Few
shows better demonstrate the resonance between collectively-held
fictional imagination and what cultural critic Raymond Williams
called "the structure of feeling" of a historical moment than Family
Ties. Airing on NBC from 1982 to 1989, this highly successful
domestic comedy explored one of the intriguing cultural inversions
characterizing the Reagan era: a conservative younger generation
aspiring to wealth, business success, and traditional values, serves
as inheritor to the politically liberal, presumably activist, culturally
experimental generation of adults who had experienced the 1960s.
The result was a decade, paradoxical by America's usual post-World
War II standards, in which youthful ambition and social renovation
became equated with pronounced political conservatism. "When else
could a boy with a briefcase become a national hero?" queried Family
Ties' creator, Gary David Goldberg, during the show's final
year.
The boy with the briefcase was Alex P. Keaton, a competitive and
uncompromising, baby-faced conservative whose absurdly hard-nosed
platitudes seemed the antithesis of his comfortable, middle class,
white Midwestern upbringing. Yet Alex could also be endearingly
(and youthfully) bumbling when tenderness or intimacy demanded departure
from the social conventions so important to him. He could equally
be riddled with self-doubt about his mettle for meeting the high
standards he set for himself. During the course of the show, Alex
aged from an unredoubtable high schooler running for student council
president, to a college student reconciled to his rejection by Princeton.
Alex's
highly programmatic views of life led to continuous conflict with
parents Steven and Elyse. Former war protestors and Peace Corps
volunteers these adults now found fulfillment raising their children
and working, respectively, as a public television station manager
and as an independent architect. If young Alex could be comically
cynical, his parents could be relentlessly cheerful do-gooders whose
causes occasionally seemed chimerical. Yet (especially with Elyse)
their liberalism could also emerge more authoritatively, particularly
when it assumed the voice, not of ideological instruction, but of
parental conscience and loving tolerance. And so Family Ties
explored not just the cultural ironies of politically conservative
youth, but the equally powerful paradox of liberal conscience. Here
that conscience was kept alive within the loving nuclear family
so frequently decried as an instrument of patriarchal domination,
and so constantly appropriated by conservatives as a manifestation
of their own values.
Significantly,
the show's timely focus on Alex and his contrasts with his parents
was discovered rather than designed. Family Ties' creator
was Gary David Goldberg, an ex-hippie whose three earlier network
shows had each been canceled within weeks, leading him to promise
that Family Ties would be his last attempt. He undertook the show
as a basically autobiographical comedy which would explore the parents'
adjustments to 1980s society and middle-aged family life. The original
casting focused on Michael Gross and Meredith Baxter-Birney as the
crucial Keatons. Once the show aired, however, network surveys quickly
revealed that audiences were more attracted by the accomplished
physical comedy, skillful characterization, and approachable looks
of Michael J. Fox, the actor playing Alex. Audience reaction and
Fox's considerable, unexpected authority in front of the camera
prompted Goldberg and his collaborators to shift emphasis to the
young man, a change so fundamental that Goldberg told Gross and
Baxter-Birney that he would understand if they decided to quit.
The crucial inter-generational dynamic of the show, then, emerged
in a dialogue between viewers, who identified Alex as a compelling
character, and writers, who were willing to reorient the show's
themes of cultural succession around the youth. Goldberg's largely
liberal writers usually depicted Alex's ideology ironically, through
self-indicting punch lines. Many audiences, however, were laughing
sympathetically, and Alex Keaton emerged as a model of the clean-cut,
determined, yet human entrepreneur. Family Ties finished
the 1983 and 1984 seasons as the second-highest rated show on television,
and finished in the top 20 six of its seven years. President Ronald
Reagan declared Family Ties his favorite program, and offered
to make an appearance on the show (an offer pointedly ignored by
the producers). Fox was able to launch a considerable career in
feature films based on his popularity from the show.
Alex
had three siblings. Justine Bateman played Mallory, the inarticulate
younger sister who, unwilling to compete with the overachieving
Alex, devotes herself to fashion and boyfriends, including the elder
Keaton's nemesis, junkyard sculptor Nick (played by Scott Valentine).
Tina Yothers played the younger daughter, Jennifer, an intelligent
observer who could pronounce scathingly on either Alex or the parents'
foibles. During the 1984 season, a baby boy joined the Keaton family,
and was played by three separate children, as--by the next season--he
quickly developed into a toddler.
Both
Family Ties' creator and its production style are products
of a specific set of events in Hollywood which, in the mid-1980s,
granted promising writer-producers unusual opportunity and resources
to pursue their creative interests. Goldberg's first jobs in television
were as a writer and writer-producer for MTM, the independent production
company founded by Grant Tinker and Mary Tyler Moore. The company
was initially devoted to the production of "quality" comedies, and
known for the special respect it accorded writers. In the early
1980s, the booming syndication market and continued vertical integration
prompted Hollywood to consider writers who could create new programs
as important long-term investments. Paramount Studios raided MTM
for its most promising talents, among them Goldberg. Like many of
his cohorts, Goldberg was able to negotiate a production company
of his own, partial ownership of his shows, and a commitment from
Paramount to help fund his next project--all in exchange for Paramount's
exclusive rights to distribute the resulting programs. Goldberg
applied the methods of proscenium comedy production he had learned
at MTM, developing Family Ties as a character-based situation
comedy, sustained by imaginative dialogue, laudable acting, and
carefully-considered scripts which sat at the focus of a highly
collaborative weekly production routine. (Inside Family Ties,
a PBS special produced in 1985, shows actors, the director, and
writers each taking considerable license to alter the script; Goldberg
mentions that he takes it for granted that 60% of a typical episode
will be rewritten during the week.) Each episode was shot live before
a studio audience, to retain the crucial excitement and unity of
a stage play.
In Family Ties' third season, the program played an unprecedented
role in the production industry's growing independence from the
declining broadcast networks. Paramount guaranteed syndicators that
it would provide them with a minimum of 95 episodes of Family
Ties, though only 70 or so had been completed at the time. Anxious
to capitalize on the booming syndication market, Paramount was,
in effect, agreeing to produce the show even if NBC canceled it--a
decision anticipating Paramount's later, successful distribution
of Star Trek: The Next Generation exclusively through syndication.
-Michael
Saenz
