What I watched: The first episode of The Life of Riley, an early sitcom. The episode starred Jackie Gleason, Rosemary DeCamp, Lanny Rees, Sid Tomack, Gloria Winters, and guest star Harry Harvey. It was directed by Herbert I. Leeds and Edward Stevens, and written by Irving Belcher, Reuben Shipp and Alan Lipscott. (It took three people to write this script?) “Tonsils” aired on NBC at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, October 4, 1949, and is available to watch on Internet Archive.
What happened: Our intro is a plain title card with credits rolling over it as some rather annoying whistling plays. Jackie Gleason as the titular Riley is at the doctor (Harvey), complaining of a sore throat, apparently caused by swallowing a fish bone. (Riley is actually his last name, but for some reason even his wife calls him that.) The doc says that there’s no problem with his throat, but he needs to have his tonsils taken out. He immediately starts getting freaked out by the size of the instrument required for the operation.
After a rather abrupt cut, Riley is at home, greeted by his enthusiastic white-bread family of his wife Peggy (DeCamp), son (Rees) and daughter (Winters. He builds up the idea that he has a major illness, but everyone is underwhelmed by the eventual reveal that he needs to get his tonsils out. His son calls him a coward, leading Riley to proclaim “I’m not a coward — I’m just scared.” The surgery is scheduled for tomorrow morning. American medicine must be quicker than I thought.
Riley tries to call his friend and co-worker Gillis (Tomack), but it turns out that he’s come over of his own accord and snuck up behind Riley. They play cards, and we go through the same dialogue where Riley exaggerates the problem and Gillis tells him it’s not such a big deal. They end up going to a female friend, who gets mixed up and thinks that Riley is about to become a father. This leads to an extended miscommunication bit, where Mrs. Bennett talks about bringing her “tonsils” home and feeding them.
The day of the operation, Riley writes a will and melodramatically reads it out to his family. Even at the hospital, the nurse hectors him to stop making a big deal about it. The nurse gives him an injection, and he bolts across the room. The doctor ends up having to do another operation, delaying the tonsilectomy to the afternoon. Not knowing this, Riley’s family wakes him up, and he begins talking about how sore his throat is. Upon learning that the operation is still ahead, he once again begins freaking out and begging for escape, and that’s where our episode ends.
What I thought: I wasn’t exactly looking forward to this one. Despite starring early-TV legend Jackie Gleason, when I’ve seen The Life of Riley referenced in writing on this era it’s almost always preceded by adjectives like “mediocre” or “unsuccessful.” Watching this premiere episode, it’s not hard to see why — the jokes are repetitive, the plot paper-thin, and the supporting characters bland as oatmeal. But, due to the fact that it was shot on film instead of aired live, every episode of Riley is available in the public domain while more well-received shows are unwatchable. The vagaries of the archive strike again.
Still, there is something in The Life of Riley. The show was adapted from a long-running radio program. The radio show had actually starred a substantially different cast, with William Bendix in the lead role, but they were contracted for a film adaptation with MGM the same year. This lead NBC to bring in Gleason, already a budding star and someone who had briefly played the role as part of the radio series. The two lead writers of the radio show, Lipscott and Schipp, worked on the TV series and as such, Riley already more or less knew what it wanted to be.
If “Tonsils” is any indication, Riley is a lot closer to a contemporary sitcom than The Goldbergs. There are a lot more obvious attempts at jokes, and a live studio audience to provide moderate chuckles. The wordplay is all right, at about the same level of banter you would see from an average network show, but there’s much less plot material than a modern comedy. As a result, the jokes are really all variations of the same thing, that Riley is freaking out over nothing.
There’s also some DNA of the modern sitcom in the character of the bumbling, overly emotional father. This trope would become a staple of the family sitcom, from Homer Simpson to Ray Romano (or whatever his TV name was.) In part these roles made men look bad, but for the most part they allowed the male star to do all the funny stuff while women were reduced to being nags — a pattern that is certainly in evidence here.
The most effective part of this pilot episode is easily Gleason. Even if the lines he’s reading are mediocre, Gleason’s facial expressions provoke some mirth. Given the small size of TV screens in the period, his big expressions must have really made an impression. Gleason is like a living cartoon character, his anxiety and cowardice large enough for anyone to recognize themself in. As I mentioned above, The Life of Riley (at least this version of it) wouldn’t stick around long on television screens, but Gleason would.
Coming up next: It’s our first-ever examination of two shows going head-to-head, as ECP favourite SUSPENSE goes up against this episode.
The Eternal Couch Potato 