Throughout television history, then, the representation of family has been a concern in Congress, among special-interest groups and lobbyists, the general audience, and, of course, the industry that has attempted to satisfy all of these parties in different ways and with different emphases.

In the early 1950s, domestic life was represented with some degree of diversity. There were families who lived in suburbs, cities, and rural areas. There were nuclear families (such as that in The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet) and childless couples (such as the Stevenses of I Married Joan or Sapphire and Kingfish of Amos ‘n’ Andy). There were a variety of ethnic families in domestic comedies and family dramas (including the Norwegian family of Mama and the Jewish family of The Goldbergs). In addition, anthology dramas such as Marty sometimes presented ethnic working-class families. At a time when many Americans were moving from cities to mass-produced suburbs, these programs featured nostalgic versions of family and neighborhood bonding that played on sentimentality for the more “authentic” social relationships of the urban past. Ethnicity was typically popular so long as it was a portrayal of first-generation European immigrants; the lives of Black, Hispanic, and Asian families were almost never explored. When minorities were represented, it was generally to provide humor or to play upon racist stereotypes; examples include the Cuban Ricky Ricardo, with his Latin temper, or the African-American Beulah, with her job as the happy maid/mammy in a white household.

Meanwhile, in 1950s documentaries and in fictional programming, the family often served as the patriotic reason “why we fight” communism, much as it served as a source of patriotism in the Norman Rockwell magazine covers of World War II. Action-adventure programs, such as the syndicated series I Led Three Lives, included numerous episodes in which communists infiltrated families and threatened to pervert American youth. Paradoxically, however, the family also provided a reason why Americans should fight the more extremist versions of anticommunism, especially that espoused by Senator Joseph McCarthy. In 1952 Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now presented “The Case of Milo Radulovich,” about an air force pilot who was suspected of communist sympathies. Murrow used interviews with Radulovich’s sister and father to convince viewers that he was not a communist but instead a true American with solid family values. From the outset, the family on television served both sentimental and political/ideological functions, which were often intertwined.

By the mid-1950s, as television production moved to Hollywood film studios and was also controlled by Hollywood independent production companies such as Desilu, the representation of family life became even more standardized in the domestic comedy. By 1960, the ethnic domestic comedies and dramas disappeared, and the suburban domestic comedy rose to prominence. Programs such as The Donna Reed Show, Leave It to Beaver, and Father Knows Best presented idealized versions of white middle-class families in suburban communities that mirrored the practices of ethnic and racial exclusion seen in U.S. suburbs more generally. Even while these programs captured the American imagination, there was a penchant for social criticism registered in 1950s science fiction/horror anthologies (such as The Twilight Zone’s “Monsters on Maple Street,” which explored the paranoid relationship and exclusionary tactics in American suburban towns.)

Within the domestic comedy form itself, the nuclear family was increasingly displaced by a counterprogramming trend that represented broken families and unconventional families. Coinciding with rising divorce rates in the 1960s, numerous shows featured families led by a single father (including comedies such as My Three Sons and Family Affair and the western Bonanza), while others featured single mothers (including comedies such as Julia and Here’s Lucy, and the western The Big Valley). In all these programs, censorship codes demanded that the single parent not be divorced; instead the missing parent was always explained through a death in the family. By 1976 the classic domestic comedies featuring nuclear families were all canceled, while these broken families, as well as a new trend of “fantastic families” in programs like Bewitched and The Addams Family accounted for the mainstay of the genre.

At the level of the news, these fictional programs were met by the tragic breakup of the U.S.’s first family, as the coverage of President John F. Kennedy’s funeral haunted American television screens. It could be argued that the proliferation and popularity of broken families in television entertainment genres provided a means for American society to respond to, and aesthetically resolve, the loss of the nation’s father and the dream or nuclear family the life that he and his family represented. 

As the nation mourned, other program genres showed cause for more general sorrow. Despite the fact that domestic comedy families were well-to-do, the fact 1960s also included depictions of the American underclass in hard-hitting socially relevant dramas such as the short-lived East Side/West Side, which explored issues of child abuse and welfare in New York slums. Television also presented documentaries such as Hunger in America and Harvest of Shame, which depicted underprivileged children, while other documentaries such as Middletown or Salesmen chronicled the everyday lives of typical Americans, demonstrating the impossibility of living up to the American family ideal. This trend toward social criticism was capped off in 1973, when PBS aired An American Family, which chronicled the everyday life of Mr. and Mrs. William Loud and their suburban family by placing cameras in their home and surveying their day-to-day affairs. As the cameras watched, the Louds filed for divorce and their son came out as a homosexual. The discrepancies between these documentary/socially relevant idealized images in the domestic comedy genre were now all too clear.

More generally, the 1970s were a time of significant change, as the portrayal of family life became more diverse, although never completely representative of all American lifestyles. Network documentaries continued to expose the underside of the American Dream, while other genres took on the burden of social criticism as they attempted to reach a new demographic of young urban professionals, working women, and a rising Black middle class. Programs such as Norman Lear’s All in the Family, Maude, and The Jeffersons flourished. All in the Family presented a working-class milieu and drew its comedy out of political differences among generations and between genders in the household; Maude was the first program to feature a divorced heroine, who, in one two-part episode, also had the first prime-time abortion. African-American families were presented in shows ranging from The Jeffersons, who had, as the opening theme song announced, finally got “a piece of the pie,” to programs set in ghettos such as Good Times. Interracial families such as Webster depicted white parents bringing up Black children (although the reverse was never the case). From the mid-1970s through the present, featuring single moms (who were now often divorced or never married) such as Kate and Allie, One Day at a Time, and Murphy Brown. Drawing on previous working-girl/mother sitcoms like Our Miss Brooks or Here’s Lucy, the MTM studio precipitated a shift from literal biological families to a new concept of the family workplace. Here, in the programs such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, coworkers were also codependents, so that relationships were often ambiguously collegial and familial. Despite these innovations, the 1970s and early 1980s still featured sentimental versions of family life including daytime soap operas, family dramas such as Family and Eight is Enough, historical-family dramas such as The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie, and the popular comedy The Brady Bunch.

Over the course of the 1980s, the genre of prime-time soap opera served as television’s answer to the Reagan-era dream of consumer prosperity. Programs such as Dallas and Dynasty presented a world of high fashion, high finance, and, for many, high camp sensibilities. Despite their idealized  upper-class settings, these programs, like daytime soaps or the 1960s Peyton Place, dealt with a marital infidelity, incest, rape, alcoholism, and a range of other issues that pictured the family as decidedly dysfunctional. Perhaps because these families were dysfunctional. Perhaps because these families were extremely wealthy, audiences could view their problems as a symptom of upper-crust decadence rather than a more general failure in American family life experienced by people of all social backgrounds. Wealth was also apparent in the enormously popular The Cosby Show, which featured Black professionals living an ideal family life. Unlike Dallas or Dynasty, however, which were widely appreciated for their escapist fantasies and/or camp exaggeration, Cosby was often taken to task for not being realistic enough.

In addition to prime-time soaps and family comedies, other programs of the 1980s and 1990s showcased dysfunctional families and/or families in crisis. Made-for-TV-movies such as The Burning Bed detailed the horrors of spousal abuse. In addition, during this period, the television talk show took over the role of family therapist as programs such as Geraldo, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and The Jerry Springer Show featuring real-life family feuds with guests who confess to incest, spousal abuse, matricide, codependencies, and a range of other family perversions. Unlike the daytime soap operas, these programs lack the sentiment of family melodrama and thus appear more akin to their contemporary cousin, the TV tabloid. These syndicated “tabloid” shows such as COPS or America’s Most Wanted offer a range of family horrors as law enforcement agencies and vigilantes apprehended the outlaws of the nation. Tabloids not only demonstrated how to catch a thief and other criminals, they also engage in didactic editorializing that either explicitly or implicitly suggests that crimes such as robbery, prostitution, or drug dealing are caused by dysfunctional family lives rather than by political, sexual, racial, or class inequities.  

Still, in other instances, the family remains “wholesome,” especially in the age of cable when the broadcast networks often try to win a family audience by presenting themselves as more clean-cut than their cable competitors. (For example, in various seasons on different nights, ABC and NBC have both fashioned lineups of family-oriented programs aimed at mothers and children.)

Over the course of the 1980s and through the present, innovation on old formats has also been a key strategy. Programs such as the popular sitcom Family Ties reversed the usual generational politics of comedy by making the parents more liberal than their conservative, money-obsessed son. In the later 1980s, the new FOX network largely ingratiated itself with the public by displaying a contempt for the “white-bread” standards of old network television. Programs such as Married…with Children parodied the middle-class suburban sitcom, while sitcoms such as Living Single and the prime-time soap Melrose Place presented alternative youth-oriented lifestyles. ABC’s Roseanne followed suit with its highly popular parody of family life that included such unconventional sitcom topics as teenage sex, spousal abuse, and lesbian romance. In 1994 ABC broadcast All-American Girl, the first sitcom to feature the generational conflicts in a Korean family.

Parody and unconventional topicality were not the only solutions to innovation. If portrayals of contemporary happy families seemed somewhat disingenuous or at best cliche by the end of the 1980s, television could still turn to nostalgia to create sentimental versions of family togetherness. For example, family dramas such as The Wonder Years and Brooklyn Bridge presented popular memories of the United States during the baby boom. Both nostalgia and parody are also the genius in the system of the cable network Nickelodeon, which is owned by Viacom, the country’s largest syndicator. Its prime-time lineup, which it calls “Nick at Nite,” features Viacom-owned reruns of mostly famous sitcoms from television’s first three decades, and Nick advertises them through parodic slogans that make fun of the happy shiny people of old TV. Other cable networks have also premised themselves on the breakdown of nuclear family, ideology and living arrangements by, for example, rethinking the conventional depictions of home life on broadcast genres. For instance, MTV’s Generation X and Y serialized programs under the general title The Real World chronicle the real-life adventures of young people from different races and sexual orientations living together in a house provided by the network. Nevertheless, cable has also been extremely aware of ways to tap into the ongoing national agenda for family values and has turned this into marketing values. Pat Robertson’s Family Channel is an example of how the Christian Right has used cable to rethink the passion for a particular kind of family life, most associated with the middle-class family ideals of the 1950s and early 1960s. In this regard, it is no surprise that the Family Channel showed reruns of Father Knows Best, but without the parodic, campy wink of Nick at Nite’s evening lineup. 

More generally, the rise during the 1990s of multi-channel cable TV has meant that audience shares for any one show are much lower than in the past. By the new millennium, what is often called “postnetwork” television presented a host of different kinds of family shows aimed at smaller “niche” audiences’ varying tastes and different lifestyles. The Christian family values of WB’s drama 7th Heaven attracted one audience, while sitcoms like NBC’s Seinfeld or Comedy Central’s Strangers with Candy either ironically mocked or else openly rejected the premises of nuclear family life. While some critics have deplored these contemporary “no family” sitcoms, others have championed them as a welcome relief to our culture’s narrow definition of what a family is and should be.

So too, numerous shows in the 1990s began to feature gay and lesbian households, presenting lifestyles predicated on the rights of individuals to form families predicted on the rights of individuals to form families with same-sex partners. In 1997, when Ellen DeGeneres’ character came out as a lesbian on the ABC sitcom Ellen, she followed a longer line of network flirtation with lesbian characters (ranging from lesbian episodes of such shows as CBS’s All in the Family to NBC’s The Golden Girls to ABC’s Roseanne). Yet, unlike these earlier examples, which flirted with lesbian lifestyles in a single episode/storyline of a series, Ellen was the first major sitcom to feature a lesbian as a continuing lead character. In this regard, Ellen represented a clear sign that lesbian love was beginning to be depicted as part of the mainstream of television entertainment (if only because advertisers felt there was money to be made in that market). Since 1998 NBC has aired the popular Will & Grace, which centers on the extremely close relationships between a heterosexual woman and her best friend, a gay man.

Although television has consistently privileged the family as the “normal” and most fulfilling way to live one’s life, its programs have often presented multiple and contradictory messages. At the same time that a sitcom featured June Cleaver wondering what suit to buy the Beaver, a documentary or news program showed the underside of family abuse or the severe poverty in which some families were forced to live. Because television draws on an enormous stable of representational traditions and creative personnel, and because the industry has attempted to appeal to large nationwide audiences. Instead it is in the relations among different programs and genres that we begin to get a view of the range of possibilities. Those possibilities have, of course, been limited by large social ideologies such as the racism or homophobia that affects the quality and quantity of shows depicting nonwhite and nonheterosexual households. Despite these ongoing exclusions, however, it is evident that the family on television is as full of mixed messages and ambivalent emotions as it is in real life.