Media and Me, the sequel

I've got a brief sequel to my how-media-influenced-me-as-a-kid post from a couple days ago. This time it deals with the boob tube. Although I said that I didn't watch much television as a young kid, I sort of lied. As I got a little older, I did have few shows that caught my aging eye. Most often I watched them at other people's houses, where there was a captive audience of pony-tailed and baseball-capped heads surrounding me. This always bested watching television solo with Mom and Dad after a healthy, well-rounded dinner and a second stab at my homework.

My soon-to-be-revealed revelations on television almost certainly will find a broader audience than my film analysis -- I mean, it's pretty unlikely that someone else's VHS collection was the same as my family's slim and wholesome pickings. But, there is a high probability that I watched some of the same television programs as my pre-teen counterparts in the mid-1980s.

[As an aside, I had Chris add the modern remake of Cheaper by the Dozen to our Netflix queue, so perhaps I'll add a movie review here -- I feel confident it's not at the top of his list, though, so don't count on that happening anytime super soon.]

Between conversations with Chris and a couple friends this week I started to compile a list of programs that we, as a group, watched growing up. Here's what I came up: Little House on the Prairie, The Cosby Show, Family Ties, Who's the Boss, Growing Pains, Brady Bunch, Silver Spoons, Small Wonder, Webster and Different Strokes. It was a television world without reality programming and adult cartoons. Every show we watched was family-based, and many of them projected the same image I talked about in the films -- the more kids, the merrier.

When ratings started to falter for Family Ties and Growing Pains, what did producers do? They threw a fourth child into the fray. When the five kids from the Cosby Show weren't so cute and innocent anymore, what happened? Denise's stepdaughter waltzed into the brownstone and lit up the living room with her endearing one-liners. There's a curious connection that might be drawn between how producers chose to add more kids to a show to give it new life and whether parents similarly choose to have just one more child in the hopes of keeping that youthful energy aglow in their homes.

There's a strong argument, which I'm sure has been covered before, that these collective programs were not a true reflection of American home life. They were, instead -- as my desires for a big family also are -- a bit of a fantasy. The next generation of programming, including shows like Roseanne and Murphy Brown helped redefine, perhaps more realistically, family life. But still, I can't help but point out the impression these family-based programs left on me -- even if I only watched them a handful of times a season.