Before radio and television, the family home was a space that could function in relative seclusion from public life. In the advice manuals of Victorian times, the ideal middle class home was one that sheltered women and children from the evil influences of the public sphere. The virtues of thrift and self-improvement - the sort of values Bush associates

One of the new consumer technologies that filled the new suburban homes was the television. By 1955 about 65% of American homes had one. Like all new media technologies, it began by reproducing the popular fare of the media it replaced. Just as the early gramophone records were reproductions of popular music hall tunes; early television reproduced popular radio shows. This is the first phase of any new media - when it borrows and adapts the formats of the old media. Not all of the popular radio programs successfully made the transition to television. Father Knows Best, a well-known TV situation comedy of the fifties, was one program that did survive the transition from radio to television. Interestingly, the 'ethnic' radio sitcoms like Amos'n'Andy and Life with Luigi did not. The general public would listen to, but not watch, minorities on television.

Every good middle class Victorian home aspired to have a piano, and women were supposed to learn to play it teach the children to play it also. The piano was a civilizing influence, supposedly. With the rise of consumerism, however, all this began to change. The phonograph, the radio and finally the television replaced the piano. The virtues of thrift and self-improvement gave way to consumerism and the pursuit of leisure for its own sake. Conservatives have always decried these changes and called for a return to the old ways, but modern capitalism depends on its consumers to keep going. Without this shift in family life from thrift to spending and from self-improvement to consumption, the industrial age might never have kept going. Indeed, the collapse of the economy that produced the return to thrift and discipline exemplified by The Waltons TV family happened in part because consumerism didn't quite take off in the 20s. It was only after the massive expansion of manufacturing that took place during the war and the deliberate efforts to turn war production into consumer production that the conditions were set for the kind of TV family we know today. The 50s saw a tremendous boom in housing construction. Young couples who had put their lives on hold during the war got into home making with a vengeance. The period of suburban ecstasy had begun.

The idea that the white middle class family was the norm might have worked in the 50s, when it was mostly white middle class people who owned the TV sets, but it stopped working in the late 60s. A more diverse TV audience, tuning in to more conflictual times could not be so easily satisfied. The answer was a new kind of sitcom, pioneered by Norman Lear. In 'All in the Family and other Lear shows, the conflicts within the TV audience are more directly dramatized on the screen. TV no longer has a clearly identifiable moral center-ground. The character of Archie Bunker - an obvious model for Homer Simpson - is the classic example. To conservative blue-collar viewers he was the hero of the show. To liberal, educated people he was the

Some common words found in the essay are:
American TV, Waltons TV, Latino Ricky, Happy Days, Homer Simpson, TV Appealing, Fonz Simpsons, Betty Rubble, Simpsons TV, George Bush, tv families, middle class, happy days, american tv, tv family, tv culture, tv families watching, archie bunker, viewers identify, tripping ottoman, started family, white middle class, virtues thrift self-improvement,
Approximate Word count = 1987
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)