There are exceptions, of course. Modern Family is a good example. All four are portrayed as loving, competent fathers in different ways, and the show treats their parenting seriously. But the fact that people point to Modern Family so quickly just highlights how rare that kind of balanced portrayal has become.
I don’t know if I completely agree with you about Leave it to Beaver. I remember an episode where Ward finds out that Wally and Beaver have spent a lot of money at a local sporting goods store. He thinks they’ve bought new baseball mitts (I think) from the most expensive store in town. He gathers the family around to collectively decide if their spending was warranted, or should it be sent back. When the package is opened, he finds that they’ve bought him a new hunting jacket as a present, and has egg on his face.
That’s a far cry from Al Bundy, but Ward could be the butt of the jokes, too. It’s a classic comedy trope to puff someone up as a self-important stuffed shirt, and then see him taken down a peg.
Including the one played by Ed O’Neill? I didn’t watch the show.
Yeah. He was gruff, but kindhearted.
Huh. My impression was that the idiot dad trope was a ‘90s thing - Homer Simpson, Family Guy, Al Bundy … and that flawed but caring … like Bob of Bob’s Burgers, the dad in Young Sheldon … was more common now. Hell, even Walt in Breaking Bad cared about being a father … his pride more but being dad was something he cared about. And in family movies even more so.
I’m a seriously underinformed commentator about current pop culture, but I agree w you; @Calder sounds like he’s describing 1980s & 1990s sitcoms.
Are whatever current shows people are watching today still like that? Hellifino.
Family Guy was only a 90s series for 11 months, though…
I occasionally see "The Neighborhood* (it’s on after Jeopardy!), Georgie &Mandy’s First Marriage, and Ghosts. The male characters all strike me as bubmlers to some degree or another, but so do the women.
I didn’t really give it much thought until reading your post. At fist glance, it seems the buffoonery is relatively equal on sitcoms these days.
I do see a lot of commercials that portray men as idiots, but maybe I just tend to notice them more.
That is an interesting point.
What’s also true is that I personally know so many wonderful, engaged Millenial/GenX fathers. In my circle it is kind of the default, and you stand out if you suck. Fathers are spending more time with their kids than ever before. And even in very traditional gender role situations, fathers are saying that they wish they had more time caregiving. Of course, my circle consists mainly of educated professionals, so I don’t know if it looks that good for other groups. But perhaps the recent push for intensive parenting has caught both Moms and Dads in its gaping maw.
So to the extent that stereotype still exists in the media, I see a lot of counterexamples all of the time.
The only modern Dad character I can think of right now is Jason Segel’s character in Shrinking. He was good at being a Dad, he totally fell off a cliff when his wife died and he didn’t know how to cope, and now he’s learning to be good again. It seems like a realistic view of fatherhood (or parenthood in general) because sometimes, despite your best efforts, you just really mess up. That’s not a guy thing, it’s a human thing.
Yes, I agree that the “bumbling dad” trope started out being funny because it was subversive: pushing back against the idealized norm of the wise, kind, dignified paterfamilias who’s unquestionably head of the household, even if he sometimes makes mistakes.
Now that the wise, kind paterfamilias isn’t the recognized default trope of fatherhood anymore, continuing to portray all these bumbling dads comes across less like skewering traditional sexist assumptions, and more like lazy and offensive stereotyping.
You know what? I want to acknowledge the other posters’ points — the incompetent man‑child dad trope really isn’t nearly as common in the 2020s. There has been a noticeable shift toward more balanced or even positive portrayals of fathers.
But that doesn’t change the fact that the trope kept going strong throughout the 2000s and 2010s. You can see it in a ton of major shows from that era: Family Guy, Malcolm in the Middle, Arrested Development, Everybody Loves Raymond, Two and a Half Men, and The Simpsons were all still running during those decades, and every one of them centered on a dad who was childish, incompetent, or the designated punchline. The 90s didn’t end the trend.
Even the otherwise competent sitcom dads like Steven Keaton or Cliff Huxtable had their boneheaded moments that required their hyper competent wives to intervene in a disturbingly infantilizing way. The examples I remember involved their diets and/or some health scare. Elyse Keaton chastised Steven for eating poorly and having either a minor heart attack or sobering medical test results, so she literally spoon-feeds him his one allowable morsel of ice cream. Claire Huxtable was constantly hounding Cliff about his diet of hoagies and soda or whatever else it was that week. Sure these dads aren’t as bumbling as Tim Taylor, Herman Munster, Fred Flintstone, Randy Marsh, or all the others mentioned upthread, but even the competent dads have some blind spot where they’re totally incapable of adulting.
I can acknowledge the inequality in these shows … not that the dads have there moments of being babied, their blind spots, that’s real life exaggerated for comedic effect; but that the moms are nearly always hypercompetent, which is a hard standard to be putting out there for all.
King of the Hill would seem to be an outlier: Hank has his flaws, but he’s generally competent and levelheaded, with only the occasional foray into “bumbling dad” territory.
Hank Hill is an odd one because he’s SO uptight and incapable of handling emotions (except with the dog) that in my mind he’s still “broken” and rather pitiable, but yeah not in the same way a lot of sitcom dads are. Peggy Hill is also not the stereotypical hyper-competent mom. She THINKS she’s hyper-competent, but she most definitely is not. The subtitles when she speaks Spanish to the Mexican judge is one of the highlights of the series. Most of the men in King of the Hill seem to be losers, jerks, or weirdos. The women are at least normal-ish in comparison.
All the characters are a bit “odd” in various ways. But people are odd IRL. I think it’s kind of telling that you (and many people) view them as “losers, jerks, or weirdos”. Which they are by TV show standards. And I think one of the problems is how a constant flow of media (both traditional and social) constantly presenting a sort of averaged, highly polished, focus-group approved, algorithmically selected version of what’s “normal” and “successful”.
I don’t think I’m being overly harsh to the King of the Hill characters. Maybe they’re within spec for redneck rural Texans, but that’s not a particularly high bar. Dale is a conspiracy theory nutter. Bill is a stalker with unhealthy romantic fantasies. Cotton is a full on bigot of the highest order. Buck Strickland is a chauvinist alcoholic adulterer with little or no morality. I don’t consider any of that to fall within the “normal” bucket, whether in TV-land or the real world. Boomhauer is fine I guess man I tell you what he just dang ol talks funny man.
Boomhauer is a saint.
I have never watched many episodes of King of the Hill but I’ve caught snapshots and Peggy Hill speaking Spanish is definitely the highlight for me.
You’re not kidding. Jill from Home Improvement raising three kids while writing her PhD dissertation? I know they were trying to be supportive of women’s professional success but that’s a pretty high bar to clear.
The 90s taught me as a little girl that women can do it all, but as a professional woman and a Mom, I have found the reality of “doing it all” is often you just feel like you’re falling short at everything.
Yeah..that’s woman shit. What exactly do you feel you are falling short at doing and for whom?
We men tend to be more like “here’s a bunch a shit that needs to get done and now that it’s done, I can go relax and do what I want.” Probably why women seem to view us as lazy buffoons.
I don’t know about you, but my sexuality is pretty one-sided.
More, I think, because male socialization traditionally tended to make a lot of men more selective about what part of the “bunch a shit that needs to get done” counted as their responsibility.
As in, if a man had got home from work and done the lawn-mowing and dishwasher-emptying or whatever that he routinely expected to do, then he tended to move on to the mindset of “now I’ve earned a little me-time for a video game or whatever”.
And if one of the kids was sick, or there was a trip coming up that needed preparing for, or any other extra domestic burden, the response tended to be less “oops here’s some more shit that needs to get done, better put the me-time on hold” and more “well but I’ve done my bunch a shit, I’ve earned that me-time”.
Not “laziness” or “buffoonery” really, more like “contractual” vs. “needs-based” task assessment. Extra burdens that he didn’t already recognize as part of his expected responsibility were assumed by default to be part of her responsibility. (With exceptions for immediate “man-of-the-house”-type emergencies, like needing to remove a snake from the kitchen or put out something on fire.)
I think men nowadays are substantially more aware of “needs-based” task assessment on the home front than they used to be.