1960s

The 1960s are more than a setting in the family history recalled by Pandora Halfdanarson: they are a television-made memory, stocked with idealized fathers, scripted households, and a theme song that Pandora and Edison can still summon decades later. The period’s domestic comedies supply a pointed contrast to their actual childhood, while Joint Custody’s later challenge to television’s conventions becomes part of the siblings’ shared past.

Television’s father-shaped decade

Pandora’s account surveys the family sitcoms that preceded Joint Custody, from The Rifleman and Family Affair to My Three Sons, Flipper, The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Bonanza. Though their premises varied, the programs repeatedly placed widowed fathers at the center of family life. The pattern becomes comic through accumulation: television seemed to suggest that mothers disappeared once they had children, leaving fathers to raise them. The shows offered a cultural template in which a father’s presence was a dependable feature of family life, even as Pandora’s own experience made that promise uncertain.

A changing television family

Joint Custody arrived in 1974 with a premise its producers presented as a corrective to television’s avoidance of divorce. They argued that, with nearly half of American marriages ending that way, children of separated parents deserved to see family fracture represented onscreen. The contrast with earlier television was real, but the series’ claim to social realism also sits uneasily beside Travis Appaloosa’s reaction to a later program, One Day at a Time: he resented it and accused its producers of stealing the idea. His proprietary response undercuts the ideal of public service he had attached to his own starring role.

The show’s fictional household was itself a contrast between competing ways of life. Joy Markle played Mimi, who leaves her idealistic husband Emory Fields, resumes her maiden name, Barnes, and establishes a family-law practice in Portland. Emory, meanwhile, lives in a cabin he built in the Cascades, without running water or electricity, and tries to grow organic vegetables that die. The scripts were not wholly sympathetic to his insistence on doing everything the hard way; in one episode, Mimi fears the children will learn that their highest aspiration is merely to be harmless. In retrospect, Pandora sees the program as a cultural conduit between the idealism associated with the 1960s and the bottom-line outlook of the 1980s.

Fiction as a family mirror

For Pandora, television did not simply depict other families; it multiplied and distorted her own. Her father, Hugh Halfdanarson, also performed as Travis Appaloosa, who played Emory Fields, a fictional father more successful at family life than the self-absorbed man Pandora saw only occasionally at home. Pandora herself had a screen counterpart in Maple Fields, a sweeter, more altruistic girl who tried to reunite her parents. The actress, Floy Newport, was someone Pandora idolized. At times she wished the show had continued and her real family had been canceled instead.

Those overlapping identities made imitation feel almost inevitable in Pandora’s later work making customized dolls. The old television world had taught her to live among caricatures and doubles: a father who was also a character, a daughter who could choose a different surname, and a screen child whose goodness threw her own childhood into relief. Television supplied not a straightforward record of family life, but a set of competing versions through which Pandora could remember it.

The theme song as durable memory

Decades later, Edison begins singing the Joint Custody theme song at two in the morning, and Pandora joins him to test whether she still knows the words. The scene turns an old television jingle into a measure of shared memory: some lines, learned long ago, remain lodged in the mind as if engraved there. Pandora imagines that the song might be among the last memories to fade, making its persistence both comic and unsettling.

The siblings’ ability to sing together carries the past into the present even when family intimacy is difficult. Their old ritual of discussing their father and their shared history can feel diversionary, and Pandora’s marriage to Fletcher Feuerbach is unsettled by the way Edison’s presence revives an earlier family arrangement: she and her brother talk late while Fletcher is left outside their conversation. The show’s fictional family and its music therefore function as more than nostalgia. They give Pandora and Edison a common vocabulary for a childhood shaped by the distance between television’s family stories and the family they actually had.