Heart and Mind

Adult Sit-Com Characters, Part 2

There's a definitely similarity in subject matter here, so this blog entry must be considered part two to my previous musing entitled Catching Up to Adult Characters (Or, "Another Blog Post with Brady Bunch References"). If you haven't read it, you might want to. Not that you need to, of course. I'm not going to spew forth some BS about how your have to have read that as a prerequisite to understanding what I'm going to say here. You can understand this just fine on it's own. But, it's still recommended reading. I'll even target it in a new browser window so you can just read it and then shut the window when you're done and be right back here.

Anyway, now that you're back or decided not to leave in the first place, let's get to today's part.

Whereas in the previous essay, I mused about how I somehow caught up in age to these adult figures from situation comedy TV and compared how I feel now to how I perceived them to be, this essay is going to look at modern day adult sit-com TV figures and compare them to the older ones.

Well...not all modern sit-com TV adults or even a wide sample of adult figures will be looked at. I don't know enough about modern TV to be well spoken on the trends. In fact, I'm only going to mention one set of adult figures: Carrie and Doug Heffernen on the King of Queens.

WAIT! Don't stop reading yet!

See, if I were reading this blog and I didn't watch that show, I'd have surfed off the page immediately, thinking, "I am not interested in this." But that doesn't matter here. The point is not to discuss the show, so if you do know about it, that's a bonus. We're discussing concepts here.

So, despite not knowing much about modern sit-coms, I do know about the King of Queens, mostly on account of the fact that I was curious after having seen that the lead female role was being played by some bitchy chick who I knew I had seen on those "summer-seasons" of Saved by the Bell. I can and will admit that, so give me props, not grief, for it.

Now, the sit-com 30-somethings—people playing roles that were supposed to be my age—of the 70s and 80s always were adult-like, capable, strong, parental-type, be they supposedly representing middle America (Mike Brady), inner city projects (James, Sr. from Good Times), or something strange and unusual from the norm, like Brooklyn housekeeper working for a rich, Connecticut female executive (Tony from Who's the Boss).

All those dude were played by guys approximately my age when they were in the role.

Now, fast forward to the more modern sit-com, King of Queens. It has been said in episodes that Doug is thirty-eight, a few years my senior. And Carrie is played by someone who is one-year older than I am in real life, so she's presumably at least that old. But these guys are not Mike and Carol. For starters, we'll state the obvious: they don't have kids. They kind of are like "glorified kids," themselves. Doug's M.O., for example, is hanging out with his buddies and watching sports, drinking beer, eating pizza. Carrie is sort of the female equivalent, into shopping for shoes and stuff like that. And as couple, their lives are about going to movies with other kid-less couples and dining out and stuff like that.

In short, they are familiar characters—just not within their demographic. Really, what they are is twenty-somethings in the thirty-something age bracket. Their lives seem to have more in common with the folks on Friends, who have plenty of time to sit and frolic at their Starbuck's like Central Perk hangout.

Even the character on the show who does have kids, Deacon, is more like Doug than Mr. Brady.

So what does this all mean? Well, like I said, you might be able to counter argue with a bunch of modern shows that are like Father Knows Best and, for all I know, you may or may not be right. But I think it simply says something that this show even exists at all. A married couple, married for 10 years or something, who still hang out a lot, much like typical twenty-somethings.

I am and never was quite like Doug Heffenen. I don't drink beer or watch football and I never was a "sit around with my boys doing male things" kind of guy. And now I am a parent. But in some ways I can relate a lot more to Doug then Mike Brady, who was the parent of teenagers at my age. I was thirty when we decided to try growing the family. I had no interest in emulating classic American norms of spawning offspring in my early to mid 20. Rather, I was doing the kinds of things that Doug might do, just on a slightly less "societally cool" level, like hanging out with my wife and our friends at Applebee's or some other restaurant of similar ilk. And then going back to someone's house and talking about stupid s**t like the kind of stuff I write on this blog.

More importantly, perhaps, is that old school sit-com adults were almost defined by their children because the show more often than not centered around "family life," not about hanging out and having fun with your friends. And I think that says a lot that King of Queens was not like that, because it points to a reality: thirty-somethings are interesting individuals because they, too, enjoy hanging out and going out to eat with their friends. So while my kids (and wife) are the most important things in the world to me, if they're in bed or if we're out (the three times a year it happens!) without them, we revert into more like what our non-kid-having friends are like.

It just doesn't happen as often, so you don't see the side as much, but it's there, even though we're thirty-somethings.

posted by Steve @ 4:54 PM