Fourth Wall Breakage

I was watching an episode of Family Ties today while I was waiting for the load in the dryer to finish tumbling and I found myself thinking. I know. This can be very, very dangerous, but I persevered in spite of the "No Trespassing" and "Beware of Dogs" signs.

The audience was having a personal moment with the Keatons in the middle of the night because Mallory was worried about one of her friends who had just discovered that she was pregnant. They were sitting around the table eating a chocolate cake. (Allow me to note here that this never happens at my house. On Golden Girls, the characters are constantly all getting up at the same time and inevitably end up digging into a cheesecake that just happens to be in the refrigerator. You just don't get up randomly in the middle of the night at my house without rousing one of our five dogs and causing no end of ruckus. There is also, regrettably, no cake involved. Instead there are drowsy questions and a desire to go to bed before you fall over. So I find the picture of Steven, Elise and Mallory sitting around the kitchen table eating cake together warm and touching, but highly unlikely. Same goes for Golden Girls. What group of women over fifty gets up at one in the morning to discuss a problem at work??? Most of the time, women over fifty get up and take another Advil and go back to bed which they never wanted to leave in the first place, let alone adding on another two pounds with midnight cheesecake which they're going to have trouble digesting anyway.)

But the cake wasn't the issue. It was the fact that all of the Keatons were in bathrobes. Seriously, what family actually wears bathrobes? I have one that I keep in case we have unexpected company or if I get treed in the bathroom without the necessary clothing. That's it. My family certainly doesn't walk around in terry cloth kimonos looking cute and Leave It to Beaver-ish. In my experience, people only wear bathrobes if they're cold or if they're having company.

The Keatons were wearing robes to indicate their familiarity with each other and their total unawareness of being observed, that being the whole point of the typical family sitcom. I, however, would have found the whole situation far more believable if Steven had showed up in old tennis shorts and a Bart Simpson t-shirt with a hole in the shoulder, rather than his pristine plaid bathrobe. So the whole point of television failed, because the fourth wall was broken and the audience became known. Otherwise, why else would Mallory and Elise have bothered with bathrobes? It wasn't like Steven hadn't seen them in their pajamas before, which I'm sure were of the cute and silken matching variety, that being what the typical mom and teenage girl wear to bed these days....