Television, of necessity, reflects its viewer's desires and perceived reality. The new conservative movement can make as much noise as it likes about reanimating the traditional family to the point of obliterating alternatives; what matters to television is the reality on the ground. And it looks like this: According to Divorce Magazine, the percentage of folks married was, as of 2002, 59 percent of the population, down from 62 percent in 1990. In 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that 13.5 million single parents had custody of 21.7 million children. Single-mother families increased from 7 million in 1990 to 10 million in 2000. Meanwhile, the ACLU, in a 2006 study, found that children raised in families "without fathers, both by lesbian mothers and by single heterosexual mothers" experienced a generally superior parenting experience.
Television depends on either a literal or instinctive grasp of such facts, which in turn helps explain why huge corporations have banked on such wide-ranging single-parent-struggle shows as Everwood, Gilmore Girls, Reba and Supernatural. The success of these shows, assorted queer-themed offerings and HBO's ironically inverse Big Love—which is about a polyamorist with too much family—underlines the reality: The American family is radically redefining itself in ways immune to traditionalist scolding and wishful thinking.
In another very obvious way, television's reflecting nature pops up in how it deals with the post-September 11 mood of fear, helplessness and government indifference, as the CSI variations Bones, Cold Case, House, Numb3rs and NCIS serve up an endless array of implacable, invisible enemies that can only be dealt with by Experts who Buck the System—which is almost always assumed to be incompetent, corrupt or both. But the finest television combines the problems of increasingly fractured social groupings and external threats and brings them to a fine boil in the cauldron of family. And nothing boils more than Denis Leary and Peter Tolan's singularly seething Rescue Me. Leary plays Tommy Gavin, a typically underpaid New York Irish-American fireman haunted by the ghosts of people he didn't save at the World Trade Center. An epic drunk, Tommy screws his dead cousin's wife, kidnaps his own kids and tries to pummel Red Staters out for a grief fix at Ground Zero. But he's still a lifesaver, flaws and all.
While arguably an exaggeration—at least to those not raised in Irish-American families—Rescue Me creates an otherwise accurate, enraged and aching look at the class and cultural stressors fragmenting blue-collar families. So much so that it's become the object of a jihad by the Parents Television Council—led by right-wing scold L. Brent Bozell—the idea apparently being that if you don't show the truth it'll go away. But like other shows about fragged families, such as those in the monumentally popular Desperate Housewives and Six Feet Under, Rescue Me reaffirms its audience's sense of who they are while offering the solace that their situation may be better in comparison.
Rescue Me's firemen constantly rib each other about being queer. While a defensive reaction to the reality of these mainly male firefighters spending most of their quality time together, it also helps them cope with the fact that they're each other's real family, united in mission and values and loyal to the core. And this idea is one that only television, with its recurring characters and season-long tales, can do justice to: the metaphorical family unit.
Not just any group of biologically unrelated folks smooshed together constitutes a "metaphorical family." While the doctors in House care about one another, they're too self-immersed to cohere as a metaphorical family. Metaphorical TV families, like the real item, are not about one person—or if they appear to be, that person is just an entry point.
The defining figure of the new metaphorical family may be Joss Whedon. His Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly were often about nothing but the struggles of metaphorical families to define and defend themselves. Look no further than the 2000 Buffy episode "Family," in which Buffy's metaphorical family—blue-collar Xander, father figure Giles and supernatural sister Dawn—band together to support Tara, the girlfriend of newly out Willow. Tara's bio-father shows up claiming she'll become a demon if she doesn't return home. Buffy and the gang reject his craven power play. Infuriated, Dad says, "We're her blood kin—who the hell are you?"
Buffy: "We're family."
"Blood kin" and metaphorical family fused on Alias, where double agent Sidney Bristow's bio-dad is assimilated into her core family of loyal, beloved co-workers. More subtly, the cops in The Wire are more connected to each other than to their families, while more overtly, the unrelated hotties of Sex and the City form a family-like core to support their Gotham adventures, as do the queered substitute families of The L Word, Will and Grace and Queer as Folk.
Right now, the two shows that most elegantly fuse external and internal threats to the family—traditional and metaphorical—are unsurprisingly two of the best shows on the small screen: Rob Thomas's Veronica Mars and Ronald Moore's Battlestar Galactica. Amateur sleuth Veronica (Kristen Bell) and her dad (Enrico Colantoni)—the most realistically positive daughter-father relationship limned in any medium for some time—live in a sunny Bush-America-microcosm town infested with moral rot, racism and elitist cruelty. For all its heroine's plucky wit and the bedrock relationship between Veronica and her father, the show is incredibly despairing. The powerful and rotten most often get away with their crimes—including Veronica's rape. Veronica's efforts to locate the truth are rewarded with smirks by the law and corrupt alike. The show's scariest element, though, is the result of Veronica's inability to form an extended family.
Once upper- but now barely middle-class, she doesn't fit in with the rich kids, while her dalliances with the few elite teens who aren't outright bastards earn her the distrust of possible ally Weevil (Francis Capra), a poor Latino biker; meanwhile, slippery race politics threaten her friendship with her African-American best friend, Wallace (Percy Daggs III). At one almost intolerably painful juncture, you're led to think that Dad has died, and Veronica's primal weeping against a backdrop of city lights and black sky makes you realize, My God, he's all she has.
Battlestar Galactica, meanwhile, is the show future media scholars will reference when trying to figure out what was up with America after September 11. It starts with the decimation of humankind courtesy of a surprise attack by the robots and human clones called Cylons. The titular battleship and a small fleet of survivors spend the show trying to escape.
What creator Moore does with this standard sci-fi armature is brilliant. Most everyone in the Galactica fleet has lost their biological families: The show posits the survivors as the ultimate extended metaphorical family. This reading is boldfaced by episodes that play out like the Hatfields and McCoys in space, with the idealistic Galactica "family" up against the cold pragmatists of another surviving ship, the Pegasus. The defining difference between the two: The Pegasus crew tortures their female Cylon prisoner; the Galactica's folks try to figure out why she is what she is. Other contemporary concerns reappear in SF drag—the place of democracy, surveillance and open debate in times of war. But Galactica is most acute in its observations on family and identity.
While there's much to be gleaned about the fluid nature of family in extreme situations by the relationships between Galactica's Commander Adama (Edward James Olmos) and his surviving son and his dead son's lover, the location of the show's central theme is in the body and soul of Sharon (Grace Park)—or, rather, the exact Cylon clone of Sharon.
As a Cylon, she hates humanity for its self-destructive cruelty, but she's also in love with one of the ship's pilots and constantly sees her belief in humanity as scumbags countered by Adama and company's decency. Will she cave in to the wishes of her Cylon forebears or bond with the Galactica family? More importantly, can she rise above being "born bad" and craft her own viable, independent identity? Stripped of sci-fi metaphor, it's the classic nature vs. nurture thing with which we all grapple. For the answers, or more likely, more questions, stay tuned.