MEET THE NEWMANS

The perfect 1950s family—they play themselves on television—crash-lands into the modern era one fateful day in March 1964.

For 12 years, Del and Dinah Newman and their sons, Guy and Shep, have played themselves on a CBS series called Meet the Newmans. As Niven’s adult fiction debut opens, it’s March 20, 1964, “the night the world as [Dinah] knew it ended.” Her husband, the creator, director, writer, and star of the series, has been in a serious car crash in a part of Los Angeles he had no known reason to visit. In the next section, a series of rather confusingly time-stamped vignettes and press clips from the day before sets the stage. The show has received a devastating review from a prominent TV critic, threatening its prospects for renewal by the network; one sponsor has already dropped out. Meanwhile, Dinah is fed up with her life, and she’s experiencing physical symptoms of numbness; 17-year-old rock idol Shep has gotten one of his many female admirers pregnant; 22-year-old Guy has secretly dropped out of law school and is having a closeted gay relationship with one of his entourage. Yet the media continues to pump out PR-driven fluff on America’s Favorite Family. With Del now in a (secret) coma, the rest of the family must rally to complete the last two episodes of the season. A stunningly clunky series of developments makes Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique the deus ex machina of transformation for Dinah and a young journalist named Juliet Dunne, who becomes her collaborator. Downtrodden and trivialized at the Los Angeles Times, Juliet is so far best known for tabloid coverage of her relationship with a famous bad-boy musician. She and Dinah write a final episode that will drop-kick the Newmans out of their old-timey rut, with a hilariously hokey women’s consciousness-raising session convened along the way to help them hone their script.

Dedicated to delivering its liberatory messages, this purpose-built homage to 1960s television lacks humor and veracity.