Jewish Post, Indianapolis, Marion County, 25 November 1987 — Page 13

By RABBI ELUOT B. GERTEL

Thirtysomething (Tuesdays, ABC) is a new series that purports to explore life, marriage and baby-boom generation conflicts but rarely gets

I WMmmmmm beyond quasi-farcical vignettes couched in semi-liter-ate dialogue, which fail to deliver the promised realism and reflectiveness. As a result, the characterizations and plots are all too often constrained by pretentiousness and self-congratulation. True, and even surprisingly. Thirtysomething does somehow succeed at offering some interesting characterizations — and well-acted characterizationsat that. Yet the characters lack heart and authenticity — they lack character—because they emerge as mere prototypes of the "child of the 60's transplanted into the 80's" or, as we'll see, of "Jewish" or "Protestant" behavior. The first episode of Thirtysomething was a meandering and pretentious introduction to the cast and to their friends and business partners and socializing rituals. A second episode, about a motherdaughter conflict, was quite touching, but only because the nature of the theme forced the writers to get both more personal and more universal. The third episode of this first season, a veiy stagey and talking version of Death of A Salesman before anyone has decided to sell anything, is the best example so far of the "child of the 60's transplanted in the 80's" prototype. Business ethics, marriage, children, office, home, career—in sum, life itself — are examined, but with no values or criteria other than "Am I being loyal to myself, to what I used to be and used to say and used to believe?" After hearing this question posed week after week, the only response can be a resounding: Who cares? Talk about solipsim! Are there not values and concerns that tran-

scend even one's own youth culture, that bind generations in a common search rather than bestowing a self-pro-claimed nobility upon one

particular generation?

Thirtysomething is one generational; it's as transcen-

dent as a throw-away diaper. Neither great literature, nor religious tradition, nor homespun values, nor even simple human instinct are enough for these people, for any of them. Every relationship, every feeling, every thought is measured only against childhood memories and youth culture experiences. Even as primal a relationship as with one's child is not experienced, but talked out, or even talked at a baby. I feel sorry for the poor baby who is forced to listen to all the repetitious rhetoric. Indeed, the protagonists in this series never seem to cease talking about ethnicity, marriage, childhood, or even books. One of them laments that he and his wife may be too extravagant in installing bookshelves for books they will never read, yet one can't help feeling that even if this couple read a hundred books, they would use what they read to impress each other or their friends and measure what they read against their own youth experiences, instead of in any way being transformed or at least drawn out of themselves by what

they have read.

The couple to which I am referring seem, by the way, to have become the focus of what purported to be an ensemble cast. They are Michael Steadman and Hope Murdoch (played by Ken Olin and Mel Harris). The very first episode of the series opens with a flashback of Michael trying to calm down his best man: "When the rabbi and the minister ask you, all you do is hand me the ring." They never let you forget they're an interfaith marriage, any more than they let you forget they experi-

enced the 1960's.

In that very first episode, Michael is angry when the kids next door keep him and his wife awake with their loud party music, which may waken their baby. When he tells them to turn down the music, some of the kids yell back what sounds like "sha-

lom!" A few episodes later the interfaith marriage motif reappears, also in the opening dialogue of the show, when Hope and Michael return from an uncomfortable night out with another couple who vent their severe marital problem. "Admit it," Michael asks his wife. "You were totally freaked out by the naked display of raw emotion." "And you," Hope replies," a Mediterranean Semitic person found it invigorating?" "No," quoth he, "actually I was totally freaked out by the naked display of raw emotion." "I'm having a Presbyterian sleep reflex," she responds. These musings on "Mediterranean" (i.e., Jewish) emotion versus Presbyterian calmness pervade the entire episode. Michael actually becomes troubled that he and Hope do not seem to fight, and yet is terribly afraid when they do. He reminisces nostalgically about the "loudness" in his childhood Jewish home (about the "{permanent hearing damage from the decibel level in Dad's house") where at least one person always ended up crying during blunt family dinners. He tells a cousin that it's predetermined that he and Hope will "get old and have awful family dinners where everybody yells. I already pinched my daughter's cheek." This episode ends with Hope reassuring Michael that they can express the things that irk them about one another without fear that their marriage will break up or that small irritations always betray big problems. Is it Michael's "Jewishness" that is responsible for his insecurities, his worries and his fears? This is the implication of virtually every episode. In one segment in particular, Michael is veiy worried about the business. Hope keeps trying to extricate him from his insecurity and brooding. The dialogue turns to all kinds of historical associations. Michael suggests that his insecurities might go all the way back to when the Romans persecuted his ancestors. Hope reassures him that her ancestors came down from the North and pillaged the Romans. All this is aired in front

of that ever-patient baby. "I knew there was some reason I loved your mommy," Michael responds, confirming the episode's intended contrast between thebroodingjewand the perkier (but not completely perky) Protestant. Lest you think I exaggerate, consider that in the same episode Michael meditates on his grandfather's ability to come to America in 1917at age 19 as a "greenhorn" and provide for his family for 50 years. Grandpa, at least, is no brooder; in Russia he would protect Jewish kids from bullies (but for ten cents!). But even Grandpa left Russia because he was no match for the "cossacks" ("Bolsheviks"?). When Grandpa appears in Michael's dream the only guidance he offers is to urge Michael to become a "great man" and to urge him to get a haircut. If zaide's (grandpa's) ghost is so out of touch (Michael doesn't need a haircut anymore), what can we say about grandpa during his lifetime? And a ghost that urgesa grandson merely to "succeed" and win notoriety, so suggesting that love and respect are conditional on external accomplishments and not on inner values or commitments, is not worthy of Dickens, let alone Peretz. The upshot of it all is that Michael is very much the brooding Jew, and it is not to his ancestors or tradition that he can look for support, strength and comfort, but only to Hope's advice that "it's not the end of the world if you enjoy yourself just a little bit," or that "bad things may happen, but not as punishment for the good things." How ironic that Abba Hillel Silver in his classic volume Where Judaism Differed, points out that Judaism has been unique in the way it has mandated enjoyment of life and moral and ethical courage. To be fair to the writers, I have to say that I think that they find Michael's brooding positive and sympathetic, and that they are trying to be "realistic" and to open new ground in television by dealing with interfaith marriage. I think they see Michael as a kind of

small screen, domesticated Woody Allen. Thus, in a recent episode, Michael and Hope have a disastrous night on the town. When they are told at a fancy restaurant that their name is not on the reservation list and hence that "you are not here," Michael responds: "You're talking to a philosophy major." When they can't get tickets for a play they want to see, and end up watching a four-hour film called Swastika, Michael comments, "I don't think I ever felt life in a concentration camp captured so harrowingly," and Hope adds: "You felt like you were there." This is pure, unmistakable, and even snitched Woody Allen (even the Gershwin music is snitched from Manhattan ) — and early Woody Allen at that. Thirtysomething ignores Annie Hall, however, when Allen finally began todiscover that for every brooding Jew there is an equally neurotic gentile. The next step is to either explore Jewishness objectively or meaningfully, or to make it clear that a particular character has hang-ups about Jewishness which are not identical with Judaism, or to simply explore certain human hang-ups or problems without labeling them as "Jewish" or anything else. Thirtysomething has not gotten beyond early Woody Allen and has not let up on "contrasting" the Jewish and Protestant spouses because the writers really seem prepared to present "Jewishness" as a neurosis intended to ex-

plain, and win sympathy for, Michael's morbid and brood-

ing and downcast characteristics, which in turn highlight Hope's positive, upbeat and fighting nature. This is the TV approach to interfaith marriage in the 80's! It's difficult, however, to decide which is more demoralizing about watching Thirtysomething —the artificial contrast which reduces Jewishness to a not-so-private joke, or the haunting feeling that a whole generation, both on screen and off, may be in need of ghost writers with a broader and deeper perspective on a lot of things.

November 25,198/ Tage National 5

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