American Housewife is one of the sitcoms that can be found on ABC at the moment. In short, the sitcom is centered on Katie Otto, a housewife who is married to a university professor named Greg, with whom she has three children named Taylor, Oliver, and Anna-Kat. American Housewife starts out with Katie and her family having moved to Westport, CT, where she becomes frustrated by the other housewives in the surrounding, who tend to be rich, pretentious, and over-proud. However, it isn’t too long before Katie manages to pick up a supporting cast in the form of two other women with very different personalities as well as very different parenting styles.
For those who haven’t seen it, American Housewife is unusual because the mother character is the one who moves the stories forward. In short, there is a strong tendency for American sitcoms to have the father characters be the ones moving the stories forward by coming up with wacky plots of one kind of another. In contrast, the mother characters tend to be the ones who provide their families with a sense of structure by being their local bastion of sanity. For proof, consider both The Flintstones and The Simpsons. Furthermore, consider Claire over on Modern Family, whose existence should make it very clear that the concept is far from being a spent force in the present time. Under these circumstances, American Housewife is interesting in that it is Katie who is the one who comes up with wacky plots whereas her husband Greg is the one who serves as the more level-headed parent in the household. The sitcom doesn’t quite go with an inverse of the standard setup, but it is nonetheless very unusual and thus very refreshing.
Does American Housewife Give Housewives a Bad Name?
There are some people who seem to see this in a bad light. Those who are curious can look up the relevant pieces that have been written about the sitcom by using Google and search engines, but essentially, they seem to think that American Housewife gives housewives a bad name. While Katie is far from being a perfect character, this seems like a stretch for a couple of important reasons.
First, Katie is a mix of both positive and negative characteristics rather than a horrible blend of nothing but bad. For example, it is clear that she loves her children, as shown by the fact that she is perfectly prepared to take on other people for their sake. Furthermore, she isn’t afraid to stand up for herself, though in her case, it is strong enough that it can be either good or bad depending on the exact circumstances. With that said, Katie’s wackiness can lead her to some rather unpleasant routes, with an excellent example being her choice to infect her daughter Taylor with head lice so that the two could spend more time together. Moreover, Katie has a pretty distinctive parenting style that not everyone will like, as shown by her willing to let her younger daughter Anna-Kat watch Die Hard. Still, on the whole, Katie is more positive than negative, meaning that it isn’t fair to say that she gives housewives everywhere a bad name.
Second, there is no indication that Katie is somehow supposed to be representative of every housewife out there. This isn’t true in American Housewife because it actually presents a number of housewives with their own personalities as well as their own parenting styles. Moreover, this certainly isn’t true for American TV as a whole because housewives aren’t exactly a rare archetype on the TV screen. For that matter, it should be remembered that while housewives aren’t as common now as they were a few decades ago, they are by no means rare in American society. As a result, while there are people whose impressions of housewives will be shaped by the media’s representation of them, their numbers will be much smaller than the actual housewives with whom they have interacted with in real life, thus reducing the societal impact of any single representation of housewives in the media. Simply put, if the many, many bumbling dads out there on the TV screen aren’t giving fathers and husbands a bad name on their own, it would be rather unfair to say that Katie is somehow doing that for housewives, particularly since she isn’t even particularly egregious by sitcom standards.
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