Those Other Ties Beyond the Family

In re-watching Family Ties, one of the elements that has struck me the most is the political content. Some of it is played for laughs, as in a season two episode when Alex considers taking amphetamines to cram for exams and consults with his framed picture of Nixon.

"Would you do something you knew was wrong?" Alex asks the former president. Cue studio audience laughter. 

But other times the politics are more serious and the ideas behind them not as easily encapsulated in one image or joke, as in the season one episode where the parents, Steven and Elyse, are arrested at a Thanksgiving Day protest of nuclear weapons. All the other jailed protestors sign a piece of paper agreeing never to protest again and are promptly released, but not these two, even though it means they'll be apart from their family on a very family-oriented holiday. The First Amendment means just that much to them.

I was transfixed with this story line. I couldn't imagine a 2014 comedy being so civic-minded, though in fairness I've been far more devoted to dramas recently. Even comedies that center on the workings of government, like Veep, are primarily focused on the shallow and manipulative hijinks of the individuals wielding power; few characters are funny and have laudable, public-minded convictions.

And a show not about a workplace but an actual family, like Modern Family? I've stopped watching it, but from what I did see, I can't imagine any of those characters going to jail for justice. As others have noted, Modern Family is problematic for a number of reasons, one of which being that it presents affluence as normal. Another is that it views family ties as The Most Important Thing.  

In Stephanie Coontz's phenomenal The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap,  she busts the notion of a "return" to private life as the cure for societal problems. She writes, "the idea that private values and family affections form the heart of public life is not at all traditional. …John Adams argued that the foundation of a virtuous republic must be 'a positive Passion for the public good.'" (The academic in me is fighting the urge to give you a page number right now :) She closes that paragraph: "The passion to have a baby or spend more time with one's family was not high on the founders' list of public virtues." Zing!

Seriously, though, there are times when all of that is easy to forget, when a person can feel crazy or blasphemous for not wanting children herself or for valuing something in addition to her family. And so I was surprised to find you're-not-crazy backup in a 1982 TV episode with the word "family" in the show title.

The nukes episode ends with the kids and grandparents bringing Thanksgiving dinner to the jail.

The family that goes to jail together stays together.

One could argue that ending this way seeks to reassure viewers that the family is The Most Important Thing on the show after all. But I think it's significant that the parents are prepared to stand up for the public good with or without the others; public virtue comes first and spending the holiday with one's family, second.

Are there current TV comedy episodes that I'm forgetting/unaware of that similarly value democratic values in action?