Pop Culture In The 50's

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From the start of television to what is on TV now, television has been portraying families in any manner of dynamic. Anything from a WASP family living in the suburbs whose only dissatisfaction comes from not finding the right flavor of ice cream to a dysfunctional household where no one can be trusted has been shown in sitcoms. According to the Collins English Dictionary, a sitcom or situation comedy is “a comedy series involving the same characters in various day-to-day situations which are developed as separate stories for each episode”. Are television shows meant to be a reflection of our current society or are they meant to invite and inspire change to society? American sitcom families have changed a great deal between the 50’s and now. The pop culture of the 50’s tried to portray a perfect world filled with smiling white anglo-saxon protestant (WASP) families . Most entertainment and advertisements seemed determined to project this image. After the second world war people came back and got married and started families. To make room for all of these people new parents were encouraged to move out of the cities and to the suburbs for “the good of the…show more content…
While the fifties stayed roughly the same throughout the decade portraying mainly patriarchal, heterosexual, and WASP families; The sixties began to depict families in new and interesting ways. “ Family depictions began to change and so did America’s thinking”. Shows like The Addams Family, Bewitched, and the Munsters began to appear on television portraying common characters in uncommon situations. They were almost satires of the ideal families of the fifties while still maintaining the nuclear families. The Andy Griffith Show was a show that quietly pushed America towards new ways of defining what a family was. The show let people explore the idea of single parent families, the families were still, however, patriarchal and due to death and not

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