TV Dads

From time to time, I'm reminded that my dad and I are more alike that I realize. He's an avid sports fan, particularly of baseball, and once coached his own team. I could care less about sports, and describing me as athletic would be hyperbole at best. My dad fixed cars while I watched cartoons about cars and played with toys. I've always seen my dad as strong and a man while I was weak and immature. He's bold where I'm afraid, but I think boldness is something that increases with age. As we get older, we care less about what people think, for better or worse.

As I drove us home from a parade on Saturday night, he reminisced about old times and old friends. A fellow band member in his fifties had earlier explained that he never got married because every girlfriend eventually wanted him to give something up or do something her way, and he wasn't willing to bend to someone else's will. I brought this up again as my dad was venting over the fact that he finally found a carpenter to do some work on our house, but my mom didn't like the guy, and if it were up to my dad he'd have taken care of things and hired someone already. Marriage is compromise, and the challenge is yielding to someone else's wishes when you might have made different or faster decisions on your own.

This discussion prompted my dad to tell me about an old friend of his who, during a period in his life when he wasn't talking to girls or asking anyone out, told my father, “Girls go to the bathroom too.” I found this funny on multiple levels. First and foremost, isn't that a great selling point? But what the guy was trying to convey was that females weren't magical, unapproachable angels, but human beings with feelings and problems like anyone else. On many occasions in my own youth when I confessed my paralyzing shyness, my dad actually gave me the same advice, but I never realized he was quoting something that had been said to him. By the time I was born, my dad was a married guy in his mid-forties. I grew up seeing a tough mechanic who spoke his mind and talked about sports. He had his act together and I always assumed my dad was some confident jock who didn't settle down until he was 40, not someone who was actually bashful and spent more time on his work than his personal life. We might have different interests, where he'd enjoy a baseball game while I'd have fun at a comic book convention, but in some ways we're the same person. Someday, when I have a teenage son and he can't ask a girl he likes to the prom, I might impart the same advice in spirit, if not the same crude words.

I know who my favorite real-life dad is. This week, Janet asked us who our favorite television fathers are. In no particular order, I would choose these five:

Henry Rush (Too Close for Comfort)
He could be blustering and scary at times, but he clearly loved his family and, most importantly, had one of the coolest jobs as a stay-at-home cartoonist. When a guy sits around sketching with a cow puppet on his hand, you know he's not so bad and I list that mental image among the reasons I pursued an art career.

Philip Drummond (Diff'rent Strokes)
I just remember him as one of the nicest dads on television. It was rare that he lost his temper with either his daughter or his adopted sons, and despite his wealth he was still a down-to-Earth guy. I haven't watched the show in about twenty years, so I wonder how it stands the test of time. In many ways his mannerism and willingness to impart lessons and morals hearkened back to sitcom models from earlier decades.

Al Bundy (Married...with Children)
“Let's Rock.” At the other end of the spectrum, Married...with Children promoted a more cynical and realistic view of family life. Al would come home from a job he despised, cheered for by only the audience, to a shrill wife, a loser son and an idiot daughter. He was a downtrodden everyman with his glory days left behind when he graduated high school. Yet, as the series went on, beyond four people living together and not getting along, at the core they were also a family. It was a characature, but more realistic than it appeared. Any one of them could annoy the others, but if someone on the outside threatened them they joined forces with a “Whoa Bundy!” From hurling his daughter's boyfriends out the front door to escaping angry mobs during a two-part vacation in Britain, at the end of the day Al took care of his clan.

Homer Simpson (The Simpsons)
Homer's another one who evolved, much like Al, and his character has had 18 years to be refined. I remember the early, crude animation, and how Homer was more of an angry father than a comical simpleton. He's an idiot and he screws up, but in the end he makes things right and his family loves him. More importantly, we love watching his antics and I can't wait for the movie.

Jack Bristow (Alias)
Jack Bristow may be one of the coolest dad's on television. He's aloof, and has trouble relating to his daughter, but we join the series just in time to learn why: he's a secret agent working undercover to infiltrate a bogus CIA operation. Once spy daughter and spy daddy learn how much they have in common, his facade begins to break down. He's still a badass, and sometimes protecting his daughter involves torturing or killing people, but beneath the cold exterior is a human being burned once, betrayed by a wife who turned out to be an enemy spy. He achieves his missions, but his daughter is his most important one and he makes many sacrifices for her over the show's five year run.

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Honorable mentions go to Heathcliff Huxtable, Harry Weston, and Hank Hill whose nuclear family bears a similarity to my own.