Representations of the Nuclear Family.

I’m an avid watcher of ABC’s new comedy Modern Family. Besides the fact that I’m totally psyched to see “Al Bundy” in a new family, the type of humor is right up my alley. With all the talk about media representations in class, I want to touch on the subject of the nuclear family being represented. I’m sure we all grew up to reruns of The Brady Bunch and Happy Days on Nick At Nite, so we have a basic gist of what we were supposed to believe the perfect family is. A working dad, a stay at home mom, who made the most massive breakfasts I have ever seen, and then a brother and sister who generally doesn’t want the other one to die.

I’m sure we’ve all realized by now that those types of families do not exist in any shape or form. We all have some sort of dysfunction in our families and I believe that media are picking up on this. There’s Married With Children, pretty much the quintessential dysfunctional family. One of my personal favorite movies, Pleasantville, really got to the meat and potatoes of the age of television’s perfect family. And most recently, Modern Family, a show following three families, who are all related to each other. They schedule time to shoot a pellet gun at their son to teach him a lesson; a sixty-something year old man remarries a gorgeous Columbian woman with a pre-teen son who thinks he’s in his thirties. There is also a gay couple that just adopted their first child from China.

These families sound more like what exits in today’s society, and I hope that this is the media taking strides in representing real families who fight, love, and occasionally push each other into a pool. It’s about time we stepped away from the nuclear family and embraced the families we have.