Before Mad Men: Dreaming of the 1960s with American Dreams

My internet has been acting up lately, especially in the evening, making browsing a bit difficult. Since I do a great deal of my television watching, especially my American tv watching online, the slow internets have been impeding my ability to catch up on this past season. I'm still getting it done, just a bit slower than I'd like. As an upshot of this, I have dived into my DVD collection. I don't have even half of my DVDs with me, but a large portion of what I do have, are television shows. One of the shows I have with me that I decided to revisit is the first season of the show American Dreams.

If you don't remember this show, it aired on NBC for three seasons, from 2002-2005. It told the story of the very Catholic (and white) Pryor family in Philadelphia just after the assassination of President Kennedy (which occured at the end of the pilot episode), and to a lesser extent the Walker family (who are black). Meg, the oldest daughter dances on American Bandstand, and this is the way the show brings the music of the era alive. The show also tackles racism and civil rights, feminism, Vietnam, and space. (It also happens to be the show that one of my favorite tv columnists Matt Roush answered my question about, relating to its third season. Yes, I am a huge dork, but *spoiler alert* do go and have a look.)

While I like the first season, the show gets much stronger in the second and third season. It is a little predictable in this season, but always enjoyable. It is sometimes not historically accurate, but I can deal with that in the name of poetic licence. I particularly love how everyone talks over each other. It takes a little getting used to, but that's exactly how life is. The actors of all ages are pretty good, and by the end of the series they are all turning in strong performances. I can't decide who is my favorite character, but I think it is down to Sam Walker and Roxanne, who is Meg's best friend.

The reason I like American Dreams so much are the feelings it invokes in me. As I've been watching the first season, I have had to ask: Is it possible to be nostalgic for an era you weren't alive to experience? Oddly, I seem to miss the 1960s, a decade that was long gone by the time I was born. I suspect this is partially because the 1960s have been "done" so much, in movies, on the tele, in novels, and through our history books, that I think we all feel very familiar with the decade. I tend to think of the sixties as a time for activism, a true the "times they are a changin'" period, and frankly it just seems so much more exciting. I have always wished I could have helped to register voters, marched in civil rights parades, and helped make a difference. Also, can you imagine what it must have been like to see color on the tv for this first time? Obviously the sixties weren't perfect, but man, what I time to live through.

The other main reason why I love this show is it makes me think of my parents. The kids in this show, are my parents--especially my mom' as her family, like this one, was a large Catholic family. I think most anyone with a good relationship with their parents, wonder what their parents were like as teenagers. This show gives me a glimpse, and I think in some ways, it is my parents' youth I am missing. That may be a bit weird, but I've always been one to reflect back on the past (look, I was sad when the 80s ended, okay), and really, reflecting on my parents's past makes sense to me.

American Dreams was sadly cancelled in its third season, and it ended without any type of closure. An alternative ending that helped to tie some things up was filmed, but never aired. As of right now the second and third seasons are not available on DVD, mainly due to all the music copyright issues; the latest bit of information I could scrounge up was that the studio was committed to resolving this and releasing the DVDs.

Really, I think American Dreams is simply making me aware of the passage of time, and how quickly we all grow up. I don't want to be a teenager again, but I'd like to do it now and again. I strongly recommend giving this show a go, for those of you who lived through the 60s, and for those of you who wanted to. I think we all, as the theme song says, deserve a chance to "live inside the spark of life" that was the 1960s.