This paper will compare two situation comedies in terms of their being windows on American culture. They will be compared in terms of what they show about general American beliefs, attitudes, roles, and expectations having to do with sex, gender, and family values. The shows selected for this study are an episode of Roseanne and an episode of Grace under Fire, which aired back to back on April 23, 1997. Both concerned parents dealing with a problem of adolescent male sexuality; hence there are both similarities and differences between the programs to be analyzed.
It is problematic whether observations based on a television episode or other dramatization are comparable to observations of ôreal lifeö done in the field. The characters of Roseanne and Dan Connor are intended to be of fairly typical Americans: here, working class, of Irish (and therefore probably Roman Catholic) background, with only high-school educations (although some of the Connor children are going on to college), and not actually active in any church. Hence their family values are presented as the sort of ôgeneric Christianö values that most Americans would be more or less familiar with.
If one were to go into an actual working-class, Irish-background, suburban home in middle America, would one observe behavior like that on the Roseanne show? Well, yes and no. The overall lifestyle is accurate--the show would not be funny otherwise--but real-life behavior certainly tnds to be much more dysfunctional, to use a current buzzword. The Connors are too healthy to seem really realistic.
There are other shows that are realistic in this sense, and they have a very different literary structure. The expectation for a situation comedy is that every episode returns to its starting point by the time it ends: whatever problem has come up in the lives of the main characters, it is resolved within the allotted half-hour or (sometimes) hour. The situation of th...