The Goode Family

The show's got a good start. Mike Judge has a really keen eye for all of the little indignities and petty intimidations of mid-level, white collar life, and addressing it to a family trying to be as ecologically moral within their limited means offers some promise. Most of the jokes were spot-on: I really liked the sequence in the supermarket, with expensive degrees of locally-farmed pesticide-free organic produce, and the electronic board showing the decimation of the rain forest in real time. 

Downsides were few. The son, an overweight blond 16 year old of limited vocal skills, reminded me too much of Chris from _Family Guy_, and the daughter's not too different from the daughter of _American Dad_. The vegetarian dog joke's as old as tofu, but decently done here, and there was only one joke that just clunked on the floor: the housewife fretting "WWAGD-- What Would Al Gore Do?" The canvas shopping bag labelled "An Inconvenient Bag" was better. 

I liked the more subtle, pointed moments. For example, the fact that the Goodes are hovering just above lower-middle-class existence, and their lifestyle choices force them beyond their means. And that they make the choices on the basis of public appearances and guilt and intimidation from their equally-proper neighbors. Or, one neighbor at the checkout lane reminding Mrs. Goode that Mr. Goode works _for_ her husband, not _with_; that's a joke that's a little more incisive than simply making fun of the oddballs. 

Fans of the show ought to go look up a book that I'm certain _none_ of you have ever read. Cyra McFadden's 1977 novel _The Serial_ told a year-long story of Kate and Harvey, two residents of Marin County during the growth of what was the "human potential" movement, where yoga, est, Reiki, body integration, TM, rebirthing and the like were exploding in the upper-middle-class regions around Esalen, and combining with a fuzzy-minded fascination with alternate cultures and one's own spiritual growth. McFadden's voice was a Sahara-dry approximation of Marin-speak. 

The only online excerpts of _The Serial_ I was able to find were on a blogsite (http://draust.wordpress.com/2008/07/05/marin-ated-in-woo/). Here, a kid named Che is sent to a summer camp run by Marinites:

“When [Che]… broke out into a rash, envisioning himself brought to a rolling boil in the hot tub, his Surrogate Parent for the session made him drink a lot of lemon-grass tea. “Listen, Che,” said [his surrogate parent], “you’ve just made a conscious decision. You’re the one that decides to get sick or stay healthy. Listen, you want your body to call the shots?”

Che just wanted the camp to call [his mother] and tell her he’d forgotten his cortisone ointment. Maybe she’d come and bring it to him and he could hide out in the trunk of the Rover. Otherwise he was in for two more weeks of unstructured freedom that stopped short of “pharmaceuticals”…

Glumly, he consulted the bulletin board, listing the afternoon’s activities, posted outside the communal yurt: belly dancing, spear fishing and herbal medicine. Che didn’t know what herbal medicine was but suspected lemon-grass tea was part of it.”

Note that the kid in this 1977 book, and the dog in _The Goode Family_, are both named Che by their owners. Which makes me wonder why _The Serial_ isn't as well-known as it should be. It's a bit of a period piece, but the period and place has expanded to the rest of the country, and it's not difficult to read 1970s fads and substitute more modern ones. (Okay, they _did_ make a bad movie of the book, written by mid-1970s sitcom veterans, offering us the spectacle of Christopher Lee as the leader of a gay biker gang. That'd kill a good book.) 

So, if you're in a good used book store, look under McF for _The Serial_ and enjoy. And if not, let's see how Mike Judge works what's still a pretty fertile field.