The Modern TV Father
Or, An American Dad
It’s 2025, marriage rates are on a sustained decline in America, what is characterized as a male-loneliness-crisis is sweeping the nation, and we might finally be feeling the strain of the long nineteenth century’s dismantling of the family. While Americans barely read, and American men read even less (although the male literary crisis appears to be overstated, people just don’t read), the internet is rotting all human knowledge into an unintelligible loam at an accelerating pace abandoning an old-young man considering a family of his own to the one true source of those good old fashioned values: Television.
A performatively masculine working dad, a stay at home blond bombshell, an older daughter who always knows better, and a young son unable to live up to his father’s expectations; the model modern teevee family, give or take a few accoutrement (talking dogs, goomahs) plus a few extra (talking fish, alien), we’ve seen for decades, so why this particular family, and why now?
American Dad! (we might drop the exclamation down the road) premiered February 6, 2005, about a month shy of the two year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, on the Fox network after the airing of Super Bowl XXXIX, a common practice to lead-out the most watched broadcast of the year and the same way sibling show Family Guy premiered in 1999. Created by Mike Barker and Matt Weitzman + Seth MacFarlane and focused on titular CIA middle manager Stan Smith, AD! starts as All in the Family updated for the Bush Administration before morphing rapidly over 20 some seasons and two networks (Fox to TBS with an imminent return to the original network) into a sci-fi-surrealist-adventure-family-comedy.
As we’re gearing up for foreign intervention in Venezuela (our old friends at the NYT are beating the war drums) with a deeply divided country and an Republican administration hellbent on hell on earth for everyone except Croesus and a Democrat leadership wholly unprepared and often complicit, I’m constantly cast back to immediate post 9/11. Why does it feel like we’re doing it all over again. Through this project I want to reflect on the past twenty years, the mistakes we made, the mistakes we can fix and those we can’t, where I am in life, what I want, and why I love the show as much as I do.
Which is a lot. I’ve seen the show many times over and I want to interrogate it critically and with fresh eyes but it’s going to be impossible to Lethe away my thoughts and I won’t be able to resist comparing the show to itself. I don’t have a structure or format I’m married to, I plan on covering the show episode by episode with meandering thoughts, criticism, and maybe some journaling. Honestly, I don’t know if the show lends itself to this kind of project, is there enough to criticize about a mid-oughts adult animated sitcom?
We’re gonna find out.
Good Morning USA!