THE ST.CLAIRE | At Home with Television

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At Home With Television

Kevin vanzaten

It is nice to have a home, a place that is for more than just our stuff. Some lived places are never home; home is at another location or nowhere at all. We can be homeless and be renting rooms. We can be without an address and be at “home” wherever we happen to be. Home is not contingent upon a building, but a house or apartment represents it. When someone says that he/she is at home, I assume that a bed and some sleep attire are not far away. For the seventy odd years of television, the American situation comedy has shared this assumption and supported several features that define home. Perhaps one could bring home into being rationally or through logical application of certain components, but it may also be a belief that we find ourselves arriving at after making a place so.

At the moment, television is now a landscape of shows distributed on various platforms; no longer limited to a box with a screen and antenna.Of television’s many genres, the situation comedy has been rather popular. In order to find
an uncontentious background for the comedy, a sit-com uses a distilled version of home. Its lack of complication reveals what we agree is essential and true about a normal home. With exception of the workplace variety, (which is a home in its own way) the sit-com generally uses a house model of home to ground the hijinks, awkward moments, and absurdity. The styles of home vary widely in appearance, but the sit-com founds home upon order, appropriate household roles, and the facilitation of family.

In many instances, a sit-com home relies on ritual order to keep the chaotic thrown wrench at bay. Sometimes that wrench is a small but powerful colonizing force like Will in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air or Alf in, well, Alf, but more often it is the actions of an integral character, like Mr. Belvedere’s Wesley Owens or Lucille Ricardo of I Love Lucy. A sense of order or established rule is essential to marking the viability of the sit-com home, the messier or more out-of-date that it is, the weaker and less desirable the home is to the viewer. The ordered home is the straight man to the chaotic wrench. The audience identifies with the former, but enjoys the antics of the latter. Characters like Mr. Belvedere and the many thankless wives guard the order of the house against the amusing mild chaos. A fuddyduddy or killjoy, his/her struggle is implied to be eternally necessary, but Belvedere’s and his ilk’s only response is snark. Her/His occasional failure to maintain order is usual rectified by cooperation from the imp, but there was a time when violent threats to the keeper served the humor. Lucy Ricardo was frequently in fear of Ricky’s threats of strangulation, and The Honeymooners' Alice Kramden starred down Ralph’s enraged threats to punch her in the face. Sure, they are played off as empty threats, but 1950’s consensus was that a bit of force may be necessary to control the home. It does pop up again now and then, but satirically (which can be a winking acknowledgement of a true desire) as in Al Bundy’s frequent and morbid threats to

murder Peg, or Archie Bunker’s constant emotional abuse of his wife Edith in All in the Family. Alternatively, Roseanne and Louie manage constant flurries of life’s shit storm, but these disruptions are not as traumatic to the home. Theirs is a conditional order that will be often disrupted and broken, but they keep it in the name of appearances and some level of sanity. Louie for the sake of maintaining shared custody of his children, and Roseanne for the preservation of the family unit (even if it must include a delusion about Dan’s death for about two seasons). Obviously some take the Order faith more seriously than others, but no sit-com home is complete without it.

The appearance of a homestead constantly changes due to the occupant’s personality and fashion, but the players of productive labor and reproductive labor have persisted with only slight modification. In any sort of family sit-com, one character typically carries out the household maintenance, reproductive labor, while the other carries out the acquisition of wealth, the productive labor. The reproductive laborer, which is the most often the “wife” of the pair, is never the star of the show unless he/she is in a professional capacity or simply living alone. In the case of Family Ties, the parents Elyse and Steve (the original stars of the show before Alex Keaton proved irresistible) are both educated professionals, but it is Elyse, an architect, who works out of the home. Although Steve may drive the kids to school and occasionally cook, Elyse is almost invisibly carrying out the daily housework. There is no reflection upon her role in terms of plot, but she is often seen straightening up, watering plants, serving coffee, or otherwise hinting at her services. Darrin in Bewitched is intimidated by Sam, his wife (a witch), and is the frequent butt of
emasculating jokes, but Sam still assumes the housework as a matter of course. Naturally the show jokes that without magic, she could not wash a dish. In general, the primary producer, oddly, often takes the role of buffoon. Herman Munster (The Munsters), Tim Taylor (Home Improvement), and Doug Heffernan (King of Queens) are frequently incompetent and childish, while their wives Lily, Jill, and Carrie, respectively, check their husbands’ foolishness with sarcasm or teasing. I suppose that this is to be an empowering gesture or commiseration with housewives, but in the end the idiot is being paid. Married… with Children is a case where both members of the ruling pair succeed at neither productive nor reproductive labor, and the home simply lingers as a limping home of failure. To its credit, Married… with Children poses that the home requires investment, or else you will be these people. In roommate programs, no one ever wants to do the housework and disputes on this point can lead story lines or be the basis of an entire show. I cannot say I have a seen a character on Girls do a chore, but Marnie’s resentment at having to carry the load off screen contributes to her falling out with Hannah. Of the two co-habitating, divorced men in The Odd Couple, Felix minds the majority of the housework while at odds with Oscar’s messy manners. This dynamic is not terribly different from the dynamic of Ray and Deborah from Everybody Loves Raymond or Ethel and Fred from I Love Lucy, except here the housekeeper’s femininity is a clear joke. This joke continues in New Girl. Schmitt appears responsible for the apartment’s neat appearance, and despite his bro aspirations, Schmitt is played more effeminate than Nick or Winston. Only nutjobs like Monica Geller or Jerry Seinfeld actually take a certain pleasure in cleaning. I am fairly certain Monica threatened to kill someone over improper cleaning, and Jerry threw away many possessions over an unknown object possibly being tainted by toilet water. There is nothing redeeming about keeping the house humming even if you are being paid, which seems to be the whole

point of Who’s the Boss? Not only is it funny that this macho guy is the housekeeper, but he is not even married to her. She pays him! His productive labor is laughably reproductive, which would be done for free in the opposite arrangement. The reproductive laborer take various forms at differing levels of power, but the player loses respect in being in this role. It’s needed to keep the home and family functioning but it is not something to be proud of.

According to every sit-com in my knowledge, the home is a place shared by a family of sorts (at the workplace or house, but most often a married couple) and the idea of home as a refuge is nearly completely absent. In the cases that depict an unshared home, it is the utilitarian, poorly designed, or otherwise unimpressive abode of a husband before marriage, or a misfit character like Cliff Clavin of Cheers. In a show like Everybody Loves Raymond, the home is the domain of a married couple. It is the place to bicker, squabble, and spat until everything is mostly resolved at the conclusion of the episode. Raymond would be a lost and slovenly bachelor without Debra. He makes his home and improves his situation in acquiring Debra, but it is unclear what Debra gets out of the arrangement other than a man to love. This is true for numerous shows from Make Room for Daddy to According to Jim. On the occasion that a single parent is the focus of the show, like The New Adventures of Old Christine or even Full House, the home takes the absence of a member into its definition. The surviving head of household requires assistance from wacky friends, relations, or male support groups. One cannot run a home alone. According to shows like Friends, a character’s home serves as a hub for his/her friends. Story lines take the characters to other locations, but ultimately they come back and mingle at the one character’s home. Monica’s home is a place to collect and see friends, but it also is the seat of dominance in that it is the home of one (or more due to roommates).
The dynamic and world of these friends would be disrupted (and in the case of Friends, end) if that home were taken away. Family is the only sense of home to the child centric sit-com. The child has had no say in the establishment of the space and is subject fully to its rules. Without the family, Cory Matthews of Boy Meets World would be wandering in an alienated land from The Twilight Zone. Cory would have no guide; there is no Mr. Feeny on the other side of the fence; Cory’s just wandering and looking for someone to tell him what to do. In the case of the recently popular workplace comedies like Parks and Recreation, 30 Rock, or The Office (but also Cheers and Taxi), there is no house to the home at all. The characters spend little time in their own residences, which are often never shown. The residence is just a place to go when work is over. Instead, they are at home with a bunch of people (some of whom they barely tolerate), with whom they have been lumped by chance. If that is not a working definition of family, I have no idea know what is. In a rare gesture to the introvert, there are some cases that present the home as a refuge from the outside. The first season of Bosom Buddies has Kip and Henry coming and going in drag as Buffy and Hilde from their women-only apartment building. Three’s Company has Jack pretending to be homosexual to his landlord so that he may live with female roommates. To their immediate surroundings they must present a certain persona, but it is only in the limits of the home that they can be themselves. However, there is never any indication they are at home to escape any thing more that high rent. It could just be that a person in his/her own place is not entertaining, but a sit-com’s persistence that a place with family is where characters thrive and find familiarity indicates our, the audience’s, agreement with that definition.
The situation comedy presents to us a sense of home and family that we find agreeable. Despite what the lease or deed may say, home is not ours to buy, it is a situation that we build. In the television model, we have built it through

decisions guided by our sensibilities. These sensibilities come from several sources in one’s life; childhood home, friend’s home, the work home, etc. We are given a model to chase after and against which to calibrate our own home. Of course our homes are never like those on TV, but some of us want them to be. Like theirs, our home could be full of passing friends, ever-present family, and our customs and comforts away from the outside; it is our world and kingdom. The sit-com character’s home is an extension of her/him, but not always to his/her liking. In the cases cited above, home, unfortunately may not exactly what she/he wants, but one he/she struggles to maintain. In watching a home, we understand that to be a home because it has the right marks and signs. These marks and signs come from a shared experience of defining “home.” When we watch, we come to an understanding that this is a home, but it is only an understanding of home. An understanding is not concrete knowledge. It is a continuous adjustment with what comforts us and what culture projects as comfort. The sit-com has provided us with both. ⊗