Order the pineapple pizza if that's what you like (even if the kids don't)

You know what’s funny? It’s not most sitcoms (ba-da-bum!). What’s funny is that after the last time I wrote about the CBS TV sitcom “The Middle,” my friend Sally wrote to agree with me, and also to wonder how it was that I even managed to sit down for an 8pm show. Sally and I both have young children, and yes, watching a show that starts at 8, which is the boys’ basic bedtime, is tough (and no, we don’t have a DVR. Yet. It’s on my list. Thanks in advance for that suggestion).

But it’s not impossible. And that small effort is part of a larger determination to not let my life, or my husband’s, be run over by small feet and sticky fingers.

And that brings me to my report on last week’s episode of “The Middle,” which totally let me down. I was so high on the Hecks a few weeks back, when Mike, the dad, stepped up to the plate and told another dad that, in fact, it was his job to tell his mean tween daughter that her manipulations and deceit were bad form. It would have been so typical-sitcom if he’d laughed it off, but he didn’t; he took the other guy to task. Go Mike, I thought.

But the other night, Mike and Frankie Heck dropped the ball. I won’t belabor the recap, because I don’t want anyone to think I’m a TV junkie (as if) or obsessed with this particular show in a way that would be unseemly (I mean it’s not HBO or anything!). But here’s what happened: the Heck parents realized that they were doing way too much for their three kids, at the expense of their own comfort and pleasure. They only ever ordered the kind of pizza the kids liked, they ran around on their lunch hours getting supplies for school projects, they lived without first-rights access to their own TV remote, for heaven’s sake! So they decided to take back their house and their lives, getting pizza with pineapples and watching what they wanted, kids be damned.

It was way over the top, natch, especially when Frankie rid the family room of any trace of her children and refused to drive her youngest to the library. And also naturally, they gave up soon enough, specifically when they realized that not driving their bookworm kid to the library meant he was spending too much time online, and had already made plans to meet in the park “a guy he was chatting with online.” Uh, oh. Bad parents. Bad!

It was funny, sure, a little bit. But when Frankie, the mom, after capitulating once again, tells a random mom with a baby that she should start now to not give her baby every little thing he ask for, to not subsume herself in his needs (“It’s too late for me, but you can do it!”), I felt so… let down.

She missed the point, the show missed the point. You can drive your son to the library and make a point of buying the polka-dot umbrella for your daughter’s dance routine without giving up your own life. Mike and Frankie compel their eldest to babysit one night so they can go to see a cheesy 80s cover band at a local bar mid-week. And why shouldn’t they? Why is the choice — bear with me, I’m talking now about all of us in the real world now, not just these fictional TV people — between doing everything for our kids and never doing anything for our kids?

Which brings me back to my friend Sally and the modern-day wonder of my husband and me sitting down at 8pm every so often because, damn it, we want to watch a show. We get the bath/books/bed routine done ahead of time, and shoo the little darlings off to their beds by 7:59. The little guy usually falls asleep pretty soon after, and I don’t care if the older guy stays up puttering in his room for a while (what he actually does in there is the subject of another post; when I check in later I try to piece his routine together with clues like an overturned piggy bank, scribbled notes taped to the walls, and which books are face-down on the floor around his bed), as long as he’s not in my hair. Hey kid, after bedtime, unless you’re sick, I’m clocked out (as much as parents ever clock out).

At 8pm, the remote is mine. Minus the remote, which hadn’t been invented yet, this is how my parents rolled. They did an awful lot for us — you know, like paying the mortgage on time, feeding and clothing us, and extras like driving us to dance lessons and dates and taking us to really high-class resorts in the Catskills with actual running water and ice cream for dessert. But their parental self-sacrifice did not include cooking to order for us or doing our homework (though my dad was aces at helping with big projects, like the shampoo he helped my sister make for a science fair, or the Inca terrace-farming project he all but created for me).

Listen, I’ll certainly order half the pizza plain, but the rest is going to have something totally icky on it, like eggplant.

Hermey and Rudolph: Misfits with bad fathers

The other day, on impulse at the supermarket, I picked up the DVD of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” for the boys. They hadn’t seen it yet, even though it’s been on TV. Both of them are rehearsing holiday songs for their school concerts, so it’s been a nonstop chorus of Rudolph over here, and I figured it was better to own the dang thing than to sit through commercials.

So we watched. And while James tucked his head under a blanket whenever the Bumble came on the screen, and Daniel laughed over my favorite character, Yukon Cornelius, I was taken back in time to the 70s, remembering watching with my sister on the oval braided rug in the den (small time-travel aside here: did others of you raised in the 1970s do all your TV-watching on the floor/rug, rather than the couch? Did the couch in your house, as in mine, have an “adults only” vibe? Weird).

The story is full of you’d-never-see-that-on-TV-today oddities. And I’m not talking about laughable “special effects” or the way the characters’ mouth movements never match their dialog. I’m talking about a reindeer father who is awfully mean to his misfit, red-nosed son, entreating him to hide his differences and fit in. Then what does the dad do, when he realizes his shunned and ridiculed child has run off? He mans up and goes after him, telling his anxious wife to stay in the cave, not for the sensible reason that Rudolph might come back, but because going out in the storm to search is “man’s work.”

Then there’s poor Hermey, the misfit elf who wants to be a dentist. His stand-in father is the head elf, who rages at his “son” who wants to be anything other than what he’s supposed to be. He, too, apologizes in the end and lets Hermey set up a North Pole dental practice, but his original sin — fatherly non-acceptance — is one that you’d never see in kids’ fictional fare today.

Last night, I was on the phone with my sister, and we talked about the show. I said, “If that were made today, the message would be ‘celebrate your differences,’ not, ‘shun the misfits.’ ” And sure, that’s eventually the lesson that’s learned in Rudolph, but the key difference is that before Rudolph can realize his oddity makes him special, he first has to be disparaged and cast out, not just by his peers, but by his own father. In the end, forgiveness is instant. And you get the idea that no one needs therapy.

Did we just miss that part as kids? No, we really didn’t, as my sister pointed out.  “We knew the father, and even Santa, was mean to Rudolph,” she said. And we pretty much thought, ‘well, that’s the way it is.’ ” And then we got on with our day.

Today, however, that show wouldn’t be made because we couldn’t stand the idea of our kids being shown a less-than-ideal parent while they were watching a TV show or movie. Sure, we’ll allow them to be temporarily frightened when the Bumble roars or, King Kong-like, grasps a struggling doe in his giant paw. We can allow them the temporary anxiety of wondering if Yukon makes it out alive, or if Christmas will be canceled like a flight out of O’Hare. Scary is acceptable.

What’s not acceptable any longer are adults who get it wrong, then apologize in the end, as Donner does to Rudolph after he saves Christmas. TV and movie parents don’t screw up. They make cookies and laugh indulgently and otherwise remain more or less benignly in the background as their kids (whether they’re reindeer, pigs, turtles or little bears) mess up, make messes, and sometimes learn lessons. But they’d never, ever, ever call their child a misfit. Even if they said they were sorry.

Back in the 70s, on that braided rug, safe in the paneled walls of our den, with our parents behind us on the couch, my sister and I watched, got scared, then felt good again, and my folks didn’t give a second thought to the negative depiction of parenthood in this once-yearly bit of holiday fun. They just yawned and sent us to off to bed.

Why do we seem to believe, as my sister pointed out, that our kids can’t comprehend and mentally manage the fact that sometimes parents aren’t perfectly nice, that they mess up and apologize, sometimes over and over for the same crimes? Why don’t we give them that credit? Why, instead do we give them entertainment that whitewashes parents into mistake-free creations that the kids run roughshod over?

Back then, Donner could apologize with a manly clanking of his antlers. Today, he’d be getting a visit from the Department of Children’s Services. Or, more likely, he’d have started out being the kind of dad who gave his misfit son a sentimental lecture on how that red nose made Rudolph special.

Apparently, fictional parents are no longer allowed to bumble their way to the right thing. They have to be perfect from the get-go.

What do you think?