Tim Roth is a fine actor, whom I normally only get to see in the occasional independent film. So I was pretty happy to hear that he has a new series, Lie to Me, on network television. In it Roth plays Dr. Cal Lightman, a deception expert who consults with the military and large corporations to help them determine when people in their employ are lying about significant events. Dr. Lightman is a tough, know-it-all pro in the vein of a classic TV detective, cop or lawyer, and very much reminiscent of Vincent D'Onofrio's character on Law and Order: Criminal Intent. In other words, despite the decidedly modern twist of an expert reading body language and facial expressions in order to measure truthfulness, the show feels pretty network familiar. And yet the first few episodes still held the promise of something refreshing and new. Right up until the entrance of the troubled teenage daughter, who threw a party for two hundred kids at the house of Dr. Lightman's ex while Mom was out of town and then lied about it to Dad. This was no fault of Hayley McFarland, the actress who plays Emily, Dr. Lightman's daughter. It's just that divorced tough guy with teenage daughter (the type of girl he'd have been trying to sleep with only a few years earlier) is getting to be quite the '00's cliche' for television dramas. James Woods' D.A. (Shark), Andre Braugher's criminal mastermind (Thief), Keifer Sutherland's FBI agent (24) and now Tim Roth's Dr. Lightman may or may not have exes around to help with the child-rearing, but even if they are, the men somehow seem to bear the brunt of educating their daughters about sex and bailing them out of trouble when the lessons don't take. Even the hard-boiled cop characters who are still married (but mostly married to their jobs) and have TV children of both sexes (e.g., Michael Chiklis on The Shield and Chris Meloni on Law & Order: SVU) tend to have eldest children who are teenaged, female and just the right age to experiment with sex and drugs and rock and roll. There are exceptions (Harold Perrineau's Michael on Lost comes to mind), but they seldom feature the lead character in a television drama.
Back in the 60's, divorce was a dirty word, but single men raising sons was a commonplace occurrence. Bill Bixby (The Courtship of Eddie's Father), Fred MacMurray (My Three Sons), Andy Griffith (The Andy Griffith Show), Brian Kelly (Flipper), Chuck Connors (The Rifleman) and Lorne Green (Bonanza) were widowers, and all had one or more boys they struggled to bring up without the help of a mother. There were, of course, a few shows that involved single men raising daughters or children of both sexes, but a large part of both the comedy and the drama of the era came from Dad trying to raise sons in the absence of maternal love.Now some thirty-five or forty years later the opposite is true. The absence of younger children on television is understandable - minors in entertainment are subject to work hour restrictions and educational requirements that make featuring them difficult. But there's no such reason to account for the absence of teenage boys in featured roles. It's as if we're supposed to believe that if today's single dads had male children who went to a wild party, took drugs and had sex with a girl, the fathers would slap their boys on the back and say "well done, son." Clearly that isn't true, but somehow, today's writers don't seem to feel that raising a male morally has any dramatic value. The most visible single men on television with male offspring are Charlie Sheen and Jon Cryer in Two and a Half Men, which is (a) a comedy, and (b) features men who are, respectively, a jingle/children's song writer and a chiropractor. Apparently either men raising boys is funny, or jingle writers and chiropractors don't count as real men. Probably both.
Parents groups decry the lack of nuclear families presented on prime-time television, pointing to statistics showing that the percentage of single parents on TV exceeds the percentage in the U.S. population at large. This doesn't particularly bother me, even if true; after all, the percentage of criminals, cops, lawyers, doctors, psychics and yes - jingle writers - portrayed on television no doubt exceeds that of the general population as well. Well-adjusted families with run-of-the-mill problems aren't totally lacking in entertainment value, but they won't fill a prime-time schedule. Yet the disparity in the number of female versus male teenagers from divorced homes strikes a troublesome note since there's no practical reason (e.g., work hour restrictions) for it to be this way. What's particularly problematic is the depiction of so many young women as victims - victims of peer pressure, victims of male desire, victims of their own desires - and the implicit suggestion that boys are incapable of insight into or responsibility for their actions. The former is a valid concern, as the wild success of Mary Pipher's book Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls illustrates, but surely there's a male counterpart. There is, however, no sign of any such counterpart on TV. Why the reason for such a disparity?
I think part of the problem stems from the fact that the majority of dramatic television writers are still male, and of the age at which a substantial number have teenage children or are, at the very least, starting to feel middle age creeping up on them. Is it possible that somewhere in their minds a little switch has gone off and reminded them of how they behaved when they were younger? So much of this latest trend feels like nothing more than a guilty conscience -- I was a teenaged dog and I will assuage my feelings of culpability by having my middle-aged male dog of a character warn his teenage daughter about guys like himself/me. Fair enough, but then where's the warning to teenage boys -- don't be like I was, it's not fair to women and besides, you'll feel bad about it when you grow up, especially if you end up stuck in a room with a bunch of other guys for 80 hours a week writing cliched TV drama? Or can the scarcity of teenage boys on television be accounted for by an even creepier reason - that the almost exclusively male writers, producers and directors that dominate the ranks of people working regularly in television are still those randy dogs and just prefer to be surrounded by cute, young females? Whatever the reason, guys, it's getting old, just like you are. Write something fresh and you'll feel younger in an instant. And formerly hot, young things like me will turn back to network TV instead of trying to recapture our own youth watching old Aerosmith videos on YouTube.