Customer Reviews

Honey, I'm Home!: Sitcoms: Selling The American Dream

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As an avid watcher of family-based situation comedies from the late 1950's to the early 1970's, I looked forward every September to the trifecta of the Jewish High Holy Days, the first day of school, and the new television season, with the last of these in fact the first of these. I couldn't wait to tune in to the family sitcoms broadcast in the early evenings to see what new furniture Lucy had in her apartment, what new apartment Danny Thomas's TV family had moved on up to, and what new fashions Marlo Thomas's "That Girl" modeled. But when in 1975 we were introduced to the family of women who were taking life one day at a time, it marked the first time that a family unit was actually down-sizing, had less than they had the season before, and were struggling to hold onto whatever they could of the declining American Dream.
Jones's book neatly covers the arc of pop mass culture from the early radio serials, most of which I have only heard of second-hand, to the development of prime-time situation comedies that centered around families. Later "sitcoms" such as M*A*S*H and Soap interested me less, but I appreciated the overview that the book provides.
Situation comedies that were centered around World War II veteran fathers and Baby Boom children (although while we were living through the Baby Boom, we didn't know it at the time; we only knew that in our Long Island community new schools were being built on every vacant lot on every available plot of land) and their pearl-wearing, high-heel-while-vacuuming mothers, not only reflected our lives but helped shape them as well. Fathers worked at jobs that required suit and tie, children went to college (but, oddly, usually tried living in a dorm first, then found that they were happier living back home with their parents -- I'm looking at you, Mary Stone), telling us that even when we are grown up with a driver's license and wearing panty-girdles and stockings, there's really no place like home. (What nice girl would want to live away from home before she got married, anyway? Marlo Thomas had to struggle against that question when trying to make "That Girl"s' Ann Marie into a modern career woman, living alone in New York City. Each week that girl was working another zany angle to keep herself financially able to live in her own apartment in the City (while her father impatiently waited for her to fail).
A few touches that I remember so well, but Jones might have overlooked: Donna Reed's perfect wife-and-mother doppleganger Donna Stone did not do her cleaning in pearls and high heels. One time a friend asked her, "How do you do it?" and she replied, "Oh I have a girl in once a week to clean." So you have heard it here: Donna Stone had a cleaning "girl." But she probably made the weekly meat loaf herself.
And Jones misses entirely the unspoken, aching pain of the ironically-named, "Honeymooners." There was no child. There was a husband and wife, in an apartment building in New York City, in the decades after World War II, but no baby. Jackie Gleason had been asked about that, and his reply had been that if there had been a child in the "family," that every episode would have to refer to the child, have the child in one or more scenes, or have to explain where the child was. Indeed, it would have changed the dynamics of the series. But there was one heartbreaking episode when Ralph and Alice Kramden do try to adopt a child, but the birth mother changes her mind, and takes the baby back. After that, Ralph and Alice never speak about a child again.
And Jones' deep pyschological probing of the role that Eddie Haskell played in the world of "Leave it to Beaver"? If you watched the show in the 1950's, you would have seen typical sitcom children living in a world of their own, often with Eddie Haskell pulling something over on Ward and June. But if you can, watch this show again as an adult. Ward and June were very much aware of Eddie's tactics, and the small bits of stage business that they do (knowing glances at each other, and barely-surpressed smiles) and you'll see a different show from the one you watched as a kid.
"Honey, I'm Home" is a treat for the generation that grew up idolizing the suburban sitcom families of post-World War II America. In post-Vietnam, post-Desert Storm, and mid- the endless Operation Enduring Freedom, it returns us to the carefree days of yesteryear, making the past so much more satisfying than the present.

I treasure this book.

Jones is one of our most persuasive commentators on American pop culture. His survey on the development of the sitcom is engaging, aesthetically rigorous, and does an admirable job placing television comedy within some larger contexts. (Personally, I wish he had extended back to American comedic writing on the stage in the 1920's and 1930's....)

There's only one flaw with this book. It stops in the early 1990's. If only some publisher would get behind an updated version so profitable ventures and (arguably) cultural touchstones such as The Cosby Show and Friends could be included.

...and pretty thorough! The book examines American ideas of family & gender by examining television's portrayal of the American family through the decades. While the analysis is consistantly sharp, intelligent, and revealing, the writing is always clear, frequently funny, and occassionally evokes nostalgia.

You will be surprised at the degree to which-- and the manner in which-- changes in the TV's sitcom families reflect changes in American culture and values. Do you think Hollywood would have even conceived of 'The Brady Bunch'-- an instant family created by the marriage of two previously married individuals-- back in Ozzy & Harriet's 1950's? What can you say about a decade in which George Jefferson, Archie Bunker, and JJ from 'Good Times' were central characters in the weekly line-up?

The author does an excellent job of presenting the parallel changes taking place in society and on TV over the past few decades. This book is a fascinating piece of cultural commentary in which the author uses seemingly innocuous television shows to construct a picture of American values in much the same way that an archaeologist constructs an image of a society by making inferences from the artifacts it has left behind.