Family night gets whacked: though Sunday is "family day" in many homes, families shouldn't look to Sunday night TV for guidance.

WHEN I WAS A CHILD FAMILIES GATHERED around their TV sets on Sunday nights to watch Bonanza and The Ed Sullivan Show. The current generation of American households has spent the last seven years tuning in to The Sopranos and more recently The West Wing on Sunday nights, and as the curtain comes down on both these critically acclaimed dramas I can't help but wonder what sort of lessons about family we have absorbed while watching them.

Many complain The Sopranos is not "family" entertainment. The language is obscene and the violence grotesque and gratuitous. But a more disturbing fact about this HBO hit is that it casts villains as heroes--or at least as ordinary family men, working stiffs just trying to get by in a canine-eat-cannoli world. Not long ago TV mobsters were monsters, not goodfellows. Remember/he Untouchables?

But all that was before/he Godfather (Paramount). Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo's masterpiece used the tale of a mobster famiglia to look at the underside of the American family, asking hard, unsettling questions about the lines we draw in the sand between our romantic and idealized notions of the family and the hardheaded world of business. The Godfather and its sequels and imitators didn't take aim at the mafia or organized crime but at the hypocrisy of the notion that we can be loving and compassionate at home while abandoning all our moral and religious values at work--because there it is "just business."

The Sopranos continued and escalated that critique of the American family. In The Godfather Don and Michael Corleone compared themselves to the titans of industry and politics, but Tony the work-a-day mobster with a faux chateaux in the Jersey suburbs reminds us more of all the other mid-level managers commuting alongside him on the turnpike each morning. He is--at least in his own eyes--just another businessman trying to put his kids through college, support his aging mother, and keep his marriage from going off the rails. True, not many of his fellow commuters are ordering mob hits, but there are unflattering parallels.

Like The Godfather, The Sopranos offers a dark vision of the American family. In the world of The Sopranos the family household--inevitably run by women--is governed by moral and religious values. People are supposed to be loyal, compassionate, and loving, and to follow God's laws. But in the world of business--inevitably ruled by men--none of these moral or religious restraints apply. Tony and his crew may kill and maim in this parallel moral universe if it helps them gain an economic advantage, but God forbid that his wife or one of his children break any moral or sexual norm within the sacred realm of the family. That would be a crime.

The Sopranos also takes a shot at the individualism behind the American worship of "family values." In the mobster world that Tony inhabits "family" comes first (though it is not always clear whether he means his married or his mob family), as well as second, third, and last. That is, family is the only thing Tony values. He and his crew worship the family but pay no attention to their duties to their neighbors or the common good.

Tony and his boys may be family men and they may be businessmen, but they are clearly not citizens. Over 200 years ago Alexis de Tocqueville warned of an American individualism that led some to sever themselves from the larger community and "draw apart with his family and his friends." The Sopranos offers a striking example of how monstrous such worship of the family can be.

IF THE FAMILY IS FIRST ON THE SOPRANOS, IT IS last on The West Wing. In Aaron Sorkin's four-time Emmy-winning drama, the job is everything while family counts for little if anything. Among the regular cast, only President Bartlett is married at all, and he and his busy wife have made little time to raise their three daughters. Everyone else scurrying about the West Wing has either divorced or postponed marriage and family in order to run the White House. Chief of Staff Leo McGarry tells his wife that family is not as important as work, while his replacement C. J. Cregg has time for neither marriage nor the care of her dying father.

When "family values" do show up on this program, they are always being defended by unattractive members of the Christian right, as if liberals or Democrats do not care about the sanctity of families or marriage, or do not have time to care for their children or elders.

All too often the message is: Work is more fun and exciting than family, and only boring or unintelligent people would give their time and energy to family. Curiously enough, on a show about politics and the common good, there is little attention to the role of families in forming citizens and communities.

CATHOLIC THEOLOGIAN JULIE ANN RUBIO takes us beyond The Sopranos and The West Wing, arguing that Christian parents and families have a dual vocation in her book, A Christian Theology of Marriage and Family (Paulist). According to Rubio, Christians should see families as both the bedrock of a community and the stepping stone to a just society.

This dual vocation means that The Sopranos are right to argue that family comes first--but not that it comes second, third, and last. Parents have a duty to care for their children and to raise good citizens. The West Wing crew is right to point out our duties to work for the common good, but government needs just and compassionate citizens, which only families can create and nurture.

It takes a village full of families to raise a child. And it takes families willing to look beyond their own households to build a village, or a nation.

Three recent films explore the role of family in American society.

The Family Stone (Fox, 2005)

The Squid and the Whale (Sony, 2005)

The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio (Filmax, 2004)

PATRICK MCCORMICK, professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.