F Is For Family: an appreciation

 Netflix's F Is For Family is a television show that never received the appreciation it deserved. It just completed its fifth and final season.

For anyone not familiar with it, F Is For Family is (or I should say, was, at this point) an animated show that takes place in the 1970s and focuses on the Murphy family of the fictional Midwestern city of Rustvale. The patriarch of the family, Frank Murphy, is a guy who--as a young man--wanted to be an airline pilot until life got in the way. He returned from the Korean War, got his girlfriend pregnant, married her, and instead of becoming a pilot, settled into the slightly less glamorous job of baggage department manager for Mohican Airways at the Walter L. Rustbelt Memorial Airport. Pretty much living paycheck to paycheck, the often hot-headed Frank and his wiser and generally more level-headed wife Sue struggle to raise their three kids: airhead stoner wannabe rocker Kevin, intelligent daughter Maureen, and awkward younger son Bill.

No other TV show I've seen captured the feeling and vibe of the 1970s as realistically as F Is For Family. I am a little bit younger than Bill Murphy is on the show, and I remember there being lots of dysfunction under the surface (and sometimes above the surface) during the seventies. F Is For Family does a wonderful job in capturing all the oddball characters of Rustvale. These are the kinds of people who seem distinctly "1970s." For example, the Murphy's neighbor Vic is a womanizing, Corvette-driving, drug-taking libertine. He reminds me of a younger guy who lived on my street in Detroit and spent hours and hours on the weekend washing and polishing his Dodge Charger. (However, I'm not sure if this particular real-life guy in my neighborhood was a drug-taking libertine, but it's not out of the question).

Then there are characters who, on the surface, seem relatively normal or only mildly strange but are actually hiding secrets, like the Murphy's neighbor Goomer and his wife Evelyn. Goomer has some odd obsessions and kinks that occasionally rise to the surface--no spoilers. Also, he and Evelyn, when they were younger, tried to have a baby, but Evelyn miscarried. Goomer is emotionally distant while Evelyn still pines for a baby. The emotional rift in their marriage manifests itself in Goomer's odd behavior.

All of this makes the show sound more serious than it is. It's actually quite funny, but the humor does tend to edge towards the dark side.

Anyone who was a kid in the '70s remembers the "hands-off"--some might say "indifferent"--approach to parenting and child care. It was the polar opposite of the "helicopter parenting" that tends to be the dominant approach these days. This is hilariously portrayed throughout F Is For Family, with kids getting in fights and engaging in outrageously dangerous activities while the adults in their lives remain completely oblivious.

F Is For Family is also full of funny parodies of '70s culture, including a pseudo-Evel Knievel ("Buster Thunder, Jr.") and a television star ("Colt Luger") who bares resemblance to Mike Connors or Charles Bronson.

This merely scrapes the surface of delights to be found in F Is For Family. Kudos to comedian/actor Bill Burr for creating this underappreciated series.