Parents behaving badly

Once upon a time, television households were safe, sanitized worlds filled with parenting paragons. Carol and Mike Brady. Ward and June Cleaver. Cliff and Clair Huxtable. Sure, there was the occasional Archie Bunker or Roseanne Conner, but for the most part, television parents were the supportive voices of reason.

Today we have “Raising Hope’s” Virginia and Burt Chance.

“I wanted to do this show because Virginia is the kind of character who will say, ‘Your baby is a bitch,’ ” says Martha Plimpton, who plays baby Hope’s frank-talking grandma and mom to her feckless son, Jimmy.

“I would have been reticent if some of the things they do — vomiting on the baby, little Jimmy almost falling through a hole in the bottom of the car or the baby flipping in the backseat — had come out of a cynical, negative place. But it’s not. It’s entirely guileless,” she adds.

Maybe so. But it’s a long way from “Ozzie and Harriet.” In the early days of TV, parents were practically perfect in every way — great role models with spotless kitchens. But as TV (cable networks in particular) have begun taking a more naturalistic look inside the household operations of their series, many of the parents on TV’s most-admired shows today have serious addiction, mental and personality issues.

Will someone think of the children?

Show runners like Liz Brixius are. As executive producer for “Nurse Jackie,” Brixius says that, even though her series’ titular character has a prescription pill addiction, she’s not necessarily a bad mother.

“It’s possible to write a character who is an addict whose heart is in the right place,” says Brixius. “Jackie isn’t drunk or loaded in front of her kids, but it’s eroding her patience, her energy level and marriage. That affects the children.”

Jackie isn’t the only one getting high: “Mad Men’s” father of three Don Draper seems to drink from sunrise to sunset, and his ex-wife, Betty, is hardly the nurturing figure — she’s practically pioneering the use of the TV as a baby sitter (that’s how little Sally ended up ogling the footage of a protesting monk who set himself on fire).

Show runner Matt Weiner notes that Don (Jon Hamm) and Betty (January Jones) are “very representative parents of their time,” and by including their outdated parenting choices, he thinks many viewers will feel a twinge of familiarity.

“There’s a big chunk of the audience who either practiced or received this behavior,” he says. “I’ve tried to stay away from the preconceptions of how parents are portrayed on TV.”

Bad — or just ineffectual — parenting on television appears to be gaining ground. On some level, that might be due to a growing sophistication of American audiences who are now open to more complex characterizations. Simultaneously, cable networks — which don’t need the broad audiences of yesteryear to survive — have opened their doors to let parents be real people too.

“The cliché is true on network television,” says Dave Finkel, a show runner for “United States of Tara,” which stars Toni Collette as a mother with dissociative identity disorder. “They want to present something warm and happy and make people feel good about watching it. The challenge with cable is being able to push the audience to look at the complexities of our own lives. That has intrigued people.”

Some shows, though, go beyond the idea of making characters more relatable — or giving them a mental illness — to explain their failings. William H. Macy, who plays the drunken Frank Gallagher on “Shameless,” says his character is just a bad guy. Don’t get him wrong, he loves the perpetually scheming Frank but admits “he’s a really rough character to work with.”

He’s not just a flawed parent, Macy says, he’s “terrible, terrible. The worst nightmare. But I think the reason the series works is … the audience is fascinated by him and tickled by him while loathing him and being disgusted with him. He works really hard. He works at scamming the system, but he’s got joie de vivre, he always has a good time, and that’s infectious.”

A character can also feel like a bad parent when that’s not their main role on a show. When a child is introduced into a series, particularly on long-running shows, the young one is meant to expand a main character’s personality; they’re not intended to be cast additions. And children, of course, come with restrictive work schedules. The combination of these factors means some TV parents may be portrayed as less capable than writers originally intended.

On “House,” Lisa Cuddy adopted an infant because, show runner David Shore says, “it felt like a story that would be interesting to explore because she’s so married to her work. None of the regulars on our show had children. That felt like a fertile area — so to speak.”

But the series’ focus is Hugh Laurie’s Dr. House, not Cuddy, says Lisa Edelstein, who plays Cuddy, so little Lucy gets just spotty appearances.

Actually, creating a bad parent is tough not just on the writers but on actors as well. Early on in the adoption story, Edelstein, who recently announced she won’t be returning to the show, worked way outside her comfort zone. “Initially, she wasn’t very good at [parenting] and was freaking out at the baby, which is a hard thing to do because it’s a real baby,” says Edelstein, who had to yell at the infant.

Emmy winner Edie Falco also had some challenges wrapping her mind around Jackie’s parenting style, says show runner Brixius: “Edie had to figure out how to emotionally get to the place where Jackie was OK with doing something that she herself would not do as a mother. She had to embrace that, and it was hard.”

Hard or not, parents are shaded with more colors than ever, which may make them more realistic modern role models. Still, Plimpton isn’t sure anyone should be trying to re-create parenting behavior they’ve seen on “Raising Hope.”

“Maybe people watch ‘SuperNanny’ for that kind of thing now,” she says. “But you know what’s funny? I cannot say with any certainty that anyone should take parenting advice from these characters. There’s so much love in them, I want to say, ‘You could do worse. You really could.’ ”

calendar@latimes.com