Many audiences, however, were laughing sympathetically, and Alex Keaton emerged as a model of the clean-cut, determined, yet human entrepreneur. Goldberg's largely liberal writers usually depicted Alex's ideology ironically, through self-indicting punch lines. The crucial inter-generational dynamic of the show, then, emerged in a dialogue between viewers, who identified Alex as a compelling character, and writers, who were willing to reorient the show's themes of cultural succession around the youth. Audience reaction and Fox's considerable, unexpected authority in front of the camera prompted Goldberg and his collaborators to shift emphasis to the young man, a change so fundamental that Goldberg told Gross and Baxter-Birney that he would understand if they decided to quit. Once the show aired, however, network surveys quickly revealed that audiences were more attracted by the accomplished physical comedy, skillful characterization, and approachable looks of Michael J. The original casting focused on Michael Gross and Meredith Baxter-Birney as the crucial Keatons. He undertook the show as a basically autobiographical comedy which would explore the parents' adjustments to 1980s society and middle-aged family life. Family Ties' creator was Gary David Goldberg, an ex-hippie whose three earlier network shows had each been canceled within weeks, leading him to promise that Family Ties would be his last attempt. Significantly, the show's timely focus on Alex and his contrasts with his parents was discovered rather than designed. Here that conscience was kept alive within the loving nuclear family so frequently decried as an instrument of patriarchal domination, and so constantly appropriated by conservatives as a manifestation of their own values. And so Family Ties explored not just the cultural ironies of politically conservative youth, but the equally powerful paradox of liberal conscience. Yet (especially with Elyse) their liberalism could also emerge more authoritatively, particularly when it assumed the voice, not of ideological instruction, but of parental conscience and loving tolerance. If young Alex could be comically cynical, his parents could be relentlessly cheerful do-gooders whose causes occasionally seemed chimerical. Former war protestors and Peace Corps volunteers these adults now found fulfillment raising their children and working, respectively, as a public television station manager and as an independent architect. During the course of the show, Alex aged from an unredoubtable high schooler running for student council president, to a college student reconciled to his rejection by Princeton.Īlex's highly programmatic views of life led to continuous conflict with parents Steven and Elyse. He could equally be riddled with self-doubt about his mettle for meeting the high standards he set for himself. Yet Alex could also be endearingly (and youthfully) bumbling when tenderness or intimacy demanded departure from the social conventions so important to him. Keaton, a competitive and uncompromising, baby-faced conservative whose absurdly hard-nosed platitudes seemed the antithesis of his comfortable, middle class, white Midwestern upbringing. "When else could a boy with a briefcase become a national hero?" queried Family Ties' creator, Gary David Goldberg, during the show's final year. The result was a decade, paradoxical by America's usual post-World War II standards, in which youthful ambition and social renovation became equated with pronounced political conservatism. Airing on NBC from 1982 to 1989, this highly successful domestic comedy explored one of the intriguing cultural inversions characterizing the Reagan era: a conservative younger generation aspiring to wealth, business success, and traditional values, serves as inheritor to the politically liberal, presumably activist, culturally experimental generation of adults who had experienced the 1960s. Few shows better demonstrate the resonance between collectively-held fictional imagination and what cultural critic Raymond Williams called "the structure of feeling" of a historical moment than Family Ties.
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