Regardless of the ethics involved, you have to give credit to that Gilbert guy for coming up with the concept. Also, apparently he did explain in an introduction that this family is not representative of a typical American family. They are simply AN American family.
Having said that, what a depressing lot. The man with the "old-school" values of work and responsibility is portrayed as the square, and the outrageously spoiled wife and kids are the "cool" ones.
What is most shocking is how the kids and the wife are totally disassociated from the source of their material comfort. They have no sense that someone is working to attain all this. Although the dad makes attempts to teach them a work ethic, he is to blame almost as much as the mom, for not instilling the right values in the kids when they were much younger.
The kids' lives revolve around pop-culture and self-gratification. There's no God, no volunteerism, no work, and ironically, no American identity.
O.K. so the dad has been having affairs. Apparently the mom had one too. But she had such little regard for his hard work or values that she became a turn-off. But of course there's more to all that. This guy was very masculine and virile, and those types of alpha-males do often get tired of eating the same meal every night, metaphorically. They have voracious sexual appetites and egos to stroke.
The other kids seemed to worship their gay older brother. Yet in reality he was nothing more than a spoiled, lazy queen. What a loser. He was so full of himself too. He thought he was so unique and that he had outgrown the provincialism of Santa Barbara. But ultimately he crashed and burned elsewhere too. Even in Paris. The problem was him, not a place.
By the way, do all young gay men embrace drag queen culture and extreme flamboyance when they come out? I doubt it.
The makers did what they could. They focused on the two most compelling or sensationalistic aspects of the family. Those were the breakup and the gay kid finding himself.
Whether they meant to or not, what they really showed was how the relative affluence of American life can alienate people from and binding core-culture traditions.
