Jamila Baluch

At a time when a growing number of older persons in the United States
are living with their adult children (between 2000 and 2011, this figure
rose from 2.2 million to 4.6
million[^\[1\]^](file:///C:/Users/debra/AppData/Local/Temp/Temp1_Ecrea%207.2.14.zip/Parent%20invasion%20Part%20I%20J%20%20Baluch_Rev.docx#_edn1)),
the U.S. broadcast networks Fox and CBS have each launched a new
situation comedy about retired parents invading their children's homes.
With the start of the 2013-2014 television season, CBS introduced the
multigenerational multi-camera sitcom *The Millers*. Created by Greg
Garcia, who also developed the comedies *My Name is Earl* (NBC,
2005-2009) and *Raising Hope* (Fox, 2010), the show revolves around
Nathan Miller (Will Arnett), a local television reporter in his early
forties, whose revelation that he recently got divorced inspires his
father to do the same: upon learning the news Tom Miller (Beau Bridges)
leaves Carol (Margo Martindale), his wife of 43 years, on the spot,
explaining that he had wanted to get a divorce for decades, but Carol
had always insisted that this would set a bad example for their
children. Since this argument is void now that their son divorced his
wife after only three years of marriage, Tom emphatically announces: 'If
he gets to be single, so do I!' As a result of the sudden separation,
Carol moves in with Nathan, while her soon-to-be-ex-husband goes to live
with their daughter, Debbie (Jayma Mays), who is married and has a young
daughter.

![Nathan
Miller](http://cms.cstonline.net/resizeimage.php?width=320&height=188&image=http://cdn.cstonline.net/assets/image/user_94/1.%20The%20Millers%201.1,%20Nathan%20Miller.jpg "Nathan Miller"){.addCaption
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*The Millers*: Nathan Miller (1:1)

![Tom and Carol
Miller](http://cms.cstonline.net/resizeimage.php?width=320&height=188&image=http://cdn.cstonline.net/assets/image/user_94/2.%20The%20Millers%201.1,%20Tom%20and%20Carol%20Miller.jpg "Tom and Carol Miller"){.addCaption
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*The Millers*: Tom and Carol Miller (1:1)

Fox's version of the intergenerational household comedy is
called *Dads*, the network's first multi-camera sitcom in years. The
show follows the lives of Eli Sachs (Seth Green) and Warner Whittemore
(Giovanni Ribisi), two childhood friends in their mid-thirties who run
their own video game company. Warner's father Crawford (Martin Mull) is
a wannabe businessman forever failing in his naive attempts to finally
find the key to success. Crawford not only lives with his son, his
daughter-in-law Camila (Vanessa Lachey) and their two children, but he
also frequently meddles in Warner's professional life, thus producing
all sorts of unwelcome surprises. Eli and his father David (Peter
Riegert), on the other hand, never had a close relationship because
David left his wife and son when Eli was a child. Despite their
estrangement, Eli agrees to let his father move in with him after
finding out that he lost his home. The show's central premise thus
resembles that of *The Millers*: in both sitcoms two retired single
parents move in with a grown-up child, one of whom is also single while
the other one has a family.

![David and his son
Eli](http://cms.cstonline.net/resizeimage.php?width=320&height=188&image=http://cdn.cstonline.net/assets/image/user_94/3.%20Dads%201.3,%20David%20and%20Eli.jpg "David and his son Eli"){.addCaption
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*Dads*: David and his son Eli (1:3)

![Warner and his father
Crawford](http://cms.cstonline.net/resizeimage.php?width=320&height=188&image=http://cdn.cstonline.net/assets/image/user_94/4.%20Dads%201.3,%20Warner%20and%20Crawford.jpg "Warner and his father Crawford"){.addCaption
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*Dads*: Warner and his father Crawford (1:3)

However, while *The Millers* is a conventional family sitcom in terms of
its humour and overall tone, *Dads* is written and produced by Alec
Sulkin and Wellesly Wild, both writers and producers for Fox's animated
comedy series *Family Guy* (1999-2003 and 2005-), and co-executive
produced by Seth MacFarlane, creator of *Family Guy *as well as of the
animated Fox comedies *American Dad *(2005-) and *The Cleveland
Show* (2009-2013). The frequently crude and politically incorrect humour
of *Family Guy*, equally hailed and hated by different sections of the
audience, is also evident in *Dads*. Even before the show's premiere on
Fox in September 2013, the press previews of the pilot episode led to a
storm of outrage over several scenes and comments that were widely
perceived as racist: at the beginning of the episode, Eli and Warner's
Asian-American assistant Veronica (Brenda Song) tells them: 'You're
lucky your dads are American. My dad beat me with a math book till I was
sixteen'. In order to win over a group of Chinese investors, Eli and
Warner insist that Veronica 'dress up like a sexy Asian schoolgirl'
which results in the investors' Chinese translator sending her a picture
of what she describes as 'his tiny penis'. Warner's father Crawford not
only refers to Asians as 'Orientals' (a term perceived as racist in the
United States), but he also warns his son that 'the Chinese are a lovely
and honourable people, but you can't trust them'. The Media Action
Network for Asian Americans reacted by asking Fox to reshoot several
scenes of the *Dads* pilot, but the network declined. Yet, what most
critics have failed to take into account is the show's deliberate and
self-conscious play with racial stereotypes, as the following dialogue
illustrates ('Dad abuse', 1:10):

Eli to Veronica: Can you recommend a good Thai restaurant?

Veronica: And you're asking me?

Eli: Yeah, obviously.

Veronica: Why me?

Eli: Because you have a cousin named Wai Mi.

Veronica: Warner, Eli is being racist!

Warner: Eli, stop being racist.

Eli: Veronica won't give me Thai restaurant recommendations!

Veronica: But I don't eat Thai. Everything tastes like spicy pets.

Eli: Now you're being racist.

Veronica: You're not racist if you're making fun of your own race.

Eli: Hey, let's leave what's being racist up to the white media, ok?

Clearly, Eli's last comment is implicitly directed at the
criticism *Dads* has faced in the US media. In fact, upon closer
inspection, the show's representations of race and gender can even be
considered more progressive than those presented in most other sitcoms.
First of all, the frequency and absurdity of racial jokes in *Dads* is a
clear indication of their function as parody. Second, by explicitly
discussing these comments in terms of their potential racism, as in the
above scene, the show introduces a meta-discourse which potentially
enables the viewer to reflect on racial categories and racist concepts.
Most importantly, however, the construction of the sitcom's main
characters subverts traditional racist and sexist stereotypes. The
character constellation is in itself unusual: while the show's four
protagonists are all white
males,[^\[2\]^](file:///C:/Users/debra/AppData/Local/Temp/Temp1_Ecrea%207.2.14.zip/Parent%20invasion%20Part%20I%20J%20%20Baluch_Rev.docx#_edn2) the
female regular characters are all non-white (by U.S. standards):
Veronica, Eli's middle-aged Mexican maid, Edna (Tonita Castro), and
Warner's wife Camila, also a Latina. However, as opposed to Edna, who is
constructed as the stereotypical illegal immigrant, complete with flawed
English and frequent swearing in Spanish, Camila is evidently a second-
or third-generation Latina whose ethnicity is only hinted at in the show
and not even mentioned on Fox's official *Dads *website. The inclusion
of a Latina character whose *Latinidad* is only a minor aspect of her
characterisation can be considered a step towards further inclusion of
non-white characters without singling them out
as *the* Latino/Asian/African-American character (the opposite is far
more common, especially in sitcoms, as for example in the case of the
sexy Colombian 'spitfire', Gloria (Sofia Vergara), in ABC's *Modern
Family *(2009-)). Even though the two Latina characters are largely
confined to the domestic space, Edna as Eli's housekeeper and Camila as
a housewife, they are both portrayed as self-determined women who are
stronger (both physically and emotionally), braver and more reasonable
than the white men in their lives. The narrative makes it clear that
both Eli and Warner would be lost without the support and supervision of
Edna and Camila.

![Warner and his wife,
Camilla](http://cms.cstonline.net/resizeimage.php?width=320&height=188&image=http://cdn.cstonline.net/assets/image/user_94/5.%20Dads,%201.3,%20Warner%20and%20Camila.jpg "Warner and his wife, Camilla"){.addCaption
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*Dads*: Warner and his wife Camila (1:3)

![Edna](http://cms.cstonline.net/resizeimage.php?width=320&height=188&image=http://cdn.cstonline.net/assets/image/user_94/6.%20Dads,%201.4,%20Edna.jpg "Edna"){.addCaption
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*Dads*: Edna (1:4)

Veronica fulfils a similar role in Eli and Warner's professional life,
because the two men are too unorganised to successfully lead a business.
Promoting herself to vice president of game development in the pilot
episode (as a compensation for her Asian schoolgirl performance),
Veronica brings structure and discipline to the work process and, unlike
her bosses, is able to face every problem head-on.

![Veronica](http://cms.cstonline.net/resizeimage.php?width=320&height=188&image=http://cdn.cstonline.net/assets/image/user_94/7.%20Dads,%201.2,%20Veronica.jpg "Veronica"){.addCaption
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*Dads*: Veronica (1:2)

By contrast, the white male protagonists in *Dads* are all deficient in
different ways. Warner is a neurotic weakling lacking testosterone (as
the episode 'Mister Edna', 1:12, reveals). Eli is portrayed as
emotionally immature, his chief interests being sex, drugs and video
games. Eli's father, David, is a cranky, lazy pessimist who has always
avoided responsibility and who spends his days watching television,
whereas Warner's father, Crawford, is an unshakable optimist, but he is
also a failed businessman and an alcoholic with old-fashioned racist
views. By offering strong non-white female characters as counterparts to
the show's flawed white male protagonists, *Dads* challenges traditional
notions of white male superiority while entering new territory in
televisual representations of race.

*The Millers*, on the other hand, uses a well-established racial
constellation by adding one black male character to an otherwise white
cast: Nathan's camera man and best friend Ray (J.B. Smoove) is the only
non-white regular character on *The Millers*. Ray's characterisation is
all cliché: he speaks with a strong black accent, comes from a poor
background (while playing Jenga with Nathan, Ray says: 'I have an unfair
advantage over you since I grew up in a house that was falling apart';
'Dear Diary', 1:11) and is portrayed as a womaniser eager to recruit his
newly divorced friend as his 'wingman'.

![The Millers Nathan and
Ray](http://cms.cstonline.net/resizeimage.php?width=350&height=205&image=http://cdn.cstonline.net/assets/image/user_94/8.%20The%20Millers,%201.2,%20Nathan,%20Ray.jpg "The Millers Nathan and Ray"){.addCaption
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*The Millers*: Nathan and his friend Ray (1:2)

Variations of the black male sidekick to a white male protagonist have
populated American sitcoms for many years (e.g., Doug Heffernan's best
friend and co-worker Deacon in *The King of Queens* (CBS, 1998-2007);
Eddie Stark's friend Kenny (also played by J.B. Smoove) in *'Til
Death* (Fox, 2006-2010); Mike Biggs's best friend and co-worker Carl
in *Mike & Molly* (CBS, 2010-)). So, unlike *Dads*, *The Millers*is
highly conventional in terms of its racial representations. Yet, at the
same time, the two sitcoms share one important aspect that media reviews
have addressed only in passing: much of the comedy in both shows is
based on ageism. While ageist depictions of older people are no new
phenomenon in American sitcoms, the centrality of this theme
in *Dads* and *The Millers* is unusual. Part II of this blog will take a
closer look at how the protagonists' parents are portrayed in these two
programmes.

 

**Jamila Baluch** is a PhD student in the Department of Film, Theatre
and Television at the University of Reading.  Her research is on
representations of race in contemporary U.S. drama series.


At a time when a growing number of older persons in the United States are living with their adult children (between 2000 and 2011, this figure rose from 2.2 million to 4.6 million
<sup>
 [1]
</sup>
), the U.S. broadcast networks Fox and CBS have each launched a new situation comedy about retired parents invading their children’s homes.

Postagens de Rogue Scholar

PARENT INVASION: DADS AND THE MILLERS – TWO NEW INTERGENERATIONAL SITCOMS PART 1