[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 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?
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