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?