The Books of My Life: thirtysomething

I was a thirtysomething baby boomer when the television show thirtysomething hit the airwaves in 1987 and I was still a thirtysomething boomer when thirtysomething went off the air four seasons later in 1991. As a devoted watcher of "quality" films and, if much less so, of "quality" TV, I watched thirtysomething when it debuted and I watched it, if not religiously,  I was taking a graduate degree after all, until it went off the air.  My sense at the time, was that thirtysomething was a slice of middle class life, a television show about the intimate lives of a group of people, as co-creator of thirtysomething along with Eward Zwick, Marshall Herskovitz put it in 2018. To me, someone brought up on European art cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, thirtysomething had a lot of the Ingmar Bergman of the 1970s, particularly the Bergman of Scenes from a Marriage (1973), in it and a bit of The Wonder Years (ABC, 1988-1993) in it. And I suppose for those reasons alone I liked it and probably for those reasons I didn't and still don't give much credence to all the whingers whining about the shows whinging boomers. The whining seemed rather "realistic" to me.

Albert Auster and Leonard Quart explore several aspects of thirtysomething, aspects foregrounded in the subtitle of their monograph, in their thirtysomethng: Television, Women, Men, and Work (Lanham, MD.: Lexington Books, Critical Studies in Television series, 2008). Instead of being dedicated followers of Literary Studies, Film Studies, and Television Studies fashion, Auster and Quart take, as they call it, a "traditional" approach to thirtysomething. They, if perhaps far too briefly, and drawing on the work of Raymond Williams, explore the broader empirical economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts of the show and explore the economic, by focusing on thirtysomethings representation of work, political, by pointing up that politics was only limitedly in the background of the show, cultural, by exploring the representation of masculinity and femininity in the show, demographic, by noting the shows focus on slice of middle class boomer life, and geographic, by pointing up the shows setting in Philadelphia, aspects of the show. For Auster and Quart thirtysomething was fundamentally a show about a group of friends, a kind of extended family of blood and choice, that mirrored yuppie boomerdom in late 1980s and early 1990s America.

Auster and Quart point up some of the problems with fashionable textualist readings of thirtysomething and Literary, Film, and Television Studies in general. Where textualist critics whinged about the stereotyped and caricatured portrayal of the female and male characters in the film, Auster and Quart argue that thirtysomething's characters were complex and contradictory and changed across the series, something that has become common in arc driven shows like the groundbreaking Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in what might be called television's third golden or its platinum age.

Auster and Quart are not afraid to criticise the show. They argue that politics was too much in the background of the show and they criticise the show for paying, in its early years, too little attention to work beyond how it impacted the inner and domestic lives of its characters. They do praise the show for exploring the Machiavellian labyrinths and moral dilemmas associated with it of the corporate ad agency Michael and Elliot go to work for after the failure of their own mom and pop advertising firm.

Though I am not enamoured of the this is how a work of literature, a film, or a television show should be written and this is how I would write it or film it if I were doing it school of criticism any more than I find the crystal ball approach to literature, film, and television text centred analysis school of criticism, compelling, Auster's and Quart's somewhat schematic monograph was, for me, an interesting trip down memory lane. thirtysomething truly was a groundbreaking show that brought Bergmanian slice of life intensity to an American television landscape that was changing thanks to the rise of satellite driven cable television. My So-Called Life (ABC, 1994-1995), by the way, created by thirtysomething and The Wonder Years alum Winnie Holtzman, and whose writers included several thirtysomething alums, would do something similar for teensomethings several years later.

As for thirtysomething's slice of life realism mixed with fantasy, flashbacks, and parody, I have to admit that I did see a bit of me in all the characters in thirtysomething and particularly in Gary since I wanted to be, once upon a time, an academic and I wasn't fully comfortable with what was expected of me when I graduated from the bohemian life and exchanged it, at least in theory, for the supposedly grown up bourgeois life. So after a few attempts at being a good bourgeois and trying to do all the things a good bourgeois was supposed to do, I gave up the ghost. Needless to say, I have been a bohemian, for the most part, ever since and I do not regret not "growing up" one whit.