Portrayals of Families on Television

The importance of the way families are presented on television was clearly stated by Stephanie Coontz (1992, p. 23) in a sociological history of American families:

Our most powerful visions of traditional families derive from images that are still delivered to our homes in countless reruns of 1950s television sit-coms. When liberals and conservatives debate family policy, for example, the issue is often framed in terms of how many “Ozzie and Harriet” families are left in America.

Several scholars have systematically examined how families are portrayed on television. Perhaps the most comprehensive examination is an investigation titled “Five Decades of Families on Television” by James D. Robinson and Thomas Skill (2000). In this study, 630 fictional television series that featured a family and were telecast between 1950 and 1995 were examined: 85 from the 1950s, 98 from the 1960s, 139 from the 1970s, 175 from the 1980s, and 133 from the first five years of the 1990s. All of these series aired on one of four commercial networks (ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC); 72 percent were situation comedies (sitcoms) and 28 percent were dramas. The investigators profiled numerous ways in which the depiction of families on television has evolved over time, several of which are noteworthy.

One major change over time has been in the type of programming in which families are portrayed. In the 1950s, 85 percent of the families portrayed were in situation comedies and 15 percent were in dramas. The proportion of families depicted in situation comedies decreased to 77 percent in the 1960s and to 65 percent in the 1970s. At this point, a slight reversal of this trend occurred, with 67 percent of television’s families presented in situation comedies in the 1980s and 76 percent in situation comedies in the 1990s.

Families with children have become increasingly prominent in television programs over time. In the 1950s, 25 percent of television’s families were childless; in the 1960s, 24 percent had no children; in the 1970s, 23 percent; in the 1980s, 17 percent; and in the 1990s, fewer than 3 percent of the families on television were childless. Whereas a decreasing proportion of real-life families had children as the twentieth century progressed, television featured a countervailing trend.

A similar pattern of disparity in real-world and television families was also found in terms of the size of families. As has been mentioned, the size of America’s real families decreased rather dramatically as the twentieth century progressed. In contrast, television families tended to get larger over time. In the 1950s, the average television family had 1.8 children; during the 1960s, 2.0 children; during the 1970s, 2.4 children; in the 1980s, 2.2 children; and during the 1990s, 2.5 children. Although the reasons for the divergence in these trends between real and television families are not entirely clear, it seems plausible that television writers and producers find it easier to create comedic and dramatic plots when children are part of the family. Nevertheless, with both trends, television is becoming less and less realistic in presenting representative families.

Jannette Dates and Carolyn Stroman (2000) systematically examined racial and ethnic depictions of families in a chapter titled “Portrayals of Families of Color on Television.” They concluded that the social realities of African-American, Asian-American, Native American, and Latino-American families have not been portrayed accurately; rather, their portrayals are the stylized views of a small number of decision makers in the television industry.

In contrast, trends in television families have tended to mirror trends in real families on other essential dimensions. For example, the number of married people heading households has dropped, from a high of 68.2 percent during the 1950s to a low of 39.8 percent in the 1990s, paralleling census findings.

In many instances, substantial differences between television and real families have been found over the years. For example, the “empty nest” family (in which children are grown and living away from home) has been a common configuration for real families for decades, yet such families are seldom presented on television. According to the analysis of Robinson and Skill (2000), no such families appeared on television in the 1950s or during the first half of the 1990s, and the only decade in which more than 1 percent of television’s families were empty nesters was the 1980s. On the other hand, families consisting of children and a single-parent father are rare according to census data, ranging from 1 percent in the 1950s to just over 3 percent in the 1990s. Yet, such families consistently have been prominent on television, ranging from 17 percent in the 1950s, to a high of 28 percent in the 1970s, to 23 percent in the 1990s. In some of these instances, it would appear that television’s deviation from real-world orthodoxy may initially have been arbitrary; however, when such conventions arose, they have tended to remain part of television’s popular culture. What effects, if any, such aberrant depictions have on the viewers’ perceptions of reality has been of interest to numerous scholars.