Reel families a real danger?

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist David Halberstam astutely surmised once that those of us who grew up watching early sitcoms like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best were branded by the experience.

Not because the exemplary families on Leave It to Beaver or The Donna Read Show or Dennis the Menace or The Dick Van Dyke Show weren’t considered role models … but because they were.

Millions were charmed by the zany antics of the mischievous but well-meaning children and the wisdom of their calm, seemingly omniscient parents in these shows … only to be greeted at the supper table by messed-up adults who fought and drank and frequently failed as parents.

People born in the first third of the last century, of course, had been damaged themselves during their childhoods by the Great Depression and world wars and then-fashionable (spare the rod and spoil the child) notions about how to bring up kids. As were their parents and grandparents and any generation you’d care to go back to.

“Kids growing up in homes filled with anger and tension often felt the failure was theirs,” Halberstam wrote in his landmark 1993 book, The Fifties, which took a deep dive into the underlying domestic realities masked by the idealized suburban exterior of what we were seeing on television.

This set me to wondering about TV shows and movies through the subsequent decades that have featured strong, loving and respected grandparent figures.

The Waltons, say, where Grandpa (Zebulon) and Grandma (Esther) guided their descendants with wisdom and mutual respect. On Blue Bloods, patriarch Henry Reagan (a former police commissioner) proudly presides over weekly dinners with multiple generations of a loving family. In Modern Family, Jay Pritchett is a crusty but soft-hearted father and grandpa, cherished by his children and grandkids.

I could go on (think Zeek and Camille Braverman in Parenthood, Lydia in One Day at a Time, Alba in Jane the Virgin, Russell and Anna Huxtable on The Cosby Show), but the common denominator is that all of these elders are depicted as dedicated to and adored by their families.

Anyone who has ever put in any time as a grandparent knows this idealized Norman Rockwellization of what is often a fraught and troubling role is a Barnum and Bailey world, just as phony as it can be. Dysfunctional family dynamics, estrangement, jealousies, favouritism, scapegoating, money woes, generational trauma, separation, divorce, illness, death … you name it, few real-world families have emerged unscathed from predicaments largely unknown in the Little House on the Prairie — at least as it was presented back in the Michael Landon days.

Older people know this intellectually. We’re not ingénues or callow fellows, naively unable to fathom why those related to us — or we ourselves, for that matter — don’t always behave with grace and decency.

Still, I can’t help musing about the unitended deleterious effects that entertaining but unrealistic programs might be having on seniors neglected by their families, or currently living in homes filled with anger and tension.

Are they once again left with the impression that they’re reaping what they sowed? That, as in childhood when Mummy and Daddy were quarrelling, the blame for not having replicated Grandpa and Grandma Walton’s love-filled golden years lies squarely at their door?

That would be true in some cases, of course. But it seems to me that there is a particular cruelty in being handed an image of familial harmony at the very moment when the family has become least capable of providing it.

The cruelty is not in the fantasy itself. We need fantasies. We need the weekly dinner, the porch swing, the grandfather who knows when to speak and, more importantly, when not to. We need somebody at the head of the table who has survived enough winters to understand that most arguments are not worth winning and most wounds are not improved by being reopened.

Or we did, at least, when cellphones weren’t sucking away most of the faces at the dinner table. That’s a whole ’nother essay. But the problem we’re talking about here begins when the fantasy acquires the authority of a moral standard.

When that happens, the grandfather who sits alone in an apartment, waiting by a telephone that does not ring, has not merely been abandoned. He has somehow failed at grandparenthood. The grandmother whose children arrive only when there is a hospital admission or a legal document to sign begins to wonder what she did wrong. The old man whose family cannot sit in the same room without resurrecting grievances from 30 years ago looks at the smiling television family and discovers, once again, that the deficit appears to be his.

This is one of the less examined consequences of sentimental television that Halberstam was underscoring: it turns social arrangements into personal character tests.

The family on television has the luxury of being a family. Its conflicts are scheduled, its misunderstandings are soluble, its resentments conveniently revealed before the final commercial break. Even death, when it arrives, generally arrives with meaning and a moving pop song. Nobody spends six months arguing about who should have noticed the symptoms earlier. Nobody discovers that the person who was always described as difficult had, in fact, been lonely for 20 years.

Real families are less obliging.

They contain the son who cannot forgive his father for something the father no longer remembers doing. They contain the daughter who has spent a lifetime being the responsible one and has consequently become unable to hear the word “need” without experiencing it as an accusation. They contain siblings who have divided the history of their childhood between them, each preserving a version in which the other received more love.

And then there are the grandparents, who have arrived at the end of the story ... only to discover that everyone else is still arguing about the beginning.

Perhaps this is why the television grandparent can be so comforting. Grandpa Walton does not merely love his family. He supplies continuity. Henry Reagan does not merely sit down to dinner. He gives the dinner a history. Jay Pritchett, beneath the jokes and the impatience, assures everybody that the family will continue to exist despite itself.

The real grandparent has no such guarantee.

Real grandparents can be vain, frightened, controlling, generous, manipulative, funny, selfish, magnificent, impossible. They can be the source of childhood stories that become family mythology, and they can also be the reason somebody has spent 40 years in therapy trying to understand why the holiday season makes them anxious.

There is a temptation, when discussing older people, to divide them into the deserving and the undeserving: the wise elder who has earned our reverence and the difficult old grump who has somehow brought solitude upon himself.

Television prefers the first category because it makes better television. Life has never respected the distinction.

The more troubling possibility is that neglect is sometimes inherited.

A child learns from a parent that affection is conditional. The child grows up, has children, becomes a parent, and discovers that what felt like normal family life was actually an arrangement held together by silence. Years pass. The parent becomes old. The children, now exhausted adults with their own histories and grievances, reproduce the silence.

Nobody has to be evil for this to happen. That may be the hardest part to accept.

It’s worth remembering that in real life, Ozzie Nelson was a workaholic who spent little off-camera time with his family. Despite his trademark portrayal of happy, well-adjusted characters, Robert Young (the Father Knows Best and Marcus Welby, M.D. guy) suffered from depression and alcoholism, culminating in a suicide attempt seven years before his death in 1998. Michael Landon, too, was a heavy drinker. The gay actors who played the grandparents on The Waltons, Ellen Corby and Will Geer, were both forced by the conventions of the time to remain precariously in the closet so far as the public was concerned. Bill Cosby … well, the less said the better.

Reality is incomparably more nuanced and intricate and convoluted and bewildering than the reel world.

But usually, there is no villain at the kitchen table. There is only fatigue. Old injuries. Money. Distance. Alcohol. Pride. Dementia. Divorce. A second marriage. A sibling who moved away. A daughter who has decided, correctly or incorrectly, that she cannot survive another conversation with her mother. A son who loves his father but cannot bear to be near him.

And somewhere in the background, absurdly, is the television family. They are still there. Grandma is still smiling. Grandpa is still dispensing wisdom. Everybody has arrived for dinner. Save your fork, Dad. There’s pie. The camera pulls back.

What it does not show are the folded hands in the lap of a lonely octogenarian in an assisted living facility on the other side of the screen.