ABSTRACT
Audiences were increasingly identifying with the sitcom as a model which provided both entertainment and the discussion of important social issues. In an interesting test case for particular advocacy groups, Maude, featuring Beatrice Arthur, latterly of The Golden Girls, dealt with a scenario in which the 47-year-old Maude discovered herself to be pregnant and opted for an abortion-a story-line which Kathryn Montgomery suggests, ‘tested, as never before, the boundaries of acceptability for programme content’ (Montgomery, 1989:28). The numerous advocacy groups which lobbied for or against the representation of serious issues like abortion in such programmes inevitably began to affect the agendas of both broadcasters and advertisers alike, and in the mid-1970s, the reinstallation by the US TV networks of a prime time family hour (an agreement to pursue greater propriety in prime time scheduling) significantly reduced the creation of radical sitcoms, and implicitly endorsed a backward-looking agenda. Happy Days, a sitcom that epitomised the desire to revisit the ideological certainties of the 1950s, was soon top of the ratings.
