Reflecting the Changing Face of American Society: How 1970’s Sitcoms and Spin-Offs Helped Redefine American Identity

Abstract

When looking back at the popular American situation comedies of the 1970’s, one notices a vast network of programs aimed at framing social discourse and at helping America come to term with its own, changing image. This was done through a restaging of the political and social ills of the generation as comedic teleplays, thereby using laughter as a vehicle towards social awareness and unwitting change or personal growth, and by recycling popular (and unpopular) clichés and stereotypes (the bigot, the racist, the bleeding-heart liberal, the closed-minded conservative, the touchy feminist, etc.) so as to undermine them while appearing to reinforce them. As this paper will demonstrate, situations used in these situation comedies were often adaptations of lesser known British television programs (as is the case with Norman Lear’s long-running series All in the Family and Sanford and Son), or of landmark films and plays pointing to new social norms (as with Robert Gutchell’s Alice or James Komack’s The Courtship of Eddie’s Father). One also notes that these recycled and reworked premises were in turn recycled and reworked into numerous spin-offs, and even spin-offs of spin-offs, thereby weaving a thick network of popular television programming that attempted to depict every facet and variation of the changing face of American society and to help Americans accept that new face while unabashedly laughing at it. Thus, these television comedies reflected, framed and fed social discourse in the 1970’s. Racism, ‘reverse racism’, religious bigotry, anti-Semitism, draft-dodging, anti-government protest, women’s rights, divorce, and even rape — no topic was too controversial to be treated in the most direct and often vehement of manners in this hard-hitting new breed of sitcom. One could argue that American sitcoms have never been as politically incorrect or socially aware as they were some forty years ago, yet it is also undeniable that current programming owes a great deal to these ground-breaking sitcoms of the 1970’s. Thus, as a closing point, it is important to note how these programs have served as a palimpsest and a common set of references for today’s TV series, and to show how much contemporary ‘breakthrough television’ owes to the Archie Bunkers, Fred Sanfords and Mary Tyler Moores of the 1970’s.