Big Brother. Lionel Shriver

       chapter six

      Edison was touchy about any suggestion that he got the idea of playing jazz piano from Caleb Fields. Me, I could never remember whether my brother started studying piano with a storied black old-timer in South Central (not Melrose—our driver kept Jack Washington’s hairy address a secret from our parents, and so did I) before or after the first season of Joint Custody aired. Travis had always believed that Edison was competing with a television character, and was still riding his firstborn for aping the ambitions of a contrivance—though the imputation was rich, since our father’s fictional children had always seemed more real to Travis himself than his actual kids.

      Travis called the series a “cult show,” but if so the cult comprised exactly one person. In truth, Joint Custody was not one of those iconic programs like Star Trek that go on to distribute generous residuals. That woman at the airport, for example: she wouldn’t have been a “fan” of Joint Custody. She’d simply watched it. I wasn’t sentimental about most of the junk we’d parked in front of, either, although I was abashed to admit that I could still hum the theme song for Love, American Style and that I continued to nurse a nostalgic crush on the late Bob Crane.

      Calling the concept “groundbreaking” gave the show too much credit, but the producers did do their homework. Take a look at its forerunners. The Rifleman: a widowed rancher struggles to bring up a boy with a Tourettesian impulse to cry “Paw!” at every opportunity. Family Affair: a widower raises two insufferable brats with the help of a stuffy, charmless English butler. My Three Sons: a widowed aeronautical engineer with three boys finally remarries after ten seasons—wedding yet another hapless victim of spousal mortality. Flipper: the performances of a widowed father and two sons are all overshadowed by a bottlenose dolphin. The Andy Griffith Show: widowed, single-parent sheriff convinces even most North Carolinians that there really is a town called Mayberry. The Beverly Hillbillies: widowed hick makes a bundle on bubbling crude … oil, that is … black gold! Bonanza: a patriarch in Nevada ranches with three grown sons born to three different mothers, all of whom are dead. The Brady Bunch: a widower and (it is blithely presumed) widow with three kids apiece know it’s much more than a hunch! that the subsequent family show will live eternally in syndication, to Travis’s particular disgust. The Courtship of Eddie’s Father: a querulous little boy matchmakes for his widowed dad, whose being called “Mister Eddie’s Father” by the Japanese housekeeper the scriptwriters believed would continue to seem beguiling even after being repeated eight hundred times.

      Extraterrestrials who picked up the airwaves emanating from the United States in the sixties and early seventies would have concluded that our species was much like salmon, and once the females had borne their young nature had no use for them and they promptly expired. On the other hand, once you threw in the widowed women who spearheaded The Lucy Show, Petticoat Junction, The Big Valley, The Partridge Family, Julia, and The Doris Day Show, the married males weren’t exactly thriving, either.

      So the producers of Joint Custody were on a crusade. Nearly half the marriages in America were ending in divorce, and the failure to reflect this fact on television was hypocritical. (In The Brady Bunch pilot the mother Carol was divorced, but the network vetoed the idea; subsequent scripts never referred to how her marriage ended. The audience opted wholesale for the industry’s default setting. Only one competing program ever had an excuse: Eight Is Enough, in which a newspaper columnist with eight kids loses his wife after four episodes. The actress who played the wife really and truly died after four episodes.) Worse, claimed the producers, this misportrayal did a disservice to the legions of kids whose parents had split and who deserved to watch programs that wrestled with problems arising in fractured families like their own. This is old hat now, when TV series are cramming as many gays, transvestites, half siblings, and third marriages as they can wedge into half an hour, but it was radical for 1974. Alas, convincing my father that his becoming a network TV star was doing the nation a public service did not benefit his character, and it made him proprietary. When One Day at a Time came along, in which actress Bonnie Franklin is unashamedly divorced, he was resentful and accused the producers of having stolen the idea. So much for his championing of social realism.

      In retrospect, Joint Custody did form a cultural conduit between the doe-eyed sixties and the bottom-line eighties. The premise ran that the mother, Mimi (played by Joy Markle), has had enough of the hippy thing—leaving her idealistic husband, Emory Fields, reverting to her maiden name of Barnes, and going establishment with a family law practice in Portland (the show opened with a few pans of the Fremont Bridge, but it was shot in Burbank). Stuck in the past, Emory is an eco-warrior who lives in a cabin of his own construction in the Cascades, with no running water or electricity and only an outhouse; he grows organic vegetables that die. The role may seem farsightedly right-on in terms of more recent obsessions with conservation and climate change, but the scripts weren’t really sympathetic with Emory’s insistence on doing everything the hard way. Mimi despairs in one episode that his exclusive emphasis on not using up resources and not polluting the environment encouraged the children to believe that “the most they could hope to aspire to was to be harmless.”

      But in the main the program is about the three kids negotiating the tricky terrain of parents who hate each other, as well as the logistical travails of shuttling between households, given the eponymous legal arrangements. Mimi is authoritarian, less concerned for her kids’ creative expression than for their career prospects. Emory espouses countercultural fulfillment, and his permissiveness often gets his kids into trouble. That might have all worked okay, except two of the three children just had to be prodigies.

      Oh, that’s only one of the reasons we hated those two so much. Still, fictional aptitude is cheap, like athletic prowess from steroids. A scriptwriter can stuff a few token foreign phrases into the dialogue, and voilà: his character is fluent in eight languages. Sinclair Vanpelt played a precocious jazz pianist without mastering one minor seventh. As for why jazz, in 1974 every kid wanted to be a rock star, and the pilot’s development