[October 15th marks the 70th anniversary of I Love Lucy’s debut. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Lucyyyyyyyyyyyy and other sitcoms—share your responses and other sitcom analyses for a crowd-sourced post that’ll need no canned laughter!]
On one way the
Marvel show embodies the best of sitcoms, and one way it reflects the worst.
I haven’t
written much about Marvel movies or the MCU in this space, despite that world
occupying a not-insignificant portion of the boys’ lives (and thus of course my
own) over the last year or so, and perhaps the reason is that I share at least
a bit of the
frustration that many others
have voiced with how much Marvel & Disney et al have come to dominate
our cultural landscape (and how much other franchises like the DC Universe are
now seemingly copying
that model). But at the same time, I have to say this: each of the three
Marvel TV shows released on DisneyPlus so far (Wandavision, The Falcon and
the Winter Soldier, and Loki)
hasn’t just been an entertaining diversion (although they have all been that
for sure); each has also grappled in thoughtful and meaningful ways with some
pretty big themes and issues. Which is to say, we can gripe about the MCU’s
dominance all we want, but we’d also better be willing to engage specifically
with what and how these texts are doing. (I’m sure I’ll get to the other two of
those series in future posts, or at the very least Falcon which is as interesting on race in America as any recent pop
culture work this
side of Watchmen.)
Much of the
critical conversation
around Wandavision has
understandably centered
on its depictions of grief (not least because the clip at that last
hyperlink features perhaps the best single summation of the emotion ever
penned), but of course the show is really first and foremost about sitcoms. Not just
that it uses and imitates
the sitcom form, that is; Wandavision
is very much about what the genre does and doesn’t do, include, engage when it comes to
family and community and identity, and so on. That formal and thematic throughline
blends with the show’s themes of grief in quite potent ways, especially by the stunning and
heartbreaking finale (even more SPOILERS in that clip than in this post
overall). But it also makes the entire show a really thoughtful engagement with
both the genre’s dangers (the way sitcoms can elide some of the darker and more
human sides of life, and thus consuming them distract us in potentially
destructive ways) and yet at the same time its potential power and value (the
way the best of it can also connect us to those sides, as great art of any type
can, and through so doing give us renewed life).
Of course lots
of sitcoms aren’t “the best of it,” though, and one I’d put in that category is
Bewitched, especially for the Salem-specific
reasons I detail in
this post. And in its own small but not insignificant way, Wandavision echoes that craptastic
classic and makes the same historical mistake (more SPOILERS to follow, natch).
The show’s eventual villain, the witch Agatha (played
wonderfully by the great
Kathryn Hahn), is introduced (not as a character overall, as she had been
in the show for many episodes by that point, but as Agatha and the villain
specifically) through a long episode-opening scene
set in (we’re told in the scene’s opening script) Salem in 1693. Which is to
say, this isn’t just another pop culture text which reinforces
the destructive myth that there were witches in 17th century
Salem—by setting this scene the year after the Witch Trials, Wandavision suggests that the town’s cohort
of witches endured after the Trials, which to my mind doubly reinforces the
Trials’ goal of rooting out this mythologized community (which of course in
practice meant killing mostly disadvantaged
and disenfranchised folks). Not the biggest element of Wandavision by a long shot, but a frustrating echo of one of
American sitcom history’s most negative influences.
Lucy post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other sitcoms you’d study?
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