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The content of 1990s urban comedy has been about the risk and discomfort of alternatives. Tueth explores the characteristics of the 1990s urban sitcom, including new patterns of comic characters and plot resolutions and a new code for interpreting life.

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The show begins with a black-and-white photograph of the New York City skyline reminiscent of the opening moments of Woody Allen's Manhattan. In the same Allen style, there then follows a photomontage of the happy couple enjoying the city, strolling across a bridge in Central Park with the Dakota apartments behind them, hailing a cab in the rain, walking their dog past a churchyard, ordering food at a deli, browsing through a bookstore, returning from a trip to the corner grocery, buying flowers at a street stand, sharing wine and lunch by the Central Park lagoon, and walking along the East River promenade. Several shots show them engaging in public displays of affection: They are caught snuggling up to each other on that Central Park bridge; the man kisses the woman's shoulder as they wait for the subway train at the Union Square stop; they pause in the midst of a nighttime stroll down a crowded city street to kiss each other once again, and finally they commit to a serious kiss as the East River shimmers in the background.

The mood is thus set for Mad About You, the popular and awardwinning situation comedy starring Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt as Paul and Jamie Buchman, a young married couple living on 12th Street and 5th Avenue in the heart-or is it the belly?-of Manhattan. The funky, bluesy theme song creates a lighthearted romantic atmosphere for these two as they ` jump into the final frontier" of romantic love: marriage. And apparently they couldn't have picked a more likely place to succeed-the big city of the 1990s.

But the Buchmans of Mad About You are not alone on their adventure. Throughout the 1990s, television situation comedy moved almost all of its most popular characters into identifiable urban areas. Seinfeld, Friends, The Nanny, Cosby, Spin City, Caroline in the City, Just Shoot Me, NewsRadio, Veronica's Closet, The Wayans Brothers, and The Parent 'Hood have all been situated quite definitely in New York City. Murphy Brown is a major player in the Washington, D.C., media world, and Suddenly Susan's characters put out a magazine in San Francisco; Frasier's opening graphic is the skyline of Seattle; The John Laroquette Show begins with the star leaning against a model of the Gateway Arch in Saint Louis. Ellen and Cybill reside in Los Angeles, Drew Carey lives and works in Cleveland, and-if one considers her a comic character-Ally McBeal copes with her life and fantasies in a Boston setting. All of these programs make frequent references to their city, and certain ones set in New York City-most notably Seinfeld, Mad About You, and Spin City-make the city life essential to the plot.

The urban locale is only one feature that these programs share. They exemplify many other developments in the situation comedy of the 1990s. A few of them are based on the earlier standup material of their stars. For most of them, the pace of the dialogue and scenes is more rapid than earlier television comedy. And the family situations, or lack thereof, distinguish them from the pack of television families that inhabited almost all the situation comedies from the beginning. The scripts for these urban comedies have displayed new patterns of comic characters, relationships, plot resolutions and, in their effect on the larger culture, a new code for interpreting life in the 1990s.

Suburban Middle-Landscape Comedy as the American Dream

To understand the development of television's urban situation comedy, it is helpful to contrast its more fluid shape with the distinct outlines of another strain of situation comedy, what Hal Himmelstein has dubbed the "suburban middle-landscape comedy."

In these comedies, television's comic depiction of American life and the actual social ideal of the American family, for a period of almost twentyfive years, matched each other closely.

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In the 1950s and 1960s, the suburbs became the preferred locale both for situation comedy and for the living situation of white middle-class America. Himmelstein describes the era as a time when

workers found it desirable (and in fact were encouraged by the hegemonic demands of an advanced industrial economy reflected in corporate behavioral norms) to fan out from overcrowded, polluted, multiracial urban industrial inner cities into the overwhelming white suburban developments that sprang up to accommodate the rapid family formation in the post World War II era. (123)

Himmelstein pictures these suburbs in terms of the American archetypes of the journey into the wilderness that becomes the promised land, a paradise:

The suburb was the mythical space between two untamed rugged frontiers: the wilderness and the chaotic, dangerous inner city. It was a place where sanity prevailed, a place of full employment; conventional white, white-collar corporate families; clean streets, well-kept weedless lawns, neatly trimmed hedges. (123)

The television comedies that these families gathered to watch tended to display an idealized version of this suburban life in such long-running programs as Father Knows Best ( 1954-60), Leave It to Beaver (1957-63), My Three Sons (1960-72), The Donna Reed Show (1958-66), The Brady Bunch ( 1969-74), and the longest-running television sitcom to date, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952-66). These popular shows clearly captured the hearts of American viewers with lengthy runs and reruns through the 1950s and 1960s, and eventually became permanently installed in American popular mythology. Throughout the 1980s, reruns of Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, and The Donna Reed Show were shown at least twice a day on national cable as well as by numerous independent stations in local markets across the country (Mart 43).

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Gerard Jones describes the world of Ozzie and Harriet as "the suburban Neverland of family sitcoms, in which details of locale and occupation are intentionally evaded . . . a homogeneous threatless world" (42). The white middle class was eagerly joining the Nelsons in the suburban paradise. With the encouragement of government policies and the practices of homebuilders and bankers, the suburbs were growing at fifteen times the rate of the rest of the country, isolating the nuclear family in their ranch-style homes, away from their old neighborhoods, their extended family, and even from their new neighbors, whose houses were separated from each other by wide lawns, hedges, and fences. The suburbs represented the American dream of a new start in the new post-World War II era of prosperity, and people seemed eager to learn how to live out that dream from the examples of the Nelsons and other television families. The ideals of suburbia were quite clear:

Television-especially the sitcom-valorized suburbia as democracy's utopia realized, a place where the white middling classes could live in racial serenity, raising children in an engineered environment that contained and regulated the twin dangers of culture and nature. The American geniuses of Jefferson and Hamilton had at last found each other, producing coast-to-coast tracts of relatively egalitarian singleunit dwellings obtainable at favorable mortgage rates. The media campaign for this burgeoning way of life included the black-and-white nuclear family sitcom that proliferated on television during the late fifties and early sixties. (Marc 42)

The values and behavioral norms for such a lifestyle were communicated through the mild humor of these suburban sitcoms. As Himmelstein describes it,

this was the comedy of the true nuclear family. Sons and daughters struggled to grow up while their parents, who tended to smother them in piety and sociological wisdom, were constantly faced with their children's fantasies and nonsense, which, while illogical from an adult's point of view, were nevertheless refreshing and adventurous in a world of conformity and of fear of deviation from norms . . This universal generation difference defines the basic comedic structure of the genre in its 1950s and 1960s manifestations. It also simultaneously points, albeit indirectly, to a social reality in which the archetypal adult says to us, all children at heart, "When you grow up, you too will find it necessary to conform to the dominant ideology so that you may be successful like us." (125)

Even such a solid ideology was finally forced to yield to the social and economic realities of the 1960s and '70s, and television comedy also had to recognize the changes. The suburbanized nuclear family has made very few successful appearances on primetime since the Brady Bunch broke up in 1974. The two most successful series during the 1980s, for example, were Growing Pains (1985-92) and Family yes (1982-89), which offered significant tweaking of the standard formula. The mother on Family Ties was an architect, not a stay-at-home Mom, and the father worked at a public television station. The father on Family Ties, a psychiatrist, had moved his office into the home while the mother worked outside the home as a TV journalist. Hardly the Mom, Dad, and kids arrangement of earlier days.

Urban Situation Comedy's Earlier Stages

But television comedy was not always thus. The earliest situation comedy on television was set in the city. David Marc describes the first sitcom, Mary Kay and Johnny (1947-50), as a "silk-pajamas comedy" that took place in a high-rise luxury apartment house "in the high society environs of a Cole Porter Song" (42). But most of us are more likely to remember the two classits of early situation comedy, I Love Lucy ( 1951-57), which was set in a middle-class apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side, and The Honeymooners (1955-56), set in a decidedly working-class section of Brooklyn. Two highly successful radio comedies that were transferred to television as soon as possible were also set in New York City: Amos 'n'Andy in Harlem and The Goldbergs in the Bronx. But the classic Honeymooner episodes lasted only for a year. In I Love Lucy's third season, the Ricardos moved to Hollywood temporarily, and in the fifth season they moved permanently to Westport, Connecticut. The Goldbergs' (1949-54) and Amos 'n' Andy's (1951-53) legendary popularity on radio did not repeat itself on television for a variety of reasons, but mainly because neither one fit into the homogenized version of American family life that television soon began to portray. Even the two popular comedies of the 1950s that were set in New York City apartments, My Little Margie (1952-55) and Make Room for Daddy (19534), starring Danny Thomas, evolved quickly into domestic comedies with very little reference to their urban environment. The Patty Duke Show, a moderate success (1963-66) in the following decade, presented its Brooklyn Heights setting as a suburban situation. In visual style and comic content, these programs resembled the type of suburban family comedy that would come to dominate television for the next twenty-five years. Television comedy's early residency in the big city was brief.

Television's second era of urban comedy lasted a bit longer, spanning primarily the decade of the 1970s. The pioneer of this era was Daddy's Little Girl herself, Marlo Thomas in That Girl (1966-71), the adventures of an independent single woman in New York City. She did not, however, prompt a flood of imitators immediately. It took a few more seasons until viewers got to see Mary Tyler Moore as Mary Richards in Minneapolis, Bob Newhart as Dr. Bob Hartley in Chicago, and Archie Bunker in Queens. They also saw Rhoda Morgenstern, the Jeffersons, and "the odd couple," Felix and Oscar, in New York City; Sanford and Son and Chico and the Man in inner-city Los Angeles; Laverne and Shirley in Milwaukee; and JJ and his family of Good Times in the Chicago projects. The plots of these comedies often included references to urban problems: muggings, city traffic, overcrowded subways, and even the power outages that made New York City the symbol of modern civilization run amok. The October 1974 full-hour episode in which Rhoda's wedding almost never happened because of various urban disasters typifies the pattern.

The 1970s ended with some highly popular ensemble comedies set in clearly identified urban locales: WKRP in Cincinnati, Taxi, Barney Miler, anti Welcome hack, Kot ter. In these urban ensemble comedies, an element that had been emerging in the previous sitcoms of the 1970s became more explicit. The characters in these shows were more exotic, often with clear ethnic characteristics and other qualities that identified them as marginalized from the mainstream. For these characters, the chaotic urban setting was the appropriate-perhaps the only--environment where their eccentricities could be tolerated, or maybe not even be noticed. One thinks of the Gravedigger's explanation of Prince Hamlet's departure to England, where his madness would not draw attention, for "there the men are as mad as he" (Ham. 5.1.155). Perhaps, after seeing so much urban unrest on the nightly news, the television viewers in the suburbs and towns of 1970s middle America likewise felt that these modern-day madmen and women fit right into the big-city chaos.

Urban Comedy's Third Stage-- City Life in the 1990s

The urbanites of 1990s television, however, have not come across, for the most part, as eccentrics, but often, even with their quirks, as something close to role models. Most of them are educated young professionals. Their lives revolve around both home and work, and their relationships cross those boundaries regularly. Influenced by the genre of workplace comedy that began with The Mary Tyler Moore Show and evolved so brilliantly into Cheers, many of these shows' characters spend a good deal of time on the job or talking about their jobs, and, in many cases, most of their relationships originate in the workplace. They experience personal success and frustration, engage in romantic entanglements and various forms of friendship, and occasionally learn some life lessons mainly in the office. These new patterns fit the description once given of The Mary Tyler Moore Show as "All in the Work-Family." Mary's last speech, on the show's final episode, could not have more straightforward: "What is a family? A family is people who make you feel less alone and really loved. Thank you for being my family" (Stark 171). In the 1990s comedies, the gang in the office or the friends who hang around the apartment have become the family.

The few shows that are not primarily work-centered are usually not set in traditional home environments. The apartment dwelling of Mad About You may be the most traditional setting, but at least until their baby arrived, the Buchmans seemed to use their apartment as more of a launching pad for their urban experiences. Episodes of the show regularly include scenes in specific New York restaurants and Broadway theaters, hospitals, parks, workout gyms, and famous tourist attractions. Cybill's Los Angeles home, at first glance, may look like the set of The Brady Bunch. However, Cybill is a twice-divorced career woman, living with a very independent daughter, two ex-husbands frequently visiting, and a best friend who usually arrives with a martini shaker or a fresh boyfriend in hand. The apartments of the characters on Friends seem more like the best of all possible college-dorm arrangements with adjacent men's wings and women's wings on the same dorm floor. And the area that serves as Seinfeld's living-room-- cum-kitchen (where, to my knowledge, no dinner has ever been prepared) has pretty much of an open-door policy, hardly any more private than the corner restaurant where the odd foursome meets for most of their meals. None of these environments enjoys the locked-- door privacy of most American homes.

Family arrangements are also quite changed from the days of Father Knows Best and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. For the most part, these new urban characters are not married, so that children seldom play a part in the shows' comic plots. In contrast to the loving, wise, and mildly authoritarian parents of Father Knows Best and the other suburban situation comedies, the parents and other relatives of the 1990s sitcoms are generally problematic, even bizarre. Mel Brooks as Uncle Phil on Mad About You and Jerry Stiller as George Costanza's father on Seinfeld are two prime examples of the pattern. Given the single status of most of the characters, the plots naturally involve romantic entanglements and explicit sexual dialogue and situations. But why not? All of these family patterns probably look as familiar to the eighteen- to thirty-nine-year-old viewers of the 1990s as the picture of Mom, Dad, and the kids did to that same demographic of the 1950s.

The main characters of these new comedies are generally attractive, well educated, and/or well respected in their professions. Yet for all their intellectual or professional superiority, they are often emotionally confused, even childish. They lack the wisdom and common sense of the adults in suburban comedy. But Ozzie and Harriet and Ward and June, while likable, were not a whole lot of fun. Their lowkey approach to life's challenges apparently served as a behavioral model to viewers in the Eisenhower and Kennedy eras. The heroes of the new urban comedy, however, have replaced common sense with passionate intensity. The nervous stand-up comedian styles of Paul Reiser, Ellen DeGeneres, Jerry Seinfeld, and Drew Carey have set a new emotional tone. The new comic heroes have personal histories that often set them apart from the statistical middle ground in America: Murphy Brown is a recovering alcoholic: Ellen is gay. Many of the lead characters dare to be unlikable, irresponsible, even hostile. These idiosyncracies, however, are usually the consequences of their superior intelligence and emotional intensity. A new synthesis is thus achieved. The eloquent sarcasm of Dr. Frasier Crane, the articulate impatience of Murphy Brown, and the sudden outbursts of Kramer, George, and Elaine are more delightfully offbeat and quirky than mild-mannered Ozzie and Harriet, end yet more socially and intellectually respectable than the comments of the sweathogs in Kotter's classroom. Mix outward respectability with inner demons, and you get Ally McBeal.

Plots and dialogue show a similar development. David Marc outlines the traditional structure of the sitcom episode as follows: Familiar Status Quo-Ritual error made-Ritual lesson learned-Familiar Status Quo. To illustrate the consistency of this pattern, Marc provides examples from I Love Lucy, Bewitched, All in the Family, and Cosby (190). This is a milder version of the classic pattern of New Comedy described by Northrop Frye and Susanne Langer, in which the tyrannical order ruling the action early in the play is disrupted by comic chaos, resulting in a newer, freer order favoring youth and fertility in the "mythos of Spring."1

The plots of the urban comedies of the ' 90s, however, are generally more complex. Many of these comedies, especially those with more fully developed ensemble casts, work with a series of shorter scenes and the interweaving of several situations. Seinfeld, of course, is the best example of this so far. I once counted twenty-five separate scenes in a twenty-twominute episode. Seinfeld's hectic pace enables the development of a separate conflict for each of the four main characters, all of them eventually dovetailing or colliding with one another in mutual disaster. Friends, Frasier, Spin City, and NewsRadio often employ the same multi-plot structure.

Another pattern, also exemplified best by Seinfeld, is the method of resolving these comic conflicts. Typically, the schemes and plots end in frustration and disaster. Yet unlike the classic schemers Lucy Ricardo and Ralph Kramden, the new comic characters are not reconciled to their failure by the loving forgiveness of a long-suffering spouse. No one seems to learn any valuable life lessons, nor, as Marc phrased it, is any ritual lesson learned. Unlike Beaver Cleaver or Ricky and David Nelson, Jerry or George or Kramer or Elaine end up frustrated, unenlightened, unreformed, and quite likely to return soon to the same misguided behavior. So do Joey, Chandler, Monica et al, on Friends.

Even though they are doomed to repeat their comic history week after week, television's urban comedians seem to be having a perfectly wonderful time doing so. Their various hopes and dreams spring eternal precisely because they live in an environment that promises endless possibility. This strange combination of cynicism and optimism in the urbancomic viewpoint resembles F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous description of driving into Manhattan from Queens: "The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world" (The Great Gatsby 75). The comic viewpoint is one of eternal promise; no catastrophe is final. Tomorrow is another day.

Television's New Presentation of the City

The reasons for this new comic perception of the city in the 1990s can be found partially in the actual changes in both the urban and the suburban environments in America. The decline in the urban crime rate, the increase of mass transit in many cities, the renovations of downtown areas, the revival of older city neighborhoods, and the return of many baby boomers and Generation X to city dwellings have changed the actual face of many of our large cities. Meanwhile, the suburbs have begun to look more urban, with more business offices, shopping centers, high-tech manufacturing complexes, and other "industrial campuses" locating in suburban settings, along with more ethnic diversity in the suburban population. In short, the suburb as the white middle-class haven from the evils of the city is no longer operative. The suburbs look less like Paradise; the cities look less like Hell.

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However, rather than considering the actual changes in the city-suburb dichotomy, it is more germane to look at the ways in which the urban environment, signified primarily by New York City, has been presented in the television medium itself. Television has been reshaping the urban myth before our very eyes. The new vision portrays city life as fun. In 1993, when David Letterman moved The Late Night Show to a refurbished CBS studio in the Ed Sullivan Theater on 53rd and Broadway, he made that upper Times Square neighborhood into his playground for grownups. The local storekeepers-- especially Rupert Gee, the genial proprietor of the Hello Deli, and Sirajul and Mujibur, who run the souvenir shop on Broadway-became Dave's playmates. They use the city streets for bowling lanes and race tracks; Dave employs the corner telephone booths for adolescent practical jokes. Even the more risque elements of the neighborhood, like the Topless Show Palace across the street from the theater, become toys for Letterman and his viewers. By his constant interaction with the city residents and tourists, engaging in playful conversation with waiters, taxi drivers, police officers, and firefighters, Letterman has contributed significantly to the new image of Times Square area as a safe and friendly playground. His rival Jay Leno has not been able to exploit his show's "beautiful downtown Burbank" neighborhood in any comparable way.

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In other genres of television programming, the image of the city combines a sense of importance and a chance to engage in good, clean fun. In 1995 NBC's Today show moved its studios back to the street-level location it had enjoyed in its early days when Dave Garroway hosted the program and the chimpanzee J. Fred Muggs entertained passersby from his perch in the display window. Today's daily presentation of happy people in Rockefeller Center waving and offering greetings to the viewers across the nation certainly sends a message, which has been repeated by the Fox Networks News Studios on the corner of 6th Avenue and 48th Street and the relocations of CBS's The Early Show to the corner of 5th Avenue and 59th Street and ABC's Good Morning America to Times Square. Every weekday morning Regis and Kathy Lee and Rosie O'Donnell testify to the joys of living in the city. In 1997, MTV moved its main studio to Times Square and regularly takes its young viewers out into the streets.

Meanwhile, above the fun and games on the street, the excitement of world events is captured by the network news moguls. NBC Nightly News begins its standard nightly telecast with an awe-inspiring view of the GE Building in Rockefeller Center as NBC's "World Headquarters" and closes each evening's news with a live shot of Tom Brokaw's image on the megascreen in Times Square, making the obvious point that these two spots in midtown Manhattan are the center of the universe. Dateline NBC also begins with a flashy view of the New York City skyline.

And through all of this, for more than twenty years, Saturday Night Live has begun every show with its signature announcement, "Live . . . from New York . . . it's Saturday Night." An entire television generation has grown up being told that the best place to spend a Saturday night is New York City. Along with these daily, nightly, and weekly messages, television provides the nation with the sight of celebratory New Yorkers and tourists at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and New Year's Eve in Times Square, major athletic championship matches at Madison Square Garden, and legendary performances Live from Lincoln Center. Television's message is consistent: The city is fun.

The credibility of this televised presentation of urban life is enhanced by the urban situation comedies' frequent interactions with "the real world," a device not often employed in the previous eras of urban comedy. Seinfeld's television universe includes George Steinbrenner, J. Peterman, Keith Hernandez, and a "Soup Nazi' character based closely on an actual soup restauranteur in Manhattan. The person on whom the character of Kramer is based now gives "Kramer Reality Tours" of sites in New York City that have been featured in Seinfeld episodes. Several news anchors and political figures have appeared on Murphy Brown, whose feud with Vice President Dan Quayle in the 1992 elections mixed various levels of reality and performance. As befits a show set in a newsroom, the final episode of Murphy Brown presented its usual pattern of topical references, in this case, the Microsoft lawsuit, the movie blockbuster Titanic, and, of course, Monica Lewinsky. Ellen DeGeneres timed the "coming out" of her sitcom character with her announcement of her own homosexuality and, during the show's last season, featured occasional appearances by her real-life partner, Anne Heche. The overall impression is that the televised portrayal of urban fun is not that different from the real lives of these urban celebrities.

In a similar mix of fact and fiction, these comedies employ a pattern of self-referential devices. They frequently cast television icons as guest characters. Carol Burnett and Carroll O'Connor have appeared as the parents of Jamie Buchman on Mad About You. Sid Caesar and Mel Brooks have played the role of other relatives of Paul Buchman. Tom Selleck appeared for several episodes as Rachel's love-interest on Friends, and, in another episode of the show, George Clooney and Noah Wylie, the sexy young doctors on E.R., played sexy young doctors dating Rachel and Monica. Marion Ross of Happy Days fame has appeared as Drew Carey's mother, and Tammy Faye Baker Messner has played the mother of the makeup laden character Mimi on the same show. And although not a familiar face, the veteran television producer Garry Marshall's recurring role as the television station boss on Murphy Brown follows the same pattern of interweaving comic fiction with references to the history of television comedy.

It is worth noting that this comic vision of urban life on television coexists with prime-time drama's alternafive view of the city as harsh and dangerous. Ever since Dragnet's Sergeant Joe Friday's acknowledgment of Los Angeles in the cryptic expression, "This is the city," police, law, and medical dramas have exploited the possibilities for disaster that large cities offer. The '90s have not changed the pattern, as the officers of NYPD Blue and Homicide, the doctors and nurses of E.R. and Chicago Hope, and the police and lawyers of Law and Order and The Practice wend their way through the mean streets of mayor American cities, in some cases filming the shows in the actual urban locations. It is a nice coincidence that the same Union Square subway station is shown, to differing effects, in the openings of both NYPD Blue and Mad About You.

A more problematic difference between the urban situation comedies and the melodramas is the racial composition of the casts. Many of the main characters of the nighttime dramas are African American or Latino, portrayed by such respected actors as S. Epatha Merkeson, Benjamin Bratt, Andre Braugher, and Jimmy Smits, along with the frequent appearance of ethnic minorities as criminals, drug dealers and users, or victims of urban violence or accidents. However, very few minority characters appear on a regular basis in the situation comedies. The workplace ensembles of Spin City, NewsRadio, and Veronica's Closet, for example, include one African American each. Of the hundreds of characters who have wandered in and out of the world of Seinfeld, only a small percentage have been from Latino or African American populations, with the notable exception of the controversial Puerto Rican Day episode near the end of the show's run. A look at the cast lists of the other urban situation comedies would almost make one think that only white people live in our major cities. Or the more disturbing message might be that only white people have a chance for any happiness in the city. Tom Carson, television critic for The Village Voice, may be right when he calls the world of Seinfeld and Mad About You "vanillaland" ( 169).

The New Suburban Comedy of the 1990s

Alongside this fascination with city matters, television comedy of the 1990s has not completely deserted the suburbs or small towns of America. They still can be found on our small screens; they just look a lot different. Even the closest imitator of the traditional suburban-comedy pattern, Home Improvement, has modified the genre by showing what the husband-- father actually does at work, and, because his job is in a television studio, providing comic commentary on the television medium itself, most notably with the use of outtakes from the episode shown during the program's closing credits. It also features a wife and mother who works outside the home. Most of the other shows not only vary from the formula, they ridicule it. The Bundy family of Married with Children is a far cry from Ozzie and Harriet. The relatives who live next door to Ray Romano on Everybody Loves Raymond are quirky and annoying. The small-town environments of Roseanne and Grace Under Fire seem oppressive or boring, best addressed by their inhabitants with cynical and even desperate humor.

The harshest criticism of suburbia can be found in the most innovative comedy of 1990s television, the animated series. The teenage phenomenon Beavis and Butthead and its spinoff, Daria, have succeeded in capturing the banality of the suburban mall culture perfectly. The Texas suburban situation of King of the Hill is stifling. The creators of The Simpsons deliberately put their ideal dysfunctional family in a town named after the hometown of Father Knows Best, Springfield. The inhabitants and settings of the quasi-horror-world of South Park are drawn as cartoonishly as possible, living in a flattened, unidimensional world of violence and profanity. The transgressive humor of these cartoon shows has clearly fascinated the younger segment of television viewers, articulating perhaps their own dissatisfaction with the American Eden of suburban and small-town life.

Television City and All That Goes in It

The change of locale for television situation comedies in the 1990s raises questions about the shifts in the values and attitudes of American television viewers. First, the city, not the suburban world, has become the locus for comic adventure for single adults and young married couples, at least on television. Does this reflect real life? David Marc recently commented about the image of New York City on television:

You have to wonder what's the cart and what's the horse, if how we've seen New York portrayed in sitcoms and dramas over the years reflects reality at all or whether it's just Hollywood responding to what it thinks the public wants and then creating an image to suit its purpose.'(qtd. in Hass 1)

One cannot help noticing, in any case, how neatly the "urban revival" on television coincides with the Disneyfication of Times Square and similar transformations of downtown areas throughout the country.

Second, the flexibility of the sitcom family structures and relationships acknowledges and encourages a diversity and tolerance in contrast to a monolithic nuclear family ideal, especially when the portrayal of the family ideal is unrealistic. Some of the cast members of those classic family comedies have gone on record to question the effect their oversimplified and narrow portrayals had on the real families who, after watching these shows, found their real family life so inferior and disappointing (Denis and Denis 552). These more flexible family arrangements at least avoid such false idealization.

Third, television comedy no longer relies on zany housewives or mischievous children for its comic confusion. Television's adults are quite capable of getting into trouble on their own. The urban culture is confusing and risky even for intelligent, relatively mature men and women. The comic chaos grows out of the indeterminacy that underlies postmodern art, science, literature, and philosophy. The postmodern city itself, with its negotiations of the urban elements of commercial and residential zoning, environmental interests, commercial development, vehicular and pedestrian traffic, care for the homeless, exploding rental and purchase prices, criminal activity, and so on, is one of the best examples of rational planning imploding on itself.

Fourth, television's comic conflicts need not be resolved with parental wisdom, spousal forgiveness, or any other mechanism. Comic situations are allowed to remain frustrating or confused in accordance with the general indeterminacy and unpredictability of modern life, a realization that some of the standard questions of the human condition are irresolvable. Modern urban life has exacerbated the conflicts between human freedom and social interdependence, personal values and societal demands, instinct and discipline, the very tensions that have generated comic plots since the days of the Greek satyr plays.

Finally, the 1990s television comic heroes need not be admirable (nor, for that matter, do the heroes of the dramatic shows). We are not surprised to find that someone with considerable professional credentials, with a salary to match, has major personal problems and inadequacies. A similar attitude prevails in the political realm beyond the television city, where the American citizenry in the 1990s claims to disapprove of its president's personal behavior while simultaneously granting him a large vote of confidence for his job performance.

Steven Stark concludes that Seinfeld merely "reflected a new adolescent sensibility sweeping America in the 1990s:' He describes the fourteen-yearold sensibility of Jerry's gang of boys, with one girl allowed to hang out in their clubhouse, their inability to hold regular jobs, their sexual contests, and their anti-authoritarian mischief. He compares them to other cultural bad boys such as Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield. Stark contrasts the "eccentric individualism" and "flight from adulthood" of Seinfeld with "the gentle ring of mainstream truth" shown in the contemporary suburban sitcom Home Improvement. Stark contends that Home Improvement has been "a better reflection of who we are, despite major social changes over decades. . . . Viewers still feel more comfortable with the Cleavers and the Bradys than they do with the Seinfeld alternative" (284-87).

But have television viewers of the 1990s looked to television comedy for comfort and gentle truth? I think not. The content of 1990s urban comedy has been about the risk and discomfort of alternatives. It is not a rush toward a monolithic, mainstream ideal, but a tumbling convergence of various channels of information and values. The style of these comedies is consistent with the wave of "urban" fashion in 1990s clothing, popular music, stand-up comedy, and film. The ' 90s urban attitude thrives on diversity, wraps its statements in irony, blends self aggrandizement with self camouflage, moves to a funky rhythm of street sounds and movement. The fifteen-second scenes on Seinfeld and the non sequiturs of Phoebe on Friends all move to the same urban beat.

I suggest that this latest wave of television comedy resembles in many ways the characters' situation in Shakespeare's last comedy, The Tempest. The play is set on a island not unlike Himmelstein's "middle-landscape," where Prospero the magician has managed to shape the primitive landscape and tame the native inhabitants to create an artificial utopia. But the island's peace is disturbed by the arrival of shipwrecked Europeans, who in their arguments with each other and their plots against Prospero are just as immature and self-absorbed as any of the twentieth-century urbanites on Seinfeld, Frasier, or Spin City. However, when Prospero's daughter, Miranda, first encounters them, their beauty amazes her.

Perhaps the television viewers of the 1990s have felt the same fascination as they gaze on the comic inhabitants of television city. As they watch Kramer come tumbling once again into Jerry's apartment, or enjoy the multiple sexual embarrassments of six attractive "friends," or observe as the professional facades of Murphy Brown, Frasier Crane, or the fictional mayor of Spin City crumble about them, these viewers glimpse new paradigms for human behavior, offering freer forms of self expression that allow for failure and propose new definitions of personal success. In such moments of comic insight, they may have found themselves exclaiming with Miranda:

O wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world

That has such people in't!

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[Author Affiliation]

MICHAEL V. TUETH, S.1., is an associate professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University, where he teaches courses in analysis and appreciation of film and television with special interest in the comic genre. He has begun a book-length study of television comedy and American values.