TELEVISION

THE FAMILY IS DEAD, HAIL FRIENDS

sitcoms don't lie; they see the future

by Estelle Babus

The Donna Reed Show

The concept of the American Family has captured the imagination of both the right and left. No matter which side you lean toward, and no matter how great the divide is in our country, everyone shares the deep suspicion that something is going wildly wrong. Strangely, sociologists, professional and armchair, also agree. There are large numbers of articles proclaiming the family to be a relic of the past, exploring the loneliness epidemic, and the tendency of the young to see romance as unattainable, turning to apps and platforms to find sexual partners. Everyone agrees we have reached an impasse or cultural catastrophe if you are inclined that way. But what kind of impasse is it and how long has it been going on? Perhaps, rather unsurprisingly, mass media (especially in the form of the sitcom) has quietly whispered the awful truth for years, which is, many people are looking to escape the family without saying so, and that we are in the midst of a quiet revolution.

In 1947, the first sitcom aired on NBC and not surprisingly, the family was at the center of it. After Mary Kay and Johnny, the family sitcom took off. The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952-66), Leave it to Beaver (1957-63), The Donna Reed Show (1958-86), The Andy Griffith Show (1960-68) were the most notable. All in the Family (1971-79), The Jeffersons (1975-85), Good Times (1974-79), Family Ties (1982-89), and The Cosby Show (1984-92) were the most popular of hundreds, as the genre dominated television network schedules into the 80’s and 90’s. Even shows like Full House (1987-97), which featured a less traditional family, the focus is still the family, with an emphasis on blood relations.

In the 1990s, a new style of sitcom that centered around groups of friends started appearing with increasing frequency. Seinfeld (1989-98), Saved by the Bell (1989-92), Sex and the City (1998-2004), and That 70’s Show (1998-2006) highlight this new focus. In the 2000s, the pace increased with The Office (2005-2013), The Big Bang Theory (2007-2019), Parks and Recreation (2009-2015), and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2005-today). When we look at the most recent sitcoms, we can’t help but notice that the trend shows no signs of waning: Girls (2012-2017), Brooklyn Nine Nine (2013-2021), Abbott Elementary (2021-), and many, many more represent the new norm.

So, we might ask the same thing many people, politicians, sociologists, armchair philosophers, cultural commentators on the right, left, and center, are asking of the family, “What happened?” Well to put it simply, the state of the world, everyone's timelines, and the very concept of what a family is have spun a few evolutions. The classic nuclear family at the center of sitcoms has disappeared, with more opportunities and ways of living becoming possible. If people choose to get married, it’s happening later and later in life. Young adults, who used to marry and have children in their 20’s and 30’s, are instead living with their friends, creating new types of living arrangements, and families. This has infiltrated every aspect of what was once seen as the one and only province of the American Family, as traditional familial rituals (Thanksgiving, weddings, and even birth) are now slowly entering the friend zone.

The most iconic American Holiday is Thanksgiving. It’s also the holiday we associate most with family and extended family. Most sitcoms have a Thanksgiving episode, and the premise for a long time was always the same. You spend the day with your family, something goes wrong, and after all the trouble and mix ups are overcome, you are all grateful that you spent the holiday together. But with the new sitcoms, questions arise, and the most basic one is who do you spend Thanksgiving with? The answer used to be so obvious, but in sitcoms like New Girl, new things start to happen and new arrangements start showing up. If we weren’t looking at sitcoms, we might even say that there is a cultural revolution happening right before us, which is not the first thing you think of when someone says their favorite show is New Girl.

The New Girl at Thanksgiving

All the New Girl Thanksgiving episodes are iconic, wonderful television. Whether they contain hunting, blind dates, food poisoning, or dead bodies, the gang always ends up closer than ever, and each Thanksgiving episode keeps on getting more and more untraditional. Although the turkey never really gets eaten, and things always go awry, these episodes are heartwarming and unpredictable. And yet for all of these qualities, they are fundamentally anti-family, or at least the blood-related kind. The message is always that the new “found” family is healthier and more appealing than the real blood one. “Friendsgiving” is never perfect, but it is clearly presented as preferable.

The New Girl Thanksgiving episode in season two is perhaps the most crucial episode in charting this sea change from family to friend. It is also one of the only times in the New Girl Thanksgiving episodes that we see the mixing of blood families and friend families. For all its lightheartedness, the episode is about serious familial estrangement. Jess, the protagonist of the show, claims to be hosting her parents for two separate thanksgivings but turns out she is trying to get them back together. With flashbacks of her “parent trap” schemes, and an ultimate admission from Jess that she’s scared she is destined to end up alone like her mom. We see the ways that Jess’ broken home has impaired her adult life. Here, we have a new trope: the family as the source of all your psychological problems.

Another one of the roommates, Schmidt, has his bully cousin over to the apartment for the gang’s thanksgiving dinner. The whole day becomes a competition between the two of them, with the goal being who is the manliest. Similar to Jess’ problems, we discover that Schmidt's inferiority complex is the result of family and that he is still trying to overcome those wounds as an adult. It’s comic and fun, but couldn’t be more pointed: blood-family is damaging.

When Nick hears Jess’ parents will be visiting, his immediate reaction is that he’s “not a dad guy” that he “doesn’t trust ‘em, never has.” With Schmidt nodding and comfortingly saying, “it’s ok man”. The implications of this brief exchange are subtle yet pointed: comfort comes from one’s friends, pain from one’s family. Later on in the episode, when Jess asks Nick to flirt with her mom and he begins enjoying it, we see the family as the source of all twisted relationships. What’s clear is that there is no comfort in family, only the comfort that friends bring. The New Girl Thanksgiving episodes literally and symbolically usher in the new era of friendsgiving.

If Thanksgiving represents the ritual where family reunite, weddings represent another form of familial unification. The day’s whole focus is not only uniting two people, but also two families. In How I Met Your Mother, Marshall and Lily’s wedding shows a shift in who people prioritize, and who in their lives are the most important and real.

Before the real wedding day, the pair almost elope. Since they broke up and then got back together, they fear facing Marshall’s family and take a spontaneous trip to Atlantic City. Their closest friends, Barney, Robin, and Ted clear their schedules to go along. Notice how readily their friends change their plans for them, where real family would complain like banshees. Their decision is a literal rejection of the biological family. The excuse is stress, but in a symbolic way it puts a price on family estrangement: that which causes any sort of discomfort is not worth the trouble and must be removed. Although fear and guilt stop them from going through with the elopement, the attempt itself says everything you need to know about blood and chosen families.

The Real/False Wedding

In the episode in which the two are actually married, we see a classic series of wedding day mishaps that ultimately lead to a very sweet ceremony. With the feeling that their perfect wedding is falling apart, they decide to go back to the original ceremony they wanted: small, outside, with only the most important people there: their friends. In fact, their friends aren’t just there; they are active participants, something normally reserved for blood-family. And when they go back for the big wedding, we know that it’s the false one. And so, in this Wedding-Day episode of How I Met Your Mother, the producers establish a clear hierarchy. Friends are more important than biological family.

In episode three of Season five, the ever popular sitcom Friends presents the most radical rejection of biological family by literally rethinking its very limits. When the episode begins, we see Phoebe walking into the hospital and going into labor. Who is following right behind her? The closest people in her life, her friends Rachel, Joey, and Ross, with Monica and Chandler showing up a few minutes later. So, again, it is friends who are there.

The real birth

The most telling detail of this episode is that Phoebe is carrying her half-brother and her sister-in-law‘s child, actually their triplets. As a surrogate, she is connected to her half-brother and sister-in-law through a kind of ersatz biology. She carries their child by donating her womb, a kind of sacrifice to blood family. Of course, she gets no benefits other than inconvenience and pain. That’s what family does to you. On the other hand, her friends come to the rescue. With Joey filming the “happy” occasion just as a dad might, all the friends gather around her bed. They are her own “surrogate family” and support system, and we see the undeniable change in what a “real” family looks like, chosen and there at the most difficult and excruciatingly painful parts of your life.

In the same episode, paralleling Phoebe's birth, Joey gives birth to kidney stones. Just as much as they supported Phoebe, the group gathers to be there for Joey’s “birth” experience, too. The support he gets makes his experience just as “real” and important. Clearly, the writers want us to see this substitution of Joey for Phoebe, that their parallel births (one, triplets, and the other, kidney stones, also triplets) tell us that in a way blood family is a scam. The writers and producers couldn’t have been more direct. Even birth is unreal compared to the love of your friends.

The false birth

Our biological families mess us up to varying degrees, in unique ways. Many young adults might find themselves stuck in a family that just doesn’t work for them wondering what might happen if they could replace them with friends? 30 years ago, few would have ever believed that it was a possibility and 50 years ago no one would have ever thought about it. In recent years, it’s become more and more common to choose a “found family” over blood family, and in extreme cases to even legally divorce your parents. As more people live with friends as adults, it becomes normal for these friends to become the most important people in your life. In theory, the idea of a “found” or “chosen” family, sounds like a utopia. It suggests the notion that the members of your family can be decided of your own volition. However, perfection in any sort of family is an unachievable goal. That being said, creating a community where love thrives, and support systems prosper is a pretty good ideal, whether this involves blood relations or not. Though it’s hard to say just how the family will evolve next, it is undeniable that wherever it goes, the sitcom will get there first.

©The CCA Arts Review and Estelle Babus