THE FALLOUT OVER TV’S NUCLEAR FAMILIES

In the final session of the National Council for Families and Television’s annual conference, Dr. Ella Taylor of the University of Washington surprised her listeners by attacking television’s No. 1 program: “The Cosby Show.”

The subject was “Television, Families and Work,” and the group gathered at Santa Barbara’s Four Seasons Biltmore Hotel for the council’s sixth annual conference last weekend consisted of representatives of the television industry--including Marcy Carsey, co-executive producer of “Cosby”--and the chief executive officers of major companies from across the country.

Most of the weekend’s discussion was devoted to how television depicts business and to how it reflects the changing American family. The businessmen complained that prime-time programming has unfairly made big business the new villain of TV fiction.

But Taylor, an assistant professor of communications, startled both representatives of TV and big business by attacking a different TV villain: “The Cosby Show.” Until her presentation, no one had questioned the purity and goodness of that ultimate TV family.

On Saturday night, Carsey spoke earnestly about the responsibility of television to “save the American family.” She cited “Cosby,” with its universal themes that transcend ethnic barriers and its perfect family--headed by the nation’s favorite father, Bill Cosby--as a model to which real families can aspire.

“Because everything is not like what is depicted (on TV) doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done,” Carsey said to an audience that responded warmly to her comments. “There’s nothing wrong with showing Bill Cosby as something of an ideal, the father we’d all like to have.”

In a panel discussion Sunday, Taylor blasted Carsey’s theory, calling “Cosby” an “enormously sexy and glamorous show” that “provides the same sort of satisfaction as a commercial” in its celebration of “yuppie consumerism” and its “extraordinarily rosy view of the ordinary.”

Taylor is not the first to question whether TV’s currently popular TV families--those happy, affluent, well-behaved nuclear units found in “The Cosby Show,” “Family Ties” and “Growing Pains”--truly represent the American family at a time when the median family income is about $27,000 a year, only 4% of U.S. households represent traditional nuclear families and the divorce rate hovers at 50%.

Taylor, however, said that she believes the atypical wealth and nuclear bliss of the Huxtables, the Keatons, the Seavers and other TV families of the 1980s are not the biggest problem with those shows. “TV, like all forms of story-telling, is not supposed to be realistic,” she joked. “You aren’t going to see a show called ‘Middle Manager’ or ‘Keypunch: The Miniseries.’ ”

She argued that the lack of serious family problems or real conflict among “Cosby’s” Huxtable family, or among the Keatons of “Family Ties,” lulls children of the ‘80s into an unhealthy complacency and lulls parents into believing that raising children is easy. Such television represents a “dull fundamentalism” rather than a highly charged forum for exploring the changing American family, she charged.

Taylor criticized Cosby’s much-lauded ability to find humor in simple problems, such as a fruit juicer not working properly, contending that it focused attention on material possessions and luxuries and on trivial, easily solved dilemmas. Even when a controversial issue is explored on “Cosby,” she said, it usually happens comfortably outside the family unit, as in an episode in which a friend of Denise Huxtable’s came to Dr. Huxtable when she developed a sex-related health problem.

The 1970s were “the real golden age of television” for the family, Taylor said, when shows such as “All in the Family” and “Maude” showed families at war with one another, the victims of divorce and financial woes, juggling family and career less ably than the Huxtable clan. These shows, she said, “set up an argument with many different perspectives of what family means.”

“I am quite worried by shows like ‘Cosby,’ ‘Family Ties’ and, to an extent, ‘Growing Pains,’ which show this monolithic family intact,” Taylor added. “There is no such thing as the family. There is certainly no such thing as the nuclear family.”

Taylor compared what is happening to “family” TV in the 1980s to what happened in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Although others have cited shows such as “Leave It to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best” as realistic reflections of a more innocent time in America, Taylor maintained that, rather than reflecting society, these series represented society’s denial that the family unit was even then falling apart; the divorce rate began rising at an alarming rate during the era. She cited the return to such ideals in recent years as yet another denial, “a nostalgic throwback to things which never existed.”

Taylor noted that even shows such as “Kate & Allie,” which involves two single parents and their three children living together, have become “infantilized” by straying from the problems of the parents to those of the kids.

Taylor said that she thinks all trends in television have a commercial reason. “Leave It to Beaver,” she said, sought to soothe a public frightened about the family unit and convince them the unit was still strong so that they would keep watching--and buying. The yuppie appeal of “Cosby” and similar shows, she insisted, is calculated to attract “a small group that spends big.”

Some in the audience objected to the idea that the current family sitcom is so blatantly manipulative. “The question we really ask ourselves in making a comedy is, ‘Is it funny? Does it make me laugh? Do I want to watch it?’ ” protested Ron Bloomberg, supervising producer of the family comedy “227.”

Although not all agreed with Taylor, most found her comments thought-provoking. “I was struck with her (Taylor’s) comment that the Cosby family doesn’t allow room for dissent,” said Winifred White, NBC vice president for family entertainment programming.

Teresa Heinz, chairman of the National Council for Families and Television, agreed that Taylor’s comments were worth considering. But, she said, “I still like ‘The Cosby Show.’ ”