The Fall of the TV Family in Trump's America

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

Donald Trump is ruining television. Consider how the principal foci of TV seemed to shift when he became president—figuratively bullhorning his way into TV’s domestic interior in a way that has clogged the thematic daring on a number of shows across network, cable, and streaming platforms. Shows of every hue now engage the tempest of Trump's reach and rule. With Roseanne, which returned to ABC last night after 20 years off the air, we again see what happens to a sitcom exacerbated by the realities of 2018: It becomes a feral thing, a carnival of political and social discourse where opinions detonate left and right but solutions run dry.

Predictably, the show is drowning in the anxieties of the Trump era. "Knee still giving you trouble, Roseanne?" Jackie (Laurie Metcalf) remarks in an early scene. "Why don’t you get that fixed with all the health care you suckers got promised." She sharply lobs the insult while clad in a pink pussyhat and a T-shirt with the words “Nasty Woman” emblazoned on the front—just in case it wasn’t clear who she didn’t vote for.

For the uninitiated: Roseanne is pure Americana. The show originally ran from 1988 to 1997 (the debut pulled in 21 million viewers) and chronicled a working-class family from an Illinois suburb. Living and loving paycheck to paycheck, they scraped by doing what they could—money, bills, and food were always cause for debates around social status—but they did have each other. At the head of the Conner tribe were Roseanne (Roseanne Barr), with her squawk of a laugh and pro-choice politics, and Dan (John Goodman), an overworked, lovable bull of a husband. The Conners, like most families, thrived on the theatre of kinship: its ceremonial arguments, its tender heart-to-hearts, and its awkward and hard-fought routes to empathy.

As with any show returning to television, there’s an overwhelming amount of ground to cover. The problem with Roseanne, already dangerously apparent in its first episode, arises from its insistence on doing just that: trying to be and become everything. (HBO’s preachy Here and Now suffers from a similar problem.) Dan can barely afford to pay for their prescription medication. DJ (Michael Fishman), recently back from a military tour in Syria, has a black daughter. Darlene (Sara Gilbert) is struggling to find work in a bone-thin job market. And Roseanne is a proud-and-loud Trump acolyte; she’s become someone who earnestly refers to conservative media as "the real news."

Writing for Vulture, executive producer and co-showrunner Whitney Cummings defended the revival’s thematic expansion. "This show is not about Trump," she wrote, "it’s about the circumstances that made people think Trump was a good idea." In an interview with The New York Times, Barr elaborated, saying that the show would be what it always was, a sitcom about the struggles families come up against on a daily basis “and what they do about it.”

It’s hard not to be cynical, though. The series shamelessly cycles through a litany of current events, a rotating chorus of podium-worthy monologues and pedestrian zingers: from gun ownership and gender fluidity to a duplicitous health care state, Colin Kaepernick, women’s rights, and surrogacy. And that’s just the first episode. These are tough, knotty issues that deserve to be lived in, to be fussed over with that classic Conner irritability—if that’s what Roseanne wants to be, and I believe it does—not rushed through on the way to the next joke.

Alan Ball’s Here and Now, the new HBO drama about a progressive multiracial family in Portland navigating the pitfalls and promises of contemporary life, is afflicted by a similar stumbling block, only on the opposite end of the political spectrum. Ball’s never been shy about his investigations into family alchemy—picking at the who, the how, the why. With Six Feet Under, he orchestrated a symphony of grief, death, and difficult love in the shape of the Fisher family, innkeepers of a Los Angeles funeral home. On True Blood, he again inverted the understanding of community and belonging through the residents of Bon Temps, a fictional Louisiana town besieged by shapeshifters and sex-obsessed vampires.

Here and Now, though, dives head-first into the mire of 2018. Trump’s name is rarely spoken, but his shadow looms large in the background. The show introduces talking points with real meat—Muslim faith, trans issues, police mistreatment, racial microaggressions—but often overcooks the essence of their messages. By the time we meet Greg Boatwright (Tim Robbins), a disaffected philosophy professor who finds himself powerless to the "cruelty of existence," he wants to feel connected to the world again. He portends wisdom in lumpy bursts of illumination, saying things like, "Maybe grand gestures are the best we can offer in a dying civilization" and "Anxiety is a completely appropriate response to today’s reality." It’s the kind of existential neurosis that on another show might seem useful, but here feels performative and overplayed.

The show, like Roseanne, is stuffed with racial and political overtones—but, again like Roseanne, is not without hope. Family dramas and sitcoms remain one of the more fascinating modes to understand American life, even after all this time. Just look to Black-ish or Jane the Virgin or Transparent; all have reoriented our view into the domestic interior in bright, unconventional ways. The problem with Roseanne and Here and Now is density. The former propels too quickly through powerful issues, while the latter treats them with the acuity of a college freshman: eagerly and immodestly, if sometimes too naively. That’s not to say there won’t be a payoff in the end. It’s the getting there that feels like a strain.