Editor’s Note: This is the seventeenth part of a series
about the German and American master director Douglas Sirk (Detlef Sierck). The
previous parts were published on
18 June 2017 (Post
Sirk:Mass Camp; Genre and the Women's Film)
12 July
2017 Afterword:
American family (melo)drama and comedy on screen. The forties and fifties
Click on the dates to access the earlier posts.
To come shortly: A final Afterword
****************
Bruce is a long time cinephile, scholar and writer on
cinema across a broad range of subjects. The study being posted in parts is
among the longest and most detailed ever devoted to the work of Douglas Sirk.
It is planned for the complete text to be published as an e-book.
As a tv series Peyton Place (514 eps., 1964-9) owed its existence to the success in America of the long running British series Coronation Street (9124 eps.,1960-2010) which showed that soaps could succeed in the US in prime time slots. Dallas (356 eps. 1978-91) centred on a rich and powerful Texan family who build their wealth on cattle and oil, lusting after power, money and sex. Dynasty (164 eps. 1981-9) featured an oil rich family in Denver, Colorado. In theme if not in style, they were prime time soap opera descendants of Written on the Wind. Dallas had a peak audience of more than 30 million. Something of an inversion of Dallas and Dynasty, The Waltons (1972-81) was a sentimental saga about a barefoot but happy hick family in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia.
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| Bonanza |
The first of the
family formula westerns was Bonanza (430 eps., 1959-73) set in
Virginia City, Nevada during the Civil War. It is more of a 'saddle soap' than
an actioner. The Big Valley (112 eps. 1965-9), is a family saga
of cattle ranching in the San Joaquin Valley while The High Chapparal
(98 eps. 1967-71) set in Arizona in the 1870s is about an attempt to
establish a family cattle empire and is notable apparently for its portrayal of
the Indians with dignity and respect.
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| Father Knows Best |
A marker for the
advent of family sitcom on the small screen, Father Knows Best
(283 eps. 1954-60) in an American WASP family of five, idealised sentiment
mitigated by the gentle irony implicit in the series title. Leave It to
Beaver (234 eps. 1957-64) was a long running family sitcom which
ostensibly gives centre stage to a kid's point of view. One critic has
commented that the father-son interactions in Happiness (see below) are
like a “pedophiliac pastiche of father-son chats in Leave It to Beaver.”
Perhaps the most buoyant of all the tv family sitcoms is The Dick Van Dyke Show (158 eps. 1961-66) created and written by Carl Reiner, divided between the work and family of Rob Petrie (DVD) head writer for a tv comedy show produced in downtown Manhattan providing a natural forum for jokes. His home life is shared with his wife (Mary Tyler Moore), son and the neighbours.
Perhaps the most buoyant of all the tv family sitcoms is The Dick Van Dyke Show (158 eps. 1961-66) created and written by Carl Reiner, divided between the work and family of Rob Petrie (DVD) head writer for a tv comedy show produced in downtown Manhattan providing a natural forum for jokes. His home life is shared with his wife (Mary Tyler Moore), son and the neighbours.
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| The Cosby Show |
Sirk commented that
in 1952 he was “interested” for the first time to have a black actor in the
cast in a supporting role in a film he was directing (Meet Me at the Fair).
More than three decades later top rating The Cosby Show (202 eps.
1984-93) based on Bill Cosby's stand-up comic style, defied concerns about the
ratings potential of a series centred on an Afro-American family. Although
Cosby originally wanted the family including five children to be working class,
it was settled that the Huxtables be upper middle class. Unlike the pioneer
network series in which The Jeffersons (255 eps. 1975-85)
are a successful Afro-American couple (a spin-off from All in the Family),
it seems that race was almost never mentioned in The Cosby Show although
black culture was promoted by cameo appearances of black musicians and artists.
Serious issues such as dyslexia and teenage pregnancy were integrated into the
comedy. All in the Family (185 eps. 1971-9) inspired by the
British sitcom Till Death Do Us Part, with Archie Bunker as the “lovably
bigoted” patriach of a working class family in Queens, NY, was groundbreaking
in the injection into network sitcom of a range of previously taboo subjects
such as racism (the black couple, the Jeffersons, were neighbours of the
Bunkers), homosexuality and women's liberation. When the satire was politically
broadened into a middle class family setting in The Simpsons in
1989, significantly it was not only animated rather than live action but also
in a fictionalised setting.
The premise for Roseanne
(128 eps. 1989-97) was to have a working mother in a leading role. The
Connors are a working class family in Illinois, three children with both
parents working in a fictional town in the vicinity of Chicago. An immediate
ratings success, Roseanne was critically acclaimed as one of the first
American sitcoms to portray a blue collar family in realistic mode. Roseanne's
brother and sister are both portrayed as gay. A ten episode series with members
of the original cast is reported to be in production for a 2018 season. Modern
Family (188 eps. in eight seasons 2009 -17, with two more seasons set
for 17-18, 18-19) is a sitcom in mockumentary style (the characters at times
address the camera) centred on three interrelated Latino inclusive families -
nuclear, step- and same sex - living in the LA area with comic takes on
everyday situations. The mothers are in the main stay-at-home. A hash tag for
simultaneous analysis is incorporated.
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| Desperate Housewives |
In Desperate
Housewives (180 eps. 2004-12) the far from idyllic lives and households
of four upper middle class housewives whose intersecting narratives are viewed
with commentary from above by one of them who suicides in the first season. The
black humour has been compared to American Beauty, the mysteries to Twin
Peaks – behind the glossy facade, a touch of nihilism. In 1990-1 Twin
Peaks (30 eps.) was a top rating worldwide sensation which in two
seasons lost much of its mainstream American audience while gaining a
stitched-on cult following. The founding idea was to combine a police
investigation of a murder with a soap opera. Peyton Place provided the concept
of the town before the characters were developed. At the centre is an
all-American family whose desecration in lowlife is fully revealed in the 1992
prequel Twin Peaks movie. In the mix of multiple plots, weird characters
and off beat humour merging into supernatural darkness across genres, David
Lynch's romantic vision achieves full alchemy in the six episodes he directed
(1,3,9,10,15,30) epitomised by the Red Room sequences. Twin Peaks has
returned in 2017 in a ten episode third season co-written (with Mark Frost) and
directed by Lynch.
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| Breaking Bad |
The Sopranos (86 eps. 1999-2007) is credited with turning serial tv
into a legitimate art form. Creator of the series David Chase has said he
wanted to tell the story about the reality of a mobster. Partly based on an
actual New Jersey organised crime family, The Sopranos sheds light on
Italian family dynamics. It has also been criticised for stereotyping Italians;
Chase tried to apply his own experience of family dynamics to the series. The fin de siècle Mafia is personified
in Tony Soprano. Like Sirk's melodramas, The Sopranos engages in a
critique of American life and values. In The Godfather and The
Sopranos organised crime and family obedience are accomplices in the lives
of two Italian-American families. Breaking Bad (62 eps. 2008-13)
locates moral complexity in the very being of a middle class family. Devotion
to family by almost all the characters in the series is a central theme of its
creator Vince Gilligan. Once the initial steps are taken, the White family
become inescapably ensnared within and without by escalating deceit in pursuit
of money and power in the illicit drug trade. Walter White and Tony Soprano
have been recognised as mirror images of one another, Walter “deliberately
abandoning the light for darkness” while Tony was “born into darkness.”
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| The Americans |
The Americans
(65 eps. 2013-17 with
a 10 eps. final season for 2018) a new take in long form family drama created
by former CIA agent Joe Weisberg which focusses on the Jennings family, the
parents being Soviet “sleeper” agents (ie, once inactive but now activated as necessary)
during the Reagan era. In the early series their children are unaware of their
parents' double life. International relations becomes a kind of allegory for
family and wider human relations. Weisberg says he based his stories on accounts
by former agents serving as spies while raising families.
Todd Haynes made a
5 part mini-series for HBO, a reworking of Mildred Pierce (2011),
melodrama with a feminist perspective in extended low key scenes of everyday
situations with, as critic Peter Bradshaw puts it, “the operatic drama
springing from an accessible reality.” Haynes works with the same attention to
preplanned detail in his mise en scène as Sirk, an acknowledged mentor to whom
he pays tribute in Far from Heaven.
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