Television families: Is something wrong in suburbia?

Abstract

Television Families: Is Something Wrong in Suburbia? William Douglas. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 2003. 197 pp. ISBN 0-8058-4013-3. $22.50 (paper). In his book, William Douglas provides a thorough analysis of the portrayal of families in entertainment media. While most of the focus is on the television family, Douglas discusses the family as seen in important predecessors: vaudeville, radio, and comic strips. He sets his analysis of the family in popular culture (e.g., the relationship between Blondie and Dagwood) against the prevailing socioeconomic conditions of families (e.g., the Lynd's study of Middletown), providing a context with which to understand the relationship between media and society. He centers on the suburban family, both because suburbia became the desired living location during the advent of television and also because most television families lived there as well. The book is organized first chronologically and then thematically in chapters that cover spousal relationships, parent-child and sibling relationships, African American families, elderly family members, and the divergence between middle-class and working families. Douglas focuses on family structure, the nature of family roles, and the more personal and relational aspects of television families. The impact of gender, class, and age in both real and media families is given much attention. Most notably, Douglas focuses on the changing roles for women that strongly influenced the structure of family life over the course of the 20th century. He demonstrates how Tarzan and Jane principles were widespread throughout middle-class, young, White families on television but notes how such principles did not apply to working-class families or ethnic and racial minorities who were rarely portrayed on television at all. The elderly have also been underrepresented throughout television's history, and more recently, children have become less visible as well. Is something wrong in suburbia? According to the author's analysis of the double decay hypothesis, which addresses the deterioration of the family in general and how that is reflected in popular culture, it appears that the answer is yes. Though there are exceptions on television, minority families other than African American families are virtually absent from the screen, and when African American families are portrayed, they are portrayed in more negative ways than White families; while depictions of middle-class, husband-wife roles are more egalitarian on television than in the past, husbands still appear to hold more family power than their wives; working-class families' interactions are marked by hostility and hardship; parents are not sufficiently involved in childrearing; and sibling relationships have become more contentious. …