[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 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?
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