Review – "thirtysomething" by Miriam Stone
It made its debut in 1984, the year Newsweek devoted its December 31st cover story to what it called the “Year of the Yuppie.” The article was long but the word “yuppie” was never clearly defined. Even the characters of thirtysomething spent a lot of their time defining and redefining the word to allow them selves to fit into it or to shun it depending on their particular whimsy. Michael summed it up one week when he cried “I’m not a yuppie. I don’t have lots of money or great cars or a nice house. I want those things, but I don’t have them!”
Thirtysomething has been described as a cultural touchstone; a cautionary tale about marriage; a saga about communication issues between the sexes and a keen a barometer measuring the national mood.
And yet there are those who tuned in to watch the same seven people struggle through their day to day crisis’s and all they saw were these seven grown-ups who did nothing but constantly whine. And that is also true.
But thirtysomething was a show about people striving to be a little better and to have an identity separate from the ones their parents saw for them.
The women, Hope, Nancy, Ellen and Melissa were dealing with the changing role of women in society. They were multidimensional in their approach to life and their desire was not to become merely an appendage of a man, a ruthless career woman or even just stereotypically dissatisfied.
Their male counterparts were also in a state of flux. They were dealing with marriage, family life, fatherhood, sexuality, and friendship. And these roles were built not only on work and play, but on political values, inner doubts and soul searching.
Work was dealt with in ways that television series have rarely attempted. Michael and Elliot owned their own advertising agency and they often found themselves walking a balancing beam between the economic necessities of the business and the moral compromises they had to make for it. Elliot’s sense of creativity clashed with Michael’s sense of social responsibility.
If this all sounds like each week was a moral value lesson, it may have been but you would be hard pressed to find it. When this show was funny, it was incredibly funny. And it found humor every week in all the day to day struggles of these flawed, incredibly likable people. When it was sad, people cried. And when a character got mad, the audience worried.
And never, never was a story line tied up with a bow at the end of the hour. Life goes on and so did theirs. Week after week you could tune in to the continuing adventures of these very human characters as they struggled through their days just like us and at the end of the hour you could somehow feel that maybe you didn’t get it so wrong that week. After all if these people couldn’t get it right and they could still survive and laugh, we could to.
