1960s AD

National Catholic Reporter, Dec 24, 2004 by Raymond A. Schroth

Over the past few weeks, following the advice of friends, I have watched over 15 hours of tapes, DVDs and the season's final episodes of the NBC Sunday night prime time series "American Dreams"--the story of a Philadelphia Catholic family surviving the 1960s--while also reading harrowing, hellish battle scenes from the Library of America anthology Reporting Vietnam.

The most horrifying is "Death in the Ia Drang Valley," the memoir of Jack Smith (son of ABC commentator Howard K. Smith), in which his company suffers 93 percent casualties and almost all the wounded are crippled for life. "They tell me that I'll walk again," he concludes. "But no one can tell me when I will stop having nightmares."

Then when I put down my book and turn on the tube, Lance Cpl. J.J. Pryor (Will Estes), having escaped Vietcong tiger cages, wanders lost, wounded and traumatized through the jungles of Cambodia, MIA on a secret mission, while his grief-stricken family back home witnesses the birth of his son at Thanksgiving and prepares for a Christmas without him.

J.J.'s ordeal--though only one of the dozen plots and subplots each show zips through in 27-second scenes wedged in between "American Bandstand," '60s songs and Ford Motors commercials--is the hook upon which all the struggles of the Pryor family hang. Just as all the--battles--family, religious, ethical, political and social--of those years seemed to hang on Vietnam.

This Emmy-winning series is no mere soap opera, no "Sopranos" without the F-word; it is a thoughtful saga about what it means to be a Catholic American today, as well as 40 years ago, and about good people trying to be better.

J.J.'s fiancee, Beth, is pregnant and her upper-class parents, who look down their noses at the Pryors partly because Jack is a mere TV salesman, want an abortion. So Jack and Helen Pryor (Tom Verica and Gail O'Grady) take her in. The show's writers stage the family fights to erupt at the dinner table, both because the table is symbolic of the family's strength and because it represents a lost '60s institution. And the Pryor table has room for most of the cast--Uncle Pete, the cop; high school rebellious daughter Meg and her ditsy friend Roxanne; Sam Walker, son of Jack's Negro employee Henry; younger daughter Patty, who thinks briefly of becoming a nun because being a nun makes decisions easier; and Will the younger son, a polio victim who undergoes an operation that inspires his father to actually pray.

The standard dinner has one motif: Don't contradict Dad. Family father John Pryor is the product of the church that reared him and the Navy in which he served. Shut up and do what you're told.

When J.J. tries to quit the high school football team because he is tired of it, Dad makes it clear that the only way he call get to college is to win a football scholarship, and it better be Notre Dame!

The Walkers are no different. Sam is accepted at the Catholic high school--officially but not socially. When Sam is threatened with suspension for participating in a college sit-in, Henry barks, "What about your scholarship?"

Meanwhile, to break the pressure for the Sunday night TV viewers--or perhaps to lure these viewers into serious questions they might have shelved in the '60s--we knit all these social problems together with razzle-dazzle "Bandstand" numbers and the '60s anthems: "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" and "The Times, They Are A-Changing."

Where is the church in all of this?

The nuns are good. They teach the girls how to walk while balancing books on their heads.

One brave nun encourages Meg to stage Shakespeare's "Henry V" as an antiwar protest--even after the priest has forbidden them to do so! And so Father removes that nun from the classroom.

Perhaps in an episode I have not seen, there is a priest with a brain. But I'd be surprised.

One priest is also J.J.'s football coach. He treats J.J.'s desire to drop football as pure selfishness. When Jack sticks up for his son, the priest tells him he's in no position to make a moral judgment since his daughter "dances on TV."

When Helen, who does not want more children than the four she already has, brings up birth control in the confessional, she is told, "This is not your decision, Helen. You know what the church says. This is God's will."

Most ludicrous is Fr. Cassidy, the new principal "from Boston," who announces that the days of "progressive" and "tolerant" ideas are gone.

Meanwhile the '60s sings and staggers before our eyes: a race riot; a blown-up draft board; a City Council race that Jack wins with black votes, but then he fails to quickly stick up for the blacks who elected him. Helen joins a women's book group and starts taking college courses. A colleague at the travel agency where she works is fired for being a homosexual--though that word is never used on the show.

However it started three years ago, inevitably the series has acquired additional levels of meaning. Because it is a commercial network prime time Sunday night series, it has to have it both ways--both support our troops in Vietnam or Irag and yet present the evidence that war is not really as just and glorious as our leaders have presented it.