A mini celebration of The Serial, the satirical book (and movie) about the cultural moment in late-‘70s Marin County, California when the ‘60s counterculture became a suburban lifestyle: hot tubs, meditation, organic food, open marriage, encounter groups, permissive parenting, consciousness expansion, personal growth and endless work on oneself.
The Serial began in November 1975 as a weekly column in the Pacific Sun (the oldest continuously published alt-weekly in the US) by Cyra McFadden, accompanied by illustrations by Tom Cervanek. But an earlier San Francisco version of The Serial was penned for the short-lived SF edition of the Sun by Armistead Maupin. It saw five installments and eventually took on a life of its own as Tales of the City.
When the San Francisco edition of the Sun shut down, Maupin wanted to continue The Serial in the paper’s main Marin locale but he wasn’t very familiar with Marin. Enter Cyra McFadden, who was recruited by the Sun’s editor. She focused The Serial on the idiosyncratic lives of a fictional middle-class Mill Valley family, and deftly incorporated references to every ‘70s (counter)cultural trend you can think of, often adopting the jargon of the human potential movement which she overheard constantly in conversations around Marin.
The original version of the book is spiral-bound and large format and makes highly entertaining reading—kind of like an illustrated, smartly written New Age soap opera. My copy includes a handwritten note from McFadden to a friend (last slide) which perfects it. The movie version with Martin Mull and Sally Kellerman (both well cast) came out in 1980—it’s a pretty good time but the book is more interesting. McFadden hated the movie and walked out on the premiere.
McFadden was originally from Montana, the daughter of a traveling rodeo announcer on the cowboy circuit, and made her way to Mill Valley in the ‘60s. She passed away on her houseboat in Sausalito at the age of 86 in 2024.
