Clean Shows

Whether we care to admit it or not, TV shows are a big part of our lives and they also influence our childhood.  Some of the right and wrong I learned I saw on TV.  Peter Brady secretly recorded his brothers and sisters and then used those conversations against them.  Peter, and the children like me who viewed that episode, learned that this is wrong because we saw what happened to Peter Brady.  Obviously some of the folks at News Limited never saw that episode.  The other six castaways wrongly accused Gilligan of stealing when it was a chimpanzee all along.  We learned that it is not good to accuse people of something without the facts.  We learned this because we felt sorry for poor Gilligan when even Mary Ann turned against him.  We did not need to be preached too but a lot of those shows did influence our morals and our attitudes.

Shows back then which children watched were pretty clean cut, even shows that teenagers watched.  They were unrealistic in many ways, but wholesome.  I sometimes wonder whether parents let their kids watch Get Smart, Gilligan’s Island and I Dream of Jeannie because they wished for a more wholesome world.  We didn’t know any better but we enjoyed the shows.

I wonder whether there are any good wholesome shows for kids, say aged 7-15 to watch today.  I tend to think not.   

Australia has a soap supposedly for teenagers.  It is fast moving which is good.  In that regard it is a far cry from Ryan’s Hope in which a woman fell off a building and it took three half hour episodes for her to splatter on the pavement below.  Home and Away is fast moving.  But wholesome?  My wife watches the show and so far as I can tell, it has had a stalker, a bomber, a couple of garden variety psychopaths, kidnapping, gangsters, drug pushers, unethical doctors and lawyers, and of course, no show would be complete for teenagers without seriously inappropriate behaviour between teachers and students. 

People will say wholesome shows are unrealistic and I agree.  But is that necessarily bad?  Let’s take The Brady Bunch which back in the day was watched by teenagers thanks to greg and Marcia.  What would the show be like today?

Well, Mike Brady and Alice would be having an affair right under Carol’s nose.  Meanwhile Greg and Marcia would also be conducting their own horizontally based activities.  They weren’t blood relatives after all.  In the season finale, Carol Brady finds out about the affair and is broken hearted, but also plans revenge.  In the next season, Carol talks to Sam the Butcher who at first disbelieves Carol’s contention that his Alice is having it on with Mike Brady.  Meanwhile Carol finds out about Greg and Marcia and in exchange for her silence, convinces both Greg and Marcia to spy on Mike and Alice to find evidence.  About three episodes later, they find the evidence and Carol finally convinces Sam.  Sam is outraged.  He just so happens to have connections to the mob and Carol and Sam decide to put the hit out on Mike.  Carol wants to spare Alice because after all, someone has to clean the house.

Meanwhile Tiger the dog bites Cindy’s best friend and the friend’s parents sue the Brady’s so Mike is busy with that.  It looks like Tiger will have to be put down.  Bobby senses something is wrong and starts to have trouble at school.  He gets into a few fights and gets suspended.  Meanwhile the mob guy starts stalking Mike Brady.

Jan falls pregnant and just before the season finale, is torn between keeping the baby or having a secret abortion.  She wants to confide in Peter, but Peter is too stoned to care and has fallen in with a gang.  This season ends just as the hit man is about to nail Mike Brady.  Carol and Sam the butcher, bonding through their common pain, start their own little romance and Alice begins to suspect Sam knows.  She also finds out about Greg and Marcia but the two threaten Alice with telling Carol about Mike and her.  Alice doesn’t realize Carol already knows so keeps quiet while she begins having a nervous breakdown.  Good thing Peter is around because he can get Alice some pills which she really needs.

That is pretty much how the modern Brady Bunch show would go.  I don’t want to be a prude, but I kind of like the original better.  When I grew up I learned some of the behind-the-scenes things that children shouldn’t really care about, but the truth is, I miss the wholesome shows for children.  I probably wouldn’t watch them myself, but I would want my children to have something decent to watch.  I even kind of miss The Waltons and I never thought I would feel that way about that show.  I used to argue with my sister about that show all the time because she would want to watch it while I wanted to watch sumo wrestling.  I even went so far as to calculate the number of TV hours per year she logged up by watching all episodes of The Waltons against all those I logged watching the Sumo matches.  It turned out the math was in her favor so she got to watch The Waltons.  I forgave mathematics since it was my idea to employ them, and I wager not too many of you have had that argument with your siblings. 

But I digress.  My point is children deserve non cartoons that do not have all this realism.  Let kids imagine, and dream, and pretend.  Realism will intrude fast enough on their lives.