[This week marks the anniversaries of the premieres of two classic TV shows: the 50th anniversary of Little House on the Prairie and the 70th 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 12th,
1954 debut, Lassie ran for 19 total seasons, making it the 7th
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?
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