Even shows with a supposedly more enlightened mission couldn’t resist slamming the working mother. When television producer Gary David Goldberg unveiled “Day by Day,” a series about a family-based child care center, he said the show would offer a rarity—a positive view of day care on prime-time television. Yet the show was unrelievedly contemptuous of its working mothers. Neurotic and inept, the show’s career moms bumble into the center each morning, thrusting their tots into the arms of its holier-than-thou directors—a husband and wife team who congratulate each other every five minutes for sacrificing their Wall Street careers to tend to these negligent mothers’ offspring.
THE SINGLE LADY VANISHES
“Single-woman leads don’t work on hour-long dramatic television,” Scott Siegler, CBS vice president for drama development, informed sociologist Todd Gitlin in the early ’80s. By the end of the decade, the TV listings would suggest that the networks hardly believed single-woman leads worked at all.
The eviction of TV’s single women repeats a pattern established in television’s last backlash. Early television actually offered quite a number of single-woman shows, although most featured hapless schoolmarms, maids, and typists in such fare as “Private Secretary,” “Ella Miss,” “My Friend Irma,” “Our Miss Brooks,” and “Meet Millie.” By the mid-1950s, however, every program with a single woman in the lead had been canceled. And the unwed heroine would remain out of sight throughout the early and mid-1960s, appearing only as an incidental character, a reminder to female viewers of the woes of unwed life. On “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” single Sally Rogers served to throw into relief the good fortunes and greater femininity of Van Dyke’s doted-upon housewife—played by Mary Tyler Moore. In the many doctor and hospital shows of the ’60s, single women surfaced only as patients, their illnesses typically caused by some “selfish” act—getting an abortion, having an affair or, most popular, disobeying a doctor’s orders.
But in 1970, Mary Tyler Moore traded in the Van Dyke dollhouse for her own apartment and show. Moore’s Mary Richards was not only unwed, she was more than thirty years old. Marriage panic did not afflict her. She had real male and female friends, enjoyed a healthy sex life, turned down men who didn’t appeal to her, and even took the pill—without winding up on a hospital bed in the final scene. (She was, however, still the subordinated pseudo-schoolgirl to her boss; while her officemates called their chief “Lou,” she always said “Mr. Grant.”) Female viewers adored her. The program maintained top ratings for its entire run, won twenty-five Emmys, and it spun off two other successful sitcoms with independent female leads. Meanwhile, other programmers got the message and drafted their own shows about strong and independent unmarried women, from the realistic in “One Day at a Time” to the superhuman in “The Bionic Woman.”
In 1986, a decade after her previous triumph, the networks returned Mary Tyler Moore to prime time—as a burned-out scowling divorcee whose career is only an object of derision. In “Mary,” she writes the consumer Help Line column for a trashy tabloid. She has no confidantes on or off the job, a fact that heightens an already bleakly drawn existence. Next door, her earthy best friend Rhoda is replaced by a narcissistic single career woman, an ad executive who is desperate for a ring from any man. In one episode, the neighbor meets a mobster—and announces her engagement the same day.
Moore’s neighbor was not the only single television woman willing to lower her expectations in the quest for a marriage license. Under pressure from the network, the creators of “Kate and Allie” married off divorced mother Allie to a colorless suitor she had known only a short while. That same season on “Moonlighting,” a pregnant Maddie Hayes got hitched to a dishwater-dull accountant right after they met on a train. Cybill Shepherd, who played Maddie, was adamantly opposed to this plot twist, and viewers were similarly disgusted. The show, in fact, was swamped with so many outraged letters that the producers finally had to annul the marriage.
Maddie’s coerced matrimony was only the latest development in a long-running campaign to cow this independent female figure. David Addison, a carefree bachelor and Maddie’s employee, ultimately tames his “queen bee” boss the old-fashioned way; he slaps her, and she surrenders to his advances. Still not satisfied, the series’ producers later have her grovel before the preening David, literally on her knees. The shaming of Maddie Hayes was no idle writing exercise. It mirrored a behind-the-scenes campaign, conducted by both executive producer Glenn Caron and actor Bruce Willis (who played David), to curb the single Shepherd’s “aggressive” personality. They told the press they didn’t like how she was always voicing her opinion when she disagreed with the show’s direction. At Caron’s behest, the network sent Shepherd a disciplinary letter. The memo ordered her, on penalty of suit or the show’s cancellation, to follow the director’s orders, submit to timed breaks, and ask for permission before leaving the set. “I felt ill when I received it,” Shepherd said at the time. “It was like reform school.”
While TV generally presented single women’s stampede to the altar as their “choice,” the story lines sometimes revealed their underlying agenda—to serve as wish fulfillment for single men. The show “Murder, She Wrote” (which, despite its name, had no female writers, producers, or directors in 1987) offered one such transparent tale in a 1988 episode about the marital redemption of a single professional woman. Jilted by a female careerist, boyfriend Grady takes to the bar. Well, maybe it’s for the best, he decides. “I want a traditional girl.” A fellow drinker pipes up: “Is she a career woman?” When Grady nods, the guy gives him a knowing look: “Yeah, you give ’em a briefcase and they take your pants.” By the end of the episode, the career woman (an accountant) recants and comes running to Grady for absolution. “I don’t want to be an accountant,” she cries. “I just want to be your wife.” A pleased Grady concludes, “I think everything’s going to work out just fine.”
The matrimonial imperative was not limited to prime time; on daytime soap operas, where wedding bells always rang frequently, the marriage rate climbed still higher, and the divorce rate fell. “Ten years ago, we might have broken them up,” Mary Alice Dwyer-Dobbin, ABC’s vice president of daytime programming, says of soap opera’s warring unmarried couples. “Now the writers have been challenged to come up with new and inventive story lines that create conflict but don’t break the core characters apart.” Why? “Women are returning to the home,” she says. “It’s all part of the pendulum swinging back from the Super-woman era.”
Like the bedridden single patients of ’60s doctor shows, women on the ’80s soaps who resisted wedding marches risked death. In the real world in 1988, 8 percent of AIDS victims were women. In daytime TV—101 percent. On “The Young and the Restless,” AIDS fells a former prostitute who abandons her child to follow her “profession”—the ultimate in careerism. (She winds up infecting her daughter, too.) In “All My Children,” AIDS strikes a divorcee and, her femininity apparently resuscitated on the sickbed, she decides to marry again. Is safe sex exercised in the nuptial bower? This “socially responsible” soap doesn’t say.
With the exception of “Murphy Brown,” the ’80s prime-time lineup offered almost no shows centered on a single woman in the working world, much less one deriving pleasure or pride from her vocation. The occasional series that were about single women actively involved in their careers, like the lawyer of “Sara,” were typically yanked after less than a season. The networks only seemed willing to support single-women shows when the heroines were confined to the home in non-threatening roles in a strictly all-female world—like the elderly widows in “The Golden Girls” or the home-based interior decorators of “Designing Women.”
Most of the single women who remained on television in this era were secondary and cautionary characters; like Sally Rogers on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” their grim circumstances only underscored the good fortune of the leading wife. Relegated to incidental roles, the single women reverted to two stock types: the coldly
calculating careerist or the deeply depressed spinster. Either she had no emotions or she was an emotional wreck. The single careerist belonged to the lowest order of females. She had traded in her humanity for a paycheck, and spurned not only men but children. The mere sight of a baby could make her already frigid body temperature descend to arctic range. “Oh, babies,” the single stockbroker on “Day by Day” gags as one trundles into her gunsights. “Unappetizing and at the same time unappealing.” The tear-stained spinster, on the other hand, rated a bit higher on TV’s backlash hierarchy of women. She was less intimidating than her professionally ambitious sister; she was too busy weeping to pursue that promotion. She deserved our pity, the shows suggested—though not our respect.
The mental collapse of the single woman preoccupied even higher quality shows, like “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd,” where the thirty-four-year-old divorced heroine has lost not only her husband but countless jobs, boyfriends, her neighboring female friend, and even her therapist. It takes only six episodes for her to suffer a nervous breakdown.
NBC Entertainment’s senior vice president Warren Littlefield told the press that the network’s “goal” in commissioning “Molly Dodd” was to do a show “that talks about the real life of a single woman.” But in the imagination of late-’80s programmers, the only “real” single woman is the one who cracks up. In the case of Molly, mental illness is her personality. “I made her neurotic,” executive producer Jay Tarses explains, “because I didn’t want her to be bland.” Tarses could have drawn on other traits to spice her character: after all, he managed to fashion a quirky personality on “The Bob Newhart Show,” where the male psychotherapist is memorable without losing his mind.
Of course, single women like Molly exist in the real world, and her character would have been unobjectionable in a more healthily diverse universe of female television characters—one that included single women with different problems, and maybe the occasional one whose admirable attributes outweighed her defects. But as one of the few single women to have her own show on late ’80s TV, morose Molly wound up serving as an archetype—and bolstering the stereotypes the rest of the backlash was pushing. And perhaps that was even her creator’s intent. “She’s every woman to me,” Tarses says of Molly. “Her biological clock is ticking. . . . ‘Molly Dodd’ is 180 degrees from ‘Mary Tyler Moore.’”
Molly was also as silent about women’s rights as Mary had been out-spoken. “I think a lot of women ask themselves, What have we gotten out of [feminism]?” Tarses says. “Have we really gained anything? That’s Molly Dodd’s view.” If the show were to flash back on Molly in the early ’70s, he says, viewers would meet a woman who “probably would have pretended to be a radical feminist but secretly would have hoped for a more traditional life.” Why? “Because that’s how I feel about it,” Tarses says. “I never did get what the women’s movement was all about. . . . Every move a man made could be misconstrued by feminists. I didn’t see why I had to walk on eggs. I still don’t understand what the big problem is. No doors ever seemed to be closed to me.”
THIRTYSOMETHING: STRETCH MARKS AND STRESS DISORDERS
If all the ’80s trend stories about women were collated and fed into a television script machine, the result might be “thirtysomething,” ABC’s celebrated “realistic contemporary drama” about upwardly mobile baby boomers. The topics addressed in this prime-time program, introduced in the fall of ’87 to intense media attention, include cocooning, the mommy track, the man shortage, and the biological clock. There’s even an episode on the downside of no-fault divorce that could be straight out of Lenore Weitzman’s The Divorce Revolution. In this segment, a nasty lawyer urges the estranged husband to use the new law to sell the house from under his wife and kids. The heartless attorney is, of course, a single career woman.
The creators of “thirtysomething” marketed the show as a thinking person’s TV series. But, like the typical trend story, the show’s scripts avoided any social or political analysis and pumped moralism into the vacuum. The cautionary tales were, in keeping with the media’s trend tradition, aimed exclusively at women. The good mother, Hope Steadman, was bathed in a heavenly light as she floated about the kitchen, rapturous over breast-feeding. Meanwhile, the bad spinsters clutched their barren wombs and circuited miserably around the happy Steadman homestead; like the single women of the New York Times article, they were “coping with a void.” The scripts concealed their weekly sermons with progressive-sounding but hollow dialogue and an ironic stance that denied responsibility for its message. The characters mounted a feeble mock struggle against the domestic images of ’50s television, then gladly surrendered to them. “Just don’t tell me I’m turning into June Cleaver,” Hope, the happy housewife, says rhetorically. She calls Michael “Ward” (the patriarch on “Leave It to Beaver”), and he plays his part, too. “So is this the part where I say, ‘Wally, step into my study’?” he asks.
While the press greeted “Roseanne” with suspicion and fat jokes, it gave “thirtysomething” the red-carpet treatment. Talk shows even recruited Mel Harris, the actress who played the good wife, Hope, to instruct its viewers on mothering. Therapists hailed “thirtysomething” in the media and pestered the network for videotaped episodes that they could “prescribe” to patients. The American Psychological Association gave the show its annual award for endorsing “the notion of inner thinking.” (Their enthusiastic response made good business sense. As a professor reported in Redbook, a survey that he conducted showed that after viewers watch “thirtysomething,” they are more “inclined to try therapy.”) Clergymen used the show to counsel singles at weekend retreats. Dating services offered “thirtysomething” matchmaking events and “The New Dating Game” promised male contestants with a “real clean-cut ‘thirtysomething’ look.” Even George Bush referred to the show in a campaign speech.
All this excitement was over a show that never ranked higher than twenty-fifth in the ratings—and slipped steadily in the charts its first season. But in this case, even advertisers didn’t mind. They were willing to look the other way because the show rated high in “quality demo-graphics”—the term used by the television industry for upper-income viewers and the strategy the industry deployed for concealing a shrinking market share. The majority of “thirtysomething” viewers had household incomes that topped $60,000 a year—and, better yet, more than half had a child under the age of three. So businesses that stood to profit from the backlash jumped on the “thirtysomething” bandwagon. Jif peanut butter and Kool-Aid even presented ads with a “ ‘thirtysomething’ feel.” The creators of a Canada Dry commercial featuring cocooning couples justified their message by citing the show. How did the ad agency know it was a “trend” that Americans were retreating to the home? “Watching that show ‘thirtysomething,’” Marcia Grace, the ad’s creative director at Wells Rich Greene, explains, “that was real key.”
In “thirtysomething,” a complete pantheon of backlash women is on display—from blissful homebound mother to neurotic spinster to ball-busting single career woman. The show even takes a direct shot at the women’s movement: the most unsympathetic character is a feminist.
At the top of the “thirtysomething” female ladder, Hope enjoys the view. “Hope is so hard to write for because she just exists in this glow,” Ann Hamilton, one of the show’s writers, says. “She never does anything, really.” When the show’s producers, Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, drafted the original pilot, they drew up mini-biographies of each character. For the men they wrote down career goals, hobbies, and convictions. For Hope Steadman they wrote: “Hope is married to Michael.”
“I feel guilty,” Hope sighs to her single friends, “because my life is so full.” Her biggest problem: She discovers her house has a “borderline” case of radon contamination. Her darkest moment: Michael misplaces their dinner reservation and the movie they wanted to see is sold out. “Michael,” she tells him, “last night was the worst Saturday night of my lif
e!”
A former “overachiever,” according to her biography, Hope has surrendered ambition in exchange for a happy family life. This was the right choice, the series hammers home on one episode after another. When Michael, an advertising executive, is having minor money troubles, Hope wonders if she should return to work. “I earn the money now,” her husband assures her—and anyway, what of their two-year-old daughter, Janey? “You love her. You don’t want to go back to work now.” Apparently, it’s not possible to work and still love your children.
Hope reconfirms her cocooning choice in a key episode, entitled “Weaning,” in which she returns part-time to her job as a magazine researcher. She’s overwhelmed by the onerous burdens of part-time fact checking; we see her working until three A.M. every night. Her husband groans, “We used to be madly in love.” She apologizes, “It won’t always be like this,” and he tells her, “Yeah, it will probably be worse.” Hope suspects he’s right. And she tells a friend, “The only thing I’ve accomplished is being totally exhausted.”
On the job, Hope meets a grasping single career woman—in fact, she’s grasping after Hope’s job. Hope asks her if she wants to have kids. “Oh, I don’t know,” snaps the woman, “I’d kind of like to get my game plan going first. . . . I mean I don’t even have time for a relationship right now.” That does it; Hope flies from the office and into the arms of husband Michael. She can’t do it anymore, she tells him tearfully. “I’m supposed to be able to do both. That’s all I hear about.” With a sly smile, Michael confesses that, although he knows it’s “unliberated,” he’d rather have her home, too. Permission granted, Hope hurries homeward, sweeps baby Janey in her arms and whirls around the nursery. Van Morrison croons “She’s an angel” as the credits roll.