Thoughts on "The Real O'Neals"

Tonight on ABC (American Broadcasting Company), a new sitcom premiered:  “The Real O’Neals.”  I don’t watch much television on the TV.  It’s the 21^st century; I stream and do on-demand when I’m in the mood to watch something.  It just happened that I found myself in front of the TV tonight and caught the first episode of a show I only heard about two days ago online. 

But before I get into it and share my thoughts on the show, in the interest of full disclosure I need to point out how ironic it is that in 2016 I’m watching a show that stars one of my very first “movie star crushes” from 1990.  Yes, I’m talking about Jay R. Ferguson.  Here’s a blast from the past.

This is Jay Ferguson as Ponyboy Curtis in FOX TV’s 1990 series “The Outsiders.”  It was the eyes, man.  Look at those eyes.  My teenage self was mesmerized. 

Hold onto this fact for a bit.  I’ll be coming back to it.

So the set up for “The Real O’Neals” is this:  The ideal, normal Irish Catholic family struggles to realize the fact that there is no such thing as normal as family members confess a series of real life issues and struggles:

Jimmy (the older son) is anorexic.

Shannon (the daughter) is a thief.

Kenny (the younger son) is gay.

Mom and Dad are getting a divorce.

So, yeah, that pretty much undermines any sense of “normalcy” in the classic understanding of the good Catholic family. 

Let me be honest for a moment.  I caught the previews for the show two days ago.  They grabbed my attention.  I sat down tonight and watched the first two episodes.  My initial concern was that the show was going to define itself too narrowly as “that TV show about the gay kid.”  What frustrated me about the creation of a show that attempts to normalize the experiences of LGBTQ youth and the whole coming out process these kids go through and the journey their families inevitably take in their acceptance of the reality of the child’s identity—what frustrated me was that, in my mind, the target demographic wouldn’t be sitting down to watch the show.  LGBTQ youth find their normalizing figures and heroes online and not on the television.  Why?  Because this generation of LGBTQ youth look for honesty and connection.  They’re not going to be satisfied with an actor’s portrayal of a struggle that is very real for them.  They will see through a perfectly cultivated and manicured script that, by the end of the half an hour, will solve all of the character’s problems and everything will come up puppies and unicorns.  They see through the Hollywood tricks. When the struggle is real for you, watching it acted out by professionals with scripts that not only solve real problems LGBTQ kids face but solve them by making the LGBTQ characters witty and perfect—it isn’t entertaining.  It isn’t comforting.  It complicates things even more.  It presents yet another impossible ideal for them.  They would much rather log onto YouTube and listen to real stories from the trenches than sit down and watch a romanticized version of a life that doesn’t exist. 

So I worried that the show was going to do more harm than good.  It wasn’t going to reach what I felt was the target audience. And when it would get canceled its critics from the religious and political right would celebrate its demise as demonstrative of how “America isn’t interested in those values.”

And then I started laughing at Martha Plimpton’s comment about “pity pork” in the second episode and I found myself relaxing and rethinking my initial cynicism.  I found myself enjoying the writing more and more.  I started appreciating the individual performances of the brilliant cast.  And then my brain made a connection:  Comedy comes from pain. 

Now, I’m not necessarily talking about dark comedy and gut-wrenching pain.  I’m talking about the fact that as human beings we tend to use comedy to move us through painful times in our lives.  We tend to use humor to soften the edges of our agony and hurt so that our story becomes more bearable.  Imagine what it would be like if we weren’t able to laugh in those dark times. 

Let me give you a quick example that has absolutely nothing to do with “The Real O’Neals.”  My grandmother (the mother of my mother) died from cancer in 1993.  My mother, my at-the-time-very-pregnant-aunt, and my great aunt all went on a road trip to see the best cancer doctors in the area.  They were all in the room with my grandmother when the doctor shared the news that the cancer was terminal and there was nothing that they could do.  My aunt had to leave the room; she was so emotionally distraught.  My grandmother, a few minutes later, followed her out into the hall and said, “You’re ruining all the fun, you know.”  In that moment, my grandmother’s sense of humor broke into a very painful moment to remind my aunt that there was more to their time together than this horrible moment.  My aunt still laughs when she shares this story.

I think that’s what “The Real O’Neals” might be attempting to do.  This isn’t a how-to show.  It’s not like we’re going to tune in to Jay Ferguson, Martha Plimpton, and Noah Galvin to tell us how to navigate issues of marriage, religion, and identity like we would tune into Nicole Curtis on DIY to show us how to sand a window and mount it in the wall.  This is a comedy in the traditional sense:  It’s trying to communicate something through humor to address the pain and struggle many folks experience in their day to day lives. 

That’s when it kind of hit me.  Though I stand by my first reaction (that most LGBTQ kids aren’t going to be on the couch watching this show because it’s in their nature to want something real and not massaged like a sitcom), I realized where my negativity was actually coming from.

And this brings me back to my teenage crush on Jay Ferguson.

When I was a kid and was “forced” to sit and watch “The Outsiders” because my sister was obsessed with the show, I remember to this day the panoply of emotions that tore through me.  It wasn’t just a matter of watching this “hot guy” with killer eyes but it was the struggle of knowing that, in that place and in that time, that kind of attraction was not “normal.”  I would have killed to be able to sit on the couch, even in the silence of an inability to come out, and watch a family struggle to understand there is no such thing as normal even within the context of religion and identity.  Just watching it would have softened the edges of my agony and hurt.

Truth be told, I am still a little worried that “The O’Neals” may end up narrowly defining itself.  But I think I’ve come to a place of appreciation for the show—or at least the first two episodes.  What I think would be interesting is to see how many coming out stories follow the #TheRealONeals hashtag as the show moves forward.  How many LGBTQ youth might actually find the courage to turn to the adults in their lives and say, “Kenny?  Yeah.  That’s me.”  And hopefully the adults will be able to turn to their kids and, even in Martha Plimpton’s Eileen-way say, “I love this project.  I’ve known this project since it was a little project.” 

God knows too many of us should have had opportunities like that when we were growing up rather than suffering in silence.  So even if “The Real O’Neals” does end up narrowly defining itself, at least it’s here now, helping to bring attention to the struggles of LGBTQ youth and their families, and normalizing the struggle of telling their story.