Can Millennials Stop Becoming Their Parents on Television?
The fifth season of Modern Family was, in many ways, a triumph of the traditional sitcom format. As television viewers become increasingly attracted to the creative freedom and fresh storytelling formulas made possible on platforms designed for binge-watching, platforms like Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime, and the papa bear Netflix, it is a testament to the wit and creativity of the Modern Family writing staff that the show’s fifth season was such a creative success, featuring some of the show’s funniest, cleverest, and touchingest moments.
The only ball dropped in the fifth season was Haley Dunphy. The Dunphy family’s oldest child, the only 20something main character, spent just about the entirety of the fifth season relegated to the background, fighting possums, getting her hair stuck in a model airplane, and singing “Midnight Train to Georgia” during a babysitting gig. Her main arc in season five was her burgeoning crush on Andy, a male nanny employed by her grandfather, this despite the fact that her growing talent for photography was a vastly more interesting storyline.
The writers were not the least bit subtle in presenting Andy as a near carbon copy of Haley’s father Phil. Haley thus falls victim to a fantasy equally shared by Gen Xers and Baby Boomers: one day, we silly little Millennials will finally get with the program and realize our parents were right about everything all along. This is by no means a new phenomenon, as there were likely nomadic pre-historic parents after the neolithic revolution expecting that their foolhardy children would eventually let go of fads like “forming cities” and “domesticating livestock.”
But with television shows seemingly so eager to court Generation Y back from the grip of On Demand services, it’s an unfortunate waste that this trend of parental wish fulfillment plays out so often across television.
It appears to be fairly consistent that all roads of character development for Millennials on television lead to a begrudging acceptance of the ideals expounded to them constantly by the real adults in their lives. The youngsters, for as much as they attempt to have the nerve to contextualize the world around them in their own unique and valid way, all end up falling to the unwavering pressure of conformity. Haley is not allowed by the writers to end up with her guitar playing long term boyfriend Dylan, not because he is a bad influence on her (in five seasons of Modern Family, Dylan showed himself to be little more than a lovesick dimwit, harmless, although an idiot), but because that path does not qualify as legitimate character development in the eyes of the writers.
No, Haley must end up with a version of her father, as this demonstrates that her parents were right all along. She fully accepts that by fully accepting a father proxy as her boyfriend, no matter how creepy that sounds.
April Ludgate over on NBC’s Parks and Recreation suffers a similar fate. She begins the series as one of the most interesting and alluring characters on all of television. Her sarcasm was so biting and so dry, it was often difficult to tell when she was amused, annoyed, or seething with anger, but she was most often disaffected by the hyperactive cast of characters around her. Watching glimpses of uncontainable sly smiles in the direction of her boyfriend-turned-husband Andy were some of the most adorable moments ever recorded for television.
Still, in the grand scheme of the show, April’s character development mainly comes from how much she grows to emulate her former boss Leslie Knope. April becomes deputy director of Animal Control, finding her passion for life in leading a department in the Pawnee government, the kind of thing she used to scoff at when she saw it in Leslie. No one can claim that this isn’t true character development, but it would be drastically more interesting to see where the April character could go if not bound to the whims of a television trope that says she must bend to the influence of those who supposedly know better than her solely by the virtue of their age.
The trend, despite having some obvious roots in the sexist infantilizaton of girl culture, isn’t limited to young women. Michael Cera has been the movie and television avatar for awkward young men since about 2003, and in the fourth season of Arrested Development, his character George Michael Bluth finally became like the rest of his family, staging a manipulative, convoluted plan to deceive people for his own benefit. Prior to this, George Michael was the sole drop of warmth in the cold, nearly sociopathic world his family inhabited. The last moments of the third season featured George Michael discovering that his entire family had lied to each other for years, and that his uncle had just slept with his ex-girlfriend. Once he hears the family is in trouble, he chooses forgiveness rather than spite.
“We should go back,” he said, demonstrating the type of basic empathy and selflessness that every other member of his family had struggled to demonstrate.
At least for Haley Dunphy and April Ludgate, it could be argued that the influence of older people in their lives was positive, but for George MaHarris, er, George Michael, it’s a bit of a bummer to see him spend three years standing tall against his family’s influence, and then falling harder than Harvey Dent in the Dark Knight.
Unsurprisingly, the only safe place for Millennials on television to escape the danger of being forced into a version of adulthood that mirrors that of an older character seems to be shows solely populated by other Millennials.
The kids of HBO’s Girls or Comedy Central’s Broad City and Workaholics live in a world where their most pressing influences are that of people their own age, allowing them the opportunity to develop without the pressure of older people. It’s no surprise that these shows aren’t as warmly received by mainstream television critics as Modern Family or Parks and Recreation. While being popular amongst 20somethings, without the condescending “you’ll grow up eventually” lessons, older people have little interest in seeing Millennials on their television screens.
If traditional television wants to draw in some young viewers, but don’t have the guts to give young characters the full spotlight, they could always follow the Scrubs model. There, young people interacted with older people, but it was the younger adults that played a positive influence in the lives of their older counterparts. The relationship between the whimsical J.D. and the bitter Dr. Cox serves to benefit the latter of the two. At the end of the series, J.D. is still the caring, sensitive doctor he was on the first day of his internship, and he manages to save Dr. Cox’s personal and professional life several times along the way. Young people have value, and can develop into fantastic people without having to turn into clones of their parental figures. Television needs to show this more often.
At one point in Modern Family, Haley Dunphy says, “People my age don’t watch television.” In a lot of ways, Generation Y has turned its back on the platform, but that’s only because it turned its back on us first. To get us back on the couch for scheduled network television, it’s going to have to get a lot better at showing self-sufficient, evolving, three dimensional Millennials who don’t always morph into their parents.
