More on 'The Goode Family' – Lighten Up, Libs!

After seeing video trailers for Mike Judge’s new show The Goode Family online last week, I was looking forward to seeing the show. Who couldn’t appreciate jabs being taken at a vegan family who wanted to adopt an African baby to show how much they “care” but end up with a white South African baby and name him Ubuntu? (There’s an inside joke in there for computer geeks, which my husband got but I didn’t.) Whose poor dog, Che, also on a vegan diet, is so desperate for meat that he eats all the small animals in the neighborhood he can get his paws on? Who wonder “What would Al Gore do?” when Ubuntu wants his driver’s license even though driving cars and burning fuel is evil? It helped too that I liked Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill.

My interest was piqued even more after reading John Nolte’s post about the New York Times review of the show. Apparently, reviewer Ginia Bellafante had a hard time appreciating the foibles of a family who try so hard to be perfect in how they live and how they relate to their black neighbors that their lives become highly stressful. To quote The Times:

But the show feels aggressively off-zeitgeist, as if it had been incubated in the early to mid-’90s when it was still possible to find global-warming skeptics among even the reasonable and informed. But who really thinks of wind power – an allusion to which is a running visual gag in the show – as mindless, left-wing nonsense anymore?

I guess Ginia didn’t read about the increasing numbers of Americans who believe that the global warming hype is exaggerated. And regardless of whether they believe it’s true, global warming is currently at the bottom of the list of Americans’ priorities. Poor Al Gore – time for another documentary to hype the masses.

That statement also made me think of the now famous quote by elite Manhattanite and New Yorker columnist Pauline Kael after Richard Nixon’s sweeping presidential victory in 1972: “I don’t know how Richard Nixon could have won. I don’t know anybody who voted for him.” Maybe like Pauline, Ginia needs to get out a little more.

As my husband and I watched the show with our 16-year-old daughter, he told her, “Your mom and I were like that back in the ’90s.” To a certain extent, it was true. We used cloth grocery bags, we were vegetarians (but not vegans), we voted Democrat and saw Republicans as evil incarnate, and drove a Geo Metro, all the while patting ourselves on the back for being so caring and progressive. I even had Greenpeace checks, with a portion of the fee to buy them going toward the organization (shudder). My husband mowed the lawn with a no-gas lawnmower, huffing and puffing as he pushed. One of our neighbors, often when he’d been enjoying a beer or two, would hop on his rider mower and mow our lawn for us, laughing at us – in a good-natured fashion, of course. (When we returned to hilly New England from the flat Midwest, that people-powered mower went the way of the dodo pretty quickly.)

So as my husband and I laughed at the Goode Family, we were also laughing at ourselves and how self-absorbed we were at one time about being “good.” The reason for our “transformation” is fodder for another article at another time.

But The Goode Family has laughs for libs too: In the premiere episode, mother Helen tries too hard to bond with daughter Bliss by being cool and hip when talking about sex. Creeped out, in an act of rebellion, Bliss invites father Gerald to a father-daughter “purity ball,” where daughters pledge to their fathers that they will keep their virginity until marriage. When they realize what they’ve gotten themselves into, Bliss and Gerald make their escape and Bliss admits to her mother that she didn’t belong with “those people” (Christian goody-goodies).

But libs, like reviewers at the New York Times, just can’t get past the fact that one of their core beliefs – global warming – has been snubbed.

And maybe, just maybe, they have a problem with the fact that while both Gerald and Helen Goode are both bleeding heart liberal weenies, Gerald seems to be the more reasonable one: he mentions the importance of tolerance of others’ beliefs and would rather shop at the less-expensive WalMart-like store than the Whole Foods knockoff, while Helen is much more militant about everything. This flies straight in the face of Hollywood sitcom couples today: the husband is a boorish buffoon, often overweight, who couldn’t tie his shoes much less hold down a job were it not for his wonderful, bright, sexy, witty wife who almost always manages to save the day.

How dare they make a woman look bad?

Overall, the show was fun, and I plan to give it another shot next week.