Channeling the Zeitgeist or Changing it: Golden Girls, Cosby, Designing Women, Murphy

[TMC]

http://www.oneutah.org/2011/04/chann...-murphy-brown/

Back in the day, The Cosby Show was must see TV. It was a ratings powerhouse. But it’s hard to find it in reruns. Same for Murphy Brown and Designing Women. But, you can see Golden Girls nightly on at least two stations.

I got thinking about this situation a while back and rented some shows.

Golden Girls was by far the funniest of these shows. Almost every episode has a laugh out loud moment and in lots of episodes the writers seemed to go out of their way for a laugh even if it meant undermining a moment of genuine emotion (a favorite gag of mine – Dorothy and Sophia are bonding after a fight “I love you ma,” “I love you pussycat” the doorbell rings Sophia says, “Who can that be?” Dorothy replies “Probably the schmaltz police”). If for no other reason, that helps explain why Golden Girls is still running – twenty five plus years on, it’s still funny.

Designing Women was less funny than very special and tried to deliver a message way too often. Almost every episode has a moment of high schmaltz and not enough laugh outloud moments; most of the topical humor has aged badly. Murphy Brown was too topical to have aged well, and the writers took too much pleasure in taking Murphy down a peg or two in too many episodes. Both shows tried to capture the zeitgeist and succeeded and as a result they are interesting pop culture artifacts.

So what about The Cosby Show? To be honest, I was struck in just a few episodes by how offensive the character of Cliff Huxtable actually was – to his family and to viewers. Much of Cliff’s “humor” was smirking adolescent snottiness dressed up as paternal wisdom. He was forever insulting the intelligence of those around him, snidely denigrating his wife and children for not being as wise as he was. Importantly, Cosbycaptured and channelled the 1980s zeitgeist about family. Cliff was portrayed as latter day father knows best, smugly dispensing nuggets of wisdom to guide his hapless, modern family through the trials and tribulations of life; he was always right and always delivers his lesson with an air of superiority, lessons which were often retrograde 50s moralizing. Cosby captured and channelled 1980s zeitgeist – fears about family disintegration and uncertainty about fatherhood and the role of fathers in people’s lives – and comforted viewers by assuring them that not only are fathers important, they are essential. In an era gripped by discussions of deadbeat dads and single moms and latchkey kids, Bill Cosby and his writers offered an anodyne, consoling vision of family in which the father is the center of gravity around which everyone else revolves. Bill Cosby’s smirking condescension was mostly invisible in 1980s but watching it today it is every bit as big a throwback as Desi and Lucy’s twin beds. Cosbywas the most prominent of a host of mostly forgettable set 80s sitcoms that told the same story – father knows best, family is hugely important. Like those other shows, Cosby has become a rather dull cultural artifact telling us that we have to havefamily and that we will always return the warm bosom of our family because we have to come back to our family because no one else will ever love us as good or a wholly.

Golden Girls, however, remains culturally relevant. Again, 25+ years on, the episodes are still funny – no one, I mean no one, could do a deadpan one liner like Bea Arthur. Golden Girls had a top flight cast – the four actresses were all amazingly talented and could sing and dance and deliver a funny line. Estelle Getty in particular had a knack for delivering a one-liner that few other actresses have ever demonstrated. And yes, lots of episodes had messages, but it was rare that the writers let the message get in the way of a good joke. But there’s more to it than that. In lots of ways, Golden Girls captured the zeitgeist but also transcended it. Episodes were built around the concept of friends as family; many of the best sitcoms implicitly or explicitly employed that same meme – Friends, Mary Tyler Moore, I Love Lucy, The Jeffersons, Will and Grace all successfully created a group of characters whose ties of friendship create family; Joss Whedon’s shows explore similar territory.

Rewatching episodes today, the outfits are dated and some of the cultural references are dated, but Golden Girls is still telling a fundamentally appealing story about people and relationships that remains relevant. Golden Girlscaptured much of the 80s zeitgeist in storylines about divorce and sexuality and family, but rather than simply capturing it, the show’s creative team were able to change it – they treated older women as complete persons, not just wisecracking grannies. Here were four women over 50 portrayed leading full lives without having “a man”, and who relied one another to get through the day. More importantly, Golden Girls at its best captures life honestly – love, heartbreak, aging, friendship and family were shown with an unblinking honesty. At the end of the day, the characters return to the bosom of the family they created to sit in the kitchen, eat cheesecake and laugh and cry together because they chose to be a family. They didn’t have to love one another and they weren’t bound together by guilt or blood or habit; it was a family of choice grounded in the deepest of human emotions.

[factsoflife]

I have to agree wholeheartedly with this entire post...