The boy with the briefcase was Alex P. Keaton (Michael J. Fox), 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 also could be riddled with self-doubt about his ability to meet the high standards he set for himself. During the course of the show, Alex aged from a high school student reconciled to his rejection by Princeton University.

Alex’s highly programmatic views of life led to continual conflict with his parents Steven (Michael Gross) and Elyse (Meredith Baxter-Birney). Former war protesters 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, a social form 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 Goldberg was 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 that would explore the parents’ adjustments to 1980s society and middle-aged family life. The original casting focused on Gross and 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 good looks of Fox’s Alex. Audience reaction and Fox’s considerable, unexpected authority in front of the camera preempted 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 intergenerational dynamic of the show thus emerged in a dialog 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 for 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, devoted 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’s or the parents’ foibles. During the 1984 season, a baby boy named Andrew joined the Keaton family; this character 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 set of events in Hollywood that, in the mid-1980s, granted promising writer-producers unusual opportunities and resources to pursue their creative interests. Goldberg’s first jobs in television were as a writer and writer-producer for MTM Productions, 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 for 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 action, and carefully considered scripts that were 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 percent 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.