Father Knows Best is a classic, stereotypical happily married couple with two point five children television situation comedy from the 1950s. Father went to work and made the money. Mother stayed at home and raised the kids. The kids went to school and followed a self imposed dress code, because it was the right thing to do. This was not reality, but people liked to watch it and pretend that it was.
Weeds is one of the newer stereotypical television situational comedy, only the situation is that a widowed mother has to make ends meet anyway that she can. She choses to sell drugs to get by, marijuana to be precise. In the very first episode we find the lady of the house buying and sell weed. She is not really concerned that being a drug dealer might be a bad thing. Her fifteen year kid is thinking about having sex and it isn’t even the first time. The son’s girlfriend tapes her father having sex with a woman other than her mother and arranges for her mother to see the tape. This is not reality, but people like to watch it and pretend that it.
Are there more serial killers since CSI became the model for every crime drama on TV? Did watching Father Knows Best make people behave better than they do now? Does watching Weeds make normal law abiding people want to take up dealing a bit of toke on the side? Is the fact that everyone on every Soap Opera is related to everyone else by the strange nepotism of soap plots sending a bad message to all those people that watch? I like to think that I don’t care about advertisements, that I can make up my own mind without some clever copy telling me what to do. But I still go to the store and pick up the brands I know and not the ones I have never heard of before.
There was a story not too long ago that young girls are watching porn movies as instructional videos. Every woman watching this story was shocked and appalled, every man said, so what’s the problem here? Porn is not reality, even if the sex is real and people like to watch it and pretend that it is.
The real world is messy, emotional, expensive, time consuming, infuriating, depressing, awe inspiring, confusing, tedious, all too brief and then it is over. Television, even great television, is still just television. But you might want to look at what you think is funny and wonder a bit about it. What if it was reality?
