Alex is the oldest child of Steven and Elyse Keaton, who were baby boomers and Democrats during the early years of the Presidency of Ronald Reagan. Married in 1964, Steven, a manager in a local Public Broadcasting Service station, and Elyse, an independent architect, were hippies during the 1960s. According to the episode "A Christmas Story" in season one, Alex was born in 1965 while his parents were on assignment in Africa, having been influenced by John F. Kennedy to participate in the Peace Corps. Alex has two younger sisters, Mallory and Jennifer. Mallory was born while her parents were students at the University of California, Berkeley in 1967, Jennifer was born the night of Richard Nixon's presidential election in 1972, and their brother Andrew was born in 1984. The family lives in suburban Columbus, Ohio.
Storylines
At the beginning of the series, Alex is a high-school student who has a passion for economics and wealth. In particular, he is an advocate of supply-side economics. His heroes are Richard Nixon, William F. Buckley, Jr., Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, and Milton Friedman. His favorite television show is Wall $treet Week and he is an avid reader of The Wall Street Journal. He also enjoys music of the big band and swing era but secretly enjoys rock music. Alex spends the first two seasons of the series preparing to attend Princeton University. While he is attending an on-campus interview, Mallory, who tagged along to pay a surprise visit to her boyfriend, Jeff, who is attending Princeton at the time, has a nervous breakdown when she finds Jeff is seeing another woman. Ultimately, Alex chooses to look after Mallory rather than complete his interview, thus destroying any possibility of attending the university and getting into the Ivy League. Alex receives a scholarship to fictional Leland University, which is located close enough for him to continue to live at home and commute. Keaton excels at Leland, and teaches an economics course as a teaching assistant. Alex holds a disdain for nearby Grant College, and regularly openly mocks their courses. While attending Leland, he has two serious girlfriends. His first is artist/feminist, Ellen Reed. After they break up, Keaton pursues a liberal psychology student with feminist leanings, Lauren Miller, who is played by Courteney Cox. This relationship ends when he has an affair with music major Martie Brodie while Lauren is out of town. After graduation, Alex accepts a job on Wall Street.
Reception and influence
The humor of the series focused on a real cultural divide during the 1980s, between the baby boomers and Generation X. According to Stephen Kiehl, this was when the "Alex Keaton generation was rejecting the counterculture of the 1960s and embracing the wealth and power that came to define the '80s." While the youngest, Jennifer shares the values of her parents, Alex and Mallory embrace Reaganomics and consequent conservative values: Alex is a Young Republican and Mallory is a more traditional young woman in contrast to her feminist mother. In the Museum of Broadcast Communications entry for Family Ties, Michael Saenz argues that few shows better demonstrate the resonance between collectively held fictional imagination and what cultural critic Raymond Williams called "the structure of feeling" of a historical moment than Family Ties. Airing on NBC from 1982 to 1989, this highly successful domestic comedy explored one of the intriguing cultural inversions characterizing the Reagan era: a conservative younger generation aspiring to wealth, business success, and traditional values, serves as inheritor to the politically liberal, presumably activist, culturally experimental generation of adults who had experienced the 1960s. The result was a decade, paradoxical by America's usual post–World War II standards, in which youthful ambition and social renovation became equated with pronounced political conservatism. "When else could a boy with a briefcase become a national hero?" queried Family Ties' creator, Gary David Goldberg, during the show's final year. In 1999, TV Guide ranked Alex P. Keaton number 17 on its "50 Greatest TV Characters of All Time" list.
