On the morning of September 11, 2001, a friend knocked on my door. As she sat on my bed and announced that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center, I stared at her sleepily and smiled. It wasn't until I padded over to my computer and found that none of the news Web sites would load that I began to get nervous.
I thought of that moment watching the frustrating, and ultimately failed, premiere of the new NBC drama American Dreams, which chronicles the transformation of America during the 1960s as seen through the eyes of a Philadelphia family. The first episode ends with the Kennedy assassination: As a teacher informs students that the president has been shot, heads instantly bow and tears stream down stricken faces.
Cue "Amazing Grace." Cut to shots of men holding weeping women. Signal the chorus to swell.
There was no gospel music on September 11 as we learned about the attacks. It took hours, days, weeks to understand what had happened and why it would change our country forever. That's the imperfect, unscripted way history is. But it's everything American Dreams is not.
NBC's new Sunday-night drama says all the right things but gets them all wrong. Stretching for archetypes, the show settles instead for a series of clichés that offer little insight into life during one of America's most tumultuous decades. They do, however, tell us a lot about American pop culture's continuing inability to accurately understand and depict time periods other than the present.
On American Dreams, the father is simplistic and confused, disconnected from his family's evolving and more nuanced desires. The mother is complicated and repressed. The son is a jock who longs to be recognized for his brains instead of his ball skills. The daughter is a "good girl" who's starting to experiment with the pleasures of the dark side.
The creators of American Dreams seek to invert our modern myths about the 1950s and early 1960s -- that it was an innocent, conservative time -- and somehow believe that this makes their show "provocative," as an NBC ad proudly proclaims. But all the show has done is exchange one set of clichés for another: The period may have appeared innocent, but the seeds of coming change were plain to see if you only looked for them, the show seems to be saying. If it's possible to be so predictably counterintuitive as to be trite, American Dreams pulls it off.
In fact, the only element missing from the premiere is a kindly black family who can help this privileged white, suburban clan become racially sensitive by introducing it to a little thing called . . . the civil-rights movement. But not to fear: Henry and his son Sam show up in the second episode. (And you thought all whites in the early 1960s were racist!)
American pop culture may often seem incapable of presenting history in a nuanced, thoughtful way -- but not always. On an early episode of the overwhelmingly insightful (and prematurely canceled) 1994 show My So-Called Life, which also centered around a teenage female protagonist, 15-year old Angela Chase sat in class watching a tape of the Kennedy assassination -- and brooding.
"Grown-ups like to tell you where they were when President Kennedy was shot, which they all know to the exact second, which makes me almost jealous," she thought during one of the show's searing interior monologues. "Like I should have something important enough to know where I was when it happened. But I don't yet. The fact is that it was a better time then. When people knew what they were supposed to do. And how to make the world better."
American Dreams pretends to be debunking this well-worn notion prevalent throughout American history: that the previous generation was simpler, kinder and clearer about its goals and objectives. Of course, that wasn't true when America consisted of a handful of Whigs scattered throughout the colonies, staging grand propaganda displays and employing harsh intimidation tactics to suppress dissent. And it won't be true when future generations make similar claims about the America we live in today.
But the invocation of this American tradition -- peering into the past for comfort -- had a power on My So-Called Life because it underscored the tradition without endorsing it. Angela's misguided reflections demonstrated her lack of direction and longing for distinction. Her generation now has its equivalent to the Kennedy assassination, and Angela would probably agree that the world is not a simpler, more appealing place as a result.
Even as they portrayed their main character voicing a common misconception, My So-Called Life's writers fractured myths about contemporary America, such as the one that says teenagers are unreachable, wantonly destructive and recklessly rebellious. Angela and her friends were sad and morose, perverse, provocative and vulnerable, all captured in the cadence of real teenagers. ("I cannot bring myself to eat a well-balanced meal in front of my mother," Angela informed us bleakly. "It just means too much to her.")
There was a complexity to My So-Called Life: If characters idealized the past, it was only because they needed to do so in order to live in the present. If anything, these teenagers thought too much. The producers of American Dreams see only a surface truth: that dismissals of the 1950s and early 1960s as a more innocent time are invalid. They seem to have missed the authenticity beneath: that people have always felt this way because their real lives are sometimes too painful and complicated to feel otherwise.
You can almost see the producers patting themselves on the back when a cheerful woman on a cooking show curses as the cameras turn off, or when the sweet smile of the fatherly priest (who is also the football coach) evaporates after listening to jock son J.J. quietly explain that it feels wrong to continue playing football (because the joy of the game has been lost in a haze of college admissions and filial obligations).
"Forget about these feelings," spits the father. What J. J. really needs to do is play ball. (You thought he was gonna tell J. J. to follow his heart, didn't you? Gotcha!)
Both American Dreams and My So-Called Life explored the theme of the "girl next door" who expands the boundaries of her existence by befriending someone more radical than herself. American Dreams communicates that delicate balance between daring and self-doubt -- the seductiveness of defying restrictive social rules versus the longing for security -- by having the "bad girl" say the word "boys" a lot. But nary a flicker of doubt, compassion or internal tension ever flits across the bad girl's face, thanks to a combination of actress Vanessa Lengies' flat performance and the silly, one-dimensional lines she's given to say. When the girls strip down to their underwear in the street, the main character, Meg, is embarrassed. When they strip down on a public bus, she's not embarrassed anymore. And that is about as sophisticated a display of coming-of-age symbolism as American Dreams ever allows its characters, at least in the first episode. The problem, of course, is that losing one's innocence isn't a binary process. It's messy -- for people and for nations.
Predictably, the father on American Dreams is stupid and simplistic and the mother is intelligent and under-appreciated. Why does the father suddenly feel blindsided by the changes being visited on his family? Has none of this stuff ever come up before? For the purposes of a TV premiere, this sort of narrative thread may provide an easy source of dramatic tension. But life is rarely so obliging. Family problems and tensions tend to build and fester for years, forcing occasional confrontations but usually simmering beneath the surface. The use of interior monologue in My So-Called Life compensated for the potency of the unsaid in family feuds. Unsurprisingly, the unsaid is nowhere to be found in American Dreams.
In the end, American Dreams succumbs to an American tradition. Trying to turn our national perception of the past on its head, the show embraces one of our most fundamental contemporary problems: the reluctance to accept nuance or acknowledge the murky territory of the middle ground. As a result, American Dreams fumbles the opportunity to tell history (or life) in the messy, uncertain way in which it really happens. On September 11, we saw no pictures of weeping women being caressed by perfectly posed, handsome men. Most of them were too busy crying, too.
