SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET: WORK AND FAMILY : In Hollywood’s Picture of Parenting, Reality Is Missing : Entertainment: ‘Common denominators’ such as child care and financial strains are seldom portrayed.

In NBC’s hugely successful “Cosby” show, a lawyer/wife and doctor/husband glide effortlessly between work and home. Despite having time-consuming, high-pressure jobs, at least one parent is nearly always home.

In the film “Baby Boom,” super-executive Diane Keaton finds her upwardly mobile career clashes with changing diapers. So she moves to Vermont.

In the current hit film “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle,” a couple hires a full-time nanny with the looks of a fashion model. She turns out to be the nanny from hell.

This is parenthood, Hollywood style. With few exceptions, the everyday problems, challenges and rewards experienced by most working parents are nowhere to be seen.

Where are the baby-sitters, day-care centers or the relatives who take care of the children? Where are the dirty diapers and the financial strains? When do parents have to take half a day off from work to take a child to the doctor? Or miss a full day of work because the sitter quit unexpectedly?

No one says television or films have to mirror life as it really is, nor that comedies can’t take liberties with reality. But for most working parents, what they see on TV or in films doesn’t come close to what they go through daily.

“TV reflects reality like a fun-house mirror. You never see the terrible stresses and challenges of trying to juggle home and work,” says Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, a social historian in Amherst, Mass.

In films and on television, career and work are typically portrayed two ways: they blend seamlessly, or clash with such force that the job ultimately must be sacrificed for the sake of the family. The message sent out most often seems to be that raising a child is as challenging as keeping a car running, or such an overwhelming experience that you wonder whether humans ever were meant to have kids.

Ed Zwick, a creator of the TV series “thirtysomething,” says that the “ambivalences” in the lives of parents--the strong tug in two directions that people with careers and families often feel--are rarely portrayed. Neither are the compromises parents often grudgingly accept.

“We put out images of people who are making out just fine. They are paying no price and don’t heed the consequences of working and trying to raise a family,” Zwick says.

The “thirtysomething” series, now in reruns on the Lifetime cable network, was one of the few shows attempting to address work and family conflicts.

The character Hope Steadman struggles with the decision to go back to work or raise her children. Work demands force another couple with an infant daughter, the characters Gary and Susannah, to launch an emotionally painful commuter relationship between Philadelphia and New York.

Zwick says the series producers tried to show what he calls the “reconciliation of opposites” that people face as opposed to the clear-cut choices TV usually offers its characters.

“There is no answer--there are only a series of compromises and constant renegotiation,” Zwick says.

What TV and films rarely portray, Whitehead argues, are the “common denominators” in the lives of working parents--sick kids, problems with child-care arrangements and financial strains.

“You never see the terrible stresses and strains of trying to juggle home and work,” she says.

Whitehead praises few shows as realistic. One she likes is the working-class comedy “Roseanne” for showing working parents who are forced to struggle to make a living.

She also takes issue with the way children on TV are cared for. Children are often cared for by nannies, she notes, an option usually available only to the relatively affluent.

Lawyers Ann Kelsey and Stuart Markowitz of “L.A. Law” have one. Rarely seen are more common, everyday child-caring arrangements--a day-care center or relative taking care of a child. (One late 1980s TV show based in a day-care center--NBC’s “Day by Day”--was received well initially by viewers but never caught on enough to become a hit.)

TV once portrayed family and work as a 9-to-5 husband married to a cookie-baking wife--a June Cleaver, Donna Reed or Harriet Nelson. Now, wives and mothers have jobs, although often those jobs are invisible to the viewer.

Author Susan Faludi, in her current bestseller “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women,” notes that scripts give working mothers professions “in title only” in TV shows.

“These women are the same old TV housewives with their housecoats doffed, their ‘careers’ a hollow nod to the profound changes in women’s lives,” she writes.

Viewers often would be hard-pressed to name the occupations because the women in the series never seem to be working. Faludi cites as an example mother/architect Elyse Keaton, a character in the popular 1980s series “Family Ties,” who never seemed to be practicing her craft.

The way many shows and films avoid dealing with work and family life is to not deal with it at all. Career women are typified by the kind of role that actress Sigourney Weaver played in “Working Girl”--ice-cold, romantically deprived and career-obsessed. A career woman with a family life--let alone a happy one--doesn’t exist.

“Hollywood creates this Tiger Lady stereotype. Every time you see a successful businesswoman, it’s a Tiger Lady,” says film critic Michael Medved of the PBS show “Sneak Previews.”

Producer Zwick speculated on two reasons why the lives of working parents are rarely portrayed. One is that Hollywood considers the problems of working parents too pedestrian to be entertaining. The other is that Hollywood producers and executives can afford a lifestyle that most parents can’t.

“Sometimes people in this community might lead less-than-realistic lives themselves as it relates to dealing with their own children,” he says. “They might think kids are more manageable because of the way they themselves live.”