Cross posted at The Smoking Room
Sitcom dads in the past 20 years have progressively gotten dumber, while mothers have become the smart ones in the virtual family. Nowhere is this more apparent than “The Simpsons.” What’s the deal with that?
We spend twice as much time with our kids as we did two decades ago, but on television we’re oblivious (“Jimmy Neutron”), troubled (“The Sopranos”), deranged (“Malcolm in the Middle”) and generally incompetent (“Everybody Loves Raymond”). Even if Dad has a good job, like the star of “Home Improvement,” at home he’s forever making messes that must be straightened out by Mom.
NYT columnist John Tierney offers some theories for the development:
The most obvious is that the television audience has splintered along gender lines, and sitcoms are now a female domain. Four out of five viewers of network sitcoms are women, and they apparently like to see Mom smarter than Dad.
Another explanation is the rising number of mothers with paying jobs. Now that they have their own paychecks, the old bread-earning patriarch is less essential and therefore more mockable. And TV writers no longer have an easy stereotype of Mom to work with. Jokes about daffy middle-class housewives like Lucy Ricardo and Edith Bunker seem dated now that so many women work outside the home.
Studies show women still do most of the housework, but:
The same studies show that men have increased their share of the child care and housework while still working 14 hours longer outside the home than mothers do each week. Overall, the men still have a little more free time – about a half-hour per day – but that gap has been shrinking, not growing, in recent decades.
But Tierney goes on to say that bumbling dads are often just as popular with men, if not more so. Despite Homer Simpson’s idiot portrayal, he’s an icon to men everywhere (myself included) and it can be difficult to find a female fan of the show. If I wanted to pick a fight with occasional feminist readers of my blog, I’d say men are more attracted to the sophisticated level of humor on the show than women…but I won’t! (That theory wouldn’t explain the male-oriented popularity of “Jackass,” though.) Actually women like the female doofus as well, which explains why the female “Friends” are still so popular in syndication. It’s certainly not Courtney Cox’s terrible acting that draws them. (Her and David Arquette were made for other professionally.)
Maybe that’s the real dynamic – each sex wants to watch its own making fools of themselves so the viewer feels relatively better about his or her place in the gender (and suitability as a romantic partner). Or perhaps we sympathize with our gender’s shortcomings and realize we’ve been in the character’s situation before. Who knows. Sadly the sitcom has faded, replaced by the genderless Darwinism of the reality show where viewer sympathies are fickle and short-lived. Thanks a lot, “Survivor.”
I’m a tech journalist who’s making a TV show about a college newspaper.