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Legally-married Barb and Christine begin their morning routine

The New Adventures of Old Christine, Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s surprisingly but deservedly successful two-camera, nineties-redux sitcom, now halfway through its fourth season on current ratings behemoth CBS, constantly tackles political issues—especially those related to “family values”—but does so in a way that subsumes political contention beneath traditional, comfortable, two-camera sitcom plots. The series takes up and comments on political questions inveterately, but in a formal and familiar conventional-sitcom environment in which all antagonisms are represented as pressing problems for individual people. Even when the show’s political message is so obvious as to seem artless and tactless, that message is articulated in political terms for neither the audience nor the characters. If these characters are playing politics, we must say that it is a peculiarly personal politics. The particular problems they face are baldly political, yet the sphere of real-world political problems does not substantively concern them.

Take the fourth-season premiere, “A Decent Proposal,” in which Old Christine’s best friend Barb (saucy Wanda Sykes), who was born in the Bahamas, loses her U.S. residency privileges upon divorcing her husband Pete. Until Barb’s paperwork is straightened out, she’s under threat of deportation. This is unacceptable to Old Christine (Louis-Dreyfus), and so, because they live in California—whose constitution prohibits state discrimination on the basis of gender, and thus mandates state recognition of same-sex marriage—she enthusiastically proposes to marry Barb to prevent her deportation. With a good deal of coaxing, a skeptical Barb accepts Christine’s proposal.

This sort of instrumental-marriage plotline is a mainstay of the conventional nineties sitcom, employed by The Wayans Brothers, Will & Grace, Wings, and the animatronic Dinosaurs, to name a handful. Yet The New Adventures of Old Christine puts this trick-pony plotline under pressure with an obvious modification: the potential spouses are of the same sex. The premiere aired on September 24, 2008, a week before California voted on Proposition 8, an attempt by antigay activists to write gender discrimination into the California state constitution where none has previously existed. Given the timing of the episode and Louis-Dreyfus’s and Sykes’s personal politics, which are stringently progressive, Christine’s marriage to Barb can easily be read as imbuing the episode with a straightforwardly liberal political message—a message so straightforward as to be crass.

"I'm not a racist! I drive a Prius!"

But its political crassness is entirely absorbed by the paralleling personal crassness of Christine’s character. Her proposal is selfish, even personally opportunistic, but it is resolutely not political. She marries Barb not to make a statement, but to prevent her friend from being deported. The women are not by any means in love, and neither considers herself a lesbian. They have had sexual relations before—and we know that Christine has, from time to time, taken female lovers when the desire has struck her—but the experience isn’t one either woman especially wishes to repeat. Christine is simply not concerned with the political implications of her actions. Her proposal is strictly pragmatic. Selfishly pragmatic, yes—the two own a gym together; Barb is a key member of the extended family that helps Christine juggle being a single mother, and so is close to Christine’s son Richie; Barb is her best friend—but pragmatic. It is, in the great tradition of nineties sitcoms, an instrumental marriage.¹ The show’s implicit politics manifest themselves solely through particular, physical, individualized, situation-specific effects. The personal is the political.

Christine’s explicit politics are also rooted in the her self-interested pragmatism. She professes to be an activist for many progressive causes, but she ultimately does little and knows even less. She is a well-intentioned but inexcusably ignorant progressive, the sort whose overriding commitment to progressive causes excuses her, in her mind, from actual engagement with “real-world” political questions. Christine’s world is a post-political one of symbolic equivalences, in which the specifics of the particular situation don’t hold sway, if they’re acknowledged to begin with. Accused of being a racist in season one’s “The Other F Word,” Christine rejects the charge categorically—not because the grounds on which the accusation is made are faulty, but on the grounds that she drives a Toyota Prius. She tells us, furthermore, that to show solidarity with gays and lesbians, she once bought a (stereotypically-gay) Mazda Miata. Enthralling herself to the symbolic trappings of contemporary corporate progressivism is the way Christine does politics.

Yet precisely because Christine’s explicit politics are so stereotypical—drawing so freely on right-wing clichés of unintelligent liberals—they are less concertedly progressive than concertedly self-interested. She volunteers to canvass for an environmentalist signature campaign, for instance, but only after feeling the crushing guilt of being caught attempting to sneak past a canvasser to whom she had earlier promised her signature. Even Christine’s Prius purchase serves a crucial psychological function, inflating her self-esteem by providing constant opportunity for self-congratulation. Her politics are progressive, but this is less a function of partisanship or ideological entrenchment than it is a logical extension of her character, which respects no boundaries in procuring favor for herself and those she loves. Her politics are progressive precisely because they are personal.

Christine and her brother sign in at her son's school's seventh-grade parent orientation

Christine’s priorities and neuroses, however often they may fit liberal stereotypes, are indisputably her own. When they compete with her politics, her politics lose. In the recent fourth-season episode “Notes on a 7th Grade Scandal,” for instance, Christine, picking up her nametag from a check-in table at her son’s school’s seventh-grade parent orientation, is shocked to find that it reads “Mrs. Richard Campbell.” Because the divorced Christine is such a staunch feminist, the strongest potential motive for her shock is indignation at being identified solely by her association with a man: the nametag, on this view, should read “Ms. Christine Campbell.” But here, her feminism takes a backseat to what can only be called a sort of vanity or pride. She leans over the table, snags a marker, and revises the nametag to read, as she proudly exclaims, pressing it to her breast: “Ex-Mrs. Richard Campbell!”

Christine’s goal here, as always, is to make not a political statement but a personal one. Faced with a decision between two potential names, one founded on a political rejection of definition by masculine authority (Ms., or even Mrs., Christine Campbell) and a second founded on the personal rejection of her ex-husband Richard Campbell (Clark Gregg). “Ex-Mrs. Richard Campbell” maintains the antiquated practice of referring to a married woman by her husband’s name, which feminist Christine cannot be happy about, but she is more concerned with declaring that she has rejected Richard than she is with actually disassociating herself from him. For anyone who reads her nametag, Christine is now defined solely by the fact that she once spurned a particular man. This is not politically convenient for a feminist. But it is personally convenient for Christine, who sees her divorce from Richard as a source of both great pride and necessary domestic stability.

That Christine’s personal interests frequently coincide with progressive political interests is not evidence of her perfunctory liberalism, which is everywhere evident. Rather, the fact that Christine and the left often agree is an indication of the extent to which the interests of a middle-class single mother, her son, her wife, her brother, her blue-collar ex-husband, his young girlfriend, and the rest of their extended family dovetail with those of progressive politics. That progressive policies are more beneficial for the better part of our population is not novel to those who know or do progressive politics, but it may well be novel to a number of single mothers and others who, in similar subjective situations—both dependent and striving for independence, simultaneously precarious and hopeful—see Christine’s personal plights as metaphors for their own. Some of these single mothers and others will be conservatives. The New Adventures of Old Christine’s implicit pragmatic progressive politics has serious potential to reach them.

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1. Here Louis-Dreyfus and Sykes discuss the marriage plotline. Politics is never mentioned.

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With thanks to Alicia Dennis, Darren Franich, Eric Freeman, Nate Jones, Lee Konstantinou, Anthony Ortega, and Peter Squeri.