by its creator Sherwood Schwartz as being a "socialistic community," while
actor Jim Backus described the island as a "benign welfare state." ⁸¹

In that the television situation comedy is a dramatic form ontologically
grounded in social discord and conflict, it could not have helped but partially
expose the fissures in liberal democratic ideology. Even in their absence, the
substantive political issues of the times--civil rights, the growth of the welfare
state, American imperialism--were the repressed but persistent subjects of 1960s
situation comedies.

Not until the end of the decade with the appearance of Julia ( September 17,
1968, to May 25, 1971)--a landmark program in that it sympathetically depicted
the struggles of a black, female, single parent--did the sitcom begin to reconcile
the ideological discontinuities between polity and popular art that had surfaced
during the 1960s. By 1968, the "politics of protest" had been modified into the
"new politics" of politically committed students, minorities, and members of
the underclass who rallied under the banner of the revitalized Democratic party.
But by midyear, the era of ideological and political ferment seemed to come to
an end with the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby
Kennedy.

In the following decade, the television situation comedy would come to reflect
the partial assimilation of counterhegemonic social ideologies that took root
during the 1960s. "Social relevance," a catch phrase that gained currency on
many a university campus in the push to update curricula, became the watchword
for the sitcoms of the 1970s. The pathbreaking sitcoms of Norman Lear and
Bud Yorkin were in particular distinguished by their tendency to generate con-
troversy. Despite their daring treatment of certain social taboos, the sitcoms of
Lear and Yorkin represented the consolidation of, rather than challenge to, the
dominant liberal ideology. As already seen, the situation comedy as an aes-
thetically veiled form of political communication has proven to be a resilient
and infinitely adaptable sociodramatic means of achieving and maintaining the
structured consensus so vital to the ongoing legitimacy of the liberal democratic
state.

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