"The more things change, the more they stay the same," is how the old saying goes. It has also been said that stereotypes start somewhere. This could not be more true than when applied to the concept of the family as perceived by the pop culture on television. Ever since the days of radio, families all over the United States have spent evenings listening or watching as a make-believe families either laughed or cried themselves through another episode. Through the years the "face" of these families have remained the same, yet many other basic assumptions have changed along the way. This paper will compare and contrast two of those TV families, "The Jeffersons" and "The Hughleys", by comparing similar episodes to examine what has changed and what has stayed the same over the last 25 years.
The "Jeffersons" premiered in 1975 on CBS as a spin-off of the series "All in the Family." The basic premise was that George Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley), who had been one of Archie Bunker's neighbors in "All in the Family", had become successful enough in his dry cleaning business to move his family from Queens, New York, to a "deluxe apartment in the sky" (quoted in Internet Movie Database, 2001) in Manhattan. George was a type of counterpart to Archie Bunker, in that he was arrogant, opinionated and the things he said often got him into trouble. He is also depicted as being stingy, but he usually meant well. His wife, Louise 'Weezy' Mills Jefferson (Isabel Sanford) was depicted as levelheaded and open-minded. She often had to bail George out of the trouble that his words got him into. She stayed at home and didn't work, but was not always comfortable with this new lifestyle as was shown in the first episode where George insists that she hire a maid, Florence (Marla Gibbs). George's son, Lionel (Mike Evans), was an engineering major at a local college who dated, and eventually married, Jenny (Berlinda Tolbert), daughter of the Willis's....