Beauty and the BeastWhy are fat sitcom husbands paired with great-looking wives?
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 5, 2005, at 1:46 PM ET
In two decades of TV acting, Courtney Thorne-Smith has never stopped looking like a cheerleader. She has the kind of large, startled eyes that suggest school spirit (this look of bug-eyed alacrity grew to almost supernatural intensity during her starvation years on Ally McBeal) and a sturdy jaw that appears custom-tooled for the cheerleader's main task of spelling out inspirational words very, very loudly. But for Cheryl, Smith's character in the ABC series According to Jim (Tuesdays, 9 p.m. ET), it's as if her cheerleaderly aspirations have suffered a perverse cosmic scramble and she ended up married not to the equally simple and beautiful quarterback everyone expected her to marry, but to the boorish, buffalo-faced center who puts his hands between his expansive ass cheeks on every play. Cheryl is married to Jim, and Jim is played by Jim Belushi.
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StumbleUponIt's a family sitcom tradition that spouses are ill-matched looks-wise, but until recently, the mismatch has usually consisted of a beautiful actress, whose glamour is partly obscured behind the clutter of everyday life, and a comparatively plain actor. Think golden-haired Meredith Baxter Birney and undistinguished Michael Gross on Family Ties or dishy Suzanne Pleshette and the comically featureless Bob Newhart in the original Bob Newhart Show. In these sitcom marriages, the husband was at least shown to compensate for his obvious lack of studliness by being what Tony Soprano would call a good earner—or at the very least a mensch.
In the current sitcom lineup, by contrast, several shows pair extremely attractive women, who are often clad in plunging tops and tight jeans suitable for a Maxim photo spread, with TV husbands who are not only not studly, but downright fat, and a couple who are not only not mensches, but are ugly on the inside, too. On The King of Queens (CBS, Wednesdays, 9 p.m. ET), smoldering working-class babe Carrie (Leah Remini) is paired with beer-gutted Doug (Kevin James). On Grounded for Life (WB, Fridays, 8:30 p.m. ET), the lovely, voluptuous Claudia (Megyn Price—my favorite), is paired with the dumpy and scraggly-bearded Sean (Donal Logue). Perhaps the most jarringly incongruous couple appears on Still Standing (CBS, Mondays, 8 p.m. ET), in which Judy (legendary '80s hottie Jamie Gertz) is married to the surly Bill (rotund, high-voiced English actor Mark Addy, whose character sounds just a little too English to be from Chicago). Bill is a scurrilous (and not terribly funny) creation, unpleasant even to listen to.
In addition to their girth, a signal characteristic of these men is immaturity. Most of them are unable to master the simplest daily tasks. A recent episode of Grounded for Life was propelled by Sean's inability to take a phone message while a typical King of Queens knee-slapper was fueled by Doug's inability to keep his hands off a co-worker's Koosh ball, which he, of course, loses. And virtually every episode of According to Jim is sparked by Jim's selfishness and impulsiveness—he fights with Santa and the next-door neighbor; he pouts about having to give up his vices so Cheryl can get pregnant. Indeed, the promixity of these men to their childhood selves is often directly invoked. In a recent episode of King of Queens, for example, Doug's dad visits for a model train convention, which dredges up bitter memories about how as a child, Doug was not allowed—I am not making this up—to play with his dad's train. When Dad is called away from the convention and Doug offers to fill in for him, Dad is still reluctant to let his dumb-ass son work the controls. (And when he does, Doug promptly destroys the train set, along with its fake mountain landscape setting. See what happens when you play with Daddy's train?) Perhaps, then, actors like Mark Addy and Kevin James are best suited for these roles not only because they portray a fantasy life for couch potato male viewers—for a half-hour a week, you can be 300 pounds and still imagine yourself married to Jamie Gertz!—but also because their proportions, with their ample torsos and short and apparently useless limbs, approximate those of babies.
It's not that there aren't handsome or sexually desirable men on sitcoms, but these men are typically marked as terminal bachelors, like Ted Danson on Cheers. To the extent they have anything to do with family life, they tend to skulk around its outer margins like coyotes. On Two and Half Men (CBS, Mondays, 9:30 p.m. ET), Charlie (Charlie Sheen) is handsome, successful, and wedded to promiscuous bachelorhood, but he gets to enjoy some nourishing familial scraps since his loser brother (Jon Cryer) and scampy nephew moved themselves into his pad. (In keeping with the Maxim ethos of these shows, the brother was abandoned by a woman who thinks she might be a lesbian. It would be emasculating for male viewers to see a man dumped for being completely undesirable, and, besides, lesbians are so hot.) Likewise, on Grounded for Life the schlumpy husband has a smoother bachelor brother, Eddie (Kevin Corrigan), who lurks around the house and functions as a Casanova alter ego. This really works in Grounded for Life, thanks to the slithery Corrigan, who is probably the best thing about any of these shows. (On According to Jim and Still Standing, the single sibling is an attractive but romantically hopeless sister of the wife. That's the choice: fat guy vs. spinsterhood.)
Since these pairings could not conceivably reflect the sexual or romantic desires of the female protagonists, they look a bit like arranged marriages. Yet in arranged marriages the pairing generally springs from a glut of intention—the long-term planning of parents, future in-laws, and other relatives. The sitcom pairing, by contrast, reflects the absence of intention, some past moment in which fate seems to have arbitrarily asserted itself. It's not the merciless fate of tragedy, but a kind of blind and stupid fate, a fate that a person can—with enough forbearance and, yes, laughter—live with. The back story in Grounded for Life is that Sean got Claudia pregnant when they were teenagers and they decided to get married and have the baby. In Still Standing, the greater unfathomableness of the marriage requires an even more perverse set of circumstances to explain it. This explanation arrives at the beginning of one episode when Bill, after directing a morning greeting to his wife and children, turns his malevolence on his sister-in-law. "Hello, loved ones … and tolerated one," he says, and she retorts, "Hello, lifelong consequence of my sister's attempt to make another man jealous." The best-laid plans … end up with Jamie Gertz married to Mark Addy.
It's tempting to register a feminist complaint about the message these shows convey—that they perpetuate the view that women shouldn't expect autonomy or fulfillment in romance and marriage. They do, after all, play to a certain male fantasy: living the gluttonous, irresponsible, self-absorbed life of an infant and basking in the unconditional love of a good-looking woman.
But it's not just men watching these shows, and, as Alessandra Stanley suggested in a review of the country western sitcom Rodney, it's not just a male id they express. As the bitter, recent book The Bitch in the House and the extreme popularity of the delightful, tendentious Desperate Housewives seem to indicate, the war of the sexes has shifted from the workplace back to the household and the bedroom. In portraying husbands as lousy parents, marginal breadwinners, and repellant sexual partners, the fat-husband sitcoms convey a persecution fantasy that rises from the same swamp of resentments as these books do: "Yes, I'm supercompetent and I even look great, despite all the crap I have to deal with, and, yes, that's my husband over there, the fat, useless one scratching his nuts."
If family sitcoms really are a Rorschach blot for their male and female viewers, then we're either in really bad shape or coping surprisingly well—in the same scenarios in which women perhaps identify their own desperation and martyrdom, men seem to find sweet, elemental fulfillment.
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Remarks from the Fray:
I've long since wondered, as has any conscious human, why these pairings exist and for whose benefit.
But, then, since it is television, you must wade through commercials, which effectively telegraph adherence to sex stereotypes with every portrayal of marriage and domestic duties. Without fail, if a commercial portrays the husband doing any housework, he's the image of emasculation, just shy of the Queer Eye guys following him with helpful hints. He is nondescript, vocally high-spoken and moves either purposelessly or anxiously (think Lucille Ball when she knew she was going to get a talking to by Ricky). They are, in short, men who would – and often do – fall short of the any woman's ideal. That's in the sitcom women Feeney mentions and women in the real world.
When you come right down to it, both the sitcoms and the commercials airing during their running time are insults to women's expectations. We live longer, work outside the home (if we're married), are college-educated and well-versed in current events, take care of our bodies and this is what we get for our reward? A guy whose idea of culture is a Steven Segal movie? I don't even want to imagine the fat sitcom husband's idea of foreplay. Martyrdom doesn't sound a strong enough descriptive suddenly.
--Splendid_IREny
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There are a few simple reasons for the fat guy - hot wife scenario. First, the shows are always vehicles for the fat guy (or the "ordinary" guy), the male comic who the network wants in its stable - Lopez, James, Gaffigan, Belushi, Ray Romano, et. al. Of course they want their onscreen counterpart to be a hottie.
Second, of course, is that the networks want 18-35 year old men to watch the shows. Family comedies may not be the most obvious viewing habit of these guys, but throw in a nice looking woman in small clothing and you'll get men to show up plenty. And its not just fake marriages as marriages. You don't think Law & Order viewship would go down if Sam Waterston's second chair was not a continuous string of absurdly attractive women (which his character may or may not be sleeping with)?
--TheAList
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…I suppose that the fact women watch more TV is a big reason the dynamic is so popular, as is the fact that women are typically the ones who control the household's purchases of the consumer products that are the staple of TV advertising. Women like to see main characters of their gender depicted as the clearly superior creatures, while men come across as barely-housebroken neanderthals who are cleverly controlled by their all-knowing spouses…
The interesting thing is that the more "meta" a sitcom is, the more heightened this tendency tends to be. For example, sitcom cartoons, which exist as both sitcoms and as alternate-world parodies of sitcoms, push this overgrown-kid thing to the extreme. Fred Flintstone, Homer Simpson, and Peter Griffin are downright retarded sociopaths, and their long-suffering wives are all clearly the more sympathetic characters. I guess "King of the Hill" is an exception to this, but Futurama sure isn't…
I think the reason these TV husbands tend to be loud-mouthed bloated halfwits isn't because the loud-mouthed bloated halfwits of the world want to imagine themselves married to someone who looks as gorgeous as a TV wife. Rather, it's because the women who make up the bulk of the audience imagine that they're gorgeous, wise, level-headed goddesses who somehow got stuck with loud-mouthed bloated halfwits, so that's the reality they respond to on TV. In light of the disproportionatley female audience for sitcoms, it seems sensible to assume it isn't male wish-fulfillment driving sitcom writing and casting choices, but rather that those choices have something to do with pleasing female viewers. For whatever reason, they like watching these overweight, overgrown infants in the husband roles.
--Arkady
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