Suppose that at some early point in its run, I LOVE LUCY was transformed into a one-hour drama? They decided, say, to make it a serious show about a mixed ethnic marriage between a professional entertainer and his untalented wife who is always trying to find a way to get on stage over the husband’s wishes? Episodes where she gets psychiatric treament, perhaps a season in which she is institutionalized,with the husband crying to sympathetic neighbors Fred and Ethel about how he loves Lucy but she is too impulsive for him, etc.
Seinfeld could be an interesting drama about the life of a New York comedian, struggling through booking acts, dealing with an insane neighbor, and his only sympathetic friends are his ex-girlfriend and his loser friend from childhood who can’t keep a job. Newman becomes the only voice of reason as the only stable human being he comes into contact with on a daily basis.
He and his three young sons are struggling to cope with the untimely death of his wife. Devastated and emotionally vulnerable, he falls for the wiles of an attractive divorcee whose deadbeat ex-husband has cut off child support for their three daughters. At first, she simply sees a ride on the gravy train as the trophy wife of a successful architect, but her feelings deepen as the two work to build a life together with their blended family.
The new living arrangements affect the children in various ways. As they approach puberty, Greg and Marcia must balance their intense sexual desires for each other with societal taboos. Peter and Jan’s typical middle-child anxieties escalate to near-psychopathic levels. Bobby and Cindy, previously doted upon as the respective babies of their families, face alienation as they must fight for the attention once freely given to them.
Meanwhile, Mr. Brady’s loyal housekeeper, who once hoped to fulfill more than his domestic needs, stays in his employ due to her love of the children, but dies a little each day as she watches the man she secretly loves build a new life with someone else. She drowns her sorrows in a nightly Bailey’s binge and a torrid affair with the local butcher.
Take out the jokes and “Married With Children” is a gritty suburban drama about a crumbling family - a man in a dead-end job with dreams of high school football glory, a woman who demeans him and spends him into near-bankruptcy, a heavily promiscuous teenage daughter with very scummy boyfriends who even go so far as to assault her father on occasion (throw in drug abuse, unplanned pregnancy for the drama), and a teenage son who wants to make something of his life but is also impulsively driven by hormones - with today’s tech he’d probably get busted for something like sexting, planting cameras in the girls’ locker room, etc.
An older, divorced man in his mid 60’s has a new trophy wife to help cope with his mid-life crisis…lo and behold, she’s pregnant. He can’t cope with the stress, and his ex-wife is a raving lunatic. He also has a step-son who has an aging disorder - he’s growing way too fast for his age.
His son is gay, has a domestic partner who’s a neurotic mess, and they’ve adopted and under privileged Asian girl who’s got an attitude problem. They’re constantly harassed and discriminated against, particularly when trying to adopt pets.
The divorced man also has a daughter who’s obsessed with Halloween. She’s married to a bumbling dolt who can’t see the forest for the trees, and they have 3 kids who all have major issues. The oldest daughter’s been expelled from college, the middle child is very smart buy feels insecure about her looks and their youngest son will no doubt grow up to be a serial killer.
There’s this guy working for a cab company in NYC in which he finds himself among the few sane cabdrivers, the rest being dangerous, demented or schizophrenic, capable of harming themselves or their passengers on a daily basis, and WORSE the cab company is managed by a cynical sociopath who doesn’t care as long as they make money…
An alcoholic ex-athlete, his life now one long anticlimax after his peak at age 30, steps behind the bar, where he can be the center of attention for a crowd of harridans, rubes, failed artists, and the constant stream of dead-enders who come in to numb their pain. No one brings anything small into Cheers. Soundtrack by Tom Waits.
Tired of the rat race and wanting only a little peace and quiet a man and his wife escape from New York only to find that life in a rural community is far more insane than the big city, and you can’t escape into anonymity.
A man dies of cancer, leaving behind his impoverished wife and five kids. The desperate mother forces her children into the gritty and hard-bitten world of rock n’ roll. The kids are so addled by the experience that they can’t even decide what color to paint their tour bus.
A woman marries a mildly retarded man who works as a safety officer at a nuclear power plant. Their kids, the youngest an underdeveloped preemie baby, the middle one an intelligent but socially awkward daughter, and their oldest a troublemaker son who always gets the family into financial and legal trouble, try to survive the best they can while the world around the slowly falls into decay.
A beautiful and intelligent woman impulsively marries beneath her, to a whining man-child still tied to his mother’s apron strings. To make it worse, the mother-in-law, her father-in-law (a buffoon, a walking embodiment of the ‘id’), and her brother-in-law (a sorry individual consumed with jealousy of his younger brother) live across the street. Husband’s family are overbearing, bossy, and intrusive, butting in constantly, and treating her badly decorated, cluttered house as their own. The woman is further held down by a life of grinding middle-class mediocrity and she finds herself, though married, virtually a single parent to a young girl and twin boys. Things build to a head, and the passive-aggressive mother-in-law is found dead in the kitchen, face down, drowned, in a pot of spaghetti sauce. The woman empties the mini-van of juice boxes, car seats, and packets of Goldfish crackers, throws them out the window onto the lawn, and takes off, driving as fast and far as she can while her schlub of a husband and his hulking brother argue as to what to do. What to do. The father-in-law picks up a bag of crackers and sits down and starts eating them. Not Everybody Loves Raymond. Love is not enough.
We’re not talking classical and there are more modes of visual storytelling than those developed by the ancient greeks. Certainly neither television sitcoms nor dramas exemplify the artforms indicated by the masks.