The 1980s were the Reagan years. Greed was good and rich was in. Television reflected this new paradigm with shows that celebrated excess. Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and Dynasty ushered in a new era of wealth and glamor to television. One show which kicked off this new direction was CBS’s primetime soap Dallas. Premiering in 1978, Dallas was about a wealthy Texas oil family and their loves and rivals. Though not the first primetime soap to hit the air (that would be 1960s Peyton Place), it was the first to make broadcast history when, in 1980, the producers struck ratings gold with the shooting cliffhanger of the show’s erstwhile villain J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman). Millions of Americans tuned in when J.R. was plugged several times on the show’s season finale, then waited over a long hiatus to find out who did the deed. The subsequent wait paid off as “Who Shot J.R.?” hit a cultural zeitgeist. The show’s cast appeared on talk shows and on the cover of Newsweek, making Dallas one of the most talked-about TV shows in primetime history. The show’s popularity spawned a successful spinoff, Knots Landing, and countless imitators such as the Aaron Spelling-produced Dynasty and Falcon Crest, among others. The influence of Dallas extended beyond primetime serials as TV shows as diverse as Hill Street Blues and Wiseguy adopted the serial’s continual storytelling with arcs extending beyond each weekly episode. Dallas also created the cliffhanger. Now every TV show ends each season with a hook to keep audiences interested over the long summer hiatus.
Daytime soaps, like their primetime cousins, were also experiencing a cultural zeitgeist. In 1979, ABC serial General Hospital likewise struck ratings gold in the supercouple Luke and Laura. Quirky and romantic, Luke and Laura became a favorite with soap fans as they watched their romantic adventures over two years when, in 1981, the couple finally married. The ratings for Luke and Laura’s wedding broke records when 30 million viewers tuned in to watch the couple exchange vows. General Hospital catapulted soap operas to worldwide attention, and other soaps soon followed in its footsteps by creating supercouples in romantic, action-packed storylines, with extra heapings of glamor to boot. Other shows also took a page from Dallas and began introducing Texan cowboys onto their canvases and, in the case of Another World, even spun off a short-lived soap based in the Lone Star state (NBC’s Texas).
The Reagan years also introduced what soon became the culture wars to television, as primetime began exploring different aspects of the family sitcom. Here, traditionalism gave way to transgressive ideas about what defined a family as producers began introducing different kinds of family sitcoms and dramas. In 1984, comedian Bill Cosby premiered his hit NBC sitcom The Cosby Show, featuring the African American middle class Huxtable family. The Cosby Show was a throwback to 1950s sitcoms where the parents were wise and benevolent and the children were cute, quirky, and rebellious, but never to the point that parental authority was ever questioned or undermined. What made The Cosby Show different from its predecessors though was largely due to race, since it became one of the first primetime sitcoms that showed African Americans as intelligent, witty, and competent. The two leads, Cosby and on-screen wife Phyllicia Rashad were both urban professionals (Cosby played a doctor, while his wife was a lawyer). Critics at the time pointed out the implausibility of two professionals who rarely encountered the problems of dividing the rigors of their professions with home life, as well as the show’s disinterest in tackling problems that many African Americans were experiencing during the 1980s, namely racism, poverty, drugs, and crime. But the show’s producers and fans shot back that these criticisms revealed racist attitudes that Black people could not have professional middle-class aspirations. Yet despite that, The Cosby Show, hugely popular with black and white audiences alike, failed to address significant problems such as racism and created a fantasy world in which these problems were no longer an issue in the black community, an idea that contradicted reality for Black America during the 1980s as it struggled with the problems of police brutality and crime.
None of the show’s criticisms though diminished its accomplishments as The Cosby Show integrated primetime in a way that earlier black sitcoms did not by presenting different depictions of African Americans on television. Yet while The Cosby Show harkened back to an earlier, gentler era of family sitcoms, other shows attempted to address different perceptions of 1980s families. Shows like NBC’s Diff’rent Strokes and ABC’s Webster addressed the issue of adoption. In both cases, young African American males were adopted into largely white households. Critics howled that these shows were Hollywood’s attempts to show whites as saviors to parentless black youth, while shows depicting the black family were largely absent. Yet, in the case of Diff’rent Strokes, this conceit did attempt to address the problems affecting the class and cultural differences within biracial families, albeit with comedic touches.
The NBC sitcom Family Ties also addressed the changing social and political dynamics in the United States in the eighties. Though ostensibly a traditional family sitcom, Family Ties operated under the conceit that the children of 1960s hippies would turn out to be more conservative than their parents. Starring Meredith Baxter Birney and Michael Gross as the parents, Family Ties premiered in 1982 and soon became a ratings hit with its breakout star, Michael J. Fox, playing the conservative yuppie Alex P. Keaton. Alex was the prototypical Young Republican during the Reagan era and his popularity was the result of Fox’s comedic talents and charm, which made the character endearing to fans—not an easy task since Alex could easily have become an annoying and braying character. Family Ties differed in many ways from The Cosby Show in that it dealt with the generation gap between the parents and their liberal values and their children who rebelled against it, becoming the first primetime show to acknowledge the growing divide between liberalism and conservatism in America. But two shows that would kick the very idea of family sitcoms wide open during the 1980s were Roseanne and Married With Children.
Premiering in 1988, Roseanne became a star vehicle for the show’s lead, comedian Roseanne, whose comedy act was mined for much of the show’s material. Featuring the Connor family, Roseanne was unlike any family sitcom ever appearing on primetime, though it did owe a lot to the 1950s Jackie Gleason hit The Honeymooners. Unlike the very middle class and respectable Huxtable family, the Connors were blue collar, braying, obnoxious, and rough-around-the-edges. And yet in spite of this, there was a charm about the show in the way it revealed how real families related to one another. The children were snotty and rebellious and the parents were snotty and rebellious right back. The show’s success had as much to do with Roseanne, whose acting skills during those years were decidedly green, but who nonetheless brought a uniquelu abrasive charm to primetime; and her on-screen husband, John Goodman, brought teddy bear likeability to his chemistry with his screen partner. While The Cosby Show often ignored class, Roseanne wallowed in it, with each weekly comedic situation revolving around how the parents worried about work, bills, and money while raising their three kids, a rare aspect not duplicated in much of primetime during the Reagan era.
The Fox television hit Married With Children began where Roseanne took off. Premiering on the nascent network a year before Roseanne, Married With Children wore its obnoxious humor as a badge of honor. Starring Ed O’Neill and Katey Sagal as the parents Al and Peg Bundy, Married With Children broke every rule of the family sitcom by featuring parents who were neither wise nor benevolent and children who were rude, obnoxious and oversexed. The show was a parody of the genre by mocking all of its conventions. Married With Children belonged to a style of humor that was gaining headway during the eighties, with comics like Sam Kinison (who made an appearance on the show) and Andrew Dice Clay growing in popularity with their brand of obnoxious, macho comedy. The popularity of this type of humor could be arguably seen as a backlash against the feminist movement which, during the Reagan years, experienced major setbacks as right wing and religious conservatives attacked statewide abortion laws and women’s rights.
Television’s depiction of women during this era, though, improved since the 1970s. Shows like Cagney and Lacey, Kate and Allie, Designing Women, The Golden Girls, Who’s The Boss?, Murphy Brown, L.A. Law and others now featured women who were not only in starring vehicles, but playing characters who were complex. In the case of Cagney and Lacey’s Chris Cagney (Sharon Gless) and Murphy Brown (Candace Bergen), the characters were not only competent professionals but recovering alcoholics, revealing that women characters didn’t have to be saintly objects of perfection in order to create comedy or drama. As more American women entered the workplace, television also reflected this changing paradigm, with many of these shows featuring the workplace as venues for comedy and drama. One such woman, though, who rose above the rest was not a character but the real life Oprah Winfrey, whose syndicated talk show became enormously popular after it debuted in 1984. Like Phil Donahue before her, Oprah addressed issues that were of concern to contemporary women, such as weight and self-esteem issues, sexual abuse, racism, etc. Unlike Donahue however, Winfrey brought her own personal demons to the forefront, creating an emotional connection with her audiences not likely seen since on television. Winfrey would go on to become one of the richest women in the world and influence countless other talk shows such as Rikki Lake and the Sally Jesse Raphael Show.
The aim toward realism and complexity, not only in the depictions of women, was a trend that gained a foothold during the 1980s, beginning with the NBC dramas Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere. Though cop and medical dramas had always been popular on primetime, these two shows brought an added mix of realism not seen on television before. Hill Street Blues, which was about an inner city police precinct, revealed cops as flawed. One running story in Blues involved Capt. Frank Furillo (Daniel J. Travanti) and his affair with prosecuting attorney Joyce Davenport (Veronica Hamel). The show also dealt with racism, sexism, crime, and violence in ways that made other cop shows pale in comparison. St. Elsewhere, likewise, dealt with the problems of doctors in a failing public hospital and revealed that doctors were just as equally impefect, a far cry from earlier medical dramas such as Marcus Welby, M.D. The show also dealt with the hot-button issues of abortion and male rape in a humanistic and realistic manner. Both St. Elsewhere and Hill Street Blues would go on to influence countless other hospital and police procedural dramas such as NBC’s E.R. and Homicide: Life on the Street and ABC’s NYPD Blue.
But not all TV shows during the 1980s reached for realism. Some were even like real life comic books. But these shows also opened the way for criticism and controversy for their use of gratuitous violence. NBC’s The A-Team was one such show singled out for criticism. The A-Team, starring George Peppard and Mr. T as a team of Vietnam veterans for hire, was a ballet of bullets and car crashes, yet its use if violence was cartoonish and no one was ever killed in the show, including the many nameless secondary characters. NBC’s Miami Vice was a complete departure from realistic cop shows like Hill Street Blues and became the first MTV series, featuring the bright neon lights of Miami’s seedy underbelly and stylish music videos as part of the show’s dramatic storytelling. Hip and unrealistic (vice cop Sonny Crockett, played by the grizzled Don Johnson ran around in a boat and a black Ferrari Daytona), the show’s signature look was all 1980s glitz and glamor. The 1980s also saw a rise in detective murder mysteries such as Matt Houston, Remington Steele, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, Murder She Wrote, Magnum P.I., Moonlighting and others. In the case of Moonlighting, starring Cybill Shepherd and newcomer Bruce Willis, the murder mysteries worked alongside humor that was reminiscent of 1930s screwball comedies such as the Nick and Nora Charles movies. Other shows, like Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, Real People, That’s Incredible, the syndicated Solid Gold, and Dance Fever replaced the 1970s variety shows for non-scripted entertainment. Like the Oprah WinfreyShow and the Phil Donahue Show, syndicated talk shows became popular during this decade, as television began to exploit the public’s need to see real life issues discussed in front of live audiences. But unlike Winfrey or Donahue, many of these shows, like the Morton Downy, Jr. Show and the Geraldo Rivera Show were exploitative and titillating, presenting hot-button topics like incest, prostitution and racism in ways that brought more heat than light to the discussion. These shows also eventually set the stage for the emergence of Jerry Springer in the 1990s.
The popularity of one-hour dramas like Hill Street Blues threatened to overshadow sitcoms as such aging warhorses like The Jeffersons, Alice, One Day at a Time, All in the Family (later spun off with Archie Bunker’s Place), Three’s Company and others were winding down toward cancellation. While other sitcoms such as Webster, Diff’rent Strokes, and The Facts of Life were still popular, the genre was nonetheless becoming an endangered species as more and more sitcoms premiering each fall faced the axe before the end of the season. Network executives began wondering if the sitcom was losing its cachet and began greenlighting more one-hour dramas. But when The Cosby Show debuted in 1984, it singlehandedly brought back a renaissance of the half-hour situational comedy. After 1984, shows like The Golden Girls, Designing Women, Murphy Brown, and others became ratings champs and revealed a new form of situational humor, one that was based less on domestic and more on workplace comedy. The humor was also edgier, wittier and far more intelligent than the genre’s previous incarnations, which relied far too heavily on cheap gags, punchlines and slapstick. One show that influenced this new style of sitcom was the NBC show Cheers. Premiering in 1982, Cheers was one of the rare sitcoms during the pre-Cosby era that was widely popular audiences. Intelligent and witty, the show was based in a bar run by former relief pitcher and recovering alcoholic Sam Malone (Ted Danson). Like many 1980s sitcoms, Cheers found its humor largely within workplace dynamics and the sexual and comedic tensions between the lowbrow Malone and elitist waitress Diane Chambers (Shelley Long). The show survived the departure of actress Long and the death of actor Nicholas Colasanto (Coach), successfully replacing them with actors Kirstie Alley and Woody Harrelson, suggesting the endurability of the series with American audiences.
The 1980s saw the television landscape broaden as cable networks HBO and Showtime began appearing in more and more American homes. Though largely outlets to showcase theatrically run movies, HBO in particular produced its own films, The Terry Fox Story (1983); TV series Fraggle Rock, Tales From the Crypt, and Dream On; and specials such as Comic Relief (1986). CNN, the all news network, also debuted during this decade. Though during its infancy, the network struggled to gain respect within the world of broadcast journalism, by the end of the decade, particularly during the Persian Gulf War, CNN revealed that a cable news channel could deliver on-the-spot journalism that none of the broadcast networks could hope to achieve. But two new networks, one cable and the other broadcast, would open up the field for new avenues of television entertainment during the 1980s. MTV, debuting in 1981, was the first cable network devoted entirely to music videos, a new genre that was part entertainment and part marketing for record labels. MTV introduced a younger generation to new music and made stars out of such video-made acts as Boy George, Dire Straits, The Police, Cyndi Lauper, and Madonna. During its early years, MTV had a narrow playlist, showing a decided preference toward white rock acts over black artists who were producing videos during this period. Networks such as the newly created BET (Black Entertainment Television) picked up the slack by airing videos by such R&B; acts as Atlantic Starr, Rick James, the Mary Jane Girls, Mtume, Chaka Khan and others. It wasn’t until Michael Jackson released his phenomal album Thriller in 1983 that MTV’s color barrier was broken down after Jackson’s record label, complaining of racism, demanded the network air his videos to “Billie Jean,” “Beat It,” and “Thriller” or else they’d pull the videos of other acts on their roster. Jackson’s videos became a hit with fans, and later opened the door for other acts such as Prince and Cameo to walk through. Later in the decade, MTV aired the groundbreaking program Yo! MTV Raps which featured the hottest rap videos of the era and also helped make rap acts like Run DMC into crossover hits. The Fox network also debuted during the 1980s. Unlike most broadcast networks, Fox aired only in major urban markets, therefore it could be far more experimental and edgier with its programming choices. Shows such as the aforementioned Married With Children, The Tracey Ullman Show, which later spun off the long-running animated series The Simpsons; Duets, 21 Jump Street (starring a young Johnny Depp), In Living Color and others appealed to younger and more urban audiences, earning the network its edgy reputation. Fox would go on to compete with the other networks with quality programming as it began to appear in more markets across the States.
Sources:
Wikipedia
IMDB.com
