Recommended Reading

My friend Tyler wrote a great essay for Hobart about the Milwaukee Brewers.

All the Presidents' Sitcom

When I wrote about the transition from Nixon to Reagan, reference-wise, on Family Ties, I thought that there was a transition, a gradual diminishing of the former and ascendancy of the latter; that was how it seemed in season four, which aired from September 1985-May 1986. But now that I've finished re-watching the show, it would be more accurate to say that Nixon and Reagan co-exist, and over time the treatment of Reagan becomes sharper, moving beyond parody into moments of critique.

I started noticing the shift in season six. Elyse's aunt Rosemary shows up unannounced and exhibits signs of Alzheimer's. The doctor says, "Rosemary, you didn't remember who the president of the United States was" as an example of her memory loss. Rosemary (played by the wonderful Barbara Barrie) says, "I know Ronald Reagan is president. I just can't accept it."

Barbara Barrie; her most recent work was a small role on Enlightened.

Then, when Alex takes over Skippy's job as a mall Santa, a girl says she doesn't believe in Santa and wants to know why, if he's the real one, there are Santas at other malls, too. Alex answers, "I have some of my elves, uh, dress up like me to pick up the slack. It's the same way that President Reagan can't be everywhere, so he sends his assistants in his place."

"I don't believe in him, either," the girl replies.

Audiences might have recognized Ellen Hamilton Latzen from Fatal Attraction.
Here she's not asking for a rabbit, though.

These episodes aired in November and December 1987, respectively. By the end of the season, in May 1988, the Reagan jokes have grown in substance from denial and disbelief to biting commentary. Andy is making a popsicle stick bread box as a gift for Nick to thank him for teaching the children's art class at the Y. But Alex has other ideas; he wants to make Nick the Reagan Ranch out of popsicle sticks: "I even have plans for a little pop-stick Ron and a little pop-stick Nancy."

Elyse, listening in, asks, "How about a pop-stick jail for his Cabinet?" The studio audience laughter quickly builds to applause and cheers - one of the most enthusiastic reactions in the show's entire run.

Alex goes ahead and makes his own Reagan Ranch anyway.

What happened? I've got one phrase for you: Iran-Contra affair. By May 1988, the Tower Commission and Congressional committee reports have been released and Reagan has given speeches, but Casper Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense, has yet to be indicted, and Oliver North is not yet on trial. It's also the middle of a presidential campaign, and many people have questions about George H.W. Bush's knowledge of and involvement in Iran-Contra.

Bush quickly becomes fodder for jokes on the show; the very next episode, the first of season seven, opens with the words, "All right, who did this?" It's late October 1988, and the family has defaced Alex's campaign poster of Bush.

And a few minutes later, Alex's girlfriend Lauren brings up Iran-Contra directly. "I'm not gonna vote for Bush," she tells Alex. "For one, I've never fully accepted his explanation of his involvement in the Iran-Contra affair."  (We never get to hear her other reasons because Mallory turns to her father and asks excitedly, "Bush had an affair?")

In between this episode and the election, Family Ties fits in one more Reagan dig. Alex is reading Robin Hood to Andy, but in the grand tradition of reading aloud to young children, he's changed the story. "It was about Robin Hood, how he stole from the poor and gave to the rich," Andy reports.

"No, no, that's not Robin Hood, Andy," Steven says. "That's Ronald Reagan." (This is greeted by the studio audience with both laughter and, not boos or groans, but low sounds of moderate disapproval. The same mixture of sounds occurs when Alex tells Andy in a later episode, "You know how lucky you are, Andy? Born under Reagan, raised under Bush. I mean, with any luck at all, you will have a completely Democrat-free childhood." I really want data on the political makeup of the Family Ties audience).

Election morning dawns at the Keatons with some seriously depressed Democrats (this episode aired on November 13, five days after the actual election).

"In August, Dukakis looked like a shoo-in," Elyse says.

"Yeah, that was before he got into the tank," Jennifer notes, flashing her own newspaper.

But this is about as current events-y as Family Ties gets, and the tone of occasional critique dissipates in the final season; in fact, Bush is largely ignored. The show returns to Nixon when Jennifer writes a play about him for her history class and Alex tries to influence her script. Nixon is still an emotional flashpoint for the characters, but he's also a denatured joke; (the episode features Alex delivering a speech as Nixon, an extended impersonation).

Nixie, the Nixon fan magazine: one of many fake texts featured on the show. 

Others include the I Love Republicans pop-up book that Alex gets for Andy and,

my personal favorite, Shirley MacLaine's There Must be a Higher Power in the Universe if I'm Making So Much Money Doing What I'm Doing, which Steven brings home for Mallory. 

And Nixon is almost sentimentalized in the final episode; when Elyse goes into Alex's room one last time before he leaves home to take a job on Wall Street, it's Nixon's face that is visible out of the darkness. We feel Elyse's loss of Alex and feel nostalgic, and Nixon gets all wrapped up in those emotions. But then Elyse turns on the light, sits on the bed, looks at the picture, and abruptly turns it face down. It's a humorous break in an otherwise serious moment, and it reminds us that, although others at the time had difficulty separating the politics from the person, these characters were consistently able to do so. The mother loves the son, not the 37th president.

Research shows that we've become more politically polarized in the years since Family Ties. The June 2014 Pew Research Center report "Political Polarization in the American Public" notes: "Three-out-of-ten (30%) consistent conservatives say they would be unhappy if an immediate family member married a Democrat and about a quarter (23%) of across-the-board liberals say the same about the prospect of a Republican in-law." Watching Family Ties has made me look at those numbers differently - I see the flip side more easily: that's 70 and 77 % of conservatives and liberals who would be OK with a family member marrying someone from another political party, not insignificant figures. I also think: what's so bad about unhappy? Steven and Elyse aren't happy that they raised a son who very early in life decided he was a Republican, but that's the son they have. And I wonder, how many Keaton families exist today - or even existed back in the '80s? My conservative brother raised conservative daughters; my more liberal brother is raising liberal children. Leaving aside all the similarities between the two major political parties today, do parents raise politically different children? And if they do, where can we find them on TV?

Remembering the Locals

This is my mother. Isn't she cute? 35 years ago today, she was giving birth to her third and final child - me. In thanks for that, and in honor of her recent visit, I thought I'd showcase her here. (Thanks to you too, Dad).

If you're interested in the painting, you should contact The Hub.
Maybe it's still for sale. 

We had a great visit, and I learned new things about her. I'd already known that she got her first job, at the newspapers in Sturgis, SD, by pestering them until they'd hire a 16 year-old farm girl. (In the late 1950s, Sturgis had a one-sheeter called the Black Hills Press and a paper called the Sturgis Tribune, both of which were produced at the same place). But I hadn't known that she'd been assigned the Locals - the section that recounted the goings-on of residents - or that such a section had even existed. The job consisted of calling people up and asking things like, "What did you do last weekend?" and then typing, "Last weekend Mrs. Smith visited her sister in Rapid City."

Isn't that cool? I love community news like that, and I hope there are still some small papers or radio stations where you can find it. In 2009, on a trip to Devil's Tower in eastern Wyoming, I found a radio program that announced a missing collie and a man's birthday party, complete with date, time, address, and invitation. "Everyone is welcome," the announcer said. I hope that program is still airing.

Only an Onscreen Ending

No discussion of Family Ties would be complete without looking at Tracy Pollan, the actress who played Alex's girlfriend, Ellen Reed, in season four, and who would marry Michael J. Fox a few years later. I do remember the character of Ellen from when I originally watched the show as a kid, but I had imagined that her goodbye was much more emotional than it seems now. For one thing, although the whole second episode of season five is devoted to Ellen's absence, we don't actually see Ellen leave; we join the story after she's already accepted a dance scholarship in Paris, and we see the aftermath with Alex trying to date again. And we don't get any flashbacks in that episode, either, or montages of Alex and Ellen's relationship. It's an interesting choice, especially since we saw a montage when they first got together, and the show has already begun the process of using clip shows, or flashback-based episodes. (The first use of the clip episode was with Ellen, actually, near the end of season four - the family sits around in the living room telling her stories about Alex's past antics - two episodes' worth, in fact. Maybe I'll write more about the use of the clip show later, but for now I'll just say that it's a shock of self-awareness - this family remembers its own past and sees connections between seemingly disparate events! - that goes beyond mere attention to continuity. Too bad it feels only like an easy way to deliver new episodes and pointless, narratively).

Is this great old tech or what?

This lack of flashbacks and montages is doubly surprising because without them the show relies uncharacteristically on audience memory. For example, at the campus snack shop juke box, Alex selects the Billy Vera & The Beaters song "At This Moment," which played during the school dance where Alex and Ellen first kissed. But the show doesn't replay that scene, and it doesn't have Alex remark on his choice - "This was our song," or the like - perhaps simply trusting that viewers would remember the earlier, pivotal scene, which took place 25 episodes before. (Or perhaps recent summer episodes reminded viewers; the Ellen's-gone episode, "Starting Over," was only episode two of a new season). The show rarely seems to expect us to remember anything about the characters beyond the most important biographical details or relationships, so if it was expecting viewers to remember Alex and Ellen's song, that would indicate a storyline that was unusually popular and therefore memorable.

Another example of a makeover, btw.
Mallory and Jennifer helped Alex look "hip" for a date.

My own memory of this storyline does suggest that it was notable, but then my memory seems to have given it an extra gloss of romance, probably influenced by Pollan and Fox's real-life romance. For example, I remembered the scene where Alex sits at the kitchen table and writes Ellen a letter, but again, I'd remembered it as being more emotional, a plea to return to Ohio that went unanswered or denied. But that's not the case at all; he's telling her that he's moving on and he wishes her well. He considers several joke closings - "Your pal," "Your son" - before choosing "Love." Alex is not over her yet - that date, with Sharon (played by Haviland Morris, who would have been familiar from 1984's Sixteen Candles) did not go well, mostly because he kept trying to get her to order her food, look, and smell like Ellen. But ultimately he accepts that Ellen is gone.

Spraying your ex-girlfriend's perfume on your date? A no-no.

Although the love story didn't end the way I remembered it, there's a lot to like about the ending. The show gives Ellen a good reason for leaving, a reason that fits with her character as an artist. When we meet her, we learn that she's a painter, and in later episodes we see her as a dancer, too. I might write a post specifically about how art is represented on the show - Elyse is a singer; Nick is a sculptor, etc. - but for now I'll just say that I think it's cool that Ellen pursues her art, which she was shown to be committed to, even if it takes her away from her serious boyfriend. She's not gone from the picture because of some other possible reason - her rich father doesn't fall sick, for example. Characters leave to tend to sick relatives all the time, but that kind of reason would have been inorganic to her character.

I also like that she's gone, period. Don't get me wrong; I love the character, Tracy Pollan is great, and the chemistry between her and Michael J. Fox is so good that I find it hard to believe that they didn't actually become romantically involved until they reunited on the set of Bright Lights, Big City. (I recommend reading that New York Times story about Tracy Pollan's guest appearance on Spin City; in addition to the Fox-Pollan information, it's worth reading to catch the before-he-was-famous reference to Michael Pollan). What I mean is, I like that the writers didn't make Ellen stick around just for the sake of Alex having a girlfriend or transform her into the kind of person who would stay in spite of a scholarship offer because she is loyal to him, can't bear to leave him, etc. Of course, Pollan herself may have had other commitments, which could explain why the character was written off the show, but whatever the reason, I like the way the writers handled it.

George Eliot has this great passage in Middlemarch where she writes that we don't often discuss how people - well, she's focused on men, but I'm expanding the range for my purposes - find their vocations, even though arriving at work we're passionate about that can make an impact on the world requires "industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires" in the same way that arriving at love does. But instead, Eliot writes, it's love that is the focus of our narrative energies: "We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her." Onscreen, vocation wins out over romance for Ellen, which feels like a triumph, writing and gender-wise; offscreen, acting and love could co-exist. This impulse to recount a love story seems like it would be particularly pronounced with two people like Pollan and Fox, who met in what turned out to be breakout work for both of them and are still together more than 26 years later. We love love stories, and we admire love stories that last.

I once read an interview with Kate Hudson where she talked about how fun it was to watch movies like Overboard to see her mom, Goldie Hawn, and Kurt Russell when they were young. I hope that Fox and Pollan's four children get a similar kick out of seeing their parents on Family Ties, a show that ended up as a home movie of sorts, offering the earliest images of them together.

Greg and Trudy, I Hardly Knew Ye

It's the ordinary things we miss about the dead: hemming a skirt...

…or singing along to "Light My Fire."

If Family Ties and other shows had a phenomenon opposite the recurring-actor, different character one, it was probably the episodes that dealt with death. Here characters are introduced only to die - as with Mallory's beloved Aunt Trudy - or are never actually introduced in life - as with Greg, Alex's friend who dies in a car accident; (the episode opens with the family returning from his funeral -  we see Greg only as Alex imagines and remembers him).

Just as the choice to bring back an actor for a different part now can seem strange (no matter how great the actor), these death episodes can seem strange for how they ask us to care about people we've never met. Not to sound crass, but why not kill off one of Alex's friends whom we actually knew? I mean, I'm not suggesting anything extreme - I don't think they should have killed Skippy Handelman, the next door neighbor - but why not one of the four or five guys who had recurring same-actor, same-character parts? Maybe because only one or two of those characters had a close relationship with Alex; maybe because audiences weren't expected to remember story lines across seasons; or maybe simply because those actors had moved on to other roles. Whatever the reason, we have no ties to Aunt Trudy or Greg, and we're only given a few details: she loved to dance, he loved the Cleveland Indians (only one of those loves would probably be written for a character, now).

Still, within these limitations Justine Bateman and Michael J. Fox give heartfelt portraits of grief. He won the Emmy, in part for emotional scenes not previously given to his character. But I was actually more moved by a moment in a scene where he is visited by Greg's ghost, who starts to leave so Alex can study. Alex pulls Greg to a chair and pushes his textbooks off the kitchen table. His movements may seem dramatic, but his tone is almost matter-of-fact. "This is meaningless," he says. What's the point of studying, he wonders, when he could die at 21 like his friend?

Justine Bateman's funeral home scene is Emmy-worthy too; she gives an impromptu eulogy where she yells, sobs, and laughs, and each of those emotions - and the speed with which she cycles through and back to them - feel true.

The Aunt Trudy story is in some ways more poignant because the actress who played her, Edith Atwater, had a long career and died the following year. I want to write a post about the actors and actresses on this show who have since died, but my mother is flying in to visit tomorrow, and so it'll be a little while before I write again. In the meantime, if there's something from Family Ties, The Grapes of Wrath or another long-ago-and-far-away work you'd like me to post about when I come back, let me know!

One More Nixon Recommendation: Watergate Sue

If you're geeking out over the many pieces about the 40th anniversary of Richard Nixon's resignation, let me add one more to your list: Watergate Sue, a comic by Megan Kelso than ran in the New York Times from April 1 to August 9, 2007. It chronicles the pregnancy of a woman who was herself born on the day Nixon resigned, but it primarily covers her mother's own pregnancy and obsessive TV-watching of the coverage of Nixon's final months in office. It's got a lot of good stuff: family dynamics, verbatim dialogue from the hearings, reproductive issues, and even a bit of Seattle (where the family lived in 1974). 

Enormous Changes Not at the Last Minute

Alex sweaters shouldn't get all the love

I've been thinking about continuity and clothes again on Family Ties, and I think Judith Butler (yes, I went there) would be useful here:

If the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the spatial metaphor of a "ground" will be displaced and revealed as a stylized configuration… .The abiding gendered self will then be shown to be structured by repeated acts that seek to approximate the idea of a substantial ground of identity, but which in their occasional discontinuity, reveal the temporal and contingent groundlessness of this "ground." 

The characters on Family Ties present gendered selves through the "stylized repetition of acts through time" - for example, they return to the same outfits, which conform to gender norms (even as some characters are understood to be more fashionable than others). But I would argue that the show uses the "occasional discontinuity" in characters' clothing, appearance, and behavior to solidify the "ground" of identity, gender and otherwise. In other words, on Family Ties there's no surer sign that a character is going through a phase than when he or she makes a big, physical change. All extreme transformations signal the temporary.

Sometimes these transformations are chosen individually, as when Mallory scores higher than Alex on an IQ test and then dresses differently to rub it in:

Or when Alex tries to be part of his girlfriend Ellen's world by auditioning for a dance company:

But more often than not, one character gives another a makeover, as when Alex helps Jennifer prepare for a history presentation on how a bill becomes a law and costumes her in the style of his brand of overachieving student:

Or when Mallory and Jennifer take their little brother Andy shopping:

Or, in the most problematic example of all, when Alex helps Nick change his style so he'll better fit in with the Keatons:

(I'll write a whole post about the show's treatment of Nick, but I want to finish the series first).

On shows like Family Ties, discontinuities don't shake the solid ground of identity; they reveal an anxiety about our true selves and our relationships, concerns that are resolved playfully or seriously in a matter of scenes but that are always resolved in favor of the "real" person. Everyone dresses like themselves, again. In this way, the show flirts with alternatives but comforts its audience with a continued return to age, class, heterosexual, and other norms, all of which can be bought and worn.

I do wish this store existed, though.

The Big Chill in Columbus

OK, I'm not done re-watching Family Ties - I'm only to episode five, season five - but already there's plenty new to discuss, and I just couldn't wait. Because, of course, I am a nerd.

In keeping with that nerdiness, I started doing research to see who else has written about the show, and one of the pieces, "The American Family on Television: From Molly Goldberg to Bill Cosby" from the Journal of Comparative Family Studies includes this passage:

     In Family Ties, one of the few shows in which politics was even
     mentioned, political preference is much like having an occupation.
     The characters, especially Alex, talk about politics but hardly ever
     participate in the political process. Characters do not battle for
     social change.  

Muriel G. Cantor does overlook the season one episode where the parents, Steven and Elyse, go to jail for protesting nuclear weapons, but I concede that there's a lack of engagement in subsequent episodes.

There is some engagement: Elyse leads a group fighting a re-zoning law at the end of season one, and in season two Alex pretends to support the Equal Rights Amendment in order to get a girl to like him and goes to jail in the process, but in season five when Steven has the opportunity to be part of the revival of a political magazine named Scavenger that he and a friend started at UC Berkeley, he finds that he's no longer radical enough for his old friend Matt.

There are fascinating details that emerge in this episode. For one, Steven expresses an aversion to being arrested, stating that "getting arrested is way down on my list now. Right below being shipwrecked." He does have a young child at home and more bills to pay - with two children in college and one in preschool - none of which he had in season one when he and Elyse were arrested, but it's still a telling shift. He's thinking ahead to the election in 1988 and which Democrats might run, an interest and investment in the two-party-dominated U.S. political system that his friend disdains; Matt is far more interested in anarchy.

Scavenger seems like a misnomer for their venture; a scavenger feasts on the dead, but Matt and the other contributors clearly think that the two-party system is still in need of killing. One of them criticizes Steven in a meeting by saying, "you're suggesting that people actually go out and vote for one of the two prevailing political parties…the only vote that counts is a vote against the system." But Steven wants to be neither a vulture nor a hawk - not only in the political sense of being to the right, but also not in the general sense of wanting to hunt, to be an activist. He's in all ways a dove.

Does this turn away from the Scavenger represent an actual shift in values for the character or the show, or a continuation? After all, we know from earlier episodes that Steven voted for McGovern in 1972, so the guy who wrote "The Two-Party System: Tweedledum and Tweedledee" for the original iteration of the Scavenger hasn't been around for awhile. While it may be a continuation that the character himself is only just now noticing, it does seem like a shift for the show, signaling that we won't have any repeat prison performances, or if we do, they'll be a joke, like Alex's, not a sincere extension of ideals. Steven may still voice his concern for nuclear disarmament and hang an old Ban the Bomb sign above the fireplace to welcome Matt, but it looks like Steven won't be going to jail for this cause, or any other, again.

There's a moment when it seems like the character and the show itself may be aware of this: when Steven asks Elyse if he's changed, she replies, "I think your social conscience has held up pretty well," and he laughs shortly and says, "Right. And the tax credit from Amnesty International proves it." Writing a check is different from other kinds of activism, the show observes. But then Elyse continues:

     You do make a statement, Steven. You make a statement by the way
     you live your life, by the way you raise your children, by choosing
     a job that doesn't compromise your principles. Those are political
     acts, as strong as anything you ever did back at Berkeley.

Here we see a character endorsing an argument that politics can be lived primarily through the family. It's not quite a disavowal of the public sphere, but it does argue that raising kids and going to work are enough, and in that regard it seems to join other works that seek to placate the idealistic young people of the '60s who have become the comfortably middle class parents of the '80s. It's OK, the show says through the character of Elyse. You're still a good person.

And in case that message wasn't clear enough or the messenger was suspect for being a fellow member of that generation, after Elyse leaves the room, Alex walks in to reassure his father as well. "Listen, Dad," Alex begins. "Over the years, you and I have searched for some common political ground. We searched…and searched…and searched" (studio audience laughs). "And even though we haven't agreed on anything yet, I really respect your ideals, you know? And the fact that you respect mine. You set a good example." The child absolves the parent.

To be fair, raising children to be respectful, independent thinkers is no small thing; nor is having a job that reflects your values. There's also a point here to how people can change, how different we can be at 40 from 20, and research from Pew shows that many older adults are more conservative than they used to be. But it's impossible not to feel like the show is withdrawing politically at this point in the series, the protesting and getting arrested of 1982 replaced with the benign Reagan jokes of 1986. I'll write more about this is in a later post; in the meantime, I leave you with this great poster and some relevant Ohio ERA history...because I'm guessing if you've read this far, you're a nerd, too:

He cares about the First Amendment, but, sadly, not this one.

Where They Were Calling From

The well-received new novel Landline makes this seem like a good time to discuss the function of the phone on Family Ties. When I first started re-watching the show, the use of the phone to advance the plot jumped out at me; it rings in nearly every episode. But the one-sided-conversation as delivery system for exposition is hardly unique to old tech; cell phones accomplish the same thing now, even as they've allowed television and film to convey information in new ways, such as making text messages or social media visible.

What's different about the landline is what the shared status of the phone makes possible. People are waiting to make a call and threatening their little sisters if they hog the phone:

Or fighting over who should have answered the phone when it rang and rang earlier. (It's not clear to me if the Keatons have an answering machine). Then you get to reconcile when the phone rings again, this time fighting to see who can answer it first:

Which leads to make up kissing, courtesy of AT & T:

Who called? Who cares?

And of course it never seems to occur to anyone that the phone can be left unanswered - even if you're in the middle of, say, gluing a broken plate back together with two other people - which allows for physical comedy too:

And while we're on the subject of old tech, let me close with a little love for the newspaper. I've written before about my love for newsprint, so I'll just say that you can imagine my joy at images like this one, from the opening credits of season one:

The newspaper is also pretty ubiquitous on Family Ties, but it's more of a prop and less of a plot-advancer (with a few exceptions, like the episode where the calling hours for Aunt Trudy coincide with the family's yard sale because Alex forgot to pull the ad in time). 

I might write more at another time about other examples of great old tech - tape cassettes and rolls of film come to mind - but for now I'm going to take a break from that subject and from the show itself. I realized that not only do most of four seasons remain for me to watch, but also from the episode guides on Netflix it looks like I haven't even reached the halfway point for the series. So I'm going to gather more data and will probably write again when I'm done. In the meantime, I might write about The Grapes of Wrath, which I have finally started and which looks to be amazing, obviously a different kind of portrait of the U.S. from Family Ties but one that, from the 2014 vantage point, shares its compelling mix of the gone and enduring.  

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. 

Our TV, Ourselves

In the season one Family Ties episode unfortunately titled "Oops," Mallory's friend Cindy finds out she's pregnant and struggles with telling her mother. First, they confide in Mallory's mother, Elyse.

"I'm so confused," Cindy says. "I don't know whether to have an abortion or put the baby up for adoption or keep it."

It was December 22, 1982, only one month away exactly from the tenth anniversary of the Roe v. Wade ruling, and the extent to which this decision had become an established fact in American lives seems reflected in the structure of Cindy's sentence; she lists abortion alongside adoption and becoming a mother as a possible choice. It's X or Y or Z, each possibility given equal weight.

We don't learn what Cindy chooses to do - the main point of the episode is about establishing open communication with her mother - but even that unresolved ending feels different from how this same subject matter would be handled on later television and film, where the point often feels like an avoided abortion  - whether that's avoided through miscarriage, as on Party of Five in the 1990s or adoption, as in Juno in 2007. The prevalence of these alternatives makes stories where a character actually has an abortion, as on Friday Night Lights or The Obvious Child, rarities and news. And not knowing the outcome of a pregnancy, as in the case of Cindy? Other than the 1996 film Citizen Ruth, I can't think of another example off the top of my head, although I'm sure there are more. Still, the dearth of such examples seems telling: in most mainstream TV and film, women's bodies need to be resolved.

"Did I really look like that when I was born?" Jennifer wants to know.

Before Cindy comes over to the Keaton house, 10 year-old Jennifer sits down on the couch with the copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves that she's taken from Mallory's room. Alex, the conservative teenager, objects to "a book like that being in this house," but Elyse sets him straight: "There's nothing wrong with this, Alex," she says. "It's just a health and sex manual for women."

This scene, and much of this episode, amazes me and makes me a little sad, too. I love that it's "just" a manual, just another day for this family, but it makes me sad that their ordinary day, 30 years later, feels more than a little extraordinary now.