The Tube Has Spoken by Julie Anne Taddeo

Author:Julie Anne Taddeo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky

Cultural Histories and Family Values Media Debates

I would argue that reality TV is the popular media form with the most to say about the current status of the American family. The television historian Lynn Spigel has shown that early TV developed coextensively with the post-World War II suburban middle-class family—a specific kind of modern nuclear family model the medium made into its favored subject and audience. As Spigel notes, while sociologists like Talcott Parsons were arguing in the 1940s and 1950s that the modern nuclear family is the social form best suited to capitalist progress, the new electronic TV medium targeted the postwar white, middle-class families flocking to the suburbs, encouraging the development of the modern family as a consumer unit.

As a new genre now exploring the self-conscious imbrication of family and the media as one of its main themes, reality TV raises vital issues of marketing and consumerism. If television enters the home to become, as Cecelia Tichi has shown, “the electronic hearth” around which the family gathers, so too does the family envision itself through the tube. TV addresses the family as ideal viewer, imagined community, and the basis for democracy mediated through mass communication; the nation is figured as a collective of families all watching their television sets (a collective that can now exercise its democratic rights by calling in to vote for a favorite singer on American Idol). If the domestic sitcom was like an electronic media version of a station wagon trundling the modern family along in the 1950s, reality TV is the hybrid gas-electric car of the postmodern family today.

As reality programs ponder the status of American families now, they also enter into the family values media debates in ways that speak to the politicization of the family. Coontz has proven that the family has been seen as the moral guide for the nation ever since the late nineteenth century, from Theodore Roosevelt's insistence that the nation's future rested on the “right kind of home life” to Ronald Reagan's assertion that “strong families are the foundation of society” (94). As the media studies critic Laura Kipnis notes in her recent witty polemic against modern coupledom, alternative models of organization trouble the social contract, so it is no mistake that “the citizenship-as-marriage analogy has been a recurring theme in liberal-democratic political theory for the last couple of hundred years or so, from Rousseau on” (23-24).

Since family opens such a space of performed social identity, often articulated through narrative, it is not surprising that television has always been one of the key battlegrounds for familial ideas. In her study of how 1970s television responded to the perceived cultural crises of the time, the historian Ella Taylor argues that TV families of the 1950s and 1960s were largely portrayed as harmonious, the building blocks of society and a consensus culture (Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It to Beaver), whereas 1970s families appeared under siege and in crisis because of significant changes, such as a spike in divorce rates during that decade (All in the Family, One Day at a Time).

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