Postnuclear Explosion

By James Poniewozik

In TV, as in politics, "family" is one of the biggest weasel words in the lexicon. Take the phrase "family comedy." To you it might simply mean a comedic program centered on a family. To, say, Joe Lieberman, it may mean one palatable to an "average family" (speaking of weasel words), or one that actively promotes "family values" (don't get us started).

But from the Nelsons to the Simpsons, it has largely meant married parents with kids. Not so this year. The lead character on abc's The Geena Davis Show shacks up out of wedlock with a widower and his kids. The single-mom heroine of the WB's Gilmore Girls was knocked up as a teen; the grownup star of Fox's Titus gets knocked out by his hard-drinking, oft divorced dad. On Fox's Normal, Ohio, Dad is divorced and gay. From Ward and June Cleaver, we've gone to Ward and June, cleaved.

This isn't the first year TV has explored contentious families or divorce (Grace Under Fire). Past producers would sometimes simply kill off Mom, leaving a cute dad who could date (ABC's Madigan Men continues the widower-com tradition). But now the nontraditional family is practically mandatory, for reasons as much economic as social. After years of big-city yuppie-coms, the networks realized, says NBC entertainment president Garth Ancier, that "the urban work setting was getting old." That meant a return to the domestic comedy--but now, says Geena creator Terry Minsky, "it's not enough to do just the typical family."

Whatever that is. According to the Census Bureau, 27% of American families with kids are headed by a single parent. "Family comedy," though, still carries overtones of the Ike years, when sitcoms like Father Knows Best defined the genre and American pop culture was supposed to promote stability, peace and the effacement of discord at any cost.

But the dirty secret of a show like Titus is that discord is hilarious. You laugh because--well, what's the alternative? "People want something that reflects their lives," says creator-star Christopher Titus, who based the series on his autobiographical one-man stage show Norman Rockwell Is Bleeding. "Sixty-three percent of American families are now considered dysfunctional," he boasts in the pilot. "That means we're the majority. We're normal." Without victim-speak, Titus looks at how Titus has become his screwed-up self in reaction to, and emulation of, his womanizing, boorish dad (a cacklingly exuberant Stacy Keach). For Titus, family is war, and it isn't afraid to drop its audiences into uncomfortable situations with no one-liners to save them, as when Titus has an aids scare and confronts the psychological legacy of his dad's own skirt chasing. Like All in the Family, its model, Titus daringly snatches comedy from the jaws of family drama. "The joy we get," Titus says, "is to scare the hell out of viewers and get us all laughing."

When Amy Sherman-Palladino wrote Gilmore Girls, on the other hand, she "never set out to create an 'alternative' family"; she envisioned "a mother-daughter relationship where they were more pals than mother and daughter." In this sweet, clever hour-long comedy, 32-year-old single mom Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham) raises 16-year-old daughter--you do the math--Rory (Alexis Bledel), who's more reserved and adult than Mom; Lorelai wears Daisy Duke cutoffs to Rory's first day in private school and jokes that she offered "to do the principal" to get her daughter accepted.

So would you believe this teen-pregnancy idyll comes courtesy of something called the Family Friendly Programming Forum? The coalition of advertisers, formed to promote wholesome prime-time fare, put about a million dollars toward a WB fund for the writing of eight "family-friendly" scripts, and Gilmore survived. (The group hopes to strike deals with other networks.) The FFPF had no input into the scripts, but members say they're happy with Gilmore even if it isn't the second coming of Little House on the Prairie. "Would I have been happier if some of the language wasn't there?" asks co-founder Andrea Alstrup, vice president for advertising at Johnson & Johnson. "Probably. But I don't think it went overboard."

The FFPF's definition of "family friendly" sounds like a recipe for harmless pabulum (it calls, vaguely, for "uplifting" shows that won't embarrass or offend an "average" viewer). But it worked: Gilmore turns out to be neither crass nor cloying. It is unapologetic about its untraditional family unit yet almost radically innocent. Imagine--a WB comedy about a smart teen who spends more time studying than scoping guys.

Sherman-Palladino wrote earlier for Roseanne, which shares Gilmore's honest, flaws-and-all mother-daughter relationship. And Roseanne's John Goodman stars in Normal, Ohio, which echoes its predecessor's discordant small-town setting, if not nearly as well. Creators Bonnie and Terry Turner (That '70s Show) conceived it as a buddy comedy between a gay and a straight man (The Odd Couple without the subtext) but retooled it; now the gay Butch (Goodman) returns to his small town to reconcile with his unaccepting parents and his grown son. Terry Turner says the creators wanted to base the show on a universal--"Family is one of those things everyone knows"--rather than on gay jokes. (Right. We counted a dozen, six minutes into the pilot.)

For better or worse, each of these shows, like Roseanne, recognizes Philip Larkin's dictum: "They f___ you up, your mum and dad." They show families whose parents and kids make real, lasting mistakes that can't be resolved in 22 minutes. (That's not to say they're wholly realistic. Gilmore's Lorelai, unlike most teen moms, has a safety net of wealthy parents.)

The nuclear-family comedy is still alive, of course, from Fox's Malcolm in the Middle to CBS's Everybody Loves Raymond, the reliable hit that is keeping in-law jokes safe for another generation. But expect the mutations to continue; in the works is CBS's Say Uncle, about a gay man raising his niece and nephew. Today's family comedy isn't always what traditionalists would call family friendly anymore. But hey, today's family isn't always either.

--With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

For more from James Poniewozik--and other entertainment stories--go to www.time.com/sampler

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles