Television Families

The words “family” and “television” have been hammered together so often that they practically define each other. The image of the family as presented on TV has produced an ideological debate more explosive than one of McGyver’s bombs. On the tube, the traditional dividing line between reality and fantasy has dissolved into a post-modernist haze of confusion. Dan Quayle is still debating Murphy Brown, a small theater group in San Francisco performs episodes of The Brady Bunch and the name Al Bundy has become a verb.

With so much heat, you’d expect to find a fire. But the standard TV portrayal of families is so marginal that it barely sparks with the dying flicker of a disused Bic. It’s a one-dimensional fantasy, whether it be Ozzie and Harriet’s pipedream or Murphy Brown’s miraculously stress-free motherhood. It’s all high concept and low reality.

“TV is either way behind the curve or way ahead of it,” says Nancy Robinson, publicity manager for the Independent Television Service. ITVS is a media organization affiliated with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and it’s currently touring the country with its seven-part series Television Families. The Wexner Center for the Arts is one of eight selected locations for screenings of the program which shows here September 8, 10 and 17.

“We are a generation that has been weaned on television,” continues Robinson. “Its influence is inescapable.”

But it isn’t unalterable, as demonstrated by the seven iconoclastic films presented in Television Families. The works range from satiric exercises in suburban bad taste to thick slices of real life, but all share a determined desire to reveal aspects of family life that extend beyond the myopic vision of the prime time world.

Some of the filmmakers whose work is included in Television Families are already well established on the independent market. Dottie Gets Spanked by Todd Haynes, whose feature film Poison propelled him to the forefront of the New Queer Cinema movement. African-American culture and a feminist viewpoint are combined in the comedy MOTV (My Own TV) by Ayoka Chenzira, while Jon Moritsugu deliriously demolishes the myths about the model Asian-American family in Terminal USA. An Appalachian legacy of pain and hope underlies the protracted drinking bout of Night Ride, while the crazy nature of TV itself erupts in A Psychic Mom, when Doris Day meets the supernatural.

If TV is a reflection of society, “then this is the funhouse mirror,” explains Robinson. Even more importantly, it’s a chance to see TV through something other than the rose-colored monocle worn by the commercial tube.