Family – The Complete First & Second Seasons

 

Picture: C+     Sound: C+     Extras: D     Episodes: B

 

 

Mike Nichols was a big filmmaker by the time the mid-1970s rolled around, with important films like The Graduate, Carnal Knowledge and Catch 22 under his belt.  These counterculture works were major successes, so to have Nichols do a TV series, let alone one called Family was a big surprise.  Could a TV show have the depth and insight to deal with today’s issues in a way it had not before, or would it just fall into melodramatic formula.  Well, at first, it met higher expectations.

 

Doug (James Broderick) and Kate (Sada Thompson) are great parents.  Mature, hard-working, intelligent and with great emotional depth, which is why they got married.  Their oldest daughter Nancy is married and has gone away, but in the pilot show, returns home when she catches her husband with another woman.  Still living there is their son Willie (Gary Frank) and younger daughter Buddy (Kristy McNichol in the role that made her a 1970s icon), who also have a good relationship.  The first season runs six shows and the Nancy character is not there much, but was played with naturalism and authenticity by Elaine Heilveil.  The show did well, but ABC wanted to be the #1 network, so Miss Heilveil was succeeded by Known actress Meredith Baxter and the show returned to some greatest ratings success.

 

Unfortunately, it also took a few turns for the worse.  Baxter is never as believable and even shrill in the role.  She does not even look like the rest of the cast members.  With McNichol back as an older, taller young lady, some of the charm and careful writing her character had in the first shows is not there.  Thanks to the Aaron Spelling style of drama, the conflicts become sillier and the show more noisy than it needed to be.  The second season has 22 shows in all, but they are not as strong as the first six and in the end, you feel as if a great show was lost for a good one to make more money.

 

Still, the Baxter seasons have their fans and all the shows have their moments of the naïve that shows the gentler world we once lived in.  Thompson and Broderick are always great, subverting the usual TV parents by simply being so real, while even someone as smart as Willie is never phony and Buddy is never precocious in a sickening way that that 1980s sitcoms like Baxter’s obnoxious Family Ties helped to sadly pioneer in a way that made bad “reality TV” possible.  Thus, looking at the shows in this set in chronological order makes for an interesting examination of U.S. TV in the 1970s and how a golden era would very slowly, but eventually slip away.  Seeing the follow-up seasons all these decades later should also be fascinating.

 

The 1.33 X 1 image is good for its age, remastered in High Definition as the case says and looking better than it ever has before.  Another show that has not been on TV as often as it used to be, the show looks good, though it has a slightly soft style typical of dramas at the time.  The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono is also good for its age, making it very watchable and rewatchable.  There are surprisingly no extras, but two seasons in one set is a good idea and certainly worth a look.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo