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TV clans have never gone completely out of style, but they have changed over the years. The genre's archetype -- stable, well-scrubbed, usually small- town families that deal with minor domestic problems that are always resolved, gently, before the final credits -- was established in such classic series of the 1950s and early '60s as Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet and The Donna Reed Show. In the early 1970s, under the influence of Norman Lear (All in the Family, Maude, The Jeffersons), TV families became more realistic and contemporary, their problems more substantial and socially relevant. But as the decade waned, TV moved toward increasingly outlandish family match-ups (Diff'rent Strokes, Eight Is Enough) or escaped into nostalgia and parody (Happy Days).
Under the Cosby spell, family shows have reverted to classic form. Though divorced mothers and one-parent households are far more common than they once were, the old-fashioned two-parent model has staged a comeback. Indeed, the circle of kinfolk is expanding: grandparents are central figures in several of TV's newest households. Superficially, these shows have kept pace with the times; the teenage daughter's boyfriend is likely to have a punk haircut and be named Lash. But the uplifting message has changed little. Children still need firm, loving guidance, but will ultimately do what is right if left on their own.
Families have not completely seized the sitcom field this fall. ABC's Sledge Hammer!, about a trigger-happy cop who talks to his gun, is an earnest but lame attempt to satirize Dirty Harry-type heroes. CBS's Designing Women features a quartet of single friends in Atlanta who run a decorating business together, a sort of pre-mid-life Golden Girls. The show has a good cast (including Annie Potts and Dixie Carter) but an overload of formula gag writing ("Suzanne, if sex were fast food, there'd be an arch over your bed").
ABC's Head of the Class is a family show in spirit, if not in fact. Howard Hesseman plays a substitute teacher who takes over a high school class of geniuses. The students are fiercely motivated (one girl is so crushed at getting a B that she has grounded herself), but Hesseman knows more about life and takes on the role of surrogate father. The pilot episode was overstuffed with characterization, but the funny premise and Hesseman's laid-back way with a line make the show one of the most promising comedies of the fall.
Most of the season's action, nevertheless, takes place around cozy couches, homey banisters and bustling kitchen tables. A sampler:
ALF (NBC). When a spaceship crashes through the roof of the Tanners' garage, out pops a wisecracking alien, who promptly moves in with the family. The Tanners accept this turn of events with amazing matter-of-factness, but ALF is no place to look for plausibility -- or charm. The outer-space visitor looks like an Ewok from the wrong side of the tracks and talks like Charlie the Tuna. In no time he is barging into the bathroom, hogging the stereo headset and cranking out ancient one-liners ("Do you get Sesame Street where you live?" "No, and frankly I don't get it here, either"). This is the show that NBC has chosen as the lead-in for Steven Spielberg's expensive Amazing Stories, which drew disappointing ratings last year. The creator of E.T. must be pretty embarrassed.