NON FICTION

HONEY, I’M HOME!: Selling Sitcoms, Buying the American Dream by Gerard Jones (Grove Weidenfeld: $18.95; 278 pp . ). Television people like to see the medium as an electronic democracy in which viewers cast ballots every time they pick up their remote controls. However, according to pop-culture commentator Gerard Jones, co-author of “The Beaver Papers,” the television picture is neither as clear nor as simple, and in “Honey! I’m Home” he gives copious examples of the distortions now integral to most video broadcasting. Jones’ focus is the development of the situation comedy, and he concludes that it is, at bottom, “the Miracle Play of consumer society”--a homogenized vision of a culture that always manages to overcome its troubles and live happily ever after. Jones begins his story with the radio days of “Amos ‘n’ Andy” and ends with “Seinfeld,” and in between he gives lively, shrewd dissections of “I Love Lucy” (“If Lucy had any kind of agenda, she could be a revolutionary”), “Ozzie and Harriet” (the white-bread, conflict-free formula allowed characters to tease one another “in an authentic-feeling but completely safe manner”) and innumerable others. “Honey, I’m Home!” is well-written, well thought out, and entertaining . . . and perhaps even significant, if Billy Gray--Bud Anderson on “Father Knows Best”--is any judge. Gray is quoted here as calling the show “a hoax,” adding that from certain perspectives it was “an incredibly destructive pattern for emulation.”