On television these days, if a character is yacking about flatulence, making randy remarks to a member of the opposite sex or being baffled by simple things, that character is likely to have some gray hair. Somehow, it seems, the TV gods have decided that characters old enough to have adult children need to be vulgar, inappropriate or moronic. Or all three.
Look, for instance, at what they’ve done to poor Margo Martindale, an Emmy-winning and Tony-nominated actress. She is currently playing the mother of Will Arnett’s character on the grating CBS comedy
“The Millers.” An entire subplot in the series premiere was built around her digestive tract, specifically gas. In that same episode, Beau Bridges, another Emmy winner, who plays her husband, is unable to use a cordless phone properly.
On another CBS series, “Mom,” Allison Janney is at least intelligent, but she uses her brain primarily to think and talk about sex, the substance abuse of her past and other ribaldry. On
“Back in the Game,”over on ABC, James Caan’s character helps his daughter coach a kiddie baseball team by being prickly and tossing off remarks not suitable for children’s ears.
Last season, on the NBC series
“The New Normal,” now canceled, Ellen Barkin’s Jane Forrest made Archie Bunker look like a model of good taste. The awful “Dads,” on Fox, puts Martin Mull and Peter Riegert in one humiliating scene after another. On CBS’s “2 Broke Girls,” Garrett Morris isn’t given many lines, but the crass ones he does speak might have raised the censors’ eyebrows back when he was on “Saturday Night Live” and certainly wouldn’t have cleared Lorne Michaels’s bar for humor, since they’re rarely funny.
Those shows are all comedies, and somebody has to be the butt of jokes; it’s just dismaying how often that somebody is in the AARP-courted age bracket and how unsophisticated most of those jokes are. But the older character isn’t faring so well on dramas, either. Before the first episode of this season’s “American Horror Story,” on FX, was three minutes old, Kathy Bates’s character had painted her face with blood, beaten one of her daughters and taken us on a tour of a room where she keeps slaves in cages and tortures them. There are plenty of manipulative characters on ABC’s “Revenge,” but none are more vile than the matriarch played by Madeleine Stowe. And so on.
Sure, there have always been inept and appalling older characters on TV. Kaye Ballard and Eve Arden were being annoying on
“The Mothers-in-Law” back when Lyndon B. Johnson was president. And, yes, it is still possible to find upstanding, intelligent characters in this age bracket on television: Gibbs on CBS’s “NCIS,” for instance, played by Mark Harmon, who is 62.
But the Old and the Feckless seem in greater supply than ever before, and they’re so loud and obnoxious that they’re drowning out the Gibbses of the television world. Even prominent guest stars are being forced to roll in this muck. The venerable
Ed Asner just did in an episode of the CBS comedy “The Crazy Ones” (on which Robin Williams, the show’s star, is doing the graying generation no favors) and played a lecherous old goat. Stacy Keach turned up on Fox’s “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” the other day, crudely announced that he had to use the bathroom and later made derogatory remarks about Puerto Ricans and gay people.
One demographic or another has always lacked for good role models on TV. For decades, there were no prominent black characters, no characters with disabilities, no gay characters. Now the group with the most legitimate beef may be the late-50s-and-up one. Where are the older characters who behave appropriately around children, who don’t grope young women, who aren’t racist or sex-obsessed, who know how to send email?
In another time, people with a little gray at the temples were those younger characters turned to for sage advice. “Father Knows Best” wasn’t just a show title; it was a worldview, one that was still pretty serviceable as recently as “The Cosby Show” in the 1980s and early 1990s. Mr. Cosby’s character, of course, was often called upon to counsel his children as they grew to young adulthood:
THEO Dad, I’m having trouble with math class.
CLIFF Well, son, you need to prioritize. A little more time with your schoolbooks, a little less time hanging out with your friends.
It’s hard to imagine that Mr. Cosby would want to be a part of such a scene the way it would be written today:
THEO Dad, I’m having trouble with math class.
CLIFF Yeah, and I’m having trouble with that bratwurst I ate last night, if you know what I mean.
THEO Maybe you could look at these equations with me?
CLIFF Is this the teacher with the cleavage? Hoo, boy, I’d like to look at her equations, if you know what I mean.
Complaining about these portrayals is one thing, but let’s go deeper and look at what might be behind this trend. Could it be payback for years of baby boomer boasting and self-glorification?
Boomers have been boring every generation younger than they are for decades with their constant babble about Woodstock, Vietnam, flower power. They have, subtly or overtly, let every subsequent generation know that its music, books, movies and life experiences are inferior.
The younger generations have choked this down quietly, biding their time. As these generations take over the making of television and become the desirable demographic for advertisers, boomer-age characters are paying the price, and older-than-boomer ones are also being swept up in the retaliation frenzy, a sort of collateral damage. It’s open season on anyone 55 and above.