Hacker Cinema
Family Matters
1989 · TV series · 23 min episodes · 9 seasons
Created by Michael Warren, William Bickley
A long-running dramedy centering on the Winslow family, a middle-class African American family living in Chicago, and their pesky next-door neighbor, ultra-nerd Steve Urkel. A spin-off of Perfect Strangers.
2 positive2 negative9 neutralfrom 13 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
13 comments on Hacker News
I used to love watching Family Matters when I was a kid. I grew up in the 80s/90s. There was nothing "DEI" about Family Matters because it was just a show they made that focused on black families. However it was wildly popular for everyone because the things the families experienced were universal. Skin color does not matter.
Things changed drastically in 2020 (or probably even 2014). People started picking specific events to showcase black hatred. Some kind of specific moment where a cop killed a black person. That stuff happens and it does suck. But again, all of the people being accused of black hate literally loved "in living color" just a couple decades before.
A family friend's husband was shot to death because he didn't open a door to the police as he was going through an "episode" in his bedroom. His wife had called the police because he was yelling threatening things at her. The couple was white. Why didn't that make the news - it didn't fit all the narratives.
I would say most people on the left are in a cult created by the mainstream media and told exactly what to think in all these situations. The leftist cult needs to enrage people to support its causes. It's causes are linked to pulling at your empathy, not at pulling at good policies. Even if there is a grain of truth to "climate change", the selling of it was designed to get votes. The other side of it all has been reactionary. At this point people on the right are just like - ok, what's the new rage going to be this month, and why do I even care anymore. And for the most part its because every rage cycle is entirely predicated on the right combination of ingredients they can mix together to whip people into emotional thinking.
You don't have to EXCUSE Scott Adams for knowing this truth and then start speaking it.
Did AOC get leftist backlash as large as Good when she said to stop chanting for Hamas the other day? That's what the right has been saying for 3 fucking years.
Did Iran protests where reports of 12k people dead get encampments on the lawn of Columbia?
What about when Hamas murdered a bunch of Palestinians on a video a few months ago?
What FAKE rage cycle do you all want to keep participating in?
> That's not to say there wasn't artistic merit in the project as a whole
Yeah, I think what really made it work is the context of Seinfeld's conceit of being a "show about nothing" while also being so influential that people encountering it for the first time today tend to see it as a bland proto-sitcom. It wouldn't mean the same thing to give that treatment to a show like Full House or Family Matters.
> I don't like the values I see in the 1990s TV shows.
You think the world is better off now that we've traded Family Matters and Step by Step for the likes of Euphoria?
Conflict with neighbors is a common theme. But also friendship with neighbors. Wilson Wilson Jr in Home Improvement. Lawrence in Office Space. All the guys in King of the Hill. Even in some which start off with frustrations about neighbors sometimes shows strong bonds between them later like Grand Torino or Family Matters or even The Simpsons.
I think a lot of TV shows and movies show a lot of different perspectives of neighbors, and I'm not convinced it's mostly negative. Lots show some amount of strife with neighbors, but even a romance movie will often show some amount of conflict between the protagonists.
Subjectively-- many of the best "black" shows in the 90s were in the Traditional Sitcom category-- Fresh Prince, Martin, Family Matters, Steve Harvey show, etc.. Even though they touched on black issues, 80% of the shows' content was "typical American experience".
Perhaps the niche-ification of streamed content has resulted in Black shows that don't feel relevant to non-black people. And since the majority don't feel it's applicable to them, they lose the algorithm game.
Just a guess, I don't have any real evidence to back this up. But if that's the problem, it seems like it would be solved by this startup.
Yeah I'm just saying it was far more mainstream than is intimated. "Charts" have always been a marketing tool, it's questionable to me from the 80s on how much they reflect what people were actually listening to.
The point is that mass consumption of dance music was a huge thing in North America.
I mean it's funny. In the early 90s I went to visit my extended family in Germany. At that point I was already a major techno fan, but the funny thing is that when I went to Europe all my cousins, the music they listened to was mostly American R&B and hip-hop. Watching overdubbed episodes of Family Matters. Huge consumers of a side of North American culture that I did not. So to me the demographic situation is more complicated.
I think many Europeans on this thread might have a biased perception of what music consumption in the 90s in North America looked like based more on North American exports than on what was actually happening here. That and most people here are quite young.
I knew those already from being flooded for 40+ years with Hollywood films (all of them) and sitcoms, I know Cosby, Malcolm in the Middle, Beverly Hills 90210, Miami Vice, the Fall Guy, Seinfeld, Friends, Lou Grant, Mary Tyler Moore Show, Diff'rent Strokes, Cheers, Golden Girls, MAS*H (the best), Married... with Children, Three’s Company, King of Queens, Family Matters and on and on and on.
Basically I know the US better - or the image it projects - than my own country.
Funnily it was a huge letdown when I visited for the first time decades ago, as it felt just like a sitcom and there was nothing new really.
Yeah? Home Improvement, lead into by the TV series Family Matters? I think it's a stretch...
I really suggest this episode from the Owls at Dawn postcast:
http://www.owlsatdawn.com/episodes-2/2018/6/25/me-too-ism-wheidi-matthews-owls-at-dawn-episode-52
In it, Heidi Matthews, a law professor, goes into all the legal implications of the me too movement. The trouble with the whole movement is the way that many people in it seek legal guards in our framework, but which simply don't work in the really complex and nuanced ways our social relationships work. It's a really good and in-dept legal analysis that I highly recommend.
So let's take a step back: professors who marry students. My graduate adviser married one of his students (she was a grad student when he was a professor when they met). Where do wanted/unwanted advances being and end?
In this specific case, it looks like the professor kept going after this guy after he was clearly not interested. She should have stopped, right? Yes. Should this be a legal thing? Hmm... now we get into gray areas right?
Let's take a big step back to the 1990s and the TV show Family Matters. Steve Urkel was a creep. Go to YouTube and watch some old videos. He does a lot of really questionable stuff, his infatuation is stalker-ish and the show is written to sympathize the audience with his unrequited love.
I don't think this show would be made today, but we are talking about people in different age groups, different generations and totally different ideas of what is or isn't acceptable.
Louis CK asked for consent in many of the cases (there are two questionable reports, one where he stood in front of the exit and another where he didn't ask consent when he was on the phone with a woman; both of those are not OK of course). This consent doesn't matter because he was in a position of authority over them, or so the argument goes. But they're adults right? So when is consent not consent? When is a Yes not good enough?
I think there are a lot of complexities here that may not have legal solutions. Sex and sexuality are weird things, which is why we classify things as "fetishes". Most of the animal kingdom (cats, dolphins, fruit flys, ducks) all participate in non-consensual sexual activities (if animals had the ability to consent; also in most animals, sex last less than 1 minute, except for Bonobos, Dolphins and possibly a few others). There is an inherent violence that is a part of the core human psyche that goes with sexuality and we have to be willing to acknowledge and address that and the awkward way that doesn't fit into our legal frameworks.
There is a lot of complexity here and I think everyone should think really carefully and critically before taking any stances. It will affect the way people pursue relationships and how we think of ourselves (as sexual men/women/whatever). There are already A LOT of lonely people out there. I don't want to move to a world where people are even more afraid to connect than they already are.
> Murphy Brown
Great catch. I think Sorkin followed that model in Sports Night, probably trying to emulate MB's feeling of crashing into a busy production room. Can't think of an earlier one though.
I, Claudius also just had a title card, a snake crawling across a mosiac, but it somehow dragged that out for a full thirty seconds according to YouTube, so I'm not sure that really counts.
In film apparently Lucas got in trouble for not crediting the director in his title-only opening for Star Wars, leading him to resign from the guild. The practice became more common though, Clint Eastwood has done title-only openings for everything he's made.
Brief history of the length of opening credits sequences here, with Family Matters as one of the most excessive examples: https://theweek.com/articles/632836/brief-history-tv-shows-opening-credit-sequences
Even that misses Murphy Brown though, so now I'm not sure anyone's thoroughly done the research. Where's Abed when you need him?
As an european who has never visited the US, I'm totally unfamiliar with this kind of buildings, other than seeing them in TV Shows like Family Matters or Full House. Also, almost every single american woodworking YouTube channel is recorded in a garage of one this kind of houses. I find them huge, yet their popularity makes me think they're pretty common, maybe even affordable?
>I have to wonder how effective those heavy-handed episodes of Family Matters or Home Improvement were.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bflYjF90t7c
Never doing drugs again.
I had heard about this a few years ago and I find it fascinating. Entertainment being used for good! Its interesting how effective this particular show has been, so I have to wonder how effective those heavy-handed episodes of Family Matters or Home Improvement were.
I'm sure there are many examples of a TV show heavily impacting stuff that we encounter in our everyday lives, but I also would recommend reading The Power of Habit, as it has a whole chapter about how TV was used to effectively get people to start brushing their teeth before bedtime.