older models of fathers come from? If you imagine a father lying in his hammock or idly killing time in his tool shed, while mom attends to the kids. How did that image find its way into your head? In many cases, the answer is television. Now we're going to talk a lot about the good dads and the bad ones we've seen on television over the years? And why the family sitcom has largely disappeared over the past two decades.

But let's start from the beginning. Some of the first widely popular sitcoms on television were not actually family sitcoms. In the early 1950s, shows like I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners focused more on relationships and marriage than raising kids. But by the mid 1950s, television producers figured out how to move away from live broadcasts and create taped shows, where they could smooth out the wrinkles of production and create perfectly scripted stories of nuclear American families. As a result, shows like Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, and The Donna Reed Show took their place as some of the first popular family sitcoms.

And in those shows, the fathers seemingly always wore suits and ties and slipped in and out of the house on their way to the office. Sometimes creating more problems than they solved. 

SAUL AUSTERLITZ: The most interesting thing about the early sitcom is that it's very much about family life. It's designed to be a domestic art form. It's designed to be watched at home, in, sitting in our living rooms, and we're watching other families kind of reflected back to us. So it's a very middle class medium. And so the sitcom is really designed to reflect back a very specific kind of middle class American experience.

And they very much are of the model where you've seen one, you've seen them all. Father Knows Best is kind of a good example. It actually got started, I believe, as a radio program. And the initial title had a question mark in it because the implication was that father definitely did not know best. And so I think one of the funny things about Father Knows Best that I took note of when I was looking at it a few years ago is that the dad is very much in this kind of bumbling model, things always work out for the best and he never does any real harm and means well and all of that, but he also is very much somebody who is often at a loss for how to best manage family life and is often making mistakes that are then repaired by everyone else. So I think it's kind of built into the DNA of the sitcom that the dad role often be kind of someone who is bungling, uh, what's otherwise a very carefully controlled situation. 

NICK FIRCHAU: Obviously a show like Father Knows Best completely predates me, and I would assume the majority of the listeners to this podcast. But I do remember as a kid watching Leave It to Beaver when it ran as reruns after school.

And from what I remember of Ward Cleaver, or maybe largely speaking what the dads of that era. They all wore suits to work or a shirt and tie, whatever it was. And I don't actually remember Ward Cleaver really being on the show that much. Like, he would just appear at dinner or something. And then he would kind of offer some kind of advice for Wally and the Beav. And then he would disappear. That seems to be what I remember of those dads. 

SAUL AUSTERLITZ: Yeah, the dads are pretty removed from domestic life. I think those are the main takeaways for dads of that era. One is that they're off to work, right? They're off to their middle class office jobs. And yeah, I think you're exactly right that they, they come in, they bestow their wisdom, offer the inspiring life lessons to the kids, but that's sort of the extent of their job for the most part.

It's like, you know, a satellite office that they have to check in with occasionally to make sure everything's running well, and then they go back to where they belong.

NICK FIRCHAU: I was looking back at some of the shows from the 1960s and specifically the sitcoms or the family sitcoms where we might see some dads walking around. And I was surprised that, you know, despite everything that happened in the 1960s, all the cultural change, especially in the, in the latter half of the decade, The shows very much look the same as the 1950s, like the big, some of the biggest shows of the 60s, like Andy Griffith, The Addams Family, Gilligan's Island, these kinds of shows. It looks like sitcoms didn't evolve much at all from the 50s. 

SAUL AUSTERLITZ: Yeah, I would say, you know, the 60s television is distinctly behind the times, right? There's a famous essay by John Leonard where he talks about watching television in 1968, this, you know, epical year of disruption in American life. And he was saying that unless he was watching the news, he saw no reflection of all of the catastrophes that have befallen the country anywhere on TV.

And so I think like you're saying, you know, TV doesn't really start to catch up with what's happening in the world at large until the early 1970s. And so, yeah, the sixties in particular, feel like kind of a wasteland for television with some exceptions like the Dick Van Dyke show, but most of the shows are less sophisticated than the ones that had preceded them in the fifties. They’re less invested in saying anything at all interesting about the world at large.

NICK FIRCHAU: So we get out of the 1960s and into the 70s, and I think this is where things begin to change a little bit. Because in 1971 we get what I think is the first father who breaks that Leave it to Beaver, Dick Van Dyke mold on television where the father is the main character, he is the sort of the straw that stirs the drink, and that's Archie Bunker on All in the Family.

That was the most watched show on television as soon as it came out. Carol O'Connor, the actor who played Archie Bunker, ended up winning four Emmys for playing Archie. It's this iconic character in television. How was Archie Bunker different from the other dads that came before him? 

SAUL AUSTERLITZ: Yeah, so, you know, Norman Lear creates All in the Family and it's inspired in part by a British show, but Lear also describes it as being inspired by his own father and by the conversations he would have with him.

And yeah, I think the thing that we get here is that we get a character who is designed at least to be quite ugly. He has all sorts of reprehensible points of view, who's often behaving in a fashion that's very different from what we've come to expect on TV. He's not the fathers from Father Knows Best or Leave it to Beaver or even the Dick Van Dyke show.

He's someone who's presented as mean spirited, lashing out at people, lashing out at his family, not very pleasant or polite to his wife or his children or son in law.

I think Norman Lear was definitely hoping that it would be popular. I think he was. Expecting or hoping that it would be seen as a kind of devastating takedown of Nixon's moral majority. That this was like the definitive satire of people like Archie Bunker and the things that they said and thought and did.

And people instead love Archie Bunker. They think all the things he's saying are terrific and they wish he would say more of it.

In terms of this question of fatherhood, I think it really opens up the floodgates to more realistic depictions of fathers, and maybe also to depictions of fathers as being kind of negative forces in their family, not just the guy who sort of pats kids on the head and says, You know, good job Timmy, or better luck next time. But people who are really, you know, Archie is an angry character. He's someone who is angry at the younger generation. He's angry at the directions that the world has gone. And the whole show is kind of like Archie in his living room, lashing out at everything he sees in the world around him and using his family as his punching bag.

NICK FIRCHAU: I think one of the differences that that we should point out is that the difference between Archie Bunker and some of those other uh, You know 1950s and 60s sitcoms is that Archie's kids are grown so we don't See him actively parent like the other guys did and I wonder if that freed up Norman Lear and his writers to write material They couldn't otherwise create if it was a father speaking to a young kid And the way that Archie and his kids and they're grown were able to have Like mature conversations about the politics and the moment that made the show revolutionary at the time.

And if I catch a rerun of that show on Nick at Nite, it still feels groundbreaking. 

SAUL AUSTERLITZ: It definitely still feels groundbreaking. I think it does things that would be challenging to do now. Right. I think it would be hard to have a sitcom where dad was like wearing a MAGA hat and talking about Donald Trump all the time.

I don't, I don't think it would be easy to pull that off and have it be functional for the audience, but yeah, I think you're pointing at something interesting as well, which is that part of what makes the show work or makes it work in the way that it does is that Archie gets as good as he gives, right?

So he's lashing out, but his daughter and son in law are punching right back at him. I think the show would feel very different if he was doing the same kinds of things. And the kids were, you know, 10 years old.

NICK FIRCHAU: We have to say up to this point, I think, that we've been talking about shows with entirely white casts, right, all the way through the 50s and the 60s. And that changes in the 1970s, finally, with shows like The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son, and Good Times. But up until that point, you're talking about the mid 70s or so, and then obviously into the late 70s, We just didn't see a lot of diversity on family sitcoms.

There were very few people of color. Everyone was straight. Um, I think it just has to be said that as we think about how fathers are portrayed for millions of Americans, they were all white up until the seventies. 

SAUL AUSTERLITZ: Yeah, and Norman Lear is really the, the crucial figure who expands the horizons of what television can do and what it's interested in doing.

And so after creating All in the Family, he ends up also creating shows like The Jeffersons. And you know, I think, I think it's clearly connected with audiences. And like you're saying, I think the seventies are really that first kind of golden age of sitcoms and family shows in particular that aren't just about white middle class families.

NICK FIRCHAU: I'm Nick Firchau, and this is Paternal. If you're like me and you grew up largely in the 1980s, you experienced what was something of a golden age of family sitcoms. But the decade certainly didn't start out that way. All in the Family came to the end of its nine year run in 1979. And in those first few years of the 80s, the top scripted shows on television were either primetime soap operas like Dallas and Dynasty, the roommate dating comedy Three's Company, or cops and detective shows, like Magnum, P. I. and Simon and Simon.

By the mid 1980s and into the latter years of that decade though, family sitcoms were everywhere and family sitcom dads were a very different breed of man than Archie Bunker. Shows like Family Ties and Growing Pains were consistently among the top shows on TV in the mid 80s. And the dads on those kinds of shows were engaged fathers. 

And in some cases, they were swimming upstream like no other father had on TV before. The 80s had so many family sitcoms with great dads, that sometimes the men cast aside antiquated gender roles for the sake of their kids. Like when Tony Danza became a live-in housekeeper on Who's the Boss?

Or sometimes, multiple men banded together to make up for a lack of a mother, like the Paul Reiser comedy, My Two Dads. Or maybe most notably, Full House, where Bob Saget, Dave Coulier, and John Stamos played men raising three young girls in San Francisco After the sudden death of their mother, 80s dads worked for non profits, they were teachers, doctors, psychiatrists, news anchors, and police officers.

And no matter what your favorite 1980s family sitcom was, or which TV dad you admired, They all trace their success back to one family sitcom that defined the decade.

The Cosby Show made its debut on September 20th, 1984, and by the 85-86 season was the top show on television, the Emmy winner for Best Comedy Series, and an estimated 62 million people tuned in every Thursday night on NBC to watch The Huxtables. 

Now, it's impossible to talk about The Cosby Show without mentioning the crimes of its star Bill Cosby. I still feel conflicted about watching that show or showing it to my kids, given all that we know now. But however you feel about the legacy of The Cosby Show, it's clear that the series changed what a family could look like on television. And what a father could be. And network executives were quick to try and replicate its success.

And that move shaped the way television played out in the 80s. And as a result, gave young kids like me the opportunity to watch a whole bunch of different men act out the role of TV dad.

SAUL AUSTERLITZ: There were an array of sort of impressive sitcom dads from the 80s. You know, The Cosby Show is obviously a show that has been tainted in many, many ways. But it's hard to talk about television from this era without engaging with The Cosby Show because it was in so many ways like the definitive show of its era.

And I think speaking to the question of parenting, part of what's intriguing about the Cosby show is that not only is it a show about a family, but it's very much a show about raising children, right? Like, to me, one of the, the sort of real strengths of the show was seeing the ways in which Cliff Huxtable engages with his children and teaches them how life lessons and sort of helps them grow always in comedic ways, always in ways where he's sort of poking fun at them.

You know, I remember an early episode from the show where Cliff is talking to his son, the Malcolm Jamal Warner character, and they're sort of discussing his career plans and Cliff demolishes them at, you know, for being totally, uh, not reflective of reality. And you know, he has to sort of get a grip on things, but it's done in such a funny way.

We can feel that love and consideration that the character is expressing, even though it's kind of coming out in this barbed way. And so I think that really influences a lot of the, the conversation. television depictions of dads from the 80s, because we do, I think you're right. We do have a lot of more positive depictions of fathers in that era for shows like Family Ties and Growing Pains that do sort of center dads in the family much more than previous shows had.

NICK FIRCHAU: When it comes to like all these super dads that we see in the mid eighties, all these shows that you and I watched when we were kids, I think about not only that the characters were good dads in the majority of cases, but they were also like theoretically good people and they didn't just disappear down to the factory or some like nondescript office, like in the fifties and sixties, like Cliff Huxtable was a doctor, Mike Seaver's dad on growing pains was a psychiatrist. Uh, Stephen Keaton worked for the public broadcasting channel on Family Ties, they all had admirable jobs. And I'm curious if you have any thoughts on what was responsible for this shift in how these dads were portrayed, because it's very different, I think, than what we saw in the years before.

SAUL AUSTERLITZ: Yeah, I think I'd point to two things. One is that in the 80s, we're returning back to kind of the original fountain of what sitcoms are right? So we had moved away from the notion of, okay sitcoms only take place in homes, right? They're only about families to saying okay, well, what if we have a different kind of family? What if it's a family of people who work together at a news station? What if it's a family of people who are working together as surgeons in Korea, right? 

And then in the 80s, maybe in part because Ronald Reagan is president, maybe in part because things had taken a somewhat more conservative turn, there's this idea of, okay, let's, let's come back to the family stories, right? And the Cosby show, like you had mentioned, is so overwhelmingly popular,  other shows of its ilk emerge as well.

And I do think that there is a generational aspect to changes in fatherhood in particular. And so part of what I was describing in my story is about fathers today, but I think clearly if we're thinking about our fathers, fathers from, you know, our, our parents generation versus their parents, that those fathers also were far more engaged in their children's lives than probably their parents had been, uh, and far more hands-on.

And so yeah. The details may have shifted, but I think the, the general notion that one generation is sort of taking note that its expectation of what fatherhood consists of has changed is really notable. And I think it's, it's like you had mentioned, it's worth acknowledging that some of these dads, some of these sitcom dads are playing roles in which their jobs also are sort of uh, caretaking jobs, right? Cliff Huxtable is an OB GYN, being a therapist, right? These are sort of like, these are jobs in which part of your, your professional role is caring for other people as well.

NICK FIRCHAU: So there were so many of these family sitcoms in the eighties and we've mentioned a few. Um, aside from the Cosby show, which, which I think everybody watched at the time, did you have any other favorite shows of all those 80 sitcoms to choose from? Did you have any other favorite shows? 

SAUL AUSTERLITZ:  Yeah, you know, I also loved as a kid, I loved Roseanne as well. I don't, I don't think I necessarily understood all of the implications of the show when I was 10 or 11 years old and watching it, but television comes and goes in waves And so when something is successful sometimes trying the opposite is also really appealing and the Cosby show everyone is so polite. It's such a polite environment. And yeah, you know, Cliff is always sort of riffing off of his children and dropping zingers on their heads, but it's like a very polite upper middle class environment. And Roseanne is just everyone being mean to each other all the time and kind of being gratuitously nasty. And there was something, I definitely did not grow up in a home like that. And there was something wonderful about seeing it depicted in that way.

NICK FIRCHAU: I'm glad you brought up Roseanne because it was also one of my favorite family sitcoms of the 80s. It was extremely popular too for the, for context, like the Cosby show was the highest rated show in television from 85, 86 until 89, 90. And that was the season when it tied for the top show on TV with Roseanne. Roseanne was the first show to match the Cosby's in terms of viewers. 

John Goodman played the dad on that one, Dan Connor, he gave us a very different father than Cliff Huxtable, the Connors were a very different family than the Huxtables, and I think that proved by the end of the decade that not everyone wanted squeaky clean families or squeaky clean father figures.

SAUL AUSTERLITZ: Yeah, you know, I think we're talking about television as a space where the things that get left out are often what then comes back in, in the next wave, and it's worth noting that with all of these shows prior to Roseanne, and maybe especially the Cosby show as an exemplar of it, these are shows very much about middle class and really upper middle class life, there's not a whole lot of discussion of, you know, um, where does the money come from to pay for all these things?

And I think some of that is just about, you know, television is an aspirational space always. And so we don't necessarily want to hear about people struggling to get by. And we want to see people who live in nice homes and there's an enjoyable aspect to it. But I think Roseanne, part of what makes it so successful is pointing out that not every family lives in a, you know, beautiful brownstone in Brooklyn Heights and that there's finding stories and finding comedy in families that are struggling to get by.

And I think tied in with that, finding comedy in stories of families that are squabbling with each other, right? That don't necessarily talk politely to each other, that aren't necessarily always finding the exact right way to impart the exact right life lesson. And that's part of what the, the joy of the show, at least in its early years, I think was.

NICK FIRCHAU: So up to this point, we've only been talking about the family sitcoms that aired on the three major networks, right? Cosby was on NBC, Roseanne was on ABC, and when it was on during the 1970s, All in the Family was on CBS. Younger listeners might not know or remember this, but there was a time when Fox didn't exist. It didn't come around until 1987, and it's shows, if you remember, really ran counter to what the other networks were doing, especially when it came to family sitcoms. 

And the very first show that aired on Fox was in April 1987, and it was Married with Children, which featured another very different dad in Al Bundy who was played by Ed O'Neil. What did you think of Al Bundy and Married with Children? 

SAUL AUSTERLITZ: Yeah, you know, I think like what you were saying, Fox is kind of carving out its own space and trying to do something that hadn't already been on. And so, you know, Married with Children emerges at that time. A few years later, you have The Simpsons on Fox. And Married with Children is still a pretty starkly crass show.

You know, my wife, when she was a kid. There were no particular rules about what she could and couldn't watch on TV, but her mom was like, you cannot watch married with children like that is the one show that we do not allow here. And I get that.  Uh, it's a very different kind of depiction. I think it wears out its welcome. Like, it's definitely a show where if you've watched two or three episodes of it, you know how the other 300 episodes are going to generally go, which is true of the sitcom in general. And so maybe it's just a personal preference, but that's a show that I have kind of a limited tolerance for.

NICK FIRCHAU: And yet that show was like a huge hit for Fox. It ran for 11 seasons, 259 episodes. It is the longest running live action sitcom Fox has ever made. So there was an audience for that kind of family. 

SAUL AUSTERLITZ: Oh yeah, and I think you're right, you know, the people don't necessarily just want to see kind of glossy, perfectly coiffed, uh, families. They want to see families that are messy also. That that's been kind of a recurring interest in terms of television audiences.

NICK FIRCHAU: Okay. So in that vein, by the late 1980s and early 90s, you have now, I think, three popular shows which I think portray messy families or less than stellar dads, right? You have Married with Children on Fox, Roseanne is on ABC, and then as you mentioned, The Simpsons. My kids have recently begun watching older episodes of The Simpsons, the episodes that I grew up with in the 90s, and they're obsessed with it.

They love Bart and Lisa and the other kids, but In my opinion, anyway, they also laugh at the right times when it comes to Homer, they get his jokes, and they also get that Homer is this lovable but bumbling idiot dad asleep in the hammock, the guy that we were talking about at the beginning of the episode, like, very different from Cliff Huxtable or some of those other 80s dads, and as much as I hate to ask this question because I know the answer, how Has Homer Simpson influenced this archetype of the dad in the hammock, the kind of dad that you wrote about in your article?

SAUL AUSTERLITZ: Yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong. I absolutely love the Simpsons. It's one of my all time favorite shows. And I think that Homer Simpson is just an absolutely brilliant character. You know, the Simpsons now to me seems just like a family values kind of show, but at the time critics and especially people, you know, sort of political commentators treated the Simpsons as if they were the end of the world, right?

I mean, the president of the United States was commenting about how he found the Simpsons to be reprehensible. But yeah, I do think that there are ways in which seeing these kinds of stereotypes consistently propagated, you know, it can have a negative effect. I think one of the interesting things that I've taken note of just because The Simpsons has been on for so long is that some of the parental stuff that the Simpsons did early on, they've had to adjust over time.

So you go back and look at some of the early seasons and like, again, it's a cartoon, right? We all understand it's a cartoon. Homer is choking his children, right? Like that, even in the cartoon world of the Simpsons, that's no longer an okay thing to have happen. 

And I think you were mentioning your kids getting into the Simpsons. My kids have become like intensive scholars of where they can tell me, you know, episode 23. Of season 27 and you know, whatever else, but I think one of the things that I've taken note of in watching some of the more recent seasons, which I hadn't really seen, was that Homer as a parent has changed a little bit. He's still bumbling. He's still bungles stuff. They haven't like revamped his DNA, but he's a little bit more sensitive as a parent and a little bit more attuned to like, who are my children and what do they want? And I think that's been. It's really interesting to take note of that and some of the ways in which the show's DNA has been tweaked a little bit over time.

NICK FIRCHAU: Okay, so by the mid 1990s, Roseanne is still on the air at that point. And so is a show called Home Improvement. That was the one with Tim Allen. That was a really popular show. Another sort of [00:43:00] lovable, but bumbling dad. Fresh Prince of Bel Air was still on at that point, but generally speaking, like something shifts around 93-94.

NBC is like the dominant network at that time, but now it's not because of family sitcoms anymore. It's because of shows like ER, Seinfeld, and Friends. And it feels like this shift paves the way for what comes later in the 90s, and even into the 2000s, and even leading up to now. And that's the decline of the family sitcom. Replaced by like, single and dating comedies, and workplace comedies, and ultimately like, reality game shows or competitions like Survivor and American Idol. What happened in the nineties to the family sitcom? 

SAUL AUSTERLITZ: Yeah. So I, you know, a few years ago I wrote a book about friends and I had a really interesting conversation with Warren Littlefield, who was the president of NBC at the time. And, you know, take his story as you will, potentially with a grain of salt. But he was saying that as he became president, he had taken note that there were, basically no shows that were being made about characters in their 20s. And he felt like being in your 20s was such a formative time of life. And why weren't we telling stories about that?

And the general consensus amongst television executives in that era was well, who is this going to be for? Younger audiences are too young. They don't know what being in your twenties is like. So this is going to be boring for them and they won't watch it. Older generations have already done that. And so they don't want to watch it either.

They want to see shows that are about people who are exactly their age, right? So If you're 40 and you're watching TV, you want to see like a fully settled 40 year old with a family acing it at work, you know, that kind of thing. And Friends is obviously becomes an enormous television success and spawns all kinds of imitators.

And so I think we see that, you know, those changes in terms of what kinds of stories get told over time. And so in the same ways that the seventies is very much about like, professional life and the workplace as being the sort of main hub of sitcom stories. The 90s is very much about groups of friends, right?

So like you have entire shows like Friends and Seinfeld, where basically there are no children. And Friends, I think interestingly, is on for so long that it has to adjust and adapt itself over time. And so you have stories about characters who are getting married and starting families. And there's like a little bit of a reflection of that, but it's basically understood that the point at which family life fully starts, like raising children, is also the point at which the show ends.

And a show like Seinfeld, it just would never do that, right? Like the sort of prime example that I can, that I can think of is, you know, having George get engaged and then having her, his fiance just die in a envelope licking accident because the show is just not interested in that kind of stuff.

Yeah, the 90s are pretty barren in terms of family sitcoms that I think anyone would want to go back and watch today. 

NICK FIRCHAU: Yeah, and if you look at what people were watching, like in the aughts and then into the 2010s, it's American Idol, or it's Dancing with the Stars, it's crime shows like CSI, or it's like roommate comedies again, like Big Bang Theory, those kinds of shows. Family sitcoms, for the most part, are like nowhere to be found. 

In your opinion, what was the last good family sitcom? 

SAUL AUSTERLITZ:  Yeah, I, I point to Blackish, I think, as being one of the best ones from the last few years. And in some ways it's, it's a similar kind of model to what we've been describing, that Anthony Anderson's character is kind of the well meaning but misguided parental figure who's often causing trouble that then has to be fixed by everyone else.

But I think it comes from a very specific perspective. But I think the show is really smartly written and really grounded in real characters. And to me presents an interesting model for a way that family stories can be told.

I do still feel like there is a fairly large gap where we still Especially in this kinds of stories that are being told on, on sitcoms of this nature, there is still that sense of like, okay, mom does the work and then dad comes in and like,  either does the high level stuff or just like messes everything up.

And I get it. It's a, it's a really funny model, but it's definitely not necessarily reflective of contemporary families. And it feels like it's leaving money on the table, right? There are just so many other kinds of stories that can be told. And maybe one of the ways to kind of re envision or re imagine the family sitcom is to change up what the dads look like, change up what the dads do and how they kind of handle family life.

And yeah, I think there are definitely ways to still continue telling these stories, but there does seem to be a decreasing interest in doing so culturally. 

NICK FIRCHAU: Here's the last one for you, Saul. Some of the best memories that I have of my father are watching these sitcoms from the 1980s and the 90s, talking about Cosby Show and Family Ties and Wonder Years, but also like workplace comedies like Cheers and Taxi, those kinds of shows, because it was a time when he was relaxed and he was in a good mood.

He was laughing. And if we laughed together, if we laughed at the same joke, that meant that we were connecting. And now my son watches me watch The Simpsons. When we watch it together, he wants cues. I think anyway, if dad thinks it's funny, it's funny. And watching The Simpsons with him, I kind of realized the other day, like, we don't have these family shows anymore. We don't have Thursday night on NBC or watching Roseanne or Home Improvement or Family Ties or whatever it is. There's so much television out there that we don't watch shows together as much as we used to. And I do feel like we're losing something there. What do you think? 

SAUL AUSTERLITZ: I agree. Yeah, there's, there's a real kind of bonding exercise in watching television together. And it's challenging to find something that kids want to watch and that you as a parent want to watch that's not like painful to sit through. And I think also, and maybe especially for, you know, new fathers who are not exactly sure what it looks like to do their job, because it's hard and you don't know immediately, seeing it reflected in popular culture, they're like, Oh, being a dad isn't just me, like, tossing off some jokes and like heading off to the shed to putter around, but like, really doing the work of, of raising my kids that can have a positive impact, right? 

And culture's point isn't necessarily just to like teach people how to be better versions of themselves. But I think especially with family programming, there is a sense of like, almost like a teaching aspect, right? Of like, this is what, this is what a good family can look like.

NICK FIRCHAU: That's comedy historian, author, professor, husband, and father, Saul Austerlitz. If you're interested in learning more about his work, including his books on friends, the history of sitcoms, or the film Anchorman. Or if you'd like to read his recent essay in the Atlantic entitled “Dad Culture has Nothing to do with Parenting,” we'll put a link in the notes for this episode.