Art: The Culture Comes Home

Over the past two months, it has become tempting--and too easy--to mark Sept. 11 as the day life turned bad and we turned good. The Great Before, goes the myth, was a time of peace, plenty and triviality, when we coasted in blissful self-absorption, drunk on day trading, egged on by a selfish, amoral popular culture. The period has become as instantly stereotyped as the '60s: just replace acid with half-caf lattes, Charles Manson with Gary Condit, and Woodstock with Survivor. It's a response that is both self-loathing (smacking of the Falwellian idea that we somehow brought disaster on our frivolous selves) and comforting (if so much was taken from us, shouldn't we get a sense of moral superiority in return?). It's also, in one important way, wrong. Of course our collective near-death experience changed many of us. But if our popular artists know anything about us, we were ready to change long before.

Consider: An elderly woman tries to reunite her dysfunctional family for Christmas. Successful urbanites quit their stressful jobs and stream back to their hometowns. A generation of ordinary young folk are called on to risk their lives for their country. These are not examples from a social-trend story about our world after Sept. 11 but the subjects of some of the most popular entertainments created before. The same social changes we are seeing in real life--reconnecting with family, regaining respect for institutions and community, fleeing the rat race--were already rampant in books, in movies and especially on TV, to an extent that suggests the real-world longing for change may be deep-seated enough to last. When it comes to changed priorities and renewed purpose, popular culture has been there, done that and bought the bowling alley.

That bowling alley is the setting of TV's Ed, in which a New York City lawyer quits his high-powered firm to move home to Stuckeyville, Ohio, woo his high school crush and buy the local Stuckeybowl lanes. Today half the stressed-out skyscraper workers in Manhattan have a comparable escape fantasy, but Ed and its newly resonant theme of fleeing to the past debuted more than a year ago. And we have seen similar homecoming stories on Providence (L.A. plastic surgeon moves home, works in clinic), Judging Amy (big-city lawyer moves home, becomes a judge) and this fall's Crossing Jordan (medical examiner moves home, solves crimes with Dad), to name a few.

Nostalgia shows like The Wonder Years appealed to adults by re-creating their childhood past. But this gaggle of series offers the greater, reassuring fantasy that you can re-create your childhood today, right down to, as on Ellen DeGeneres' The Ellen Show, moving back into your old bedroom. "The characters experience a new beginning but also have an anchor and things that are familiar to them," says Ed creator Rob Burnett. "There is a certain feeling of trying to recapture youth that we find appealing."