Hacker Cinema
Family Ties
1982 · TV series · 7 seasons
Created by Gary David Goldberg
Former 1960s flower children Steven and Elyse Keaton raise their conservative son Alex, daughters Mallory and Jennifer, and later, youngest child Andrew.
8 neutralfrom 8 commenters
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8 comments on Hacker News
Growing up in the 70s and 80s in Germany, I've been brainwashed by US movies and sitcoms, 90% of the things I've watched was from the US - Magnum P.I, Simon & Simon, The Fall Guy, Kojak, A-Team, Golden Girls, Mary Taylor Moore, Lou Grant, MacGyver, Knight Rider, Night Court, Family Ties, Miami Vice, The Wonder Years, Facts of Life, Love Boat, and on and on and on.
I know the US better than many parts of Germany.
In 1986-87, when Family Ties was at its peak, it had a rating of 32.7, which means almost a third of all US households watched the show every week.
That probably amounted to 60m+ people tuning in, which is close to Super Bowl numbers ... every week. The TV audience was concentrated then in a way it isn't now. Yellowstone gets less than 12 million viewers per episode today.
Maybe you think Meredith Baxter was better known, but I'll bet more people were paying attention to the teenager than the hippie mom. But let's say she was no 2, or no 5. She was galaxies more famous than the most famous people on TV today. And she has a CS degree. Which taken together is more astonishing than Ben Affleck opining on LLMs.
Some pop culture context. In the hit TV series "Family Ties" episode "Rain Forests Keep Falling on My Head" from 1989, Jennifer becomes very concerned about the environment, worried that if people don't act, the rain forests would be destroyed, the ozone layer destroyed, and we would live in a long hot endless summer.
Later, she's depressed since it's 1°F hotter than it was in 1956, and doesn't want to go to school, feeling like she's dealing with the end of the world.
The episode is available at https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8gyxf5 if you want to verify this yourself.
That was a fictional portrayal, certainly, but I doubt it was made up whole cloth. If so, the writers were extremely good at predicting how kids would react!
Things are significantly worse now than in 1989 - why wouldn't even more kids be worried?
That happened when the yuppies in the 1980s rebelled against their hippie parents and embraced Reaganomics. They made a whole sitcom about it (Family Ties.) Of course nowadays Alex P. Keaton would be an incel flogging NFTs and MAGA conspiracy theories and collecting Nazi memorabilia. History doesn't repeat but it does spiral.
Oh I remember this. There's one positive I take from this.
A lot of people are understandably upset at, say, the GOP's latest wedge issue: health care for trans children [1]. It's one of many from gay marriage to trans athletes to bathrooms to mask mandates to vaccine mandates to abortion to guns.
The positive I take from this is that manufacturing issues like D&D and Satanism is nothing new and despite these continued and deliberate attempts at stoking the fires of a culture war, things have gotten better. White exceptionalism and the lasting echoes of slavery continue to this day, for sure, but it is better. Back in the 1980s people talked openly about how if Black people moved into their neighbourhood it would lower home prices. There was even a Family Ties episode about it [2] (objecting to the irrational fears, to be clear).
Here's another positive actually: in the 1980s it kinda sucked to be a nerd. Now at least it's more accepted and the Internet gives lots of people (not just nerds) access to communities and likeminded people that just wasn't possible then.
Of course there's a downside: cyberbullying, the envy culture of Instagram (eg hundreds have died taking selfies [3]) and so on but there's a ton of good too.
People fall into a trap where they'e nostalgiac for the past. Our memories are selective. This contributes to people getting trapped into the idea that things are simply getting worse. Even if it's true (which I don't believe it is), it doesn't help you to believe that and this kind of pessimism is no way to live.
You even see it with people stressing about the threat of nuclear war as a result of the war in Ukraine. To anyone who was alive in the 1980s, this is really old hat. We lived with this threat for literal decades with a much more aggressive Soviet Union.
But yes, anti-D&D hysteria. That takes me back.
[1]: https://www.vox.com/22360030/trans-kids-health-care-arkansas-explained
[2]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0577277/
[3]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/10/03/more-than-250-people-worldwide-have-died-taking-selfies-study-finds/
> It is believed that a combination of genetic and environmental factors, such as pesticides and pollution, may cause Parkinson’s; Fox later learned that at least four cast members of Leo & Me, a Canadian TV show he starred in as a teenager, also developed early-onset Parkinson’s. “But believe it or not, that’s not enough people to be defined as a cluster, so there hasn’t been much research into that. But it is interesting. I can think of a thousand possible scenarios: I used to go fishing in a river near paper mills and eat the salmon I caught; I’ve been to a lot of farms; I smoked a lot of pot in high school when the government was poisoning the crops. But you can drive yourself crazy trying to figure it out.”
Completely unfounded speculation, but I always wondered what the effect of the absolutely grueling schedule of simultaneously filming Family Ties and Back to the Future was. (Sleeping in cars, working til 7am, just a couple hours of sleep a night).
> Gale said that Fox's youth meant he could cope with less sleep than usual. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_the_Future#Filming_with_Fox)
They'd already filmed half the movie and brought Fox in as the replacement. With so much on the line, did he take more than just coffee to keep going? Drug-induced 'Parkinsonism' is a thing. Having it progress like typical Parkinson's is rare, but it happens. (https://www.parkinsons.org.uk/information-and-support/types-parkinsonism).
Sorry ya without context, I don't suppose my comment made sense.
I grew up in Idaho and went through a couple of recessions. Most of the TV/movies from that time like Family Ties and Ferris Bueller's Day Off portray it as prosperous, but it was really more like South Park.
My dad practiced dentistry for many years but due to some house fires and other setbacks, we didn't have money until I was about 15. So I grew up eating a lot of lamb, deer, elk, farm fresh eggs, etc that he got when he traded out dental work because nobody had much money.
So what I was trying to say is, real prosperity to me would look more like if the 80s and 90s had continued so the US still had its manufacturing base today. A bit more like how Germany has prospered.
Instead we have the appearance for prosperity for most, but the bottom income half of the US is really struggling right now with multiple jobs, high debts, and not nearly as strong of a social safety net as we had then. So I question why that is necessary when some people are doing so phenomenally well. To me, America lost its way after the dot bomb around 2000 and never really recovered. Maybe I'm reaching though, if I'm seeing conspiracies just because we can't find a discontinued connector, which I fully admit haha.
There aren't that many 47 year old female undergraduates, let alone in computer science. And, in addition to describing her own experiences at UCLA, Bateman, is publicizing stories of older women going back to school in STEM subjects, as you'll see from her twitter and esp. her tumblr, where she lets some of these women tell their stories, at length.
And it's interesting reading about her interest in computer science, what it took for her to be able to be admitted to UCLA, her experiences with the courses and projects, etc.
Additionally, if you read her stuff, you'll see she is an entrepreneur, with her own company, who was trying to get Hollywood interested in doing projects involving digital media, the internet, etc. years ago but kept getting push-back.
And that's without any of the celebrity pixie-dust.
As far as that goes: she was on a very highly rated, award-winning TV show, along with Michael J. Fox, called Family Ties, back when tens of millions of people would watch a TV show.
And: given that the newly-revived Arrested Development just came out on Netflix, she happens to be the sister of Jason Bateman, who plays Michael Bluth.
tl;dr: she's quite HN-worthy.