Sitcom Infantalization and the Death of America

It’s not difficult to peg precisely when the American sitcom moved away from following the lives of mature adults to idealizing the lives of overgrown adolescents. But there’s no question that two generations of Americans have now grown up in a world where virtually everyone worth watching on television is a twentysomething to thirtysomething without a home, a spouse, children, or even a solid job in many cases.

That transition began with the modern shift of the early 1970s, when CBS led the way in moving from traditional situation comedies like Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies to more urban-centered comedies like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and All in the Family. Both of those shows focused on non-traditional situations. The Mary Tyler Moore Show focused on a single woman living with a roommate while working at a news station. All in the Family focused on a father and mother living with their grown daughter and son-in-law. The twist: the father was a bigoted moron, and the mother was a good-hearted idiot, while the liberal son-in-law, who didn’t have the ability to provide for his wife, was the smartest one of the bunch.

Fast forward forty years. There are still family-oriented sitcoms, although they all feature non-traditional families being equated to traditional families, or completely dysfunctional traditional families (Modern Family, Glee, Two and a Half Men, Family Guy). There are work-oriented sitcoms, although those sitcoms largely revolve around people who dislike their jobs (The Office, Parks and Recreation). But all of those sitcoms revolve around people who are in their forties.

What of people in their thirties? They are treated like people in their twenties used to be. The Big Bang Theory features late-twenties scientists rooming together, or with their mother, struggling with love; it took five seasons for one of the main characters to get married. Nobody on the show has had children. New Girl features three men living with a woman in an apartment. All are approaching or above age thirty. All but one have dead-end jobs. None are married, none have children.

That used to be the exception rather than the rule. Now, thanks in part to the plethora of television characters who live glorious and fun single lives without responsibility, that’s become the societal ideal. The median age of marriage was stagnant from 1950 to 1970; it was 22.8 for men and 20.3 for women in 1950, and 23.2 and 20.8, respectively, in 1970. As of 2010, the median age of first marriage is now 28.2 among men and 26.1 among women.

As for childbearing the numbers are similarly stunning. The average age for first childbirth for women in the United States is 25, lower than the average age for marriage (no wonder there are such massively rising rates of unwed motherhood across socioeconomic lines). The median age in 1950 was 22.8. That may seem like a minor rise, but as Jonathan Last has pointed out in his fantastic What to Expect When Nobody’s Expecting, a rising age of first birth and a lower age of last birth means fewer children.

Not all of this is attributable to television – not even close. But television, as both a reflective and a transformative medium, has changed how people think about marriage and family. Marriage on television is largely relegated to negativity. Married couples are generally miserable (Everybody Loves Raymond, The Simpsons), while single people lead glamorous lives full of sexy partners and interesting jobs (Sex and the City, Friends). Nobody has to live with the consequences of spending adulthood as in a suspended state of adolescence.

America, however, will. When Americans stop getting married, stop having children, stop aspiring for a home and a homestead, the predictable effect is an unmoored civilization, both morally and economically. We cannot all live in our father-in-law’s house. Someone has to pay the bills. And someone has to pick up the slack for a population that increasingly blows off responsibility for the fleeting fun of college-style living.

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3 Comments Sitcom Infantalization and the Death of America

  1. DanCanada

    Eu am ce am cu ‘lung metraje’ timpite (Hangover 1-3, Grownups etc). Ma mir ca au succes, nu mi se par funny deloc: o gramada de middle age guys complet retardati, poante cretine. Iar un film ca Idiocracy e practic necunoscut. Cit despre cultura rap – gangsta ce sa mai vorbim?

    Bine spunea unu’ Darren Jonesco (o fi roman?) pe AT astazi: „It
    is for that half-white president to stop trying to earn „his props” by
    flaunting his friendship with the millionaire „pimps” and „hoes” of the
    „black entertainment industry” who sell drugs, violence, racism, and sex
    as the secret path to „coolness,” i.e., acceptance, when in truth – as
    the lives of so many of these „entertainers” beyond age thirty prove –
    the heaven they are selling is in fact the pit of an inescapable hell.
    Enough of the White House gala evenings and Michelle Obama tweetings
    about Beyoncé, Jay-Z, and the rest of the creeps, punks, and porn
    stars-cum singers.

    Duke
    Ellington brought American „black entertainment” to the heights, mixing
    his muse comfortably, and on a footing of real equality, with
    Shakespeare and Steinbeck, Tchaikovsky and Grieg, always studying,
    always learning – so that today, his supposed heirs can rant in a
    drugged-up stupor about killing cops and defiling women. Ella Fitzgerald
    became America’s „First Lady of Song” by expanding her repertoire from
    the popular dance tunes of her early days to masterful renderings of
    Gershwin, Porter, and Ellington in the 1950s; her heiresses today slink
    around like strippers using words and images to enliven the basest
    sentiments of the perpetual pubescents that comprise today’s pop music
    audience. Today’s so-called black leaders, including their „beige”
    president (to use Ellington’s phraseology) are firmly on the side of
    the glamorizors of cop-killing, rape, and prostitution. They have
    deliberately squandered or obscured the gains of the twentieth century
    for their own evil, oppressive purposes.”

    Reply
  2. Beavix

    Articolul ăsta e un mare bullshit. Sitcomurile nu fac decât să satirizeze anumite aspecte din viața reală, care s-a schimbat în ultimele decenii nu din cauza sitcomurilor.

    Reply
  3. Nea

    Păi a început mai demult, dinainte de TV. Majoritatea personajelor din literatura englezească pt. copii şi tineri sunt masculi celibatari, uneori animale, alteori oameni, care ar face orice în afară de o nuntă cu dar.

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