Red Forman's Vision of the '70s on That '70s Show

Watching That '70s Show years ago (mostly in reruns) I found it a mixed bag. Some of it worked, some of it didn't.

The antics of the young people who were the focus were pretty forgettable for the most part, and as it happens I actually remember more about what the adults said and did. Not that they didn't have their limitations, of course. Eric Forman's father Red was a pretty standard string of pretty standard period sitcom clichés--a working-class man who, repeatedly and badly dinged by life, has nonetheless found himself with a family in the suburbs with its different tone and expectations in middle age, to whose seemingly unending demands he responds gracelessly and insensitively; and a reactionary old member of the Greatest Generation who is endlessly tearing into the Baby Boomer son he regards as a soft, incompetent, wimp; but who, for all the coarseness and the sarcasm and the yelling, can always be expected to do the "right thing" in the end (however grudgingly and, again, gracelessly), while every now and then reminding us that he is a human being after all.*

. Still, the writers every now and then gave us a little more than the usual--in part by, in this era in which social reality was not to be seen much in a major network sitcom (1998-2006), occasionally mining a little of that reality for comedy, with a memorable black-and-white sequence in the episode "The Velvet Rope" presenting us with what Red imagined his life, and the world, would be like at that point, an era of burgeoning incomes and exploding consumer technology making life better and better for Joes like himself. We heard, too, something of its basis--the sketchy premise that, because the American worker was "experienced, loyal, and hard-working," and Germans and Japanese were not, the post-war boom that made it all possible would just go on and on.

Of course, as people learned the hard way in the '70s, it didn't (and couldn't, certainly on that basis), and the world was very different for it, with one consequence the bitter gap between expectations and reality. (There went the flying cars! Or, as Red Forman seems to have referred to them in that scene, "hovercrafts.")

Much as progress-hating postmodernists sneer at those who dare remember and bring up those broken promises the reality is that those promises really were important, and their breaking important; that there really is a disaster and a tragedy here; and far from helping the world understand with it and cope with it and move on to something better (not their forte) they have preferred to indulge their stupid ironic snobbery as the world falls apart, making them infinitely more deserving of contempt than all the people and things on which they presume to look down.

* It seems worth noting that in the show's equally nostalgic '80s counterpart, The Goldbergs, paterfamilias Murray is very similar.