Several television shows that premiered in 1984 have earned a lasting place in the cultural firmament. The Cosby Show distinguished itself both through its comedic content and its careful depiction of a loving, respectful family. Miami Vice used the police procedural format to introduce levels of stylization still being explored in shows like 24 and CSI. The touchtone of the time for prepubescent girls, however, was undoubtedly Punky Brewster. Though unremarkable for its sense of humor or sophistication, it doggedly dramatizes the anxieties of young girls, and in fact puts its protagonist through emotional traumas so earnestly rendered that the show becomes an uneasy mix of wispy light comedy and preadolescent dread.

Punky Brewster is an adorable eight-year-old scamp who lives with Henry Warnimont, a curmudgeonly widower, and Brandon the Wonder Dog, a golden retriever. Theirs is a children's show, and it addresses the tastes of children with a totality that is jarring to the modern viewer. The comedy is played extremely broadly, relying more on an air of zaniness than wit or satire. The dialogue is punctuated with countless reaction shots of Punky wincing and grimacing at the actions of her co-stars and Brandon covering his head with his paws when the lighter moments go sour. Adults on the show are often filmed from the vantage point of a child. Fashion shows and room redecoration require long musical montages, and a wait in line for baseball tickets or a visit to the dump to retrieve a discarded doll leave Henry's clothes filthy and torn. The show rarely winks at any adults who may be watching, which makes the canned laughter subtly unnerving -- who is generating all of those grown-up sounding guffaws, and why are they so tickled by Punky's dog washing exploits?

But while the child's view renders the comedy of Punky Brewster rather insubstantial, it pushes the melodrama to a level that is distractingly dark. All of the dancing and mugging and funny hats on the dog come to a screeching halt when Punky has reason to be upset. As a child recently left for dead by her mother at a shopping center, she finds such reasons everywhere, and the narrative never seeks to gloss over her pain. This is most evident in the first three episodes, which begin with Henry discovering Punky squatting in an abandoned apartment in his building and end with him winning the right to become her foster father. These episodes are full of earnest tears and social workers explaining that Punky's old family probably doesn't want her back, and that Henry is unfit to raise a child. While the show shoehorns the occasional joke into these proceedings, it also plays the reality of Punky's pain, and the story never moves forward until her anxieties have been at least temporarily answered.

One expects, though, that this is a necessary effect of a painful origin story, and that having granted Henry custody of Punky and set up the non-traditional family unit that forms the show's core, the future will be more sitcom-like and replace the psychic trauma with lighter fare. This expectation is confounded regularly. Punky doesn't shed her sense of abandonment, and crises that kids on other shows can toss aside with a quip send her into total Freudian meltdowns. When Henry makes an offhand complaint about the bills, Punky blames herself and runs away. When she works to reunite Henry with a wealthy old flame, the old flame decides that Punky belongs at a European boarding school, and she takes refuge in a hobo shanty town.

These situations would seem very alien to, say, the Huxtable children, whose worries never really overwhelmed the course of The Cosby Show. Their problems, in fact, were ultimately revealed to be unimportant by Cliff's unflappable wisdom. Punky's problems, by contrast, are never really overcome, they just obligate Henry to continually reassert his devotion to her. In this way, The Cosby Show tells stories of children the way that adults would tell them, while Punky Brewster is a tale told by a child.

Of course, tracing Punky's emotional state is not always the way that Punky Brewster meets its narrative goals. Its two most notorious episodes are also its most hamfisted. In one, the show addressed the then-hot issue of kids locking themselves in discarded refrigerators by locking Punky's friend Cherie in a discarded refrigerator and letting her suffocate (this episode also contained a CPR lesson). In the other, filmed in the immediate aftermath of the Challenger explosion, brought in astronaut Buzz Aldrin (playing himself) to explain what had happened and to reassure Punky that she should still dream of becoming an astronaut. These episodes, awkward though they may be as art, still find the show attempting to explore a child's world in a way that does no disrespect to a child's fears.

Having watched a sitcom in which the title character spends a considerable amount of time panicked and/or weeping, convinced that she's powerless and alone in the world, one is left with a powerful urge to watch a more modern kind of comedy. On Everybody Loves Raymond, for example, the indignities of interpersonal relationships are unimportant except as a catalyst for laughter. On Arrested Development, family itself is nothing but a frame of reference for comedy. In these worlds, pain fades by its own accord to make room for the next gag and the pain that will follow it. The sarcasm and sneering referentiality that are so widely bemoaned these days are a permission that we grant ourselves to talk about something other than the ways we're hurting each other. Every time that Punky Brewster stopped dancing to cry bitter, earnest tears, she pushed America an inch closer to the ironic morass in which we find ourselves. And thus did Buster the Wonder Dog beget Chandler Bing's little goddamn monkey.

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