The Clothes Make the Continuity

If you Google "Alex P. Keaton sweaters" - and I know you've, like, been dying to - you'll find articles and blog posts about how he epitomized preppy style, the APK monogram, and readers' identification with or replication of his wardrobe. 

I'm primarily interested in something else: sweaters as sign of continuity and income status. On some television shows, characters seem to never wear the same outfit twice and/or what they do wear is always expensive. On the one hand, this makes sense; if a production has money, why not spend it? Audiences like to look at nice things. But when wardrobes are enormous and enviable, clothes become a sign of affluence even if the characters aren't presented as wealthy, and although those clothes may be as inanimate and unspeaking as a large house with expensive fixtures, still they loudly proclaim, "These people have money!" There's something about the silence of all this adornment that can feel insidious; wealth, sometimes extreme wealth, is presented as being as natural as air. But of course it's not, and television has not always operated this way.   

On Family Ties, for example, not only do characters wear clothes that are normal-looking and wear them more than once, but also those clothes stick around for years. Here's just one example:

Don't you wish you owned this sweater? 

In real time that represents a sweater that was on set from November 1983 until at least March 1985, if not longer. (I've just started season four, so the joy that is this particular sweater could continue). In regular-people time, wearing a sweater for a year and a half is normal; on TV, it can seem radical.

Now this is not to say that Family Ties doesn't have some continuity or presentation-of-class issues. Near the end of season one, Elyse, who has been working as an architect from home, goes back to work at an office, but the episode before she's hired has Jennifer referencing mom being back at work. Huh? As great as the actor Earl Boen is, doesn't anyone else notice when he's both selling airline tickets in season one and showing up at the Keatons' when Alex turns the house into a hotel for a weekend in season three?

And yes, that is Jeff Cohen of Goonies fame in the hat.

There is also the question of whether the incomes of an architect and a PBS station owner could support three children and a new baby, even in 1985 Ohio. But the family doesn't go on lavish vacations or own fancy cars (despite Mallory's lobbying for a Maserati near the end of season three); the house is big, but the furniture is modest. They own one television.  

On the bigger-picture level, for all the lessons Alex learns about valuing his sister Mallory (as when he cuts short his college interview at Princeton to comfort her during a breakup) or caring about people instead of money (as when he volunteers at a hotline to fulfill a college humanities credit and ends up helping a suicidal man), he continually makes fun of Mallory and derides nonprofits. Some of that feels normal - a brother is going to tease a sister - and some of it feels like the writers have decided these characters will conform to certain types with nods to lessons learned but minimal actual evolution. 

Maybe as viewers in 2014, some of us have become accustomed to both continuity and growth. We want our fictional worlds thoughtfully and intricately constructed, consistent, and evolving, conducive to weekly visits and schedule-busting binge-watching. On that measure, Family Ties mostly fails. A detail dropped in a joke or a minor character met in season one is rarely mentioned again, let alone brought to developed life two seasons later; there is no Jesse Pinkman and the lovingly handmade box here.

But there are small, consistent rewards. Jennifer has a best friend, Chrissy, whom we never see but who is referenced throughout the show. The same treatment extends to the next door neighbors, the Obecks. Alex will always beat Steven at chess; Mallory will hate films with subtitles. Details like these help create the fabric of this world. And sometimes there is a wonderfully resurrected detail: in the opening scene of the pilot episode, Steven and Elyse show their kids slides of their anti-war protests from the '60s, but the kids collapse in sighs at the prospect of looking at Peace Corps footage, too. Two seasons later, after a long day, the kids are begging their tired parents to hang out to no avail. Then Alex says, "All right, all right. You win. Get your old Peace Corps films. We'll watch those." In this moment, a viewer could have jumped from episode 1 to 54 and laughed with recognition, firmly in the same comfortable old home.