MovieChat Forums > Family Affair (1966) Discussion > How come this show is so bizarre?

How come this show is so bizarre?


I notice when I watch Family Affair that many really bizarre things happen.

Such as:

- The kids turn a biohazard dump into a park, and Uncle Bill and the community endorses this but has no concerns at all for the children's health.

- A hamster is strong enough to bust open the closed top door of it's cage. How it even got that high in the first place I'll never know. Perhaps it was bitten by a radioactive spider in the aforementioned biohazard dump/park and thus acquired webcrawling and super-strength abilities. After it busts out the first time, they find it in the sofa and then put it back in the same cage. It later busts out again in the park. Why didn't they get a better cage after the first time it busted out?

- A heir to a foreign country's throne who is just a kid is whisked away to America with a woman who is protecting him, and hidden by Uncle Bill until his family puts down the uprising in his country that ousted his family from power. In the mean time the kid and the woman have to be conscious of agents who are following them around Bill's neighborhood and trying to kill them. As if all that is not bizarre enough on it's own, but also at first the woman does not wanna reveal the secret of who she and the boy are. But Uncle Bill says "I have children to think about therefore I must know". However, when the answer is one that is guaranteed to put the children at great risk - agents going around the neighborhood trying to kill the women and boy - Uncle Bill then says "Sure you can stay with us." What happened to thinking about the children?!

- Sissy is going out with a boy. Then a hotshot other boy comes to visit who works in the Peace Corps. Sissy immediately starts treating the boy she is currently dating like total crap, and then changes their scheduled date. She actually dates the new Peace Corps boy instead, at the time she was scheduled to date the boy she was already dating. And she drags that boy along with her on the date. Immediately after that, Sissy wants to marry the Peace Corps boy. Then the other boy complains to Uncle Bill about how the new boy is ruining his life by stealing Sissy from him --- shouldn't he instead be complaining that Uncle Bill raised a tramp and he is disgusted by her and hopes to never hear from her again? But no - he actually still wanted Sissy to be with him! I don't understand this; even if he ended up marrying Sissy she would just cheat on him, so what's the point? And how come Uncle Bill never talked to Sissy about the immorality of treating boys like slabs of meat as she was doing?

- In one episode a window washer with no harness who cleans the very-high apartment unit's windows always opens the window to Bill's apartment where the kids are. It is like you see in the classic vampire movies where the windows of a young woman are opened all the way at night so that a vampire can come in. He teaches them how to do new math whilst sitting on his bench many, many stories up, with no harness on him. Not only is this extremely bizarre, but also it was posing a huge safety risk to the children who could easily have fallen to their deaths when interacting with him. Especially because they had to hand him their textbooks with the windows completely open and nothing to stop the children from falling out. At the end of the episode Bill comes by and tells the window cleaner not to talk to the children any more - which seemed to to imply something even worse than the sheer bizarreness of it all already had going on.

I have not seen all of the episodes otherwise I'm sure the list could be much, much larger.

How come this show is so bizarre?

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I agree that a lot of the storylines were bizarre. I loved it as a kid but watching it as an adult, it's like -what the hell??? Even more than most shows back then. It seems like a nightmare situation for a kid to be in, with a grouchy mumbling father figure who's away all the time, and a strait-laced English butler!

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Most TV is unrealistic in some way. It's not meant to always be real. It's a means to escape the real world,

Plus, it was the '60s.

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I'm not sure the 'Family Affair' world is one I'd want to escape into. Except maybe to have that apartment.

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With Sissy there, I would be there.

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It is the opening. It would give anybody epileptic seizures.

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The opening has that Catchy theme song!! (Very lawrence Welk like, I may add, so add that to Welk like influences besides Cissy's hairdo as mentioned by someone else..)

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Were the kids the children of his maid? Why did he get custody?

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