In TV, as in politics, "family" is one of the biggest weasel words in the lexicon. Take the phrase "family comedy." To you it might simply mean a comedic program centered on a family. To, say, Joe Lieberman, it may mean one palatable to an "average family" (speaking of weasel words), or one that actively promotes "family values" (don't get us started).
But from the Nelsons to the Simpsons, it has largely meant married parents with kids. Not so this year. The lead character on abc's The Geena Davis Show shacks up out of wedlock with a widower and his kids. The single-mom heroine of the WB's Gilmore Girls was knocked up as a teen; the grownup star of Fox's Titus gets knocked out by his hard-drinking, oft divorced dad. On Fox's Normal, Ohio, Dad is divorced and gay. From Ward and June Cleaver, we've gone to Ward and June, cleaved.
This isn't the first year TV has explored contentious families or divorce (Grace Under Fire). Past producers would sometimes simply kill off Mom, leaving a cute dad who could date (ABC's Madigan Men continues the widower-com tradition). But now the nontraditional family is practically mandatory, for reasons as much economic as social. After years of big-city yuppie-coms, the networks realized, says NBC entertainment president Garth Ancier, that "the urban work setting was getting old." That meant a return to the domestic comedy--but now, says Geena creator Terry Minsky, "it's not enough to do just the typical family."
Whatever that is. According to the Census Bureau, 27% of American families with kids are headed by a single parent. "Family comedy," though, still carries overtones of the Ike years, when sitcoms like Father Knows Best defined the genre and American pop culture was supposed to promote stability, peace and the effacement of discord at any cost.
But the dirty secret of a show like Titus is that discord is hilarious. You laugh because--well, what's the alternative? "People want something that reflects their lives," says creator-star Christopher Titus, who based the series on his autobiographical one-man stage show Norman Rockwell Is Bleeding. "Sixty-three percent of American families are now considered dysfunctional," he boasts in the pilot. "That means we're the majority. We're normal." Without victim-speak, Titus looks at how Titus has become his screwed-up self in reaction to, and emulation of, his womanizing, boorish dad (a cacklingly exuberant Stacy Keach). For Titus, family is war, and it isn't afraid to drop its audiences into uncomfortable situations with no one-liners to save them, as when Titus has an aids scare and confronts the psychological legacy of his dad's own skirt chasing. Like All in the Family, its model, Titus daringly snatches comedy from the jaws of family drama. "The joy we get," Titus says, "is to scare the hell out of viewers and get us all laughing."