About the Title

Philip K. Dick wrote science-fiction. One of his most well-known novels, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, inspired the cult classic film Blade Runner. Dick challenged traditional ontological assumptions, using androids as a foil for exploring what it means to be human.

The Dick Van Dyke Show featured Rob and Laura Petrie, a young couple living in the New Rochelle suburb of New York. Rob (Van Dyke) was a comedy writer with wacky co-writers as his best friends. Laura (Mary Tyler Moore) was the quintessential housewife. The show featured one of the first iterations of the affluent, suburbanite "starter-family" format that would become a staple for the contemporary sitcom.


Elements in these divergent stories come together, I think, to describe the particular tension in the rising generation, namely ontological confusion (questions concerning origins, history and destiny) and the stabilty of traditional structures.

On the one hand, twentysomethings are skeptical about their parents' basic assumptions about reality and self; they are almost haunted by the questions "Who am I?" "Where did I come from?" "Where am I going?" and "What do I do on my way there?" and their parents' answers don't prove satisfying. As a result, they seek a different lifestyle, usually urban and experimental.

On the other hand, ask most of these same twentysomethings where they hope to be in 10-15 years and they seem to want a stable family (a life-partner and one or two children) and the kind of personal peace and affluence that characterizes their own upbringing. In other words, they are both skeptical of and desirous for those structures that shaped them.

They navigate a tension between Philip K. Dick and The Dick Van Dyke Show.