Bad Television Parenting

In a post entitled, "Why Are There No Good Parents on TV," Lisa Belkin of the NYTimes Magazine says the following:

Bad parenting, I can’t help noticing, is the only kind of parenting on television. An anthropologist with just our TV programs to go by would think that most of us at the turn of this century have no children, and that those we do have tend to go poof when they become complications (What happened to Molly in “Heroes”? Or JD’s son in “Scrubs”? Why doesn’t Chloe ever call the baby-sitter on “24″?) The smattering of kids allowed to stick around are being raised by self-involved, clueless, overly permissive (or overly militant), absent (or hovering) parents. This is true whether the characters are fictional (”Gossip Girl,” “Desperate Housewives”) or “real” (”WifeSwap,” “Jon and Kate Plus Eight”).

I certainly can’t claim to watch every show out there (and please send me examples of where you see this trend, or not) but from where I sit, it has been a while — since the days of The Bill Cosby Show, and One Day at a Time, and, before that, The Brady Bunch and the Partridge Family — since a parent on television spent much time actually being a parent. They might not have done it realistically back in those days, but at least they did something that resembled parenting.

I think that shows are simply different than they were ten or twenty years ago. Taking her own examples, what notable difference can you point out between shows such as "Scrubs," "Heroes," and "24" and shows like "The Bill Cosby Show," "The Brady Bunch," and "The Partridge Family?" Well, the former are clearly not shows about the daily lives of a typical (or in some cases, comedically eccentric) American family. "Scrubs" is about the life of several hospital employees, with the show's focus centered around the hospital and not the family unit; "Heroes" is about a group of ordinary citizens all over the world who cope dealing with superpowers (and speaking of which, I think that there are plenty examples of good parenting in this show--at least in the first season: think of Claire's mother and father, persistently trying to protect her from harm as she struggles with her newfound abilities); and "24" is...well you get the idea.

The point is that most television shows today (at least the popular ones) are less concerned about the every day trials of the family and more with bestowing upon their viewers elements of the fantastic or the unexpected. "House" is a great example of a show that takes elements from previous doctor/hospital stereotypes and flips it by marking the protagonist as a misanthropic, rude medical maverick--in many ways opposed to the expected archetype of the caring, nurturing healer. This is why most families you see on TV today are unusual and differ from the "good" parents of yore.

The question really is why the American public has grown so tired of seeing those American families in their daily lives. Is it simply that we've become oversaturated and bored with the same overt attempts at teaching us morality? Is it that storytelling has evolved to more creative, stimulating plateau? Or is it reflective of the fact that Americans are simply less concerned with family values than they were a decade ago. Personally, I think it's some combination of the first and the second.