Sitcoms and Moral Education

Oh, the memories from back home: sitting on sofas with the family, eyes peeled to the television, eyes tearing up from laughter.

Whether in black and white or Technicolor, the shows from my father's childhood are still funny today - hilarious in fact.
Oh, classic shows like...
I Love Lucy
Hogan's Heroes
Gilligan's Island
The Andy Griffith Show
The Beverly Hillbillies
My Three Sons
Michale's Navy
F-Troop
The Waltons
The Adams Family
The Brandy Bunch (even though that was a little later)
Red Skelton
Gunsmoke
Green Acres and its sibling
Petticoat Junction

These classic shows posses something that TV lacks today: family suitability. The humor, the lessons, the themes, are always good-natured and worthy of being respected. In every one of these shows, courtesy, decency, humility, and piety are always encouraged by the parental figures in the show. In Andy Griffith, childhood lessons about envy, diligence, honesty are consistently taught by Andy the father or Aunt Bee the caretaker to the more childish characters in an episode: Opie (Andy's son) and Barney Fife (Andy's Deputy). One episode stands out in my mind as an example of the moral education championed by these early shows.


"If we don't teach children to live in society today, what's going to happen to them when they grow up" justifies the moral education that permeates throughout this episode. 'Opie and the Spoiled Kid' served to teach hard work, respect for the law, respect for parents, personal responsibility, fiscal responsibility, while discouraging greed, dishonesty, and materialism.

Unlike the classic animated Disney movies of the 1990s, the audience of this show is not mainly comprised of children - but adults. The role cast by the delinquent boy's father, with his failure to educate his son, serves to impose upon adults a responsibility to educate and guide children or other people on a more "moral" path. The nature of the audience, combined with

The fact that this episode, of the dozens of Andy Griffith episodes, sticks in my mind most, I think is testament to the power of a fable when it becomes the dominant plot of a show like this.

I also remember an episode from Petticoat Junction, where two young men staying at the main characters' Bed&Breakfast Hotel try to rob a train. The heist fails when the safe is empty, and the family resumes normal life, ignoring the robbers trying to rob their house while holding the family at gunpoint. The episode concludes with a scene where the family, all gathered around the table at dinnertime, defends these "harmless, good-natured boys" from the sherriff. The family forgives them of their crimes, and the boys acknowledge their crime and respect the family for their forgivness, ending the episode on a note of "happily ever after".

It seems that everywhere one looks in these shows, moral education permeates. The main plots of episodes - where vengeful businessmen lose their job, German Commodants give in to mercy, or weird-looking Adams children stand up to bullying - defined and encouraged morality for an entire generation of American audiences.

I remember my father once rhetorically asked us: "aren't these shows different than what we see on TV today?" to which he answered "[the older shows] don't make us look at what's wrong with a shrug of acceptance. They make us see them as something that shouldn't happen and ought to be corrected." Such a generalization by nature does not apply to every show, but does highlight an important truth about the contrast between the purpose of these skits. Like the difference between a fable and non-fiction, the contrast lies between what should be, and what is. It provides a compass for action in fields beyond gender and family roles: our role as human beings in our corresponding communities.

Is it more that our communities have changed? ...that substance and human abuse, theft, and dishonesty are more prevalent? I would think not. But what has changed is the way in which humans visualize these elements: as inescapable elements of human nature and human life.