Sins of the father
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![Family fun? Sitcoms such as Malcolm in the Middle feature loveable but moronic male characters.](/web/20161124085439im_/http://www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2004/12/22/malcolm_narrowweb__200x266.jpg)
Family fun? Sitcoms such as Malcolm in the Middle feature loveable but moronic male characters.
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They are two-dimensional, irrelevant and the butt of many jokes. Wendy Tuohy considers the plight of TV's dads.
Who would want to be a TV dad? If you're in a sitcom you are most likely a man-boy buffoon, clueless about fatherhood or marriage, self-indulgent but not self-aware, unreliable, immature, and usually the butt of the family joke.
In dramas, many of which from the late 1980s on centred on hero-mothers running the family (the genre spear-headed by Murphy Brown), fathers, even if still in the house, have regularly been deemed obsolete. And in soaps they are not much better off.
Often two-dimensional, soap's would-be patriarch is treated by the family as largely irrelevant or even faintly ridiculous. He habitually flounders in the wake of the quick-changing language, values and life events of everyone around him, puffed up, but hollow like a kind of mid-life meringue.
Not that most of the dads in question seem to mind that much. Homer Simpson is easily pleased with his doughnuts and Duff beer. Raymond Barone (of Everybody Loves Raymond) has a catch cry on the show's website of "The amazing thing is, is that I function at all''.
And while the character Malcolm, of Malcolm In the Middle describes his mum as "the lord high executioner, ultimate arbiter and dispenser of justice, inflictor of guilt" on the show's site, he says of dad, Hal: "My dad's always thinking about something. We just have no idea what it is. At least it keeps him occupied."
Oddly, none of them seem unhappy about being the guy whose messes everyone else cleans up.
In fact Homer Simpson swelled with pride in a recent episode when he punished Bart by banning him for life from the Itchy and Scratchy movie. Homer had left his son in charge of baby Maggie in front of TV, and the baby escaped and crashed the family car.
In another oft-repeated episode, Homie impresses Bart by beating up the attentive man who had adopted the disillusioned boy as part of a "Big Brother-Little Brother" scheme. Homer was the proudest dad alive as he then taught his son how to win in fights ("you get him on the ground then knee him in the chest and step on his neck".)
Even sitcoms attempting to deal with the real-life issue of fatherhood after divorce, such as the hit US series Two and a Half Men (seen here on Channel Nine), show men as totally under-skilled in most areas of adult life. In this series a divorcing father, Alan, moves in to the home of his out-there bachelor brother, Charlie, along with Alan's 10-year-old son, Jake.
Although Charlie gets over the initial shock to his lifestyle, becomes attached to Jake and decides he wants to make a real home for him, Jake is shielded from none of his uncle's leery antics. In a custody hearing, the boy's mother even produces a sketch he's done of a G-string-clad girl's bottom, drawn from life of one of his uncle's conquests as she leaned into the fridge first thing in the morning.
So irritatingly inadequate are much of the contemporary batch of TV dads, that veteran Australian television writers such as the Seven Network script executive, Bevan Lee, say they are becoming annoying to watch.
"My personal idea of TV viewing hell is these (dopey dad) sitcoms things like Everybody Loves Raymond, Home Improvement, Malcolm in the Middle where the father figure is a central figure running around like an idiot, and he's the butt of everyone's jokes. It's my idea of La Hague war crimes torture to tie me to a chair and make me watch those on loop." The granddaddy of daddy-as-village idiot shows is Married With Children, which Lee also despises.
"They just perpetuate the myth of the dad as the fall guy in the centre of the family, everybody else knows better than dad, but at the end of the day `That's OK, that's just dad'. It's so patronising."
Lee, among others, points out that painting such a consistently damning portrait of mothers would go down atrociously with audiences. Motherhood, in TV land, is sacred, while father-failures are fair game.
This was noted recently by one Hollywood Reporter television writer pointed out: "Dads are the last subculture in America whom it is permissible to bash and malign with impunity ... You can depict dads as stumbling, bumbling doofs all you want and receive not a single shred of flak for it."
"By contrast, motherhood is sacrosanct. Moms don't make mistakes on TV. When they do, it's probably because of something their husband did. Too often, family TV comedy is all about what dad did to screw up the day/night/event/situation. Fathers are mere dummies at the mercy of everyone, their children included.''
Oddly enough, script writer Bevan Lee thinks some of the worst examples appear in series designed for children, where he says the father figures are often painted as little more than clowns out of make up.
"You just have this succession of extraordinarily poor, ridiculous fathers trotted out. I don't see why the father figure can't be supportive, or a decent person, or even if he is a bit silly, just not this bumbling cartoon," says Lee.
Of course it was not always thus for the much-maligned TV dad. A Family Affair was one of our favorite shows of the late 1960s and early '70s. It featured a confirmed bachelor, "Uncle Bill", suddenly saddled with his six-year-old twin nephews and their 14 year-old sister, and doing an admirable job of getting them on with their lives.
Fred McMurray did an admirable job of raising My Three Sons, and solo fathers steered their broods well enough in everything from Gidget, to Flipper (and Skippy), Daktari, The Beverley Hillbillies and even The Thunderbirds (where Mr Tracey's word was international law).
Even in wacky sitcom hits such as The Addams Family or The Munsters, dads were part of the joke, rather than the joke itself. In Happy Days, even the Fonz was scared to getting on the wrong side of the teddy-like but tough Howard Cunningham.
The fatherly respect - where if he didn't always know best at least he got a hearing - flowed through the comedy decades spanning everything from Leave It To Beaver to The Brady Bunch, The Cosby Show, Family Ties and their like.
With exceptions, such as the Cosby-style My Wife and Kids, in the last decade things have turned bad for dad, says Queensland University television course coordinator Alan McKee.
"In the last 10 years there have emerged new representations of families where the characters, the dads in particular, are incredibly flawed - to the point of being moronic. The kids are often terrible to the point of demonic and the mother is strained to the point of hysteria," says McKee, author of the book Australian Television.
"In the more masculine genres the father is still the hero figure. Such as 24 (the suspense drama in which Secret Agent Jack Bauer risks all to save his daughter Kim and the the world), or Without a Trace, (where FBI missing persons investigator Jack Malone must also protect his own family).
"But in the genres aimed at women (sitcoms and soaps) its changed quite dramatically since the era of say The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (one of the earliest family sitcoms, in which the man was ostensibly in charge but the woman was considered an effective equal).''
So how much does the down-grading of dad really matter? The formula is a ratings winner, and, as Nine programmer Len Downs insists, it is just entertainment anyway, and audiences do not read in too much.
The issue is taken seriously in the US, where parents' groups argue many shows send messages that children either don't need good fathering, or sometimes any. Lobby groups such as the Parents Television Council regularly survey network TV to see how it is dealing with fatherhood.
Its 2002-2003 study found that after a period in which father figures had been at a low, the scene for them was improving. Just under half of children were now depicted as living in a separate house from their father (down 6 per cent on the previous year to 47 per cent). The number of kids depicted not living with any father figure was down three per cent (to 27 per cent).
Australia lacks such precise dissections of the image of fathers on TV, but psychologists with a research interest in men's issues, such as Swinburne University's Roger Cook, say not all that is to laugh about in the loser-dad shows is funny.
While many male (and female) viewers brush off the repeated messages that men are nigh on useless, the reduction of fathers to a kind of domestic "Russell Coight" is not always benign.
"The message has gone from being that dad has a somewhat important role in the family ... to a sort of Russell Coight image; a bloke who's making a kind of valiant attempt but is always stuffing it up.
"Some people are able to dismiss it, but it gets others down a bit. Some men ... feel a bit like women did about all the shows showing them stuck in the kitchen."
But according to script specialists such as Diane Cook, a script editor who also teaches screen writing at RMIT, some programs are painting more engaging pictures of fathers.
She highlights the Mafia-family drama The Sopranos as one turning point, in its depiction of a conflicted father with deep and complex feelings about family and fatherhood - as well as chopping people up.
"I'm satisfied watching those more complex attitudes (to male characters) in drama that they are portraying real people.
"All of us gravitate to portrayals which are complex and multi-dimensional - where sitcoms can gloss it over."
Cook finds attempts by many of the sitcoms to make the dad "buffoons" loveable "fall flat".
"I think it is frustrating ... I don't think comedy needs to dump on its character like that."
Soaps, at least in Australia, are also leading a new approach to fatherhood. While Home and Away's Bevan Lee says he recently took a risk by putting a popular character in a position where he had to choose between his loyal and loving second wife, or returning to his grand passion, the suddenly re-available first wife, challenged his audience.
And at Neighbours, senior writer Luke Devenish says the show's historical "daggy dad" prototype is being left behind as the men of Ramsay Street are fleshed out.
Devenish has just re-introduced one of the founding characters, Paul Robinson, as part of the show's 20th anniversary year.
The character is desperately trying to pick up where he left off, with five children by three failed marriages, carrying the baggage of a murder, time on the run and a jail term, as well as the stigma of three divorces. It is a coming-of-age for fathers on the show, and something of a turning point for them in Australian soap history.
"Daggy dad has evolved across the first 20 years of the show, the first being Alan Dale (now playing "evil dad" on the hit American drama The OC). He was the quintessential Neighbours character the kids could relate to; doing bad puns and wearing the wrong clothes, and thinking the kids were younger than they really are," says Devenish.
The 21st century Neighbours father is "a slightly different beast, no longer necessarily a bastion of propriety or a moral centre". "We still always stick to the premise that they fundamentally do everything they can for their kids, but have tempered it with interesting flaws."
Devenish says the time is right to put fathers back into interesting scenarios, rather than play them as slightly fuzzy wall-paper, or, as the sitcoms would have it, tragic clowns on centre-stage. Homie in therapy? It can only be episodes away.