There’s a Reason TV Parents Get No Respect

I’ve been watching TV comedies for a long time and, over the past few years, I’ve noticed an increasingly prevailing trend: Parents portrayed in situation comedies are almost always crazy.

Since I’m a parent, you can see that that might bother me. But I don’t think I’m overreacting.

Almost every current comedy features characters in their 20s or early 30s, most of whom have parents who drop in from time to time.

And though the shows are set in various locations, from New York to L.A. to Chicago, the parents invariably originate from the same place: hell.

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Think about it. Of all the parents on “Friends,” is there even one you’d willingly let into your house? What about “Roseanne’s” mother? Would you want her anywhere near the good china? And those twin monsters on “Everybody Loves Raymond,” swooping in uninvited on their helpless son and his cowering family?

Crazy parents infest the airwaves. The Seinfelds. The Costanzas. The Bundys. Homer Simpson. Show after show of smothering, self-absorbed, insensitive, neglectful, stupid, hurtful, terrible parents.

If we were a minority, we’d be picketing by now. But being sedentary, parents just watch in horror and dismay, muttering, “Why do they hate us?”

As a writer of comedies, I recognize the need to make the characters you create as funny as possible. And I admit there’s nothing funny about watching sensible parents serving as valuable resources to children grappling with life’s thorny problems. Fifties parents did that, and they weren’t funny. Beaver’s Dad never got a laugh. Even from a machine.

Most people also agree TV parents of the past were way too idealized.

Kid viewers were confused. They saw sitcom parents doling out hugs and answers, while all their own parents offered was yelling and naps. And it wasn’t just the parents on television who were perfect.

Should Mom and Dad meet with some terminal off-camera mishap, writers chipped in with a perfect uncle, like Brian Keith on “Family Affair.”

So clearly, one reason for television’s monstrous parents of today is a backlash against the perfect parents of the past.

But notice, parental characterizations weren’t pulled back from perfect to well-meaning but flawed, they went straight to toxic.

Of course, the obvious explanation is children really hate their parents, but I think it goes deeper than that.

In the early days of television, advertisers liked parents. Parents bought things, including televisions. So it made sense to craft shows that appealed to them.

Writers, who were themselves parents, injected idealized images of parenthood into their shows, and viewer-parents ate it up.

There were their on-screen counterparts, straightening out the lives of their hopelessly misguided children, and it made them feel good. And everyone knows, if you feel good, you spend money.

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Flash-forward to the ‘90s. Advertisers now hate parents because of their inflexible purchasing patterns; they buy the same toothpaste for 30 years.

On the other hand, their children, now in their 20s and early 30s, are delaying marriage and parenthood, leaving them money they’d otherwise be shelling out for braces.

So what happens? The advertisers, no dummies, dump the parents and appeal to the kids. Writers, now primarily from the kids’ generation, craft shows making their contemporaries happy, shows where kids are the heroes. And what makes them heroes? They survived their parents.

Styles come and go, but the guiding principle of business remains the same: Be nice to the customers.

All that’s happened is the customers have changed, and the new ones like to see evil parents. So that’s what they get.

There’s some comfort in knowing parental abuse on the airwaves is nothing personal. And besides, it won’t last forever.

Some day, many of us will move on to the next stage and become grandparents.

And when we do, we’ll no longer be hateful on television.

We’ll be cute.