Good Times: The Evans Family

Good Times is an sitcom about a poor African American family who lives in the ghetto. The Evans family is family of five living in a small apartment on each others back. James Evans the man of the house is bouncing around from job to job while his loving wife Florida Evans is a school bus driver and trying to maintain things around the house. Their first child JJ Evans is not your typically type of son. JJ is a smart, outgoing, and a hustle man. Thelema is the only girl. She is spoil and the type of sister that everyone has. Whatever she wants she gets and that makes her brothers mad. Lastly there is Michael. He is the baby and is the nerd of the family. Michael is all about his books and making his parents proud. Good Times was released in

1974 with 6 seasons following. With the show ending in 1979 the was to never return. Good Times would last between 25-30 minutes and would air CBS.

“Life in the Chicago projects is never easy, However, the Evans family never gives up trying to make the best of things.

While Florida and James struggle to provide for their family, their sons J.J., an aspiring painter, Michael, the undying political crusader, causing trouble while their sister, Thelma, stands between them as the voice of reason. Living in the same building were Willona Woods, Florida's best friend from High School who provided support, love and gossip and Nathan Bookman, the overweight janitor who gave them grief and was the butt of a lot of fat jokes, especially Willona who often referred to him as Buffalo Butt or Booger. Life, at least, is never boring while they fight to keep their heads above water and one day leave the projects, which they did in the series finale. Sadly, it was without James who was killed off in the 4th

season.”
-Kate Tripper
This is just one of the reviews that I came across and I felt as though that there are different opinions about this sitcom. The Evans family was just your typically family living from paycheck from paycheck. Somehow the family made it work with the help from God. Good Times is kinda based off a stereotype of African Americans.

My opinion on Good Times is that is it a great show to raise your kids upon. It teaches the value of how to love your family. Being a black family back in those days were hard because of the Civil Rights were going on. When a black male can graduate from high school and attend college and coming from a community that the Evans family lived in is accomplishment. No one ever thought to see a black male to succeed the way they did. Having James as a father figure is good because you don’t see a lot of fathers acting the way James did. Mr. Evans demanded respect in his house and that is what he got. I think more parents need to watch Good Times to see what children had to go through before they were here. When you have children at an young age, then you and that child will never know what it means to have disciple.

As said in the last paragraph, we don’t relate to what happened in 1974 because they were going through the Civil Rights Movement and dealing with racist people on a daily basis.

Being an young parent and then to become an young parent is something they didn’t have to deal with because parents didn’t play that. There are a lot if things you couldn’t get away with back then that you can now. People just don’t how to act when it comes down to respect and having to raise a family. The family that prays together stays together and that’s what the Evans family did. They had the support of friends and you can’t get that now. The Evan’s family trusted people and our first ones are “I don’t trust them or I don’t know”. The Evans family didn’t know a lot of people, but still trusted them and were very nice to

them.

In closing we are thinking in this day and time that we are to judge a book by it’s cover, but we shouldn’t jump to conclusions about people. Living in the world we live in now os ve4ry dangerous. You have to watch your back at all times. It’s not how it used to be when you can just go anywhere and don’t have problems, now problems follow you everywhere you go. Children nowadays don’t care what is going on, how they treat their elders, and it is just crazy. You couldn’t grow up disrespecting an adult and not expect to get in trouble, but now it’s just a slap on wrist and go play. We have to go back to the old days where parents cared about their child respecting them and obeying what they have been told. I guess we’ll get there one day.