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American Dreams
NBC
8 p.m. Sundays (EST)

The times they are a-changin'," Bob Dylan declared with a growl in 1964, issuing an updated emancipation proclamation for all who suffered under the traditional moral and political order. The sense of apocalyptic inevitability that drove Dylan—the certainty that this revolution was jolting households across America, provides the starting point for NBC's bold family drama, American Dreams.

Set in working-class Philadelphia and centered on the Pryors, an Irish-Catholic family, the show is planted right on the cracks that emerged in the 1960s as subterranean America got all shook up. A new age was born, and, in the way that creation myths usually do, the '60s have fascinated us ever since. So it's not surprising that American Dreams traffics in its fair share of myth. But it also makes a credible effort to understand and interpret those years, and in so doing gives Christians a poignant glimpse of the self-understandings that shape our troubled times.

Tension and stress lurk in nearly every scene, as transgression of established norms seems, almost week by week, to become easier and more alluring. The show's most jagged moments occur between Jack and Helen Pryor, the young parents of four children ranging from ages 7 to 18.

It doesn't take long to see that their marriage is meant to prefigure the culture wars that have dominated American public life in the aftermath of the '60s—Jack defaults to an embattled mid-century Roman Catholicism, while Helen cautiously moves toward less traditional visions of freedom.

In the opening episodes, Helen, played by Gail O'Grady, dares to move from participating in a neighborhood reading circle to auditing her first college class, in European literature, at Temple University. In other scenes she quietly refuses to bear more children, despite Jack's wishes and convictions. In both instances, Jack ends up giving ground.

To the writers' and O'Grady's credit, Helen Pryor is no proto-radical just waiting for her scaly conservative skin to fall off. She is sensible, sincere, careful, and loyal; she even confesses to a priest her desire to stop having children. That she loves Jack is never in doubt; that she is coming quietly to rue her location in his world is equally clear.

Jack, played by former L.A. Law cast member Tom Verica, manages the upheaval with a good-natured if fiery disposition. Verica's performance is all the more impressive given the stereotyped character he is forced to play. Jack Pryor has clearly been appointed the show's Square, a small businessman and World War II vet who only wants, as he tells Helen in the premiere, "a boat, a yard, and a family."

As the season has progressed, the writers have found something redemptive within this patriarch, something that promises to redeem from the bondage of stereotype not just his character but perhaps even the entire show. Jack, it turns out, possesses a fierce, lively love for his wife, children, and friends. This has made possible some of the most moving scenes so far. When his brooding, decent son J. J. (Will Estes), a high-school senior, is accepted at Notre Dame but denied the football scholarship that would make his enrollment possible, Jack looks him in the eye and, with deep emotion, whispers to him, "You got in—let me worry about the rest."

Alas, this approach to the past, which finds ruin and redemption in unlikely places, too often eludes the show's creators, as they habitually default to the all too familiar mythologizing mode. It seems impossible to them that the good life may be more present within Jack's world—including the Catholic schools that his children attend—than within either the cultural modernism of the university or the relentlessly hip world of pop culture. Jack's traditionalism is good for something, they seem to say, but not the main thing—which is, of course, freedom.

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May 2003, Vol. 47, No. 5