Home Is Where The Venom

By Richard Zoglin

"Ah, home sweet hell." It's Al Bundy of Married . . . With Children arriving at his doorstep, which in fact does resemble the gates to Dante's Inferno. Conversation in the Bundy family is a torrent of verbal abuse. "This is a home, not a restaurant," insists Al's wife Peg, after he demands his supper. "I know," he snaps. "If it was a restaurant, we'd have a clean bathroom."

The Conner household on Roseanne is hardly an abode of peace and contentment either. Mom has a constant chip on her shoulder -- about her job, her housework, her nagging kids. "They're all mine," she says in a moment of reflection after a Thanksgiving get-together. "Of course, I'd trade any one of them for a dishwasher."

Now comes TV's latest hit family, The Simpsons. Here the characters are animated but still a grungy, bickering lot. "Sometimes I think we're the worst family in town," says Dad gloomily. His solution is to drag his brood to a therapist, who hooks them up to electrodes as part of behavior- modification treatment. Result: they start giving one another electric shocks.

( After nearly four decades of sweet, wholesome TV clans, from Father Knows Best to The Cosby Show, a new clutch of anti-family sitcoms is exploring the squalid underbelly of domestic life. And making a killing. ABC's Roseanne is the No. 1-rated show on TV. The Simpsons, on the Fox network, is a smash mid- season success; it and Fox's Married . . . With Children, airing back-to- back on Sunday nights, have jumped into the Nielsen Top 20, an unprecedented triumph for TV's fourth network.

The anti-family shows aren't against the family, exactly, just scornful of the romantic picture TV has often painted of it. Was Dad once a pillar of wisdom and understanding? In the new shows he is either a slob or an oaf. Did Mom used to be the nurturing guardian of home and hearth? Now if she even knows how to put a roast in the oven, she could sear it with her sarcasm. TV kids have always been mischievous, but now they are bratty and disrespectful as well. Standards of decorum have gone out the window too: Dad burps out loud at the dinner table; a kid snaps photos of his mom shaving her underarms.

Why is America tuning in? One reason may be the refreshing dose of real- world grit these shows provide. "With Ozzie and Harriet, everyone felt guilty," says Barbara Cadow, a psychologist at U.S.C. School of Medicine. "With these new programs, we see that we're doing all right by comparison." Alvin Poussaint, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and an adviser to The Cosby Show, suggests that these shows, with their exaggerated nastiness, are an "outlet for people who feel, yeah, they really would like to knock the kid in the head, but they know it's wrong."

TV family comedies, of course, have always depended on domestic discord and jokey put-downs for humor. A few of them, like The Honeymooners and All in the Family, have focused on grumbling working-class households. But their barbs were rarely aimed at the institution of the family. Archie Bunker may have railed at Edith and argued politics with Meathead, but the domestic bonds remained rock solid. Roseanne's whiny wisecracks, on the other hand, protest a setup that forces Mom to work during the day to help win the bread, then come home at night to cook it. The message, writes Barbara Ehrenreich in the New Republic, is that "Mom is no longer interested in being a human sacrifice on the altar of 'pro-family values.' "

Those values are shredded completely in Married . . . With Children. The matriarch of this clan is a slothful shrew who never does a lick of housework. Dad is an insensitive lout who picks his toes and spends his happiest hours on the toilet seat. The oldest daughter is a floozy who can barely count to ten. Their repartee is drenched with venom. (Al wants to take Peg bowling for her birthday. "Come on," he says, "this'll be the first birthday you begin in an alley.") Gross and funny in roughly equal measure, Married . . . With Children turns the TV family into a vicious cartoon.

The Simpsons, a real cartoon, is actually much closer to recognizable human life. Family members are not depraved or offensive, just a little dim. Homer, the father, works at the local nuclear power plant and gets no respect at home. His wife Marge, her blue hair piled into an otherworldly beehive, is a scratchy-voiced simp. The only real live wire is Bart, a bratty fourth-grader whose vocabulary includes such bons mots as "Eat my shorts." Created by cartoonist Matt Groening, The Simpsons has a good deal of savvy wit. One episode, in which Bart is mistakenly labeled a genius, sharply parodies a class for gifted children, where a "learning coordinator" leads the grade schoolers in discussions about free will and paradox. The Simpsons, however, is strangely off-putting much of the time. The drawings are grotesque without redeeming style or charm (characters have big beady eyes, beaklike noses and spiky hair), and the animation is crude even by TV's low-grade standards.

Still, ratings keep going up, and Simpsons merchandise, from T shirts to key chains, is flying off the shelves. Obviously, these raffish losers have struck a chord. Maybe it is because, for all their grumbling, this misfit family sticks together in the end: the camaraderie of the downtrodden. There's something oddly touching about the sight of five Simpsons lurking in the bushes, spying on neighbors in their living room. "They actually enjoy talking to each other!" marvels Marge. Or of Homer encouraging his son before sending him off to class: "One day, you may achieve something that we Simpsons have dreamed about for generations. You may outsmart someone." In the world of the anti-family show, parents learn to think small.