By Terri Hamlin, San Diego Union-Tribune
January 1995 – It is not often that I have to miss work due to illness. After 21 years of teaching third grade in Chula Vista, I have become fairly bionic to sneezes, sniffles and little hand-borne germs. Even when I am sick enough to stay home, though, I still drag around, slogging through the chores that never seem to end. It is rare for me to be so ill that all I want to do is lie in bed and watch television.
But that is what I did the day Harriet Nelson died.
A virulent intestinal upset had sidelined me, and television seemed like the only way to while away the time. Since I am not a daytime viewer, I had decided to see what the talk shows were like, and the myriad of hosts and hostesses whose names I knew nothing about.
By the end of the day however, I felt worse but I couldn’t blame it on the flu. I had logged six hours watching seedy casts of dysfunctional people, who yelled and cursed as they wallowed around in the mire of their problems. Problems which all seemed to hinge upon gross aberrations of families and their interrelationships.
There were mothers who had slept with their daughters’ boyfriends, and parents whose children hated them. There were women who had stolen their sisters’ husbands, and fathers who had had sex with their daughters.
Every tawdry familial permutation was there for the viewer to see. How ironic that my first glimpse of tabloid-vision family structures occurred the very day that the television matriarch of America’s quintessential family, Harriet Nelson, had died.
Television has enjoyed a long history of showcasing the American family. The 1950s gave birth to the entertainment concept of portraying traditional white families who could laugh at themselves or learn tidy little lessons within 30-minute time blocks.
Enter Harriet Nelson. As the homemaking icon of television’s longest-running sitcom family, she could actually claim her TV relations as her own in real life. We were delighted with their weekly foibles, and those of other similar shows, which always found the characters somehow befuddled by the acute simplicities of their saccharin lives.
Our appetite for amusement was easily satisfied.
Of course, we now scoff at the absurdity of their mundane hurdles. But what we forget is that their long-range objective was to entertain us gently, as they gradually became additional members of the families within our living rooms.
Video families strove to be the hand mirrors that reflected the national conscience, maintaining its integrity as it exposed its light-hearted shortcomings. Even though we weren’t all white and supported by traditional family structures, we still absorbed the constructive modeling.
Later decades opened the way for extended definitions of the American family. Color crept into households. Single parents surfaced. Remarriages merged new groups together.
Weekly segments became more realistic as families confronted economic and social issues, but they remained positive in that families were shown as loving, caring units who could triumph over their hardships. In reaffirming the relevance of the family as a viable entertainment theme, television continued to also uphold the family as the honorable institution that it is. Or should be.
Somewhere along the way, television has mutated the American family to the lowest denominator for talk programs. Nothing more than a repugnant carnival freak show whose members are coaxed to shock us with lurid human transgressions, the family is being exploited by the stations, hosts, and hostesses who are eager to plunder the gold mine discovered by Phil Donahue and others.
What a time-serving gesture to now hear that Oprah has become disgusted with the sleaze she has been hustling for years, while she quietly made her millions. In recently admitting her show was always of the "trashiest," she says her new goal for herself "is to reach the highest level of humanity that is possible for mer." Sorry, Oprah. Too little, too late.
It is a tragic commentary of our times that we are willing to compromise our most sacred institution in order to hawk if for ratings dollars. Unquestionably, there exists a troubling percentage of family depravities in our society, but that is not a new phenomenon for mankind.
What's different, however, is our addiction to an increasing need for titillation, whether through violence, deviance, or prurience, that is stomping out the very core of our humanity. We are legitimizing our perversions and tragedies by sensationalizing them. The irony is, we will spend future scholarly pages and tax dollars analyzing what caused our anguished plight as a civilization in distress.
Until we realign out national backbone to be strong against such rampant media decay, those of us in our homes, schools, and churches who are toiling away, trying to instill values in future generations, are only rearranging the patio chairs on the Titanic. When we can demand that the media uphold the ideals toward which a civilized society should strive, there is promise that we'll someday achieve them.
Anyway, I'm glad Harriet didn't watch TV that day. I hope she will just remember the good old years. 
