What I watched: The second 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 Jimmy Lydon. It was directed by Herbert I. Leeds and Edward Stevens, and written by Irving Belcher, Reuben Shipp, Alan Lipscott and Ashmead Scott. (It took FOUR people to write this script?) “Babs and Simon” aired on NBC at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, October 11, 1949, and is available to watch on Internet Archive.
What happened: We begin this episode in media res (possibly due to part of the recording being cut), with Riley getting angry about his daughter Babs dating the titular Simon. Simon, we learn, is twenty years old and (in the opinion of Riley) a layabout with an ugly face. Apparently Simon’s uncle was an ex-boss of Riley’s who did him wrong.
Nevertheless, Babs persists in trying to “step out,” waiting on the porch for Simon to pick her up. Riley catches him hiding behind a chair, and we discover that Simon is the image of a feckless nerd. An angry Babs storms inside, and Riley hesitates to follow her. As he hangs back on the porch, his friend Gillis comes over with a log, and they banter over the problem. Gillis tells Riley he was too harsh, and he refuses to admit it. Gillis then spins a tale of lovesick Babs running away from home and drowning herself in the river. (We also learn that these people live in Los Angeles, which is notably short on rivers.)
Once inside, Riley changes his tune, saying that he loves Simon and he’s going to invite him over for supper tomorrow night. We cut immediately to the night of said dinner, with Riley buttering up Simon. But an oblivious Simon brings up the uncle that Riley has history with, and he promptly begins to lose his cool and kicks the kid out again.
Later, Babs sneaks out of the house to see Simon, as a voice-over narrator comes out of nowhere to describe things to us. The pair go to a justice of the peace, but they don’t want to get married. Instead, they’re starting a business selling greeting cards and wedding announcements. In the middle of the night. Really.
Riley plays checkers with his friends as they have a long, repetitive conversation. He eventually realizes that Babs has left, and concludes that she and Simon are eloping. This leads to Peg and Gillis upbraiding him for being a bad father. They get a call from the justice of the peace, saying that the kids have “left their license” at his house, and Riley leaps to the (frankly reasonable) conclusion.
Simon and Babs return to the house, and upon finding wedding cards (and hearing talk of ordering baby announcements), Riley gets the old Homer Simpson grip on Simon. The misunderstanding is cleared up, but Riley still orders Simon out of the house. Oh, Riley you cad.
What I thought: If Life of Riley is a prototype for the decades of mediocre sitcoms ahead of us, this episode introduces one evergreen trope: the idiot father’s protectiveness of his daughter. The sitcom dad is the prototypical patriarch, always alert to the danger posed by adolescent female sexuality, interrogating and demeaning any prospective suitor. The overprotective father freaking out about a date has become a story so rote TV writers can probably tell it in their sleep.
This expectation of paternal control is everywhere in our culture, from novelty t-shirts to Facebook image macros, but is perhaps nowhere more common than the family sitcom. The pilot of Modern Family, a very popular “update” of this genre, makes sure to establish its bonafides by having its father chastise his daughter for a revealing outfit in the opening minutes. At least one show (8 Simple Rules) based the entire series on this trope.
Going further back, the paternal obsession with filial chastity has its root in historic patriarchy. Control of a daughter’s sexuality was a symbol of control over her entire life, including the ability to sell or swap her through arranged marriage. Fathers had material incentives to act in the way Riley does in this episode: if your daughter “stepped out” and eloped with some farmboy, you stood to lose out on a lucrative dowry. And of course, a Freudian might say that the father’s fear of rapacious suitors is a barely displaced fear of his own sexual aggression, or even of desire for his own daughter. The father may remember taking advantage of a teenage girl in his past, and excuse himself by assuming that such action is natural and hence must be guarded against by responsible adults.
So overprotective father jokes likely emerged as an observation of real behaviour, exaggerated for the sake of humour. But when rendered into a sitcom trope, these jokes have the effect of normalizing and excusing patriarchal behaviour which, in real life, often takes on more violent and abusive aspects then on TV. To be clear, the father’s actions usually aren’t precisely justified. In Life of Riley, for instance, the viewer can plainly see that Simon is no rakish seducer, and we know from the start that he and Babs aren’t going to elope. But at the same time, one expects that the average viewer would be more shocked if a father was indifferent about his daughter’s chastity. As in all things, the sitcom father goes too far, but we understand his desires as being both relatable and just.
As a container for this trope, The Life of Riley is predictably flawed. The episode starts out fairly well, setting up its conflict quickly and featuring some decent banter (“Don’t live in the past.” “I can live any place I want, I’m an American citizen.”) However, things gradually go south with a truly preposterous sitcom misunderstanding. Is the audience really supposed to believe that a young couple would sneak out in the middle of the night to… start a greeting-card company?
I get the sense that this will be part of a trend with Life of Riley — “Tonsils” also got bogged down in its second half with lame supporting characters and overdone confusion. I’ve already written about the misunderstanding as the crux of the sitcom plot, a device that allows for conflict without antagonists. Here, however, we see the downside of this device: either one character has to be a total idiot, or the writer has to contrive circumstances that strain believability. I expect that, as this series and this genre continues, we’ll see plenty of both.
Coming up next: Bela Lugosi makes a rare TV appearance in a stellar episode of Suspense.
The Eternal Couch Potato 