Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
—Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
The entire premise for many
Dom Coms is that the lead characters are a family of maladjusted people who generally don’t get along. Usually they consist of an
Al Bundy father, a mother who is either a
paragon of common sense and efficiency or a repulsive harridan (or both, a la
Roseanne), and two-three kids who are unhappy, dislike each other, and resent at least one of their parents. Also, the father and his mother-in-law tend to hate each other. The family is generally fairly poor, although not always -–
Arrested Development is about a large, rich dysfunctional family.
Don't get them wrong, though; for all the family arguments, the typical dysfunctional family never engages in actual abusive behavior — any that did would
immediately lose all audience sympathy. Furthermore, when the family is facing a major problem from outside, they will generally pull together to face it. Dysfunctional Families may not get along, but they rarely actually
loathe each other, and often receive
Aw Look They Really Do Love Each Other moments.
Note that this was originally a subversion of the
Leave It To Beaver/
The Brady Bunch almost-too-good-to-believe family, but eventually ballooned into a genre of its own.
Contrast with
Quirky Household, where the people are merely
weird, but generaly happy — indeed, more happy than more convential households.
See also
Big Screwed Up Family who are more people and more dysfunctional.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- Tsukihime reference: The Tohno Family who, due to their non-human ancestry, were basically a 'cursed' gene pool of insanity, various psychosis, and sanity-decaying superhuman abilities; their family tree was literally full of suicides, early deaths, disappearances, and the like. Needless to say, they didn't necessarily get along with each other, although they co-existed rather well.
- The entire premise of The Daichis: Earth's Defense Family is one of these families being recruited as a pseudo-Super Sentai team just before the parents formally divorce each other - and the hilarity and angst that ensues.
- The Tendou/Soatome household from Ranma One Half.
- In the Josei manga With The Light, (almost) each child or parent Sachiko encounters has a dysfunctional family. This troper's personal favorite chapter had the saddest way to start: a father is stinking drunk and the son tries to run away- only to see his mother escaping asap in a taxi- leaving him alone. Another child, Eri-chan, refused to tell a teacher about Hikaru, an autistic boy, getting seriously hurt in fear that her father would hit her "just like he hits mommy".
Comic Books
- The Fantastic Four of Marvel Comics fame were designed to be a rather dysfunctional and constantly bickering, but ultimately tight-knit and loving family unit, which is part of what made the comic so popular and part of what put Marvel Comics on the map; the fact that each member has superpowers only adds to the tensions and clashes between them. Although only Susan and Johnny were initially directly related to each other (sister and brother), Susan and Reed later married and started their own family.
- Reed and Ben are the type of best friends that are so close they each consider the other their brother, blood relations be damned.
Film
Live Action TV
- Malcolm in the Middle
- Roseanne
- Married With Children
- Reversed in The Addams Family and The Munsters, both families are wildly dysfunctional in the classical sense, but treat each other with respect and love. That it's expressed via poisoning, stabbing, and other grievous and macabre means is just funny.
- Titus
- Eastenders and Coronation Street - if there's a family these days on either of those two shows which is actually functional, this editor hasn't seen them in a while.
- Arrested Development
- Brothers And Sisters
- In Third Rock From The Sun the aliens resemble this. In one episode, they use it as a cover for their odd behavior when they become the subject of a documentary on dysfunctional families.
- Everybody Loves Raymond, although it focuses more on the adults than on the kids. (Actually, if you think of Frank and Marie as the "parents" and their children and their girlfriends/wives as the "kids", you have two generations of this represented.)
- My Family
- The Cylons. But given the screwed up process by which they are created, they can't help but be dysfunctional (and a bit psychotic).
- Mama's Family
- The George Lopez Show- George's dad left him, his mom's a bitter drunk, his daughter gets bullied an extreme amount and always is getting in trouble with boys, his son is dyslexic...you get the picture.
Theater
- Next To Normal: "So my son's a little shit, my husband's boring, and my daughter, though a genius, is a freak."
- You Cant Take It With You features a happy version of this: a whole household of loveable Cloud Cuckoolanders, among them guests who came one day and just decided to stay.
- Joe Pitt, his wife Harper, his mother Hannah, and his absent father in Angels In America bring a couple more complexes to the already insane mix.
- Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, which is really a modern "indie" dramedy a la ''LittleMissSunshine'' way before its time, lives and breathes on this trope.
Western Animation
