Pensamientos Acerca de Televisión
Back to You: “Pilot”
Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton have received a reputation during the last decade or so for being two of the most outspoken conservative celebrities in television. So naturally when the two of them got together in 2007 to star in a sitcom for which Grammer was the executive producer, they naturally chose to star in a show in which one of the major subplots involved the conception of a child outside of wedlock.
No, seriously. Almost fifteen years after the big
Murphy Brown debate about the implications of an unwed mother appearing on prime-time TV, two of Hollywood's most notorious conservatives chose to star in a TV show in which one of the main characters was a woman who not only conceived a child out of wedlock, but made little effort to hide such child from any of her co-workers.
Needless to say, we've come a long way from the days when Lucille Ball had to tiptoe around network censors to find ways to refer to her own pregnancy during the filming of her show
I Love Lucy even though she and her real-life husband were playing a married couple. And yet as
the recent fracas over poor Natalie Portman showed, we haven't come far enough.
After all, one has to ask: if Natalie Portman's decision to attend the Oscars sans wedding ring while she was visibly pregnant was so bad, why was it okay for conservatives like Grammer and Heaton to play unwed parents in a show that essentially glamourized unwed parenthood? After all, it would have been a lot easier for Grammer to have the scripts rewritten so that he and Heaton were not playing unwed parents than it would have been for Portman to just ignore one of the biggest nights in her career because of her pregnancy. For that matter, why was it okay with so many cultural conservatives for Ms. Heaton to essentially play the same type of unwed mother role on
Back to You that Candice Bergen got criticized for playing on the '90s series
Murphy Brown?
For what it is worth, I am not a big fan of unwed pregnancies -- which is why I have been careful to avoid creating any -- but I am also not a big fan of the notion that they are the worst of all social evils. Nor do I see how lecturing unwed mothers on their “bad behavior” is especially useful at a time when far worse behavior goes on without remark. After all, it could be argued that the father who deliberately walks away from a pregnant woman because he does not want to face the hassle of raising a child is far worse than the mother who conceives a child out of wedlock with the wrong partner because she had mistakenly thought said person would stand by her in the event of pregnancy -- yet for some reason, you rarely hear the same anger being directed at said fathers as often as it is directed against unwed mothers.
In any event, it is not like
Back to You would have been one of the better sitcoms out there had it gotten rid of the unwed parent gimmick. After all, the show lasted less than a year and all too often relied on such gimmicks as “funny” ethnic names and a Latina weathergirl who was basically your classic stereotypical dumb blonde with a bad artificial tan and a Shakira wig. The only stand-out among the cast was actor Ty Burrell who has since gone on to a funnier and more famous role in
Modern Family. Meanwhile, Kelsey Grammer's TV career appears to have stalled. If it weren't for Ms. Heaton's recent success as a married mother on the TV series
The Middle, one would be almost tempted to call this a case of poetic justice.
But it isn't.
Labels: Conservadoras y Conservadores, Kelsey Grammer, Patricia Heaton, Pensamientos Acerca de Televisión VII, Ty Burrell, Valores Familiares
