You Don't Realize It Until You Do

When I grade papers for my classes, typically I'm also mindlessly watching some Netflix in the background to give me some noise as well as a story to listen to so that I don't go crazy. I've gone through great shows like Murder She Wrote (seriously that show is a LONG show, it's got something like 13 seasons of 1 hour episodes, everyone in her home town is dead by the end of that show if you start counting deaths up) and even Supernatural.

Recently I've been tackling an old school sitcom of The Munsters.

There are times that I start to think they're being sarcastic, or trying to create some social commentary, because it's the Munsters. It's supposed to be about counter culture and the rebellion against what is normal and their life versus that suburban world that they are surrounded by. I expect that sort of content from their writers, but then I start getting upset because instead of a story about differences being acceptable, it becomes episode after episode about how differences should be hidden and how you should deconstruct your ideas down to the suburban world of life because that is the socially acceptable way of thinking.

Let's dive into this thing and the ways that it makes me angry.

Let's start with the husband/wife dynamic.

She's supposed to be the stay at home wife, he's supposed to be the working husband. While this doesn't bug me, the part that annoys me is just how controversial it is whenever a plot line comes around where she gets a job. Her family runs out of money and can't pay the bills for her niece to go to college, or any other story line, and she steps up and gets a job. Instead of showing her as being a contributing factor of what is going on, she gets boiled down into this idea that her having a job is a horrible thing, and that the husband should just step it up even more.

Don't even get me started about their personal gender stereotypes either. How that she is the ultimate power in the home, a passive wife outside of the place. How that he is a goof inside the home but a violent freak outside of the home. Hello! Did anyone not notice these and try to draw correlations to the real world and gender expectations between men and women?

Next, we have the children, or rather their one child and then their niece that is living with them.

They are all but forgotten. For being a show about a family, the children (and especially the son) seem to be given no regard to having a voice or opinion about anything. Even the smallest elements they are washed over and the parents act almost as though the kids aren't even there. It's such a weird thing to look at considering that 2/5 of the cast are younger, and they never get story lines. The son is always off doing something, and occasionally we hear about him being at school, but his own issues or his own life are non-consequential to everything else that is going on. The niece that is 'normal' is just as flat a character. She is cute, and boys like her, but they get scared away by her family. That's all she is. That's all she has for every single episode. Past that we have no clue of who she is, what she likes, or what she wants to be in her life. We get nothing from them because they're just the kids and they don't matter.

Given, for that fact, the writing on all of these characters falls a little flat, but at least with the mother and father we get some sense of there being something more behind what they're acting. It's just unfortunate because the entire set up of monsters being normal and trying to live a normal life has such good place for talking about social inequality, the feelings of injustice that we all feel, and ultimately the goal of embracing your weird to be who you are without any fear of judgement around you.

Unfortunately it doesn't follow into that world, but instead creates small little dramas that are fixed in slightly unique ways, but ultimately build up the stereotypes and cultural expectations of it's era. You're not going to find the munsters ever doing anything to break away from suburbia, no matter how weird they are, no matter how backwards they tried to look, they still exemplified the boring, stifling, oh my goodness how I could never had lived during that time period, life.