The Ladybird and I caught a rare episode of Frasier last night as we were preparing dinner. She said that her father had formulated a theory about Frasier’s style of humor: it was all door-related. People coming in and out of doors, people going out of doors in order to create these conundrums in which Frasier and Niles had to navigate out of with their wit and humor.
I thought of other door-related sitcoms and realized that most of the most popular ones had some sort of entrance and exit related humor device; it’s the nature of the sitcom. Through doors, characters bring with them that week’s problem. Comedy happens when, for example, Frasier must deal with an external force creating disharmony within the Family and therefore within the Self. In this episode, the disharmony comes from a boorish and disrespectful girlfriend played by Felicity Huffman.
I took the idea a bit further though: the side of the screen from which the main characters usually enter can determine the political leanings of the shows. For example, All in the Family. Bigoted and uncouth Archie Bunker takes an extremist tone with nearly everyone who comes through the door of his house, which is located on the right side of our screen. Liberal son-in-law, Michael, gets it the worst (“Meathead!”) when he challenges Archie’s wrongheaded blusterings.
Full House and Who’s the Boss? Both have characters entering the house from the left and have an implicitly progressive message. The families in Who’s the Boss? would be considered non-traditional. What household in real life has a live-in male nanny from the Bronx, his daughter, a single mother, granny Mona, and an effeminate boy who turns out to be gay in real life? Similarly, Full House counts because of the show’s location (San Francisco) and the fact that Danny Tanner heads a non-traditional household as well.
Along with Full House, there are two other shows from ABC’s early-90’s successful TGIF night. The first is Step by Step, which is a ripoff of the Bradys. However, whereas the Brady Bunch’s entrance is from the right, (the kids never got into any real trouble. One has to assume that Alice held Bible studies in between cooking dinner and cleaning toilets) Step by Step’s left-sided entrance carries the non-traditional banner much more readily. The Bradys never had a stoner cousin who lives in a van behind the house. Carol and Frank must have been fairly liberal to allow such nonsense. Get a job, hippie.
Family Matters, the show that gave us ::shudder:: Urkel, was a perennial favorite in ABC’s weekend canon. Likewise, the left-sided entrance connotes a search for justice and progressive empowerment of the black culture. Carl, the patriarch of the Winslow clan, is the face of justice with his role as a police officer. Uber-nerd, Steve Urkel, had a passion for science that probably encompassed belief in evolution; didn’t he also make an atomic bomb in his basement? However, one can argue that the Urkel dance is devolution of sorts for black culture.
On the flip side, there’s The Cosby Show. The Huxtables lived in a stately townhouse in NYC with a right-sided entrance. Similarly, the show portrays the nuclear black family. Here, instead of a middle-class aesthetic, Cliff and Claire represent the upper class with their jobs as an obstetrician and an attorney, respectively. Although theirs is considered a strong family, their right-sided entrance isn’t wholly conservative. The conservatism from Bill Cosby’s speeches that seem to berate many in the black community.
“Fifty percent drop out rate, I’m telling you, and people in jail, and women having children by five, six different men. Under what excuse? I want somebody to love me. And as soon as you have it, you forget to parent. Grandmother, mother, and great grandmother in the same room, raising children, and the child knows nothing about love or respect of any one of the three of them. All this child knows is “gimme, gimme, gimme.””
Whether you agree with Cosby or not, I contend that this rhetoric has more in common with James Dobson’s Focus on the Family than Malcolm X’s separatist oratory.
Murphy Brown presents an interesting juxtaposition. As the 90’s representation of the Breakdown of the Nuclear Family, Brown’s single-mom status brought the opprobrium and ire of many conservatives. If only they knew how tame Murphy Brown would seem today...
At home, with the baby, her progressive nature seems to come out. As a successful woman with a baby and no one except the occasional visit from Eldin the handyman, her house naturally has a left-side opening.
At work, however, the elevator to the FYI studios appears from the opposite side. No matter how far women have come in the workplace, there’s still a patriarchy that surrounds professional careers. This conservatism reaches all the way to heavyweights like Katie Couric and Barbara Walters. Walter Cronkite can get as fat and old as he wants, but god forbid Walters starts to show her age. When Katie Couric took over for Dan Rather it was rumored that the execs at CBS paid more attention to whether she could take on such a big role AND take care of the kids than her male counterparts. Brown, like Couric are both single parents as well; although Brown’s was by choice and Couric’s through happenstance.
Obviously, there’s no proof to these claims. I could come up with shows that defy this theory. But, I’m not going to. Because I’m lazy.
Remember, correlation should never be confused with causation.
However, given the liberal/progressive history of Hollywood and the television industry, maybe somewhere, deep in the recesses of the collective hive-mind that is entertainment there are proclivities towards door placement as a means of silent protest similar to a basketball player wearing an armband in solidarity to a cause. If only Joe McCarthy would have applied my theory to the silver screen, he would have rooted out a lot more commies.
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