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From Mayfield to Wellsville

            The American family has gone through many transformations over the years and these changes have been highlighted in the ways these families have been represented through one of the staples of popular culture, the television sitcom.  While sitcoms can take on a range of concepts and subject matter, from a family of social outcasts on The Addams Family to the eclectic college study group of Community, the suburban family sitcom has remained a staple of the genre.  These programs offer examples of “traditional” American families built upon what their creators feel are crucial aspects to this identity.   One of the landmark early domestic sitcoms, 1957’s Leave It To Beaver, whose central cast of two adolescent brothers and their loving parents helped craft an archetype for a nuclear American family that has become a sort of trivial reference point in the years following the show.  As cultural morals and ethical standards have evolved over the decades, so too have sitcom families been forced to reinvent themselves in order to reflect these changes. Nickelodeon’s1991’s cult classic, The Adventures of Pete and Pete frequently tested the precedents glorified in Beaver in an attempt to update these predetermined “traditions” of family life in a contemporary landscape.  Where Beaver is remembered for drafting what constitutes a stereotypical “average” American family, Pete and Pete became a sort of response to this legacy of misinformed generalizations guised as truth that hold little water in the non-televised world.

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