Oh, I have no problem with the subject matter. The Golden Girls (Along with a few other mid 80s sitcoms, like the Cosby Show and Roseanne) tackled a lot of social issues and changed TV in a lot of ways. I don't really dislike Blanche either; she was just my least favorite.
Man, do I miss the sitcom era of the 80s. Too much drama and reality bull**** on TV nowadays. Granted, I do love me some drama, but good sitcoms are so hard to find these days.
I normally like my comedy to be really dark and tasteless or extremely family friendly, so I think the last comedy program I really enjoyed was
Action, which was aired and cancelled way back in 1999*...
I think part of the problem is that there's very little in today's comedies that tries to create some kind of core value system to bind all the funny stuff together. Whether or not you agreed with the idea of trying to create 'very special moments' within your sitcoms, I think their existence helps ground the humor better.
The Nanny demonstrated an alternative personification of the 'important woman' whether its in the life of a teenage girl or a widow-less theatre producer.
Roseanne showing us that despite the blue collar curmudgeonly foibles of an overweight, inside lies the heart of a true mother.
In short, the sitcoms of old were required to carry the weight of drama that existed outside of the police procedurals and courtroom dramas as it certainly wasn't being addressed in high concept action-adventure like
MacGyver and
Knight Rider. The only alternative outlet for drama to exist outside of the courtroom and the precinct was in the soap opera, and we all know how high brow those damn things are.**
I'm not thinking too hard about this but off the cuff, I'd say that because of the 90s suspicion towards excessive moral conviction and unapologetic navel gazing, two things have happened to TV between then and now:
a) Sitcoms like
Seinfeld and
Frasier took an increasingly amoral (not to be confused with immoral) direction and
b) The soap opera gave birth to more sophisticated spawn like
Party of Five and
My So-Called Life.
Today's sitcoms now give greater emphasis to the work place than they already did. This is good because workplace comedies are easier to syndicate to international markets and are less culturally polarizing than a sitcom about a middle class family of African Americans or a foursome of sexually active retirees living in Florida. Sure, there'll be the funny gay black interns or a token 'smart' Republican, but they're just standing in as archetypes within the office, they're not destabilizing values or re-contextualizing definitions of family (for comedic effect).
Workplace comedies aren't bad, it's just that the opportunities to make us think about our own values are significantly less (but not nonexistent) than they could be. I mean, okay, the boss is a moron and there's a social climber and there's the guy who passes all the blame to other people. The comedy practically writes itself, and rare is the writer who doesn't rely on that vast renewable resource as a crutch***.
I'm not saying that
30 Rock and
Boston Legal are bad shows. They just operate in a neutral "OMG! My boss is an asstard too!" space that anyone can relate to, and just don't challenge our deeply set assumptions in the way that domestic comedies did. I could actually write paragraphs about HOW domestic comedies work, but this essay is long enough.
Don't get me wrong, I don't mean to unquestioningly deify the domestic comedy. Shows like
Yes, Dear,
Still Standing and
Grounded for Life fail not because they are centered around a homogenous white middle-class palette, but because their comedy operates entirely around what big infantile doofuses adults and parents can be, and how precocious their children are at outwitting their dum dum ways.
In the meantime, as comedies grew more uninterested in addressing family values, the drama has begun to find ways to cross breed with other TV formats, whether its in the emo moments of black ops bad-*** Jack Bauer in
24 or the weepy desire for normalcy in
Alias and
Veronica Mars, or its ability to give rise to the woman's working drama in
Judging Amy and
Ally McBeal.
I'd talk more but I'm sleepy now.
*
The year compound and I started hanging out for the first time. We were young back then. My nose wasn't melting off my face and I was a cradle-snatcher rather than a pedophile. He had all his hair and both his testicles.
**
Answer from back of the book: Not very high brow at all.
***
If you pay attention to my other TV essays, this is not the first time I've used the word crutch with the same connotation.
