DYS-functional

Your father comes home drunk, has a loud screaming match with your mother that wakes everyone up, and then he gets into a fight with your brother who tried to get in the middle.

OR

Your father packs up and leaves one day when you get home from school because he caught your mother with the pool boy.

OR MAYBE

Your sister goes into a drug-induced rage and stabs you in the leg with a carving knife.

Okay, so maybe your family issues aren’t as dramatic as these, but we’ve all got them. That friend of yours, the one with the perfect parents, and the best siblings in the world – yes, even she has family issues. We all think that we’re the only ones, or that ours are worse than everyone else’s.

Take a moment to reflect on your family for a minute. Maybe you see hints of the Addams Family, the family in Weeds, or the Sopranos. Which dysfunctional family of TV do you think bears the closest resemblance to yours?

My little rant here was inspired by the empty hole that was left in my life when the first season of Shameless ended. The Gallagher family takes dysfunctional to a whole new level. The mom left, the dad is in a constant drunken stupor and the eldest daughter Fiona is left to cope with the five kids – Philip the genius who’s tutoring a neighbourhood girl in return for sex, Ian who’s gay, Debbie who’s an adult in a child’s body, Carl who’s on the road to becoming a sociopath and Liam, the black toddler. 

The Fabulous Gallagher family

I do this with any TV show or movie that I watch or even any book I read – I become a part of the whole story. I somehow develop some sort of investment in the lives of the characters. I’m rooting for the bad boy who seems to have a good heart. I’m backing the poor misunderstood girl. So when Shameless came to an end – it felt like the family next door, who had become like my own family over the past 10 years, just up and moved away.

Is it because it’s just such a good show – or because they must be one of the most dysfunctional – yet realistically so – families I’ve seen on TV? It wasn’t that difficult to imagine life in the Gallagher family.

I got to thinking about why dysfunctional families on TV are so entertaining. And I came to the conclusion that it must be because they make us all feel better about the small ways in which our families are dysfunctional. Compared to the crazy insane, coke-whore-for-a-mother, Mafia-boss-for-a-father, serial-killer-for-a-son shows we have on TV, our families seem like the Brady Brunch.

I’ve been hooked on a lot of shows with dysfunctional families – Six Feet Under, Weeds, The Simpsons and Arrested Development. I could go on forever. And of course there have been some movies too – The Royal Tenenbaums and most especially, by far my favourite, made me cry and laugh like a little baby: Little Miss Sunshine.

And now I wait (not so) patiently for the second season of Shameless.

TV – putting the function back in dysfunction since the first season of Dallas and Dynasty. 

 

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