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thirtysomething

Season 1 (1987-1988)

ABC: Created by Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick

Brief Summary:

The ABC series thirtysomething focused on a group of young adults living in Philadelphia. The

central characters are Hope and Michael, a married couple with an infant daughter, and all the

other characters exist in relation to them. Michael owns a small advertising firm with Elliott,

who is married to Nancy. He is also close to his cousin Melissa (a single photographer) and best-

friend Gary (a pre-tenure college professor). Hope’s best friend Ellyn (a civil servant in the

Philadelphia government) is also a frequent presence on the show. Basically, thirtysomething

was a character-based drama where the people on the screen spend a lot of time discussing their

feelings, especially the anxiety of new parents and young adults of the 1980s who are not always

enthusiastic about the consumerist mentality of the 1980s. They are also not entirely comfortable

with the countercultural values of the early 1970s that they grew up with. They are, in a word,

conflicted.

(From left to right: Gary, Melissa, Michael, Hope, Ellyn, Nancy, Elliot, with kids Janey, Ethan,

and Britty)

Evaluation

Watching thirtysomething literally thirty years after it first aired is an interesting experience.

Without a doubt, it feels dated. The fashions (the shoulder pads that some of the women wear are truly

amazing) and technology can be hard to take, but more importantly it simply feels old. The pacing is

much slower than a contemporary show and the first season, especially at the beginning of the run, is

plagued by awkward fantasy sequences and flashbacks that inevitably seem to result in the actors wearing

wigs and other signals of “the 60s.” The characters do seem to spend an awful lot of time worried about

what today we might call “first world problems.” One of the complaints about the show when it first aired

was that the characters – especially Michael, who seems to be wholly unable to make a decision without

agonizing over its socio-economic and philosophical implications – are whiny.

Binge-watching the show today really emphasizes this and has a tendency to make the characters

insufferable at times. In one episode, Hope and Michael want to have a party, but the renovation of their

kitchen isn’t finished. Eventually, after much hemming-and-hawing, they decide to hire a carpenter to

complete the work. But Michael soon comes to the conclusion that what they want is going to be too

expensive, so they direct the carpenter – who, of course, is also flirting with Hope – to scale back the

plans. They’re not really sure this is the right thing, in part because they want to impress the people who

they’ve invited to the party. By the end of the episode, Hope and Michael have decided on a third option:

leave the work undone and lean into it, having the party anyway and emphasizing the potential of the

room. 1 This is portrayed as the Right Decision – something that happens a lot in the show. Michael or

one of the other characters freaks out over a particular issue or problem; he or she agonizes over it by

talking about it with the other characters; eventually the character Does The Right Thing – mostly. This is

annoying, watching the show today, but that might be because of the binge-watching effect. It didn’t

strike me as a problem watching it in 1988, perhaps because this is how television worked back then.

It’s important, then, to think about why people liked thirtysomething in its original context. Of

course, it wasn’t a universally liked show, although it did attract a very desirable demographic, according

1 If I recall correctly, the work on the kitchen is never completed. This becomes a running motif on the show.

to the interviews with creators Zwick and Herskovitz on the DVD extras. The people who watched the

show bought into the world of the characters, and I think the reason for this is the intimacy of the

characters. In the 1980s, there wasn’t anything else on TV where characters were talking about mundane,

real world problems. By doing this, thirtysomething was able to get at some very real – very typical –

fears experienced by lots and lots of average Americans. Some of these problems had relatively low

stakes – finding a babysitter, for example – but they were real. And as the series got into deeper issues,

the intimacy of the show because truly powerful, to the point where it became almost hard to watch, as if

we as the viewers were eavesdropping on the neighbors and seeing into a world that we really shouldn’t

be.

One of the most powerful sequence of episodes involved the death of Michael’s father. He shows

up in the episode “Business as Usual,” pretending that everything is great, but Michael notices that he

seems weak. There’s a powerful shot here where Michael, from a distance, sees his father struggling to

get out of a chair, and we can see the pain, the concern, and almost a sense of betrayal on actor Ken

Olin’s face. Later, after his father passes away, Michael has to confront his brother about the fact that the

family business is failing. The writing and acting really gives us a sense of the relationship between

siblings, where love and resentment can be mixed up in a powerful way that’s hard to put into words. Olin

in particular is great at showing emotional escalation, going from calm to seething anger to furious

shouting in moments. We see this here and also later in the season when Michael and Elliot’s company

seems to be on the verge of collapse. It feels awkward watching the two business partners and friends

nearly coming to blows, but it makes for powerful television.

This awkward feeling is magnified in the most powerful episode of the season. Entitled

“Therapy,” it focuses on Elliott and Nancy’s rocky marriage. Elliott seems to want to leave his wife

(played by Patricia Wettig, who ironically was and still is married to Ken Olin), but they decide to give

couple’s therapy a chance to save their relationship. The episode is essentially an airing of each other’s

dirty laundry, and for the audience it is incredibly powerful, but, again, hard to watch, kind of like

overhearing a couple fighting at a restaurant. The acting by Wettig and Timothy Busfield as Elliott is top-

notch, and the writing is subtle, getting at the small nuances in their relationship that are acting as a

wedge between the two of them. But it’s not sensationalized in any way. There’s a brief nod to the idea

that Elliott wants Nancy to watch pornography with him, but where another show might have used this to

establish that he’s a pervert, thirtysomething just mentions it and moves on, suggesting that it’s part of the

character’s complexity.

Along with the intimacy that we as the audience experience watching thirtysomething, it’s this

complexity of the characters that made people turn on the show week after week. I think people connected

to this – to the fact that Michael was sometimes a jerk, but sometimes a great husband, that Melissa was

sometimes scared and insecure but also sometimes brave, and so on for almost all the characters. The fact

that they were complicated and conflicted, and that they agonized over their decisions, invited a kind of

interactivity that made the audience feel like they were part of the club. When I watched the show in the

80s, I remember watching it with my mom, and discussing the choices the characters made after the show

was over. Ultimately, that’s why thirtysomething worked: its intimacy brought us into the conversations

of the characters, inspiring us to get involved in conversations of our own.

Gender

As a show that is primarily about relationships among young-ish people, it’s not

surprising that’s thirtysomething would frequently bring up issues of gender, and given that it

premiered in 1987, it’s not surprising that the some of those issues would seem very particular to

that moment. And as a show that seemed to be speaking for – or at least describing – a very

specific demographic (white, upwardly-mobile people born in the 1950s), it’s also not surprising

that thirtysomething was seen by the media as establishing a particular definition (or stereotype)

of their lives were supposed to be all about. In other words, the characters in thirtysomething –

and perhaps especially the female characters – were seen as representatives of their “types.”

Hope was the Happy Housewife; Nancy was the Unhappy Housewife; Ellyn was the Single

Professional Woman; Melissa was the Single Bohemian Woman. Imagining the characters as

types is part of the reason why the show received a substantial amount of criticism for how its

female characters were portrayed.

A strong example of this criticism appeared in Susan Faludi’s book Backlash: The

Undeclared War Against American Women (1991). Faludi’s basic argument is that the

conservative swing of the 1980s brought with it a response to the gains of feminism that occurred

in the 1970s. Feminism became a dirty word, as conservative Republicans and the mainstream

media began to blame the women’s movement and its accomplishments of the 1970s for a wide

variety of socio-cultural problems of the 1980s. According to backlash writers, feminism was

bad for women who really wanted to live according to traditional gender roles and the norms of

the nuclear family. Women who worked outside the home weren’t as happy as their stay-at-home

counterparts; single women really wanted children, but they were being forced into lives of

empty relationships because of the demands of feminism. Faludi’s book is tremendously

persuasive, as she demonstrates in great detail how various writers, institutions, and

organizations advocated for these ideas that seemed to want to push the country back to the way

it was back in the 1950s.

One of her targets is thirtysomething. Her criticism is two-fold. First, she argues that the

main female characters in the show – the aforementioned Hope, Nancy, Ellyn, and Melissa – are

all backlash-inspired stereotypes. She argues that the single women on the show are portrayed as

unhappy because they lack men and don’t have babies. She describes Melissa as “the tear-stained

version of the 80s spinster” (164) while Ellyn (“the hard-as-nails single career woman” (165))

gets no sympathy on the show, as she sees it. Faludi suggests that Hope is totally submissive to

her husband Michael, inevitably giving in to what he wants. Meanwhile, she notes that while

Nancy does develop a professional, creative, and even sexual life once she’s separated from

Elliott, she points out that in the third season of the show that Nancy is essentially punished for

her liberation by having to cope with a cancer diagnosis. (167)

On one level, Faludi is accurate about her assessments, but her judgements seem to be

based on selective viewing of a handful of episodes. She doesn’t get the full picture of these

characters. She is probably most accurate in her evaluation of Hope, especially in the first

season, but there is more nuance to Melissa and Ellyn than Faludi suggests. For example,

Melissa might want kids – she breaks up with a doctor simply because he claims to be unwilling

to become a father for a second time – but there’s a lot more to the character than that. She’s a

photographer who lives independently, working on her art without having to compromise her

values (usually) by doing work simply to make money. Of all the characters on the show, she’s

probably the most caring and supportive. In this way, her desire to have a child is actually

consistent with her other personality traits. She’s not quite the gender stereotype that Faludi

makes her out to be. More importantly, Faludi tends to ignore the ways in which these characters

do offer positive images for women. The friendship between the women is powerful, and none of

them are really defined by their status with men. Even Hope, who tends to fit the stereotyped

image of the stay-at-home mom, is very self-conscious about it and the show establishes that this

is ultimately her choice (and a temporary one at that). She realizes that ideology, media, and

tradition have made her want to stay home with Janey, her daughter. When she makes this choice

to stay home, she does it in a way that suggests that it’s not meant to be a policy that she’s

advocating for all women. It’s just what’s best for her, at that moment in time.

In some ways, Faludi’s second criticism of the show is more damning, suggesting more

strongly that thirtysomething is an example of the backlash. She reports that the men who created

the show, Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, wanted its female characters to be more

traditional, more domestic – and more domesticated – than what viewers saw on the screen. “The

show’s female actors and viewers weren’t clamoring for full-time nesters,” she writes, “but the

show’s male creators were.” (167) The quotes that she provides back up this assertion, as both

Zwick and Herskovitz come off as being not much better than the conservative Republicans who

spread the backlash ideology. The saving grace of the show, argues Faludi, is the group of

women behind the sexist characters they are playing. Melanie Mayron, who portrays Melissa, is

described as having developed her character’s photography career, while Polly Draper (Ellyn)

challenged the show’s creators and pushed for her character to be independent, confident, and

not totally jealous of Hope. (165)

Reading between the lines, there is a strong sense of betrayal in Faludi’s analysis of

thirtysomething. She seems angry that this show, beloved (I’m guessing) by some of her peers

because of its substantial roles for women, doesn’t live up to its potential as a progressive vision

of how gender roles could – and should – be in the late 1980s. From the perspective of 2019,

though, the show gives us powerful insights into how traditional gender roles were still being

portrayed on TV into the 1980s.

Structure

Like most television series before 2000, thirtysomething does not have – especially in its

first season – a strong, overarching narrative structure. But while the series is not a serial, despite

sometimes being compared to soap operas when it originally aired (for example, look at Jane

Feuer’s Seeing Through the Eighties: Television and Reaganism (1995) for how the series was

sometimes framed as a soap opera (112)), it is also not strictly episodic. This means that

although individual episodes are not inaccessible to new viewers, there are at least two weak

narrative threads that connect the first season of the show. In this way, thirtysomething is

actually structurally similar to The Sopranos (which premiered in 1999, nearly a decade after

thirtysomething was cancelled) with its mixture of episodic and serial storytelling. In his essay

about The Sopranos, Ohio State University professor Sean O’Sullivan argues that the series is

more like a short story collection than a novel with continuing themes that link the episodes of

the series rather than a single overarching plot. (71) thirtysomething works a similar way.

The first season of the series has three main narrative threads that last more or less from

the first episode to the last. The threads do not appear in each episode, and some episodes don’t

include any of them. At the same time, viewers are quickly reminded of these basic plots in

subsequent episodes and certainly are able remember from week to week what is happening with

their favorite characters. The first narrative thread focuses on Michael and Elliot’s advertising

business and how it’s not exactly as successful as the partners want it to be. 2 Michael in

particular is nervous about the company’s bottom line, while Elliot has more faith in the notion

that everything will work out in the end somehow. These different approaches to the business

develop into a tension between the partners that flares up at various points. The second narrative

2 In fact, the Michael and Elliot Company goes out of business about a third of the way through the second season,

and in many ways the series becomes better because of it.

thread involves the dissolution of Elliot and Nancy’s marriage. This has significant ramifications

for the show, as both characters are integral parts of the circle of friends at center of the show.

The third narrative thread involves Hope’s conflicted feelings about going back to work. This is

primarily a concern of Hope and Michael, but it does occasionally impact other characters,

especially Ellyn and Melissa.

The episodes of the series breakdown this way:

Episode Title The Business The Marriage Going Back to Work Other Main Plot

Pilot Yes Hinted at Yes

The Parents Are

Coming

No No Yes Relationship with

parents

Housewarming Yes No Somewhat

Couples No Yes No

But Not for Me Yes No Yes Gary and Melissa

We Gather

Together

Yes Yes Yes

Nice Work If

You Can Get It

Yes No No Ellyn at work

Weaning Yes No Yes

I’ll Be Home for

Christmas

No Yes Yes What to do about

the holidays?

South by SE No No No Gary is

threatened

Therapy Yes Yes No

Competition Yes Yes No Learning about

computers

Separation Yes Yes No

I’m In Love . . . No Yes Yes Melissa and

Ellyn

Business as

Usual

Yes No No Michael’s father

Accounts

Receivable

Yes No No Michael’s father

Whose Forest Yes Yes No

Nancy’s First

Date

Yes Yes No Melissa wants

kids

Undone Yes Yes No

Tenure No No No Gary

Born to be Mild Yes No Yes

What we see here is that, with the exception of a few episodes – primarily ones about

Gary – every episode features at least one of the major narrative threads, and many episodes

feature multiple threads. In some of these, the thread is the major plot. For example, most of

“Therapy” takes place in the office of Nancy and Elliot’s marriage counselor. In other episodes,

the narrative threads are minor or are simply alluded to. In the two episodes about the death of

Michael’s father, the business theme is alluded to through references to his father’s business. As

it turns out, his company is failing, which clearly makes Michael think about the financial status

of his own business venture. Moreover, the fact that Michael is named executor of his father’s

will, despite his brother’s involvement in the company, reminds viewers (and most likely

Michael and other characters) about his over-active sense of responsibility. Even the marriage

narrative thread connects back to the business, as both Michael and Nancy feud with Elliot over

his mishandling of funds that are supposed to belong to both partners. In the second season, this

is emphasized even more when Michael and Elliot “divorce;” Michael is even able to connect

with Nancy better because they both feel like they’ve been betrayed by Elliot.

Regular viewers of thirtysomething certainly benefitted from watching every episode, but

missing select installments of the show would not have taken a tremendous amount away from

the overall impact of the first season of the series. In fact, some episodes – the ones focusing on

the death of Michael’s father and the episode where Hope and Michael have to decide how to

celebrate the holidays as a mixed-faith family – stand up just fine on their own. The series – and

certainly TV in general – seemed to be moving in the direct of more serial formats, though. As

thirtysomething moved into its third and fourth seasons, the narrative threads became stronger, in

much the same way that TV series would become more serial oriented in the 1990s and 2000s.

TV History

thirtysomething has an important place in the history of American television as an

innovative example of the family drama genre. This style of series virtually didn’t exist prior to

the premiere of thirtysomething. Family sitcoms, of course, had been and continued to be staples

of broadcast television, but depicting family interaction in a more serious way was, surprisingly,

not very common during the first four decades of TV. Dramas tended to focus on other, more

“high concept” genres that featured suspense and tension simply as part of their foundational

ideas. Cop shows, Westerns, legal dramas, and even medical dramas had conflicts virtually

“built into” them, and in that way they were able to avoid having to deal with real-world issues

and real-life concerns. Perhaps that’s why the family drama was not a big part of the networks’

schedules.

There were a few family dramas that preceded thirtysomething, though. Two of them had

historical settings: The Waltons (1971-1981), set in the 1930s, and Little House on the Prairie

(1974-1983), set at the end of the 19th century. This high-concept element makes these shows

significantly different from thirtysomething. Eight is Enough (1977-1981) was a high-concept

show by virtue of the size of the family: 3 sons and 5 daughters. The producers of the show kept

it relatively light, although not to the point of it being a sitcom. For these reasons, it is not really

a direct predecessor to thirtysomething. The series Family (1976-1980) does have some

connections, though, including the fact that Edward Zwick, one of the creators of

thirtysomething, was also a producer on that earlier show. More importantly, it didn’t have a

high-concept – it was just about a family and their middle-class lifestyle. There were no

gimmicks, except perhaps for the presence of teen idol Kristy McNichol. Family was just about

life: jobs, divorce, relationships, aging parents, and other everyday realities. An important

difference between the two shows was the focus on young adults on thirtysomething, as opposed

to older parents on Family.

Viewers during the 1980s could find “family drama” in soap operas, and while some

critics at the time suggested that thirtysomething was similar to them, they were clearly different.

Soap operas tended to be melodramatic, telling sensationalistic stories about scandal, cheating,

and sudden turn-abouts in very dramatic ways. While thirtysomething did have some episodes

about these kinds of things, the way that the show depicted them was very different from soap

operas, even prime-time soaps like Dallas. While soap operas tended to be over the top, with

characters confronting each other in tension-filled scenes, thirtysomething was much more

introspective, with characters agonizing over choices for entire episodes. And when the

characters in thirtysomething did finally get to the point of confronting someone, the sides of the

argument were much more complicated than what one would find in a soap opera. While soaps

tended to have heroes and villains, no one on thirtysomething was purely good or bad.

Relationships and people were complicated on thirtysomething, while on soap operas the plots

tended to be more complicated.

Because of its position as an innovative family drama, thirtysomething has gone on to

influence later shows. The creators of thirtysomething went on to create two thematically and

tonally similar family dramas. My So-Called Life (1994) and Once and Again (1999-2002) were

both shot in a style that is similar to that of thirtysomething and all three focus more on smaller,

real world events as opposed to hugely dramatic life-changing transformations. The writing of all

three is similar, with a lot of introspection, and they even seem to take place in the same

universe. In fact, the character Miles Dentrell, introduced in the second season of

thirtysomething, also appears in Once and Again.

Perhaps more importantly, thirtysomething influenced sensitive family dramas from a

variety of creators. While some of the intimate discussions between Philip and Elizabeth in The

Americans are similar to that of thirtysomething, the series that truly seems to be a spiritual and

even visual descendent of the show is This is Us. While more melodramatic, this contemporary

series really gives viewers a strong thirtysomething vibe, even down to the acoustic guitar music

that is frequently heard on the show. The characters are earnest, just as in their predecessor, and

they seem to be walking a political line between politically correct progressive and self-centered

elitism. Perhaps the biggest similarity between the two shows in the tendency of characters to

agonize over choices, leading to a sense in both shows that the characters are excessively whiny.

In addition, a number of episodes of This is Us have been directed by thirtysomething alum Ken

Olin, the actor who played Michael Steadman, giving us a direct line from the older show to its

contemporary counterpart.

Cultural Significance

I first became aware of thirtysomething when a college professor of mine mentioned the

show in a US History class in what must have been 1987 or 1988. He mentioned the show as a

way to talk about how the countercultural baby boomers of the late 1960s and early 1970s were

having to come to terms with adulthood in the 1980s. Because of his mention of the series, I was

ready to think about its cultural significance even before watching my first episode. For many

other people, too, thirtysomething was more of a cultural touchstone than it was a collection of

stories about how a group of people relate to each other and the world as adults with real

responsibilities for the first time. As a result, thirtysomething was probably talked about more in

the 1980s than it was actually watched, and when people talked about it, they often talked about

it as a show about yuppies.

Although it’s not clear who coined the term, by the late 1980s “yuppie” was a common

buzzword used in all manner of media reports. A play on terms from the 1960s like “hippie” and

“yippie,” “yuppie” referred to people who were seen as “young urban professionals,” or

sometimes “young upwardly-mobile professionals.” As a result, yuppies were frequently

attacked as the personification of the consumerist mentality of Ronald Reagan’s America. This is

especially true since the yuppies, at least originally, were thought to be the children of the 1960s

who, all grown up, have abandoned the countercultural values of their youth for greed and

consumerism. This construction of the yuppie undoubtedly comes from the film The Big Chill

(1983), a movie about former 60s radicals who join together to mourn the suicide of one of their

friends. Nearly everyone in the group has sold out: a woman has become a corporate lawyer after

getting tired of defending “scum” while working in a public defender’s office, a man creates a

running shoe company and becomes incredibly wealthy, another man abandons his dream of

becoming a novelist to write for People magazine.

As Jane Feuer points out her book Seeing through the Eighties (1995), the characters in

thirtysomething really are too young to qualify as this kind of yuppie. (70) If they had been born

in the mid-1950s, then they would have been too young to have been involved in any of the

meaningful protests of the counterculture. Still, the show suggests in its first season that Michael

and Gary, in particular, were involved in various protests against their university administration.

This aspect gets downplayed later on in the series, but there is always a notion that Michael kind

of feels like he should be living according to the values of the counterculture. At the same time,

though, he’s also drawn to the concept of supporting his family, being successful, and living a

“good life” according to the standards of mainstream America. If Michael and his friends are

yuppies, they are a different kind of yuppie than the characters of The Big Chill. They are the

younger siblings of the kids who protested at Kent State and had to worry about being sent to

Vietnam, but this doesn’t really prevent them from being thought of as yuppies.

Especially later in the 1980s, the yuppie type was less connected to the 1960s and more

connected to the consumerism of the 1980s, and especially the dominance of the financial

industry. The image of this yuppie is more consistent with the character of Bud (Charlie Sheen)

from the movie Wall Street (1987). This yuppie is all about making money and looking the right

way in the process: slick, slim, and well-dressed. Any pretense to morality is gone; the corporate

lawyer in The Big Chill feels bad about it, but Bud doesn’t regret making a lot of money, until

he’s caught cheating. The characters in thirtysomething aren’t like this. They feel bad about

being successful in a strictly monetary way. In fact, they’re not really that successful or that

wealthy. Feuer quotes show creator Marshall Herskovitz as saying that, yes, Hope and Michael

have a big house, but it’s a house that’s in terrible shape and still needs a lot of work. (112) Gary

and Melissa aren’t really interested in making money – they’re focused on art and culture, not

acquisitions. The only character who seems to be a “professional” in the first season is Ellyn, and

she works for the city government, not exactly a direct path to wealth.

Herskovitz might have thought that the characters in thirtysomething were not really

yuppies, but that isn’t exactly true either. (Feuer 113) They are somewhere in between the two

extremes of the yuppie stereotype, baby boomers with a dim memory of the counterculture who

nonetheless feel some pressure to live according to the values of their older siblings. In this way,

thirtysomething might have been the most important yuppie text because it provided a more

realistic portrayal of the yuppie stereotype than was available in any other media of the 1980s.

Works Cited

Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. Anchor Books, 1991.

Jane Feuer, Seeing Through the Eighties: Television and Reaganism. Duke University Press,

1995.

Sean O’Sullivan, “The Sopranos: Episodic Storytelling.” How to Watch Television, edited by

Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell, New York University Press, 2013, pp. 65-73.