The 'Seinfeld' syndrome.

• Author: Rapping, Elayne
• Position: Negative aspects of situation comedies on television - Culture - Column

Am I the only left-leaning U.S. citizen who has not joined the cult of Seinfeld? I know it's hard to remain cult-less in these days of mass social anxiety and instability, when each day brings new waves of terror to our fast-shrinking global village: mad rightwing bombers; out-of-control viruses; contracts on America; the Invasion of the Body Snatchers at the White House; the sudden, nerve-wracking reappearance of the word "socialist" as a political swear word in public discourse.

It's all very stressful. And for those of us who can't quite get with the culture of crystals, or twelve steps, or cyberspace intimacy, or psychic healing, Seinfeld does seem a harmless enough way of getting our minds off our troubles. He and his costars are certainly funny, often hilarious. They're certainly intelligent and hip. They even hang out on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, one of the last bastions of intellectual, left-liberal culture.

But at the risk of alienating everyone I know, I must say that I find the show, and its fast multiplying gaggle of clones--Mad About You, Ellen, Friends--almost as scary as the social and political nightmares they serve to momentarily mask.

Call me a hopeless Puritan. But I see, in this airwave invasion of sitcoms about young Manhattanites with no real family or work responsibilities and nothing to do but hang out and talk about it, an insidious message about the future of Western civilization. It's not that I'm such a big fan of the way industrialism has structured our work and family lives. But these new sitcoms--which seem to be functioning as cheering squads for the end of work and family life as we, and the media heretofore, have known it--don't offer much in the way of replacement. In fact, what I see as I watch them is a scary commercial message on behalf of the new economic system, in which most of us will have little if any paid (never mind meaningful) work to do, and the family ties (remember that old show?) that used to bind us, at least as economic units dependent on the wage of a bread-winner (remember that old term?), have become untenable.

"What, me worry?" ask these clever series, as mantras to get us through our pointless postindustrial days. To which I answer, under my breath, "But I do, I do."

These shows function as an entirely new, yet logical--even inevitable--media development. On the one hand, they do indeed diverge radically from the classic professional career/family-based sitcom we have come to know and love/hate.

On the other hand, the TV sitcom, with its rigid work and gender patterns, was always, at heart, propaganda for a radical and in many ways terrifying new economic order. For these were the years when the new corporate-driven economic order shepherded us, en masse, into suburban bedroom communities, where we learned to watch...