Sitcoms as History

Is it fair to use sitcoms from 40 years ago as a marker of our history, and comparison with affordability today?  We explore using Married With Children, Roseanne, The Cosby Show and Brady Bunch.  

Transcript

Sitcoms as American History

August 2026

“Everyone has to live with their disappointments; unfortunately for me, I have to sleep with mine.”

Al Bundy, father in the sitcom Married with Children

“I love sitcoms, and I grew up on sitcoms. That’s my tasty junk food.”

Felicia Day

“I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and despite what most people might have expected from a young girl growing up deaf, life for me was like one long episode of The Brady Bunch. Despite whatever barriers were in my way, I imagined myself as Marcia Brady skating down the street saying “hi” to everyone, whether they knew me or not.”

Marlee Matlin

Sean Davis, CEO of the Federalist magazine, recently received some opprobrium (appropriately) for posting this to his social media account on X: “This was the home of shoe salesman Al Bundy on the show “Married With Children,” which was on in the 80’s and 90’s. The Bundy family was considered to be comically poor. That exact house is currently valued at upwards of $700,000. The affordability crisis is real.” 

The post was accompanied by a photo of a house used in the Married with Children sitcom’s opening credits.  Like many sitcom images, and the Tardis from the Dr Who series, the inside did not really match the outside.  But his point was to take a fictional family and a suspect image and apply modern-day housing issues to the content. And why not base a 2026 affordability argument on Married With Children? After all, Al Bundy was a made-up character existing on a set that had nothing to do with the house that was, in turn, featured in the intro, which was set to theme music sung by Frank Sinatra.  

Let’s just say that Davis is not quite Norbert Schoenauer, the author of 6,000 Years of Housing.    

The Bundys, introduced in 1987 and unlike two contemporary sitcoms we will discuss, were not meant to be archetypes of anything.  In one episode, the Bundys, caught in traffic, brawl with another family of four similarly trapped.  Al against the Dad, Al’s wife Peg taking on her opposite, and even daughter Kelly and son Bud squaring off against similar opponents.  The Bundys beat the tar of their familial opposites, until the traffic moves again.  In another episode, the Bundys manage to force the repeal of a beer tax.  After first failing to do so through a voting plebiscite, they incite a riot which does the trick.  To use the fictional Bundys as a comparison to real-world issues is, well, dumb.  

However, there were two contemporary programs that, beneath the humor, were earnest about societal commentary: the first was The Cosby Show, debuting in 1984, and the second, Rosanne, coming out 4 years later.  One of the best lessons I learned in college is the ability to segregate the art from the artist.  Bruce Springsteen’s 1970s hits were commenting on New Jersey, but I felt he had insight into the closing of the paper mills in my home valley in East Central Wisconsin.  Whatever Springsteen meant with “Thunder Road,” I think it is a conservative anthem, not a universally held belief. In other words, my interacting with the art matters as much as the art itself.  Yet that is hard with some artists.

I think Michael Jackson is the most talented entertainer in US history.  I also think he was a pedophile, which not only clouds a listen to “Billie Jean” or “Beat It,” but far worse when in the “Thriller” video he states, “I’m not like other guys.”  In that piece, he was referring to his werewolf issues.  We all knew at the time it was something else.  And do not get me started on his song “Pretty Young Thing.”  

Cosby is the same.  He messaged one thing but was personally doing quite another. I basically grew up with Cosby. I was too young for I Spy, in which he was the first black man to star in a prime-time drama. I did get glimpses of his turn as a high school teacher in his first sitcom, The Bill Cosby Show.  Yet it was Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, a staple of Saturday-morning cartoons, that was my introduction.  

Additionally, my brothers and I would listen to his successful albums, including his riff on Noah’s Ark.  Cosby’s standup was also noted as clean, something of which he was proud and would castigate other black comedians, notably Eddie Murphy, for taking the Lenny Bruce/Richard Pryor approach-profanity combined with vulgarity.  

Then there was The Cosby Show.  The point was to present a successful, upper-class black family, after portrayals such as the projects-dwelling Evans clan in Good Times or the junk-yard-owning, downwardly mobile Fred Sanford in Sanford and Son. These were poor, dysfunctional, struggling families.  

The Huxtables resided in a fabulous New York brownstone afforded through Cosby’s role as a doctor, Cliff, and his wife’s role, an incredible Phylicia Rashad, as a high-powered lawyer named Clair.  The Huxtables were not the first wealthy black family on TV.  That would be the Jeffersons, who indeed succeeded as noted in the fantastic theme song “Movin’ on Up,” co-written and sung by actress and singer Ja’Net DuBois, who also famously played Willona Woods on the sitcom Good Times.  

Yet the point of the Jeffersons was not direct commentary on black prospects but rather on wealthy black interactions with the rich whites they encountered in their new lives.  And one of the most stunning aspects was the presence of Thomas and Helen Willis, an interracial couple.  They were not technically the first.  That would be Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, a Cuban American.  The Willis couple was the first black-white portrayal, which shows the difference between a union between a white woman and a Hispanic, rarely commented on in the show I Love Lucy, and Helen and Tom, of whom George Jefferson was aghast and was not shy about expressing his views using pejoratives ranging from Zebra and the now nearly nonexistent honky to describe Tom.  

If the Jeffersons were about racial interactions, The Cosby Show had very little of it.  White and black characters visited the Huxtable mansion interchangeably, while economics was critical.  There is a scene on wealth and regular living in the very first episode (“Theo’s Economic Lesson”). Cliff Huxtable uses Monopoly money to break down the economic realities of a regular person’s salary for his son Theo, who claims he just wants to graduate and be “regular.” 

One of the Cosby transformations from his late-60s and early-70s TV personas to The Cosby Show was his personal education.  Cosby earned a Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1976.  The Spy turned schoolteacher turned cartoon staple restyled himself as Dr. William H. Cosby Jr. and started writing books.  He wrote the bestselling Fatherhood two years after the sitcom’s debut, following a series of children’s books.  But it was his later works, such as Come On People and On the Path from Victims to Victors, written in 2007 as a critique of modern black culture, that began another transformation of America’s Dad into a conservative commentator—more Thomas Sowell than standup comedian. 

Cosby and his coauthor Alvin Poussaint wrote: “Certain people tell us that we are picking on the poor. Many of those who accuse us are scholars and intellectuals, upset that we are not blaming everything on white people as they do. Well, only blaming the system keeps certain black people in the limelight, but it also keeps the black poor wallowing in victimhood.”  The entire point of The Cosby Show was to show black potential, not black angst, anger, despondency, and dependence. 

In case one thinks I am cherry-picking shows based on my personal preferences, The Cosby Show was number 1 for five consecutive seasons, until Rosanne supplanted it. The power of Cosby was such that, in another sitcom, Night Court, NBC President Brandon Tartikoff appears as himself.  He delivers an impassioned monologue on his personal integrity, but then, upon taking a call that “Cosby wants a sub sandwich,” he runs off to do his bidding.  

Ironically, both sitcoms were produced by Carsey-Werner. They depicted family dynamics, but from different lenses. The Cosby Show chronicled the life of an idealized upper-middle-class Black family, an unprecedented portrayal at the time. Roseanne showcased a grittier working-class family dynamic in the Midwest.

Brenda Alexander, writing in Parade magazine in 2026, noted the comparison of the two shows. 

“Interestingly, their onscreen characters (Roseanne Barr and Bill Cosby) matched their professional personas: Cosby pushed education, clean comedy, and family values. Barr was controversial in her takes, used profanity, and was proud of it. Both would later face career and personal controversy: Cosby for his alleged sexual abuse of dozens of women throughout the years, and Barr for her political views.” Needless to say, Barr’s cancellation was typical of her character.  Her titular screen persona was opinionated, combative, and cocksure in her views just like the real one.  The Cosby on TV was drastically and horrifically different from his depictions.  

Whereas The Cosby Show was portraying something aspirational, Roseanne went for the underside of humanity.  In an episode, after Roseanne’s husband, the normally easy-going Dan Conner, has a heart attack, his wife tries to control his eating, which sets him into a rage.  Both say increasingly awful things to each other, destroy their living room, and contemplate divorce.  

Unlike the Huxtables, the Conners live paycheck to paycheck.  There is a teen pregnancy, and only one of the three kids goes to college.  The Connors may share the same financial struggles as the Bundys, but the themes of Roseanne were far more similar to the Norman Lear comedies of the 1970s, especially All in the Family, than anything to do with the Bundys.  

And here we come to the hybrid of these shows, and combination of fanciful and reality, and the one that gets us closer to understanding the supposed affordability crisis of the 2020s.  I am talking of the Brady Bunch.  

There was a period in the 1970s when every situation the comedy was based on involved carnage—Beverly Hillbillies; Ellie May Clampett’s mom, dead. Cousin Jethro’s dad, also passed.  Partridge Family; dead dad.  Courtship of Eddie’s Father; dead mom.  Family Affair; both parents gone.  And so with the Brady Bunch.  The reason for the butchery was simple: a writer would want to maneuver the characters into some form of romance, but until 1975’s One Day at A Time, divorce was too icky (and relatively uncommon; the 70s would change that). Not even Norman Lear divorced his characters.  

To blend the two Brady families, you had to repeat the slaughter, or at least in patriarch Mike Brady’s case.  Matriarch Carol’s first husband was never mentioned; his fate was never mourned.  This is what I mean by hybrid.  You have the family make one reference to the boy’s passed mom in the pilot, then never again.  Carol becomes the mom in all senses of the word, except for blood ties.  

Other contortions had family sack races, Marsha’s busted nose, and the platonic relationship of live-in housekeeper Alice’s “boyfriend,” Sam the Butcher.  It all was a bit Bundyesque.  Yet the parents were not cartoonish, which brings us to the economic piece.  I just noted the live-in maid, Alice.  Carol was not a high-powered earner like Clair Huxtable but a housewife.  There were SIX kids.  And all of these folks lived happily and well on one single salary, the one Mike earned in a white-collar job as an architect.  Here is the bizarro part harped on by heritage American historians and those inane posts about “what they took from you;” Mike housed, fed, and clothed nine people, including three adults, on one paycheck.  The weirdest part of all of this is that 1970s homo Americanus did not think this especially odd.  Carol and Alice believing their house was haunted? Silly.  A middle-class American employing a live-in maid.  Not so much.

The entire point of The Beverly Hillbillies was the juxtaposition of rustics, living in a mansion with a gorgeous stone pool (the see-ment pond) in one of the toniest zip codes in the nation, with their snobbish neighbors.  But the Clampetts, as cartoonish in their way as the Bundys, did not employ a single servant.  The Bradys did, and where the Clampetts were seen as fanciful, the Bradys were not.  The humor did not come from their wealth but rather the sheer number of people, the competition of the kids based both on sex and age and, I guess, on beauty between Marsha and Jan, prepubescent versions of Ginger and Maryanne from Gilligan’s Island.

In 2026, we all know wealthy people driving Lexus SUVs, living in 9,000-square-foot McMansions, and taking lavish vacays.  How many of these employ a live-in servant?  

Yet here is what those heritage folks, or any such comparison, completely miss, and why I call foul on so much of the affordability complaints, including that of Davis.  

Quick, how many bedrooms did the Bradys occupy? That would be four, for nine people—one for Alice, one for the parents, and just two for the six kids. Stuffed three to a room, and even in the sets used for the show, the rooms were tiny.  You also had six kids sharing, count it, one bathroom (albeit without a visible toilet, forbidden by the TV censors of the day.  A Gen Zer would not call such room allocations inconvenient, as the Bradys did; he would call them inhumane and demand a full hearing from the Department of Child and Family Services.

A few other items.  How many TVs did these nine people share? Assuming Alice had some black-and-white model in her tiny back room, the answer is one color TV whose scarcity led to some of the kerfuffles among the kids (but not that many).  In the United States in 2025, multiple-television ownership is the standard, with 81% of households owning more than one TV set. Only about 19% of homes have just a single television, and the average US home has roughly 2.9 sets. In fact, in 21st-century America, we now have, on average, more TVs than people.  

And the channels? Three.  No cable, no streaming, to TIVO or ROKU or whatever is the fashion these days.  How many iPhones? None. Personal Computers? The same; they did not exist.  And even the telephony of those days included, at best, three or four cord models with rotary dials. Some of my listeners may have to Google rotary telephones.  According to Census.gov, in 2026, over 86% of Americans own some form of smartphone, and keep in mind that it is not just the cost of the device but the monthly service that adds up.  About 95% of US households—roughly 110 to 120 million families—own some computer, with roughly 86% owning traditional large-screen computers such as desktops or laptops. Only about 13.3% of households lack a traditional computer or rely entirely on a smartphone. And what is a computer without Internet access?

Vacations? Over the show’s five seasons, the Bradys recorded two. One was entirely by car, though even as a child of the 80s watching Brady reruns I had no idea how they would stuff 9 people in what was called a station wagon (again, Zers, Google away on that car model).  Only on the Hawaiian trip would they have flown. In 2026, according to Traveling Age West, “Over 100 million people in the U.S. plan to travel with family each year, with overall family trips accounting for roughly 376 million individual trips, and roughly 92% of parents expressing intent to travel with children or grandchildren annually.”

The Bradys were rare in that they possessed two cars.  According to the Department of Transportation Bureau of Statistics, in 1970 29.3% of American households (around 18.6 million homes out of 63.4 million total households) owned two vehicles. In 2020, that number had risen to 37%, which translates to roughly 46 to 47 million households out of the total 122 million having two vehicle units.

Out of 117 episodes, the Bradys ate out a mere handful of times, and Alice, with help from Carol, prepared all the family meals.  According to a survey by SWNS Media Group, the average American individual or household gets food away from home about 4-6 times a week, which combines physical restaurant visits and takeout or delivery orders. Households with children tend to cook at home more often than single-person households, averaging closer to 1 to 3 times per week. US households spend roughly $4,000 per year on food prepared outside the home.

I live near a small Utah town called Kamas, where the local grocery store is inundated with high schoolers getting hot meals at noon (which is why I try to avoid the place at noon).  The Bradys ate sack lunches: no Whole Foods or DoorDash.  And absolutely no double caf lattes from Starbucks, which, though founded at the same time as the TV show, was not the ubiquitous presence it is today: no designer clothes or $100 sneaks.  The Bradys rarely saw movies.  

And do not compare those cents-on-the-dollar gas prices one views in 70s picture postcards. In 1970, the average cost of a gallon of gasoline was $0.36, which is about $3.09 in today’s dollars when adjusted for inflation. Compared with current national averages of around $3.29 to $4.35 per gallon, gas today is moderately more expensive in real terms than it was at the start of the 1970s.

Now imagine an American family today that rarely ate at restaurants and never used a delivery service, had one TV, no cable or streaming.  All clothes were purchased not from American Eagle or PacSun, but strictly from Walmart or second-hand stores.  And they lived 2-3 per room in their homes.  They could not afford computers or iPhones, and went on vacation two out of every five years.  Getting a coffee outside of the home was an unimaginable luxury.  There is a description for this in today’s US of A; it is called abject poverty.

And I should note that, despite 15 years between debuts, pretty much everything I have noted as a staple of American families in 2026 was not one for the Bundys any more than for the Bradys.  

So, when I see the inanity of a Sean Davis comparing how Americans live today with that of 40, 60, or 80 years ago, and thinking we are so much worse off, it is almost always some political wish-thinking or the stoking of anger to drive donations, or in his case, subscriptions.  And what is frustrating is that the public Bill Cosby would have been the first to castigate this line of thinking.  Davis and his ilk are as interested in casting their constituencies as societal victims as the race baiters against which Cosby contended.  But alas, getting back to my art and artist comment, Cosby’s content in his show and his writings are too tainted to ascribe to them the value of which I believe they merit.  Yet as Actor and Comedian Baron Vaughn has stated, “You can’t erase Bill Cosby’s contributions. That’s the conflict. He’s one of the most influential comedians of all time, and ‘The Cosby Show’ is one of the most influential sitcoms ever. When I watched as a kid, I wanted Cliff to be my dad. Everybody did.”

Interestingly, another of those TV dads whose onscreen portrayal did not match reality was Robert Reed, portrayer of Mike Brady.  The character is wise, judicious, charming, capable, professional, a great husband, boss, father, and provider, and not just in love with Carol, but for a 70s comedy, also in lust, once stating to his sitcom wife who was attired in cowgirl garb, “you can ride my range anytime.”  Growing up in a home with a single mom, I marveled at the simple fact that Mike Brady was home every night to be present for his family.  Reed, however, was a Shakespearean-trained actor and a gay man, whose fame rests on playing the epitome of the sitcom dad.  Yet none of his personal life rivaled that of the destruction caused by Cosby and his intentional drugging of women.  In fact, the actors portraying the kids had fond memories of Reed and considered him a surrogate Dad in real life.

The use of cultural touchstones to explain this or that about our history is to be encouraged. Yet there is an element of warranted skepticism that art can imitate life and inform our studies. We view the art one way, but the artist may have a different idea. Humorist Cynthia Heimel noted, “Those rosy memories we all share are actually memories from our favorite TV shows. We’ve confused our own childhoods with episodes of “Ozzie and Harriet,” “Father Knows Best,” and “The Brady Bunch.” In real life, Ozzie had a very visible mistress for years, Bud and Kitten on “Father Knows Best” grew up to become major druggies, and Mom on “The Brady Bunch” dated her fifteen-year-old fictional son.” The latter is a reference to the crush Carol’s portrayer, Florence Henderson, had on the actor playing the oldest son, Greg.

Cite the show, but also know the culture, the demographics, and the numbers, then and now.  And maybe not center your affordability argument on a fictional shoe salesman who states, “I deserve to be punished; I married your mother.”