September 30, 2024: 19th Century Baseball: A Contested Origin

[200 years ago this week, “Father of Baseball” Henry Chadwick was born. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Chadwick and other 19^th century baseball histories, leading up to a special weekend post on my new podcast on 19^th century baseball and much more!]

On what’s not the case about the sport’s origins, and two interesting details of the (uncertain) real story.

So apparently Abner Doubleday had nothing whatsoever to do with the invention of baseball. I’m not gonna pretend for a second that I knew that before researching this post—indeed, blog completists might remember that I highlighted Doubleday as at least a strong contender for the title in this long-ago post on Thomas Dyja’s Play for a Kingdom (if you are really that long-standing and attentive of a reader, please please please leave a comment or email me and say hi!). But while former baseball player, club executive, and sporting goods entrepreneur Albert Spalding really pushed the narrative of Doubleday as the sport’s inventor—going so far as to commission his friend and former National League President Abraham Mills to “investigate” the question, leading to the highly suspect Mills Commission report of December 1907—the truth is that there is no specific evidence in Doubleday’s life or writings, or any peripheral materials, to support the myth. That’s particularly ironic because the Mills Commission identified Cooperstown, NY as the site of Doubleday’s invention (in the equally fabricated year of 1839), leading to the eventual location of the Baseball Hall of Fame in that town.

Doubleday’s lack of involvement with the sport’s invention is far more certain than the question of when baseball was invented, and by whom. Indeed, what is far more definite is the late 19^th and early 20^th century featuring warring camps, and that those camps were often explicitly linked to the ongoing rivalry between England and America. The English historians traced the sport’s origins to various traditional folk games, from archaic games like “stoolball” and “trap ball” to the more familiar (and still played) parallel sports of cricket and rounders. Their American rivals acknowledge these antecedents and influences, but focus instead on more direct references in early American texts and documents to games like “baste ball” (mentioned in the 1786 diary of Princeton University student John Rhea Smith), or to “baseball” being included (alongside “wicket, cricket, batball” and others) in a 1791 bylaw in Pittsfield, MA. In truth, what these various historical examples and details indicate is that the sport developed over centuries, through various iterations and stages, and was played in both England and America for many years before being standardized and professionalized (on which more in a moment). But that’s not as sexy as a fight to the death between Revolutionary rivals, so I’ll let the transatlantic diamond turf war proceed unchecked.

Apologies to my EnglishStudying colleagues and friends, but it was more definitely in an American setting that the sport’s rules were first laid down in a more standardized way. That setting was New York City in September 1845, where the Knickerbocker Club and its officers Alexander Cartwright, William Wheaton, and William Tucker published a set of rules that came to be known as (duh) the Knickerbocker rules. These rules were close enough to the modern game that in 1953 Congress credited Cartwright as the sport’s inventor, which was a total slap in the face to the Williams but that’s another story for another post. But in any case I think we can all agree that the most compelling thing about the Knickerbockers was their decision later in 1845 to move their home games to Hoboken, NJ’s Elysian Fields, which remains the most impressively named field or stadium I’ve ever encountered. As I’ve highlighted in just about every post I’ve written about baseball in this space, the sport captures certain fundamental, pastoral, idyllic American images in a legendary, mythological way that defies precise histories, which might just explain why the history of its own invention remains and likely will always remain an open debate.

Next baseball history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Baseball or sports histories you’d highlight?

September 28-29, 2024: September 2024 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]

September 2: Fall Semester Previews: 20C Af Am Lit: For this year’s Fall Semester previews I focused on things I’m especially excited for, starting with student presentations in 20C Af Am Lit!

September 3: Fall Semester Previews: First-Year Writing: The series continues with adding digital options to my longstanding First-Year Writing course.

September 4: Fall Semester Previews: English Studies Capstone: Reading Jesmyn Ward’s vital new novel in Senior Capstone, as the series rolls on.

September 5: Fall Semester Previews: American Lit II Online: What different modalities of teaching require and help me to do.

September 6: Fall Semester Previews: Aidan at Vanderbilt!: The series concludes with an even more special Fall Semester, my older son’s first!

September 7-8: Fall Semester Previews: My New Podcast!: I didn’t get to write a post on the podcast, but please check it out at that hyperlink!

September 9: Classic TV Studying: Amos ‘n’ Andy: A series inspired by a couple TV anniversaries kicks off with a strikingly different way an influential early sitcom could have gone.

September 10: Classic TV Studying: Sitcom Dads: The series continues with the cliched extremes of sitcom dads, and the men in the middle.

September 11: Classic TV Studying: Little House on the Prairie: For its 50^th anniversary, on a key difference between the Little House show and books.

September 12: Classic TV Studying: Lassie: For the show’s 70^th anniversary, takeaways from three iterations of the classic canine hero.

September 13: Classic TV Studying: I Love Lucy: Why the groundbreaking sitcom’s comfortable familiarity reflects its most radical elements, as the series watches on.  

September 14-15: TV Studying: Bridgerton and The Bear: The series concludes with a special post on three contexts for two recent TV hits.

September 16: Summer Reads: The Good Lord Bird: A series on books I read for pleasure this summer kicks off with James McBride’s historical fiction masterpiece.

September 17: Summer Reads:  Interior Chinatown: The series continues with Charles Yu’s experimental and excellent novel.

September 18: Summer Reads: The Cold Millions: Jess Walter’s impassioned and important historical novel, as the series reads on.

September 19: Summer Reads: Let Us Descend: A bracing and beautiful recent novel that I’ll be teaching in my Senior Capstone course!

September 20: Summer Reads: Yellowface: The series concludes with a complex and biting book about culture, cultural appropriation, and much more.

September 23: Folk Figures: Pecos Bill and Joaquin Murrieta: In honor of Johnny Appleseed’s 250^th birthday, a folk heroes series kicks off with two competing frontier figures.

September 24: Folk Figures: John Henry: The series continues with a link to my Saturday Evening Post Considering History column on railroad heroes.

September 25: Folk Figures: Molly Pitcher: Why the iconic war hero might not have existed, and why she matters in any case, as the series rolls on.

September 26: Folk Figures: Johnny Appleseed: For his 250^th, two contrasting contexts for the iconic folk figure.

September 27: Folk Figures: MrBeast and 21^st Century Folk Heroes: And the series concludes with one of my favorite recent posts, inspired by conversations with my sons and my wife alike!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

September 27, 2024: MrBeast and 21st Century Folk Heroes

[On September 26^th, 1774, Johnny Appleseed was born. So for the 250^th birthday of the man, the myth, the legend, this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of folk figures, leading up to this post on the status of the concept in the 21^st century!]

On a contemporary folk hero who reveals both the enduring power and the darker sides of the concept.

If you’re the age of my sons (18 and 17), you probably don’t need to read a brief biography of James “MrBeast” Donaldson (1998- ). But if you’re in your 40s like this AmericanStudier, you probably do need a few contexts for this young man who is already one of the most famous people in the world. Donaldson began his career on YouTube in the early 2010s doing things many other YouTubers do (live commentary while playing video games, conversations with other YouTubers, and the like), but gradually evolved into a creator of more unique, elaborate stunts and games that were generally designed to award large sums of money to lucky strangers. That has continued to exemplify the MrBeast brand ever since, with ever-more-elaborate (and frequently dangerous) stunts and games; although as he has developed a more significant infrastructure as well as considerable personal wealth he has likewise expanded to more systemic activist endeavors such as the Team Trees and Team Seas fundraisers and projects (both of which he co-founded).

Those latter two projects are both impressive and important, and of course the Team Trees one aligns MrBeast closely with the historical folk hero who was the reason for this week’s series. But I would argue that if we were to call MrBeast a 21^st century folk hero, it would be due to the trend which more than anything else made him so famous in the first place: his ability and willingness to make random strangers suddenly and fabulously wealthy. One of the defining features of our era is the fact that wealth and fame can come in entirely sudden and random ways (I’m drafting this post in a moment featuring one of the most extreme cases in point yet, Hawk Tuah Girl), and both MrBeast’s own success and that which he promises others fully fit that category. Yet precisely because he does promise wealth to others, he has become more than just a representative of his era—he is, to my mind without question, a folk hero for this moment, one to whom audiences can look not only for inspiration but also for (ostensibly) a path toward their own success.

Hoping to make it rich through the largesse of a YouTuber is, of course, an even more extreme version of other unlikely “rags to riches” narratives before it like lottery winners (and perhaps even more unlikely, or at the very least even more random since lottery winners did take the proactive step of buying a ticket). But the fact that MrBeast’s folk heroics are unlikely to reach the vast majority of folks isn’t necessarily a striking thing, as of course the same can be said about any folk hero (even Appleseed planted trees on only a tiny fraction of the American landscape). What is striking, and I would argue destructive, is that he often asks his potential beneficiaries—and indeed, as I mentioned above, has done so more regularly as he's gotten bigger—to risk their health and safety, if not their very lives, in order to pursue these folk heroic goals. At a certain point those kind of risky realities would make MrBeast’s challenges the equivalent of The Hunger Games (or historical gladiatorial contests), and that’s a very different kind of story than that of a folk hero—and perhaps all too relevant of one to our dystopian current moment.  

September Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Folk figures or histories you’d highlight?

September 26, 2024: Folk Figures: Johnny Appleseed

[On September 26^th, 1774, Johnny Appleseed was born. So for the 250^th birthday of the man, the myth, the legend, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of folk figures, leading up to Friday’s post on the status of the concept in the 21^st century!]

On two contrasting contexts for the iconic folk figure.

Just over 11 years ago, I shared a wonderful Guest Post from William Kerrigan, one of our foremost authorities on Johnny Appleseed. (I also had the chance to return the favor and Guest Post on Kerrigan’s American Orchard blog.) In lieu of my own first paragraph, I’d ask you to check out that great post and then come on back for some more AppleseedStudying.

Welcome back! There’s something really beautiful and inspiring about the legend of Appleseed planting trees as he moved through his Revolutionary-era American world, and iconic science fiction author Ray Bradbury must have felt the same, as he dedicated a chapter of his novel The Martian Chronicles (1950) to a character and story entirely inspired by Appleseed. In that chapter, “The Green Morning,” Bradbury creates the character Benjamin Driscoll, who makes it his mission to plant trees on the barren landscapes of Mars (and achieves results far beyond his expectations). In a book largely defined by at best ironic and at worst (and the majority of the time) horrifying stories, “The Green Morning” doubly stands out as a depiction of how an individual can influence his world for the better, and thus clearly reflects Bradbury’s perception of Appleseed having done the same.

Many of those horrifying Martian Chronicles stories connect to a very different potential context for Appleseed, however: histories of colonization and their negative effects on both places and indigenous communities. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that Appleseed was in any direct way a colonizer, much less a participant in the era’s very much ongoing genocides of Native American communities. But at the very least, our images of Appleseed depend on portraying the American landscape as open and available for his intervention, which in its own way is an extension of the “virgin land” argument which fueled so much of the conquest, colonization, and genocide histories that unfolded in the Americas after European arrival. And given, again, how much those processes were continuing to unfold in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries—indeed, how much they were really only beginning for many Native American communities across the continent—it’s important to make sure not to reify that inaccurate part of the Appleseed story, even as we rightly celebrate other layers to this iconic folk figure.

Special post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Folk figures or histories you’d highlight?

September 25, 2024: Folk Figures: Molly Pitcher

[On September 26^th, 1774, Johnny Appleseed was born. So for the 250^th birthday of the man, the myth, the legend, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of folk figures, leading up to Friday’s post on the status of the concept in the 21^st century!]

On the iconic war hero who might or might not have existed, and why she matters in any case.

I can think of few more AmericanStudies ways to analyze popular memory and prominence than through the eleven rest stops on the New Jersey turnpike—and by that measure, Molly Pitcher and Clara Barton are the two most famous women in New Jersey history and culture (if that last phrase isn’t an oxymoron—I kid, Jerseyites, I kid). Pitcher’s is also the only one of the eleven rest stop referents that wasn’t an actual name, and that might not even link to an individual figure—some historians believe that the name does refer to one woman, Mary Ludwig Hays, who followed her husband and the Continental Army to the Battle of Monmouth and found herself not only serving water to the soldiers but even taking over her wounded husband’s artillery job; but others have linked the name to a number of other Revolutionary-era women who performed one or another of those roles (camp followers, water carriers, and so on), including Margaret Corbin.

So Molly Pitcher is as much a folkloric as a historical figure, one not unlike Paul Bunyan, John Henry, or, perhaps more accurately, this week’s starting point Johnny Appleseed. Because like Appleseed’s inspiration John Chapman (about whom see that hyperlinked, wonderful Guest Post by William Kerrigan), women like Hays and Corbin most definitely existed; the details of their lives and experiences are as partial and uncertain as most any 18^th century histories, even those of the Revolution’s most prominent leaders, but there’s plenty of information out there, such as at the various stories linked in my first paragraph’s closing sentences, and the Molly Pitcher legend provides an excellent starting point for researching and learning about these historical figures. Even absent such research, any collective memory of “Molly Pitcher” itself adds women to our narratives of these Revolutionary war battles and histories, producing a more full and accurate picture of those histories as a result.

I’d take that argument one step further, however. I’ve written on multiple occasions, including in this post on Judith Sargent Murray and this one on John and Abigail Adams, about the striking cultural, social, and political voices and roles of Revolutionary-era American women (including not only Murray and Adams but also Phillis Wheatley, Annis Boudinot Stockton, and others). Indeed, it’s fair to say that such women help us to see the era’s possibilities for gender and society as likewise revolutionary, and as foreshadowing and influencing the 19^th century women’s movement. That some of these women, including Adams and Stockton, achieved such success in relationship to their husbands’ lives and work—just as, that is, Hays and Corbin did in relationship to their husband’s wartime efforts—reflects some of the era’s limitations and obstacles; limitations and obstacles that all these women, like Molly Pitcher, pushed well beyond.

Next folk figure tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Folk figures or histories you’d highlight?

September 24, 2024: Folk Figures: John Henry

[On September 26^th, 1774, Johnny Appleseed was born. So for the 250^th birthday of the man, the myth, the legend, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of folk figures, leading up to Friday’s post on the status of the concept in the 21^st century!]

Two years ago this week, I focused a Saturday Evening Post Considering History column on histories and stories of Black railroad workers, including the iconic folk hero John Henry. So in lieu of a post for today, I’ll ask you to check out that column, which also includes the surprisingly racist history of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” among other things!

Next folk figure tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Folk figures or histories you’d highlight?

September 23, 2024: Folk Figures: Pecos Bill and Joaquin Murrieta

[On September 26^th, 1774, Johnny Appleseed was born. So for the 250^th birthday of the man, the myth, the legend, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of folk figures, leading up to Friday’s post on the status of the concept in the 21^st century!]

On two folk heroes, and the competing frontier histories they reveal.

Even as a kid, encountering his stories in a compilation of tall tales, I could tell that Pecos Bill was a bit of a Paul Bunyan knockoff—an outlandish origin story (Bill fell out of his family’s wagon as a baby and was raised by a pack of wolves as one of their own), similarly larger-than-life animal companions (his otherwise un-rideable horse Widow-Maker, the rattlesnake Shake that he used as a lasso), an equally mythic love interest (Slue-Foot Sue, who rode a giant catfish down the Rio Grande). So I wasn’t surprised to learn that Bill was a late addition to the “big man” school of tall tales, likely created in 1916 by Edward O’Reilly and shoehorned back into the mythos of Westward expansion, the frontier, and the Wild West, one more addition to the roster of lawless heroes who had by the early 20^th century come to define that American mythos so fully.

That Bill didn’t come into existence until a few decades after the closing of the frontier doesn’t lessen his symbolic status, however—if anything, it highlights just how much the mythos of the American West was and remains just that, a consciously created set of myths that have served to delineate after the fact a messy, dynamic, often dark, always complex region and history. Moreover, that mythos was as multi-cultural as the West itself, as illustrated by Mexican American folk hero Joaquin Murrieta, “the Robin Hood of El Dorado”: Murrieta, a California 49er from northern Mexico, first came to national prominence in a popular dime novel, John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta (1854); the tales of his charming banditry have been a part of the region’s folk history ever since, including a cameo as Zorro’s older brother in the Antonio Banderas film The Mask of Zorro (1998).

Yet however much Murrieta’s story has been fictionalized and mythologized, it did originate with an actual historical figure—and that distinction can help us see past the myths to some of the frontier’s messier, darker, and more defining realities. For one thing, Murrieta apparently began his outlaw career after he and his family were violently dispossessed of a land claim, events which connect to the social and legal aftermath of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. For another, his gang’s victims included not only Anglo settlers but also Chinese laborers, revealing California’s genuinely and often painfully multicultural community as of the mid-19^th century. A fuller engagement with these histories would in part force Americans to confront the centuries of conflict and violence that have so frequently comprised the world of the frontier—but it would also allow us to push beyond tall tales of larger-than-life individuals and to recognize just how collective and communal are both the myths and realities of the Southwest, and of America.

Next folk figure tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Folk figures or histories you’d highlight?

September 20, 2024: Summer Reads: Yellowface

[I didn’t get to share my usual Beach Reads series earlier this summer, so I wanted to make up for it by highlighting a handful of the many amazing novels I read as I worked to return to pleasure reading over the last few months. I’d love to hear what you’ve been reading, from any genre, for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

Each of the books I’ve highlighted so far this week is in one way or another what I would call “serious”—that doesn’t mean that they’re not also damn funny (both McBride’s and Yu’s in particular) or page-turning (Walter’s and Ward’s in particular), but that they deal with profoundly serious historical and cultural themes and are without question Literary Fiction (note the capital letters). Whereas Yellowface (2023), the newest release from the acclaimed fantasy novelist and East Asian Studies scholar R.F. Kuang, is more of what I’d call “pulp fiction”—a work of biting satire that ultimately becomes a page-turning thriller, and with a delightfully unreliable first-person narrator whom we can’t help but love even if we also hate her quite a bit. If all of that makes it seem like Kuang’s novel is serious fun, then I’ve done my job and made the case for this along with all of the week’s pleasure reads.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: What have you been reading?

September 19, 2024: Summer Reads: Let Us Descend

[I didn’t get to share my usual Beach Reads series earlier this summer, so I wanted to make up for it by highlighting a handful of the many amazing novels I read as I worked to return to pleasure reading over the last few months. I’d love to hear what you’ve been reading, from any genre, for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

I wrote about Jesmyn Ward’s phenomenal new novel a couple weeks ago, as I’ll be teaching it in my English Studies Capstone course this semester. As I noted there, I’ve long been a fan of Ward’s, but I’d argue that with this novel she’s done something particularly impressive—created a genuinely unique and unfamiliar historical novel about slavery. By “unfamiliar” I don’t mean that she’s not engaged with American histories with which we all need to grapple, nor that her book isn’t in conversation with prior works such as Morrison’s Beloved and Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (among many others). But nonetheless, despite my own relatively thorough knowledge of both those national and literary histories, at virtually every moment of reading this bracing and beautiful book I felt as if I was encountering something new. This is quite simply a book every one of us needs to read.

Last summer read tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What have you been reading?

September 18, 2024: Summer Reads: The Cold Millions

[I didn’t get to share my usual Beach Reads series earlier this summer, so I wanted to make up for it by highlighting a handful of the many amazing novels I read as I worked to return to pleasure reading over the last few months. I’d love to hear what you’ve been reading, from any genre, for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

With the first two books about which I’ve written in this series, I had a strong sense of them before I began, even if both did (as I hope I’ve made clear) exceed my expectations. Whereas with Jess Walter’s The Cold Millions (2020), a book recommended to me by my Mom (the main way I learn about new fiction, if I’m being honest), I knew literally nothing about it before I finally dove in this summer. So when I say that this was probably my favorite read of the summer, and definitely one of the most successfully executed historical novels I’ve ever read, you’ll understand just how much I’m saying. One of the best measures of a great historical novel is that I’m both thoroughly informed and utterly moved by the end, and I was crying when I read Walter’s epilogue so, y’know, mission very much accomplished. Now I gotta read everything else he’s written!

Next summer read tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What have you been reading?

September 17, 2024: Summer Reads: Interior Chinatown

[I didn’t get to share my usual Beach Reads series earlier this summer, so I wanted to make up for it by highlighting a handful of the many amazing novels I read as I worked to return to pleasure reading over the last few months. I’d love to hear what you’ve been reading, from any genre, for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

I didn’t mention the 2020 TV adaptation of The Good Lord Bird in yesterday’s post, but of course I look forward to checking out Ethan Hawke as John Brown and Daveed Diggs as Frederick Douglass at some point soon (and have heard good things about the limited series overall). Not yet available but on the horizon is a TV adaptation of another novel I read this summer: Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown (2020). I suppose I’ll check that one out as well but I can’t lie, the amazingly experimental structure and style of Yu’s novel seems very unlikely to be successfully adapted to a visual medium (which is ironic, as the novel is centrally and thoughtfully interested in visual media like TV and film, but it’s nonetheless the case). At the very least, I would implore everyone to read Yu’s novel, as it is quite simply one of the most innovative and captivating literary works I’ve read in a long, long time.

Next summer read tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What have you been reading?

September 16, 2024: Summer Reads: The Good Lord Bird

[I didn’t get to share my usual Beach Reads series earlier this summer, so I wanted to make up for it by highlighting a handful of the many amazing novels I read as I worked to return to pleasure reading over the last few months. I’d love to hear what you’ve been reading, from any genre, for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

I know James McBride’s masterpiece of a revisionist historical novel The Good Lord Bird (2013) is far from a new release (and indeed that his newest release has been even more acclaimed still, and I promise to check that out one sooner than a decade down the road). What I can say, I had really slacked on my pleasure reading for far too long (and hadn’t had a chance to teach McBride’s book, so didn’t have that reason to check it out). But McBride’s hilarious, pointed, and ultimately profoundly moving depiction of John Brown through the eyes of fictional escape enslaved person Henry “Onion” Shackleford was more than worth the wait, and might well have even edged out Russell Banks’ Cloudsplitter (1998), itself one of my very favorite novels, as the best book about Brown I’ve ever read. No matter what, this is quite simply a unique and amazing book, and of all the great ones I read this summer was the one that most fully reminded me of the unabashed and to my mind unequaled pleasures of pleasure reading (and, not unrelatedly, convinced me to get off of Twitter, but that’s a story for another time).

Next summer read tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What have you been reading?

September 14-15, 2024: TV Studying: Bridgerton and The Bear

[This week marked 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’ve AmericanStudied those and other classic TV shows and contexts, leading up to this special post on what we can learn from a couple current hits I finally got around to checking out this summer!]

On three contexts for a pair of the year’s (and decade’s) biggest shows.

1)      Bingeing: I’ve analyzed the relatively new form of cultural consumption that is binge-watching a few times in this space, most especially in this post on streaming sitcoms. I still have mixed feelings on the trend, and would in fact go further: when it comes to shows that were originally created to air once a week (ie, pretty much every TV show prior to the rise of Netflix original content in the early 2010s), bingeing them is as best a less ideal way to experience what the creators intended, and at worst actively ruins the experience. But for shows being created in this new era of streaming, the opposite is, if not a given, at least always possible: that the creators intend them to be binged, and have worked to create shows which reward viewers for such extended immersion. I’d say that’s the case for both Bridgerton and The Bear, particularly because both are so good at…

2)      …(World)Building: When I’ve used this storytelling term previously in this space, it’s largely been in the context of my Intro to Sci Fi/Fantasy course, as worldbuilding has been without a doubt the most-discussed concept in every section of that class I’ve taught. But of course any genre and any cultural medium can build a world, and I don’t think any recent TV shows have done it more intentionally nor more successfully than do these two. But in two very distinct ways: Bridgerton in the vein of the best historical fiction in both senses of that genre as I’ve defined it in the past (such as in that hyperlinked post), immersing the audience in a prior historical period and yet creating compelling fictional stories that are not bound by historical facts; while The Bear builds its restaurant industry world through incredibly potent use of narrative tension and emotion, making the audience feel every detail of that setting and community. Or at least it hopes to do so, but the recent season three did meet with a great deal of…

3)      …Backlash: After a pair of relatively universally acclaimed seasons, The Bear’s season three has been quite a bit more divisive. I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet (like I said, I’m late to these games), but my wife, who has, has offered a very thoughtful take: that the show is working to become more cinematic in its storytelling and imagery, while still using those devices to capture emotion and character as it always has. If that is the case, it would mean that The Bear has evolved but not fundamentally changed, and I’d say that’s very much the case for Bridgerton (on which I am fully caught up), which makes the rising backlash to that show’s various forms of diverse casting and storytelling particularly frustrating. That is, I get that Bridgerton differs from the original novels in a variety of ways, including its diversity; but that’s been a central element of the show from day one, and by this point fans should either go along for the very enjoyable ride or find something else to binge.  

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

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

September 13, 2024: Classic TV Studying: I Love Lucy

[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 why the groundbreaking sitcom’s comfortable familiarity actually reflects its most radical elements.

While I Love Lucy (1951-57) was one of the first prominent sitcoms, there are a few reasons why its domestic and marital dynamics seem to fit comfortably within existing, familiar tropes, and most of them center directly about star Lucille Ball and her prior professional work. For the years leading up to the sitcom’s debut she had been starring in a CBS Radio program entitled My Favorite Husband, where she played a wacky housewife. When CBS initially balked at her request that a TV adaptation co-star her husband, Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz, Lucille and Desi toured as a vaudeville act, performing the same kinds of marital hijinks that they would feature on the sitcom. So by the time Lucille and Desi were given the chance to perform those exaggerated versions of their real-life roles on TV, they—and Lucille especially—had extensive personal and professional experience with such characters and dynamics, helping give the show that impressively lived-in feel from its pilot episode on.

At the same time, I think it’s just as accurate to say that I Love Lucy itself established many of those sitcom domestic and marital tropes that have since come to feel so familiar, and that’s an important reframing because it allows us to see the show for just how radical it really was, in two distinct ways. For one thing, there’s the apparent reason why CBS initially balked at casting Desi are Lucille’s husband in the TV adaptation: their concerns that TV viewers wouldn’t accept a redheaded white woman and a Cuban man as a married couple (even though, again, the two had been married in real life for a decade by that time). What Ball understood, far better it seems than these network executives, was that mass media genres like sitcoms don’t have to simply reflect existing images or narratives (although they far too often settle for doing so); they can also, and perhaps especially, shape such cultural and social conversations. Am I suggesting that I Love Lucy helped create the shifts in attitudes toward cross-cultural marriages that would contribute to the Supreme Court’s groundbreaking decision in Loving v. Virginia (1967) a decade later? Well yeah, I guess I am.

Through and because of the show, and more exactly because of how much it brought her star power to wider audiences, Ball was also able to achieve significant professional milestones of her own. Most strikingly, she and Desi founded a TV production company, Desilu, of which she became the first female studio head; when the two divorced in 1960, she bought out his share and cemented her role as the full business and creative director of that successful and influential studio. Lest you think those are hyperbolic adjectives to make my point, here are just four of the TV shows that Desilu produced, all of them during Lucille’s reign as solo studio head post-divorce: the original Star Trek (launched in 1966); the original Mission: Impossible (also 1966); The Andy Griffith Show (launched in 1960); and The Dick Van Dyke Show (launched in 1961). All of those in their own ways became and remain familiar presences within, and contributed enduring tropes to, their respective genres—one more way that I Love Lucy has left its radical imprint on our cultural landscape.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

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

September 12, 2024: Classic TV Studying: Lassie

[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 AmericanStudies takeaways from three iterations of the iconic canine hero.

1)      Family: After its September 12^th, 1954 debut, Lassie ran for 19 total seasons, making it the 7^th longest-running American primetime TV show to date. The first ten of those seasons are the ones most audiences likely associate with the show, as they were set on a family farm (or rather two families’ farms, as the original Miller family transitioned to the Martins during the fourth season, if ostensibly at the same farm). That farm setting was somewhat distinct from most of the era’s family sitcoms, if in keeping with later rural-themed 1960s shows like The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Green Acres among others. But nonetheless, I would argue that the first ten seasons of Lassie exist squarely in the TV metaverse inhabited by the sitcom dads I wrote about in Tuesday’s post, along with their wives, children, neighbors, etc. Family was the name of the game in early TV, and Lassie did it so well that it outlasted almost all of those other programs.

2)      Forestry: No show exists for nearly twenty years without evolving, though, and after those ten family-focused seasons, Lassie shifted dramatically beginning in season 11 (1964-65), when Lassie became the canine companion of U.S. Forestry Service Ranger Corey Stuart (Robert Bray). Not coincidentally, the show transitioned to more full color filming in this era, and that technology was used to showcase a variety of spectacular Western locations, including Sequoia National Forest and Monument Valley. Those locales would seem to parallel this new iteration of Lassie with another of the era’s most prominent TV trends, the ubiquitous Westerns. But I would argue that they also represented a potential counterpoint to that genre’s mythologized and frequently nostalgic American West, offering viewers glimpses of a contemporary West to which they, like the heroic pooch, could travel.

3)      Fucking What?: As is the case with so many successful and long-running shows, when Lassie came to a close its creators sought to continue the success with a spin-off, in this case the animated show Lassie’s Rescue Rangers (1973). Yet that spin-off lasted only one season, with the main factor in its demise undoubtedly being a couple prominent responses: Lassie’s original trainer Rudd Weatherwax claiming “That’s not Lassie. That’s trash”; and the National Association of Broadcasters adding “The manufacturers of this rubbish have incorporated violence, crime, and stupidity into what is probably the worst show for children of the season.” I can’t lie, if you read some of the episode descriptions, they do sound, well, batshit insane (seriously, read them and thank me later). But I also have to believe that another factor in these extreme responses was that the new Lassie was even more overtly tied to early 1970s environmental themes and advocacy, and not everybody was ready or willing to accept that emphasis for the beloved pooch.

Last TV Studying tomorrow,

Ben

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

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?