My own family moved to the suburbs in 1957, right at the first fever peak of the big suburban migration. I was three years old at the time, so it wasn't until much later that I realized our way of life- an acre of yard, hedges, rabbits, a treehouse - wasn't American life. And my delusion was reinforced by the fact that I spent pretty all my free time watching TV like this:

LEAVE IT TO BEAVER CLIP

That looks campy to us now. But not as campy as this, even though it's a full decade newer:

BRADY BUNCH CLIP

But even back when "The Brady Bunch" was first on, we watched it in my suburban household with a smirk; we knew that its goody-goody. version of the suburbs was ludicrous and fake. And that's because by the time it went on the air in 1969, we'd already seen and entirely bought this version of suburbia from 2 years earlier:

CLIP FROM THE GRADUATE

Right at that moment in the 60s, all the cool people and all the smart people were obliged to start looking at suburbia through a new prism: amused contempt. Rejecting the suburbs was another way for baby boomers to reject their parents, and the bouncy, happy, oblivious, Vietnam War-fighting America of their parents. For three decades, in fiction and film and even on television, "the suburbs" became shorthand for materialism, conformity, stupidity, hypocrisy, boredom, complacency. You can draw a straight line from "The Graduate" to the decadent depressing hell of "American Beauty":

CLIP FROM AMERICAN BEAUTY

But during the 1980s, a different vision of the suburbs also started to appear on TV and in the movies. The suburban tracts in which "Close Encounters" and "ET" took place were neither the innocent Norman Rockwellian eden of "Leave it to Beaver" nor the cynical, alienating nightmares of "American Beauty" and "The Ice Storm." We started to see a more ambivalent version of the suburbs, as a decadent and innocent place, oppressive as well as pleasant. Sometimes smart and sharp, sometimes "Dazed and Confused":

CLIP FROM DAZED AND CONFUSED

But more than the movies, I think, it's been on television where the new,more complicated take on the suburbs has really flourished. Whether it's a great farce (like "Malcom In the Middle) or great drama - that is, "The Sopranos." Among the achievements of "The Sopranos" are its portrayals of suburban life right now-the McMansions, the media rooms, the families who bear no resemblance to the Cleavers or the Bradys.

In fact, not only is the best dramatic program on TV today partly about the suburbs, so is the best comedy.

CLIP FROM THE SIMPSONS

So, in 50 years the culture's mainstream depictions of the suburbs have gone from one extreme to the other to something rich and complicated and in-between.

And that's what we're looking at on the show today-American suburbs, as pieces of American design, and as a subject for American artists and storytellers.

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