Ordinary People Themes

The 1970s were a hard time for many people, and we don't just mean the neck pain from holding up those giant 'fros. The economy was in recession. Unemployment was high, and gas prices were, too. So...

There were 218 million people in the United States in 1976, almost 100 million fewer than the there are today. There were also about 100 million fewer Starbucks, which was founded in 1971, and no o...

Awkward family photos were at peak awkwardness in the 1970s. But what's more awkward than having a photo of your entire family in tweed suits, gold chains, and lots of chest hair (and that's just M...

The 1970s can be blamed for a lot of things. The Leisure Suit. Watergate. And "Disco Duck." Oh, the pain of "Disco Duck."But the Jarrett family in Ordinary People isn't concerned with any of this s...

Mary Tyler Moore—or, to be more precise, the character she played on her show, Mary Richards—had a solid identity. The theme song told us everything we needed to know about her. She turns the w...

Anyone coming of age in the 1970s, like Conrad Jarrett in Ordinary People, was born in the 1960s. The 60s were a weird decade, characterized by both protests—Civil Rights, feminism, and anti-warâ...

In 1967, the Beatles sang about getting by with a little help from their friends. Conrad Jarrett in Ordinary People must not be a Beatles fan, or maybe he's just listening to "Bohemian Rhapsody" on...

No, we're not here to talk about the death of disco. But let's have a quick moment of silence for disco, which died on July 12, 1979, when 60,000 fans crowded Chicago's Comiskey Park to destroy the...