Why Do We Care How Old TV Characters Are?

Thoughts on a generational obsession

Discussed: Social media, Gilmore Girls, Boomers, Millennials, Zoomers, King of the Hill, Family Matters, Rugrats memes, the inevitable march of time

I don’t want to be the type of critic who declares that a behavior is “a Millennial thing” when it’s something everyone does. But I’m comfortable in my belief that the tendency to obsess over the ages of adult TV characters is, or at least began as, a Millennial thing.

I first noticed this a few years ago. On social media and in group texts, peers posted pictures of ‘90s TV characters with their ages stamped on top. My screen was crowded with images of Carl Winslow from Family Matters (37 when the show began), Stu Pickles from Rugrats (33, approximately), Sam Malone from Cheers (35 in the first season), and Homer Simpson (39, though it varies from season to season). Soon after seeing these, I found myself wondering about the ages of the people in the movie or show I had just watched. This fall, a cartoon from Luke Kruger-Howard in the New Yorker hit close to home, showing a man sitting in front of a TV, staring at his phone, and calling to his partner, “I’ll be right up. I just need to finish Googling the age differences between me and celebrities.”

What I imagine every time I see a TV character age meme.

I’m not so self-centered that I would think Millennials are the only generation to compare ages with people on TV. I’ve seen posts from friends a decade younger than me despairing at the realization they’re now as old as the older brother in a cartoon they used to love, or close in age to the cast of Friends in the first season. And surely plenty of Baby Boomers saw a rerun of The Andy Griffith Show in the late ‘80s and realized they had reached the age Griffith was when the show first aired (34 years-old), while they had watched as a peer to Ron Howard’s Opie (age six). But there are technological, economic, and social forces that make such realizations existentially jarring for the generation between Boomers and Zoomers.

Millennials grew up in the prime years of broadcast and cable—we had a lot of options for channels to watch, but no control over what was on them. We spent our childhoods flipping between new and rerunning shows about families. Between Nick at Nite and TGIF, we grew up with everyone from Eddie Munster to the Brady family to Steve Urkel—generations of kids were frozen in time for us. These shows were fiction, but they weren’t pure fantasy (no matter how many times Urkel used a machine to become cool or a world-famous celebrity stopped by Springfield). The shows of our youth were grounded in reality, and TV suggested that we would one day inhabit that reality. As we entered adulthood, we gained instant access to two things: Wikipedia, which gave us meticulously researched articles on fictional characters (articles that are often more in-depth than those on real historical figures), and streaming services, which provided full seasons of the shows we grew up with. This, in turn, presented us with two realizations: one was that we were now the same age as the parents in the shows we used to watch, and the other was that our lives were quite different from the ones we saw. 

Millennials are as old or older than these characters.

As the age memes spread, Dani Alexis Ryskamp wrote in The Atlantic that the life of the Simpsons was no longer attainable—economic trends have made it impossible to raise a family on a single middle-class income. Many of us aren’t raising families at all, though. Millennials are having fewer children or having children later. Most of the friends I know who have kids haven’t yet sent those kids to kindergarten; we’re a decade behind sitcom parents who were our age but had kids in middle school.¹

This adds a note of despair to the age comparisons. I’m not Homer years old yet, but I’m well past Stu, I think as I contemplate how I’ve spent my thirties so far. But aging can be the key to understanding a show more deeply. None of the shows we grew up on, even those meant for kids, were written by kids—they present a grown-up’s version of youth and an adult’s reflection on maturity. 

When Gilmore Girls debuted, I was a high school sophomore just like Alexis Bledel’s character Rory. I watched the show and related to her academic ambition, her teenage romantic frustrations, and her occasional social awkwardness. I thought of Lorelai, Rory’s 33-year-old mother played by Lauren Graham, as a side character. Her constant joking and her resistance to the mature preoccupations of her peers made her seem like an imitation of a real adult. When the show landed on Netflix, I was closer to Lorelai’s age, and in a rewatch, I found her to be the more compelling character. Lorelai is a single mother running her own business and struggling to maintain a strained relationship with her parents. Even though I share none of these traits, I could understand the character’s rush to humor as a coping mechanism for stress and uncertainty. Where I once saw immaturity and quirk, I now saw a nuanced presentation of the delicate balance between insecurity and willed confidence that sets in with adulthood. Meanwhile, while I had once related to Rory, her storylines only made me feel happy that I wasn’t a teenager anymore. This empathetic portrayal of multiple generations was largely missing from the 2016 reboot. The characters had aged but they hadn’t matured; the middle-aged Lorelai and young-adult Rory seemed like sketches of what their characters might have imagined (or feared) they would become, and not the well-realized portrayals of their generations they had been in the show’s original run.

The show from my childhood that I’ve aged with the most seamlessly is King of the Hill. I adored the preteen protagonist Bobby Hill when I was his age. He was doughy, uncool, and obsessed with the idea that comedy could take him out of his small town. I read his dad Hank’s squareness with a kid’s-eye-view of the boring world of adults. Hank (whose age varies from late-30s to mid-40s) loves the routine of going to work, drinking beer with his friends, and mowing the lawn. Unlike with Gilmore Girls, I never stopped watching King of the Hill. I tuned into reruns on Cartoon Network for years, and after I canceled my cable subscription. I streamed episodes whenever I was bored around the house. With each passing year, I found myself gravitating toward episodes with Hank-centric plots. As I did with Lorelai, I saw nuance in what had once seemed like a broad caricature. Hank’s love of routine is funny, but it’s also an understandable embrace of adulthood. Hank just wants a quiet, predictable evening after a day of work. His fascination with household tasks reads as dedication to the low-stakes hobbies adults fall into. I think of Hank fixing his mower every time a friend tells me they just got into birdwatching or board games. While researching this piece, I watched a lot of clips of King of the Hill on YouTube. Under many of them, there were comments that said something like “I am turning into Hank more and more each day.” I feel it, too, sometimes, when I find myself reading long articles about pencil design or browsing through my coffee machine manual for fun. 

Hank is stuck in his ways, sometimes to a fault, but he’s never presented as being in a rut or facing a crisis of meaning. He’s comfortable with who he has grown into. With Lorelai, despite her stresses and insecurities, she, too, is comfortable as an adult. She seemed unorthodox as a parent at the time Gilmore Girls first aired, acting like a peer to Rory more than a mother, but she’s living adulthood on terms that work for her and that provide opportunities for her child (Rory goes to an Ivy League school, after all). There’s none of the fear of aging that we can find so easily on TV. These characters aren’t fighting the clock or showing their resistance to responsibilities by labeling routine tasks “adulting.” 

This comfort is perhaps the one part of the characters’ lives I find hard to understand. I wonder how I can attain their comfort every time I search Wikipedia to find out how old someone is. 

1. This makes the Pickles family in the first run of Rugrats almost look prescient: two incomes and no children until both parents were in their thirties.