Americans Respect Fathers – But TV Doesn’t

As part of a recent Harris poll of on the subject of fatherhood, over 2500 adults were asked which television father was their favorite. Americans ranked Cliff Huxtable of The Cosby Show as their top choice among American fathers as depicted on TV. The other top five favorite choices, in order of preference, were Ward Cleaver of Leave It to Beaver, Jim Anderson of Father Knows Best, Andy Taylor of The Andy Griffith Show, and Ozzie Nelson of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. Other fathers named included Mike Brady of The Brady Bunch, Charles Ingalls of Little House on the Prairie and Ben Cartwright of Bonanza.
 

These results are revealing in several ways. All of the fathers named above were chosen from programs made or set in the 1980s or earlier, when fathers (and families generally) were portrayed in an upright fashion. Clearly, Americans respect their fathers, and appreciate programming that presents them in a positive light.  That no fathers from contemporary programs were named may be attributed to the fact that there are few programs today which feature fathers and family settings  -- and those that do are almost uniformly mocking and negative. Consider the “father figures” on programs like CBS’ Two and a Half Men, where a whiny, incompetent single father tries to parent his son – only to be outshone by the boy’s sex-crazed, promiscuous brother; Fox’s Family Guy, with its dysfunctional father and family; or, most insulting of all, American Dad, the very title of which is a mockery of traditional fatherhood. Fox recently reran an episode of this program which featured three generations of men coming together – only for a father to reject his own prison inmate father, who then takes his own enthusiastic grandson along as he visits prostitutes.  This is a perfect example of the disdain the entertainment industry has for families and fathers…proving once again that Hollywood is out of step with the people it is supposedly trying to entertain.