I was listening to a Ben Shapiro podcast (and I don’t remember which one) when he likened either Tim Walz or Doug Emhoff (and I don’t remember which one) to a 1990s sitcom dad. That struck me as being exactly right. We are seeing the result of American expectations shaped by decades of Hollywood’s deliberate campaign against the post-WWII idea that “father knows best.”

I was born in the last year that can call itself a Baby Boomer. We were the post-war generation that was shaped by 1950s-1970s television.

Looking back, it’s obvious that Hollywood has always had fun with hapless men and shrewish women, a stereotype that existed for the Baby Boomers. Significantly, though, these hapless men and their wise, shrewish, or equally hapless wives mostly didn’t have children, and, when they did, they weren’t hapless as to the children.

The classic in the childless genre was the Honeymooners: Two childless, working-class couples with foolish men and wise women, albeit in loving relationships.

Image by AI.

I Love Lucy actually started out in the same vein, with two childless couples. However, when Lucille Ball got pregnant, things changed. While the series poked fun at parenting issues (my favorite being the Lucy Goes Into Labor episode, when all their carefully laid plans to get her to the hospital collapsed), when it came directly to parenting, Ricky was not a fool, and Little Ricky was not the wise solon.

The same was true for The Dick Van Dyke Show. Rob and Laura could do remarkably silly things, trading both wise and foolish roles. However, while there were laughs in their relationship with their son Ritchie, the show never, or almost never, deviated from the principle that Rob and Laura were the parents. Ritchie, while he occasionally offered “out of the mouths of babes” wisdom, never got the upper hand.

And of course, in shows such as Leave It To Beaver or Father Knows Best, father really did know best. Whatever daddy was, he wasn’t a fool, a worldview that continued into the 1970s with the fathers in The Brady Bunch, Good Times, and Diff’rent Strokes. Of course, in the more leftist shows (All In The Family, Maude, The Jeffersons, etc.), fathers were already lapsing into being morons. It was simply bad luck, from the creators’ viewpoint, that people fell in love with Archie Bunker’s legitimate (if often crudely and cruelly expressed) values.

Childless men, of course, were always a different story. All the men in Three’s Company were childless, and all were fools. Gilligan and the Skipper, both childless, were fools. (See also the childless men in The Andy Griffith Show.)

While the fools could remain untouched moving into the 1980s—and, indeed, functioned as a feminist dream of stupid men—the new generation of writers absolutely needed to push back against the idea that men could be good and wise fathers. Suddenly, TV shows began to portray fathers as idiots who were constantly put in their place by smarta** children and liberated women.

Since I wasn’t watching a lot of television by the 1980s, I have a harder time naming shows from that era. However, I distinctly remember how incredibly impressed people were when Bill Cosby portrayed a father figure who had a sense of humor but wasn’t a fool. Back before Cosby became a pariah, the New York Times wrote,

The difference is simply that Mr. Cosby, here at his very best, can take the ordinary and make it seem delightfully fresh. He is not just another harassed father. He is the ultimate father dealing with problems that are terribly and hilariously real.

In the 1990s, the rise of dad as the feckless idiot began, hence that comment from Ben Shapiro, a Milennial.

As for me, I missed most of the 1990s because I was either working 70-hour weeks as a lawyer or 100-hour weeks as a lawyer and mom. However, by the early 2000s, my kids were watching Nick and Disney TV, and I was very disturbed by the shows they wanted to see.

In show after show, parents were absent entirely, or dads were complete idiots. The two that stand out in my memory are Disney’s Hannah Montana, which birthed the broken, drugged-out Miley Cyrus, and which starred her real-life father as an ineffectual dimwit, and I, Carly, which had an older brother as the dimwit. Kids and women moved to centerstage as the wise, compassionate players. Dads were dolts.

If you’ve kept up with me so far, you see my point: Beginning forty years ago, Hollywood deliberately turned dads into silly fools who must learn to follow around the wise women and young people in their universe. This is the dad role that Tim Walz and Doug Emhoff gladly play. I doubt either is quite the fool he appears but both are willing to gain power—and, more importantly, advance leftist goals—by embodying TV’s amiable dunce who has no virtue independent of that which he learns from the women and children in his world.

As for me, I happen to like the manly virtues of ambition, courage, assertiveness, risk-taking, and caring for those who can’t take care of themselves. However, those virtues require channeling men’s natural aggression, strength, and impulsivity into moral and sensible values and pursuits—and that’s something American culture has refused to do for over 40 years.

UPDATE: I was the last of the Baby Boom generation. Rich Kozlovich was the first, and he sent this lovely memory of a long-gone America, a memory that ties in nicely with this post.