After watching “my family” I have gathered some information on how each family member is represented.
Ben Harper (the father)
Ben Harper is portrayed as a very middle class, grumpy, sarcastic, yet careless character that seems to believe that life, and everyone that lives; is miserable. Ben shows this by constantly going on about how he can’t wait until his death and by being rude to almost everyone he sees, unless he really needs something. Ben works as a dentist, which he hates, there are a lot of jokes and references about how he got into dentistry because he couldn’t get into medical school and how dentists are just failed doctors.
Susan Harper (the mother)
Susan Harper is also portrayed as middle class but she is very easy going, polite, funny at some points and a bit of a control freak. Just like in a traditional family Susan is a housewife who cleans, deals with the children etc. But unlike a traditional family, poor Susan can’t cook to save her life. I think that this was to an unconventional aspect to the family because generally, one would expect a housewife to be able to cook for her family since she has nothing else to do.
Nick, Janey and Michael Harper (the children)
The children in “my family” are very unconventional for a real family, yet very conventional for a TV family. The reason I say this is that in intelligence the oldest is the dumbest and the youngest is the smartest. There’s Nick the oldest yet dumbest of the three who is very dopey, Janey who is average in intelligence and a typical teenaged girl and Michael a young genius has little friends and is sometimes made fun of in school.
Most of the sub-plots revolve around the children, whilst the main plots revolve around the adults. Usually what will happen is, Ben will be put into a situation that he has to get out of whilst Janey will want something so that she can be popular with the other girls in school, and Nick has some sort of plan to make money or to get a girlfriend. The main difference between the adults and the children is that the adults are much more three-dimensional than the kids. In pretty much every episode Janey wants something to be cool and Nick has an idiotic plan; what happens with Ben and Susan can change sometimes.
Overall I think that all these family sitcoms have something in common, and that is that the farther is always the main character and there will always be sub-plots that involve the children
