This is the first of FM’s new biweekly “Pop Culture Flashback” column, which will analyze the cultural detritus of our youth. E-mail fifteen_minutes@hotmail.com with suggested topics.
In 1984, President Ronald Reagan declared “Family Ties” to be his favorite TV show. And as much as it may have meant to Mr. Reagan, “Family Ties” is probably closer to the hearts of the millions of us who grew up alongside the Keaton children. The Keatons entered our homes 20 years ago as the MTV generation entered the world. Yet the Keatons were by no means a stereotypical yuppie family, let alone a typical sitcom family. The Keaton parents were hippies to the bone—Elyse a folk-singing flower girl and Steven a draft-dodging pacifist. To their dismay, they birthed four yuppies-to-be, led by one Alex P. Keaton, a card-carrying Young Republican with a blazer over his shoulder, a tie around his neck and a picture of William F. Buckley on his wall.
Though political humor pervaded Keaton dialogue—when he’s asked by his girlfriend’s father, “What are you, a dancer, poet, communist?” Alex replies, “No sir, I’m against all those things”—the show was not concerned with taking a political stance. Politics were always subordinate to family, a message reinforced by the producers’ decision to replace the original opening credits, a series of photographs from Elyse and Steven’s hippie days, with a painted portrait of the family. When Steven interrupts Alex’s prom at an elitist country club to protest the club’s policies, Alex imparts some perspective: “Dad, I’m 17. When I see Kimberly Blanton in a strapless gown, I don’t look past her for the Bill of Rights.”
“Family Ties” has its roots in the definitive generation-gap comedy of the 1970’s, “All In the Family.” The working-class Bunker family, though less educated and refined than the Keatons, was just as diverse politically. The frequent debates between bigoted conservative Archie and his liberal son-in-law Michael mirror those between Alex and Steven Keaton. But while Archie Bunker’s children were adults who might be expected to challenge the crusty patriarch’s dogged views, the eldest Keaton siblings were mere adolescents. The uniqueness and cultural importance of “Family Ties” lie in the precocity of Alex, Mallory, Jennifer and even little Andy. Their maturity and wisdom created a world in which the children often raised their parents—as well as a political dichotomy shared at dinner tables across the country, as the flower children’s offspring embraced the Reagan Revolution.
The connection between the Bunkers and the Keatons begs the question of whether their descendants currently exist on television. While social issues including teen pregnancy, drug addiction and divorce have become the province of family melodramas like “Seventh Heaven,” the generation-gap sitcom has disappeared as controversies like the Vietnam War have been replaced by less-impassioned debates over stem cells and soft money. The sitcom legacy of “Family Ties” lives on in other precocious TV youngsters, most prominently Lisa Simpson and Malcolm Wilkerson of “Malcolm in the Middle.”
To maintain that “Family Ties” achieved commercial and critical success on account of politics or eccentric kids would be to sell short the rare charisma that oozed from the pores of Michael J. Fox, now and forever Alex P. Keaton. People tuning in to “Family Ties” repeats are nostalgic not merely for legwarmers and Watergate humor, but for the boy Fox once was. Alex’s eagerness to grow up is now steeped in tragic irony, as his real-life counterpart is stricken with Parkinson’s disease, an disorder that usually afflicts people decades older.
Throughout his ordeal, Fox has retained the boyish charm and wit that made Alex P. Keaton, the cold-blooded capitalist, into a lovable older brother and a hero to quite a few children of the 1980s. Yet Fox is no longer the carefree sprite he used to be—and the show’s theme song now hits a little closer to home.
What we would do, baby, without you? Sha la la la.
