September 11, 2024: Classic TV Studying: Little House on the Prairie

[This week marks the anniversaries of the premieres of two classic TV shows: the 50^th anniversary of Little House on the Prairie and the 70^th of Lassie. So I’ll AmericanStudy those and other classic TV shows and contexts, leading up to a special post on what we can learn from a couple current hits I finally got around to checking out this summer!]

On a key difference between the TV show and the books, and why it matters.

I watched a good bit of the TV adaptation of Little House on the Prairie (1974-1982, but I mostly watched it in subsequent reruns on TBS) growing up, but only one episode stands out in my memory: “Gambini the Great,” an episode early in the show’s 8^th season (the penultimate season, and the final one featuring Michael Landon before the show changed its title to Little House: A New Beginning for the 9^th and final season) in which the Wilder family’s adopted son Albert (Matthew Laborteaux) becomes enamored of the titular aging circus escape artist/daredevil. Albert’s father Charles Wilder (Landon) tries in vain to convince Albert that the openly and proudly non-religious Gambini (Jack Kruschen) is not someone to idolize or emulate, and is proven tragically yet righteously accurate when Gambini dies in a stunt gone wrong. As I remember it, the show and Charles (pretty much always the show’s voice of unquestioned authority) present this tragedy as, if not explicitly deserved due to Gambini’s lack of religious faith, at the very least a clear moral and spiritual lesson for Albert, and one that he takes to heart as he returns fully to the fold of the family’s religious beliefs.

Albert was a character not present in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s series of books (in which Little House on the Prairie was the third of eight published novels, with a ninth published posthumously), and thus represents one of many elements that were added, tweaked, or significantly changed in adapting the books into the show. But I would go further, and argue that the overt and pedantic religious themes and lessons exemplified by an episode like “Gambini the Great” were also far more central to the TV adaptation than the novels. That’s not to suggest that religion and spirituality weren’t elements of the novels and their portrayal of the Wilder family and its world, but I believe they were just that: elements, details of the family’s identity and community and experiences that could be paralleled by many other such elements and themes. Perhaps it’s the nature of episodic television (particular in its pre-serialized era) to need more of a moral, a sense of what an audience can and should take away from the hour-long, at least somewhat self-contained story they have just watched. Likely the show’s producers also learned quickly just how compelling and charismatic a voice they had in Michael Landon’s, and wanted to use him to convey such overt morals and messages. But in any case, I believe (and as always, correct me if you disagree!) that the show tended toward such overtly pedantic (and often, although certainly not exclusively, religious) moral lessons far more than did the novels.

Although the word “pedantic” does tend to have negative connotations, I mean it more literally, in terms of trying to teach the audience a particular lesson; that is, I’m not trying to argue through using that word that the novels were necessarily better or more successful as works of art than the show because of this difference. At the same time, however, I do believe that the difference produces a significant effect, one not so much aesthetic as thematic, related in particular to how each text portrays history. To me, the novels seek to chronicle the pioneer/frontier experience for their focal family and community, describing a wide range of issues and concerns that were specific to that communal experience (if, of course, very different from the concurrent experiences of other Western communities, such as Native Americans, with whom Wilder engages to a degree but certainly far less, and at times more problematically, than would be ideal for a more accurate portrait of the American West). Whereas the TV show consistently seeks to make use of its historical setting to convey broader and more universal messages (about religion and morality, but also about family, relationships, communal obligations, and more). Which is to say, I would argue that, to use the terms I deployed in this post, while Wilder’s novels certainly qualify as historical fiction (as well as autobiographical fiction), the show seems more to be period fiction, with somewhat less to teach its young audiences about the history itself.

Next TV Studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other classic TV you’d analyze?

September 10, 2024: Classic TV Studying: Sitcom Dads

[This week marks the anniversaries of the premieres of two classic TV shows: the 50^th anniversary of Little House on the Prairie and the 70^th of Lassie. So I’ll AmericanStudy those and other classic TV shows and contexts, leading up to a special post on what we can learn from a couple current hits I finally got around to checking out this summer!]

AmericanStudying the clichéd extremes of sitcom dads, and the men in the middle.

1)      The Wise Men: It’s no coincidence that one of the first popular TV sitcoms was entitled Father Knows Best (1954-60, based on the 1949-54 radio show). A central thread throughout the genre’s history has been the trope of the wise father responding to his family’s problems and issues, from Father’s Jim Warren (Robert Young) and Leave It to Beaver’s Ward Cleaver (Hugh Beaumont, proving in that clip that father most definitely did not always know best) to The Cosby Show’s Cliff Huxtable (Bill Cosby, now ironically but nevertheless) and Growing Pains’ Jason Seaver (Alan Thicke), among countless others. It’s difficult to separate this trope from 50s stereotypes of gender and family roles (especially after seeing that hyperlinked Leave It to Beaver moment), but at the same time the trope’s endurance long after that decade reflects its continued cultural resonance. If sitcoms often reflect exaggerated versions of our idealized social structures, then there’s something about that paternalistic wise man that has remained a powerful American idea.

2)      The Fools: Yet at the same time that the TV version of Father Knows Best was taking off, Jackie Gleason’s The Honeymooners (1955-56, based on a recurring comedy sketch) was experiencing its own brief but striking success. I’m not sure whether Gleason’s foolish, angry husband (not yet a father in Gleason’s case) character was a direct response to wise characters or just the natural yang to that yin; but in any case such foolish fathers have likewise continued to be a sitcom staple in the decades since, with Married with Children’s Al Bundy (Ed O’Neill) and The Simpsons’ Homer Simpson (voiced by Dan Castellaneta) representing two particularly exaggerated end of the century versions of the type. Yet also two significantly distinct versions—Al Bundy consistently desires to escape from his wife and family (putting him in the American tradition of characters like Rip Van Winkle), while Homer is a macho stereotype who loves his beer and donuts but also mostly loves his family. To paraphrase Tolstoy’s famous quote, each foolish sitcom father is foolish in his own way.

3)      The Middle Men: Because these two extremes have been so prevalent in sitcom history, it’s easy to put each and every sitcom father into one or the other of these categories. But I think doing so would be a disservice to (among others) those sitcom dads who might superficially seem like caricatured fools, but whose characters included complexities and depths beyond that stereotype. I’d say that’s especially the case for a few 1970s dads: All in the Family’s Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor), The Jeffersons’ George Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley, who first appeared as the character on All), and Sanford and Son’s Fred Sanford (Redd Foxx). Each of those fathers could be as foolish and angry as any, but to stop there would be to miss much of what made them and their sitcoms memorable: partly the willingness to engage with social and political issues such as race and class; but also and just as importantly the messy, dynamic humanity each character and actor captured, all without losing an ounce of their comic timing and success. Few fathers are purely wise or foolish, after all, and these dads in the middle help remind us of the full spectrum of paternal possibilities.

Next TV Studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other classic TV you’d analyze?

September 9, 2024: Classic TV Studying: Amos ‘n’ Andy

[This week marks the anniversaries of the premieres of two classic TV shows: the 50^th anniversary of Little House on the Prairie and the 70^th of Lassie. So I’ll AmericanStudy those and other classic TV shows and contexts, leading up to a special post on what we can learn from a couple current hits I finally got around to checking out this summer!]

On a strikingly different way the early sitcom could have gone, and why the difference matters.

By the time the television adaptation of Amos ‘n’ Andy premiered on CBS in June 1951, it had been a popular radio program for nearly a quarter-century. Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, the two white Vaudeville actors and radio hosts who had met in North Carolina in 1920, transitioned to work at Chicago’s WQJ radio station in 1925, and then created Amos ‘n’ Andy and its main characters in the late 1920s and been central to the program ever since, had been working since the mid-1940s on whether and how to transition the show to the emerging medium of TV. Apparently their working goal throughout those early years, and indeed per a December 1950 Pittsburgh Press article their plan when the show was in its initial production phase, was for the two of them to continue providing the voices of the characters (as they had throughout its radio run, and not just Amos and Andy; they provided as many as 170 different character voices), and for Black actors to be seen on screen but only to lip sync the parts.

Supposedly (per Melvin Patrick Ely’s excellent book The Adventures of Amos ‘n’ Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon [2001]) Gosden and Correll recognized that they would not work as well as television actors (not least because their one attempt to bring the show to the big screen, the 1930 film Check and Double Check, had been an unmitigated flop that Gosden would later call “just about the worst movie ever”) but wanted to be paid more than the TV show’s Black performers, and since speaking lines make a part more substantive and thus higher-paying they devised this plan. But even without that overtly racist motivation, the lip syncing plan was a truly awful idea. At the very least, it would have made the show’s Black performers into quite literally minstrel show characters, stand-ins for the racist stereotypes created by white artists. It’s even possible to see Black actors in this plan as an inverted but just as gross form of the longstanding cultural tradition, in but also well beyond such minstrel shows, of Blackface performance.

Fortunately, Gosden and Correll’s plan did not come to pass, and when the show premiered in June 1951 it not only featured exclusively Black actors—including Alvin Childress as Amos, Spencer Williams as Andy, and the well-known Vaudeville comedian Tim Moore as their shady friend Kingfish—but they also spoke all the lines. The show only ran for two seasons (totaling 52 episodes), and was unquestionably controversial throughout that time, as illustrated by the NAACP’s 1951 publication “Why the Amos ‘n Andy TV Show Should Be Taken Off the Air.” But it also seems to have represented a positive influence for many African American viewers and communities, at least according to historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. who wrote in his 2012 American Heritage essay “Growing Up Colored” that “everybody loved Amos ‘n’ Andy—I don’t care what people say today. What was special to us was that their world was all colored, just like ours.” That would have technically still been true if the Black actors had only lip synced their lines, I suppose, but hearing their voices was of course part and parcel of their presence, and so I’m very glad that this early TV show went that way.

Next TV Studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other classic TV you’d analyze?

September 6, 2024: Fall Semester Previews: Aidan at Vanderbilt!

[As my 20^th (!) year at Fitchburg State University kicks off, I’ll focus my Fall Semester previews on one thing I’m especially excited about for each of my courses. Leading up to a special post on a new scholarly project I’m very excited about as well!]

By the time this post airs, I will be down in Nashville for Family Weekend, visiting my older son Aidan as his first year at Vanderbilt University kicks off in earnest. I don’t want to pretend that I know what his Fall semester will hold, no more than I do any other part of these next four years and beyond (although I’m super excited to find out!). But I know that one of the courses he’ll be taking this Fall, alongside a bunch of Engineering and Engineering-adjacent ones as he starts his major in Civil Engineering, will be Literature and the Environment, taught by English Professor Rachel Teukolsky. I don’t expect Aidan will take many English courses in his time at Vandy, and I hope y’all know me well enough to know I’m more than good with that. But I can’t lie, I’m excited to think about his first year featuring one such course, and to talk about it with him, at Family Weekend and beyond.

Special weekend update tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What are you excited to teach or work on this Fall?

September 5, 2024: Fall Semester Previews: American Lit II Online

[As my 20^th (!) year at Fitchburg State University kicks off, I’ll focus my Fall Semester previews on one thing I’m especially excited about for each of my courses. Leading up to a special post on a new scholarly project I’m very excited about as well!]

One of the more unexpected ways my teaching career has evolved over the last few years has been the chance to teach the same course in multiple modalities, and thus to really experiment with variations of the syllabus, readings, assignments, and more in those distinct spaces and time periods. This past year has been a particularly striking case in point: in Fall 2023 I taught an online accelerated section (which met for only the last 8 weeks of the semester); in the Spring semester I taught an in-person section of my American Lit II survey; in the Summer semester I taught a 5-week online version; and this Fall I’ll be teaching it online again, but this time for the whole 15-week semester. For those keeping count, that’s four distinct versions of the same course in about a calendar year—a blend of in-person and online, full-semester and accelerated in different ways. I can’t lie, I still don’t always feel that I’ve mastered online teaching (despite having done it for more than a decade now). But I do know that each way I teach a course challenges me and helps keep it fresh as a result, and for one of the classes I’ve been teaching throughout my 20-year FSU career, that effect is a welcome one indeed.

Next preview post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What are you excited to teach or work on this Fall?

September 4, 2024: Fall Semester Previews: English Studies Capstone

[As my 20^th (!) year at Fitchburg State University kicks off, I’ll focus my Fall Semester previews on one thing I’m especially excited about for each of my courses. Leading up to a special post on a new scholarly project I’m very excited about as well!]

As I’ve traced here in multiple end of semester reflection posts (hyperlinked below), one of my favorite things over the last few years of teaching has been the opportunity for my English Studies Senior Capstone students to connect with authors we’ve read in that course. That’s included my fellow public scholar Kevin Gannon for his book Radical Hope, but also the authors of our last two 21^st century literary texts: Monique Truong and Eric Nguyen. I try to keep that spot on the syllabus particularly fresh, so for this semester’s Capstone section I’ve slotted in a new, very recent novel: Jesmyn Ward’s bracing and beautiful Let Us Descend (2023). I know the students will get a lot out of Ward’s book no matter what, and I’m excited to have a couple weeks of intense conversations about this intense and important novel. But I’m certainly hoping we can connect with Ward, at the very least to share some questions as I did with Nguyen last year. I’ll keep y’all posted on the results!

Next preview post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What are you excited to teach or work on this Fall?

September 3, 2024: Fall Semester Previews: First-Year Writing

[As my 20^th (!) year at Fitchburg State University kicks off, I’ll focus my Fall Semester previews on one thing I’m especially excited about for each of my courses. Leading up to a special post on a new scholarly project I’m very excited about as well!]

I’ve taught at least one section of First-Year Writing I in every one of those 20 Fall semesters, so it’s fair to say that most of what happens in this course will not be new to me (even if it’s genuinely the case that each community of students forms its own identity in a way that keeps these courses fresh nonetheless). But I do try to find ways to update the syllabi when possible, and for my two sections this Fall I’ve done so with the culminating assignment, a paper where the students combine personal and academic modes of writing around a complex central topic of their choice. I’m a big believer in this final paper, as it helps me remind students that their personal identities, voices, perspectives, and experiences should always be part of their more formal academic work. But here in 2024, it seems to me that for many students, this assignment might make more sense with digital components (or as an entirely digital product), rather than in writing on paper—so I’m going to include that as a parallel but distinct option for this final paper, and hopefully we’ll work together to figure out how each and every student can make this assignment fully and successfully theirs.

Next preview post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What are you excited to teach or work on this Fall?