Giving the American Housewife a Bad Name

It’s just a TV show — and a sitcom, at that.

But nobody should mistake the protagonist of “American Housewife,” the new ABC program, for an actual, real-life housewife.

The husband wears a T-shirt that says “My Wife Is Married to a Feminist.”

The show centers around fictional housewife Katie Otto, her husband, Jeff, and their three children in the wealthy town of Westport, Connecticut.

The son brings to mind Alex P. Keaton, the character portrayed by suit-wearing Michael J. Fox in the old sitcom “Family Ties.” He is a capitalist and wants to be rich and successful. He love his stock market club in school and calls Halloween “a celebration of handouts that encourages a welfare-state mentality in our kids.”

He’s probably just there to encourage mockery of conservative ideas — by his mom and viewers — but at least those ideas get screen time. That’s how it started with Alex Keaton as well, but he ended up being one of the most popular characters on the show.

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The husband, a submissive type who wears a T-shirt that says “My Wife Is Married to a Feminist,” takes the brunt of her frustration with domestic life. He’s warmer than she is, which seems only to frustrate her all the more. She jokes easily about him being dead or divorcing him.  She shows little concern over him being tired, sick, or overwhelmed with work.

In one episode, the husband forgets he is supposed to read to their daughter’s class and is too sick to do it anyway.  “What are you? An idiot?” she tells him before rushing off to the school to fill in.

And boy, does she fill in. She’s supposed to read a book about a cat, but, like everything in the show, it ends up being all about her.

“Hunky Mama Cat does every last thing for her kittens,” she begins. “She feeds them. She plays with them. She licks them clean. Does she complain? No.”

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Then she unloads about the horrors of the life of an upper-middle-class housewife in modern America.

“It was her choice,” she continues, “but Hunky Mama Cat still wonders what the h*** happened to her life. You know, before she decided to spew kittens onto the planet, she had a great job. She was North American sales director of Rollabooster Stroller Company. She got to wear high heels. She got to fly in airplanes. She had the special golden corporate credit card. And Peter, the president of the entire corporation, emailed Hunky Mama Cat an offer for her old job back!”

In other words — she gave up much more than a job when she decided to settle down and raise her family. She gave up what, for her, seemed like any chance at fulfillment.

Then, she returns home to find her sick husband working from bed, and proceeds to lecture him about how at least when he goes to work he gets a “break” from her miserable life of child-rearing and homemaking.

“A break?” he responds. “You forget that I work all day and then I continue to help you with kids at home. I don’t get a break.”

He tells her to go back to work if she likes because he wants her to be happy. But, predictably, it doesn’t make her happy.

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It only makes her more frustrated until finally, she cries out, “I have a marketing degree from Duke!”

Eventually, she decides she is in the right place — even if that place is not paradise.

“Being a stay-a-home mom does suck,” she finally says. “But this is what I would rather do.”

What does it say to kids that it makes their mom miserable to be around them?

If this is her first choice in life, we don’t want to see how she reacts to second and third choices.

Yes, trading a briefcase for a diaper bag is a life-altering transition, and it’s certainly not always glamorous. But the problem with “American Housewife” is it presents motherhood not as a beautiful endeavor of bringing the next generation into the world but as an exhausting, frustrating, unrewarding task to be endured rather than enjoyed.

It’s hard to see how that negativity, that estrangement from those around her, doesn’t rub off.

Being cynical and tired and negative is easy. Bringing joy to the people who depend on you is harder. It takes effort and appreciation of one’s blessings. Popularizing the whiny “woe-is-me” character of so many adults today is unproductive and unnecessary. And ultimately, it serves only to make things worse.

When the older daughter befriends a joyful and fit neighbor named Viv, Katie gets insecure about her mothering skills. She asks the daughter why she likes Viv. “She’s positive,” the daughter responds.

Sitcoms are supposed to be funny — and “American Housewife” is simply a tortured show to endure that inspires little joy about parenting or much else.