Television never has been an accurate mirror of American family life, but most scholars who study such things agree that the medium has hit an historic low in potentially destructive distortion.
Glenn Sparks, communications professor of Purdue University, says what is being shown “translates into a pretty harsh family dynamic.”
Froma Walsh, professor of social work and psychiatry at the University of Chicago, says television “perpetuates the view that so many families are dysfunctional and deviant, when it’s really a very small number.”
And Leonard Eron, a University of Illinois psychology professor who has been a point man in the fight against TV violence, says “in the same way television teaches violence, it now teaches youngsters that these dysfunctional families are par for the course.”
We’re not talking about “Roseanne” here; the Connor family may be dysfunctional, but at least it is warm and loving. Nor are we talking about “The Simpsons,” which is a cartoon, or “Married . . . With Children,” which is a parody of itself.
We are talking about movies of the week, all bearing the imprimatur, “Based on a True Story,” which presumably makes them “news” and thus unassailable by people who yearn for the good old days when the fables, if false, at least were sweet.
In 1958, the twin paradigms of the “typical” American family, accordto prime-time television, were “Father Knows Best” and “Leave It to Beaver.”
“Father,” Jim Anderson, was so wise he made King Solomon look like Mad magazine’s “What,-Me-Worry” kid, and his children were saints in training. Meanwhile, June Cleaver, Beaver’s mom, kept a perfect home and cheerfully scrubbed her kitchen floor in high heels and pearls.
Fast forward to the 1993-1994 prime-time season where movies of the week pepper the schedule with what now passes for American family life.
In ABC’s “Shameful Secrets,” a battered wife fights to keep her abusive husband from taking away her children on the grounds she abandoned them by going to the hospital after he nearly beat her to death.
In NBC’s “Appointment for a Killing,” a dentist’s wife goes undercover to prove her husband, the loving father of her children, really is a serial killer.
Last year, three separate network versions of the seamy Amy Jo Fisher-Joey Buttafuoco story ran back-to-back to smash ratings. The Andersons and the Cleavers may have been as far off the mark of family reality in their day as the current crop is now, but television activist Terry Rakolta will take them any night of the week.
“Those programs didn’t display the nihilism you get from today’s programming, and even if they weren’t true to life, they had a moral that was uplifting,” says Rakolta, founder and director of Americans for Responsible Television. “What they are doing now is mainstreaming deviance from the outer fringes of our culture. It’s really scary.”
Walsh, who is co-director of Chicago’s Center for Family Health, would agree.
“It makes people view their own families through a glass darkly and look for pathologies,” Walsh says. “We tend to over-pathologize the family. We tend to label too many families dysfunctional when they’re really just trying to cope as well as they can with the ordinary problems of getting by.”
Rakolta says reasons for the sudden infusion of weirdness and perversion are twofold: competition with such tabloid television shows as “Hard Copy” and “A Current Affair,” and production costs.
“When `Hard Copy’ made its debut, it was one of only four such shows; now there are 32,” Rakolta says.
Sparks worries that all the focus on televised violence is obscuring an equally dangerous influence. He says the “media cultivation theory,” developed by Eron in his studies of violence, says that whatever is provided as a steady diet on television tends to become a reality in the eyes of frequent viewers.
“If the typical portrayal of the American family is as a dysfunctional, chaotic group-and that’s what we see, over and over again-then the cultivation theory would predict that heavy viewers would come to overestimate the prevalence of that kind of family in American society,” Sparks says. “The result is that young people are cultivated into thinking this is what they have to look forward to and what they can expect as the norm.”
Not everyone is that worried, however. David Turkat, an Atlanta media psychologist, says familial perversity always has drawn a fascinated audience:
“We’ve always had tragedy and deviance and peculiarities within families, but it is only through the growth of communications that we have come to this point that we now show it in made-for-TV dramatic replication.
“I don’t really see it as being all that different from `Queen for a Day.’ That was a show, back in the ’50s and early ’60s, that had women getting up and telling their sob stories, and whoever had the worst life won the refrigerator.”
Turkat says there is a bright side to the headline-driven sick-family production in that “it gives you an opportunity to learn what you don’t want; it lets you learn what you want to teach your children and what you want to protect them from. Used properly, it can be a teaching tool.”
Sparks says television has as much power to be uplifting as it does to corrupt and producers should be making more “pro-social” programs: “If you show people helping other people, or being kind to other people, we have evidence to suggest that watching those kinds of programs fosters helping behavior and increases altruism.”
Don’t count on it any time soon.
“We have a case here in Georgia that’s perfect for made-for-television material: a well-respected lawyer who apparently was involved in a conspiracy to have his wife killed,” Turkat says.
“They’ve already been offered a variety of options for a made-for-TV movie. They (movie producers) hound the country looking for these kinds of stories to turn them into `dramatic’ representations of real-life horrors.”
