I've got a theory that accounts for the pattern John Tierney notices in a recent Times column. The column complains about dumb dads on TV:
Where did we fathers go wrong? We spend twice as much time with our kids as we did two decades ago, but on television we're oblivious ("Jimmy Neutron"), troubled ("The Sopranos"), deranged ("Malcolm in the Middle") and generally incompetent ("Everybody Loves Raymond"). Even if Dad has a good job, like the star of "Home Improvement," at home he's forever making messes that must be straightened out by Mom. There have always been some bumbling fathers like Dagwood Bumstead and Fred Flintstone, but now they're the norm. A study by the National Fatherhood Initiative found that fathers are eight times more likely than mothers to be portrayed negatively on network television.
Something fishy: the study he cites isn't mentioned at all on the National Fatherhood Initiative website, so I'm going to assume they're not too proud of it. One way to explain these dubious results is through demographic trends:
The most obvious [cause of this trend] is that the television audience has splintered along gender lines, and sitcoms are now a female domain. Four out of five viewers of network sitcoms are women, and they apparently like to see Mom smarter than Dad. Another explanation is the rising number of mothers with paying jobs. Now that they have their own paychecks, the old bread-earning patriarch is less essential and therefore more mockable. And TV writers no longer have an easy stereotype of Mom to work with. Jokes about daffy middle-class housewives like Lucy Ricardo and Edith Bunker seem dated now that so many women work outside the home.
As I understand it, back in the Cleaver days, the idea of questioning authority was pretty much absent from public culture. The dominant frame was that people in positions of authority made it there through being wise and moral, and were therefore supposed to be respected. Well, that story's been balanced with a different one. Modern TV-watchers are very conscious of the logic of questioning authority. They know why authority should be questioned, and what is supposed to happen when the questioning takes place. That's a frame--a structure of ideas that we use to interpret the things we experience.
Both frames for authority are out there. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that maybe the second frame makes for better comedy. Dads whose ethics or intelligence aren't on par with the authority they're given are funny dads. Maybe TV writers construct their worlds around doofus dads because flouting their traditional moral authority results in more chuckles than putting a cardigan on Homer Simpson.
But if you zoom out and look at the universe of male figures on TV, you've got quite a lot of strong patriarch figures. President Bartlet from The West Wing, the guy on 24, the dad on Six Feet Under, and all sorts of guys who aren't fathers but are still good role models. But these guys are all in dramas, where there's no incentive to portray them as bumbling.