What I watched: The third episode of The Life of Riley, an early sitcom. The episode starred Jackie Gleason, Rosemary DeCamp, Lanny Rees and Sid Tomack. It was directed by Herbert I. Leeds and Edward Stevens, and written by Irving Belcher, Reuben Shipp, and Alan Lipscott. “Egbert’s Chemistry Set” aired on NBC at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, October 18, 1949, and is available to watch on Internet Archive.
Riley’s name is written on his lunchbox, in a childish touch.
What happened: The episode begins with Riley and Gillis mid-conversation, discussing their children. Naturally, Gillis begins disparaging Riley’s son Junior, calling him a “nothing.” In comparison, Gillis says, his son Egbert is a genius and president of the chemistry club. When Riley talks to his son, he learns that his only activity is assistant cheer-leading, and he doesn’t have a plan for what he wants to do as an adult. Riley badgers him about developing career plans, while the boy’s mother doesn’t see what the big deal is.
At dinner the next day, Riley teases his son over his “long and slender” fingers. He then gets Junior to carve the chicken, much to the kid’s strange joy. He struggles with it, before crudely tearing off a piece. From this, Riley concludes that he will never be a surgeon. His next ambition is for his son to be a brave big game hunter, fording rivers and stuff, but this is quickly dashed when Junior freaks out over a mouse in his room.
Riley reads a child-rearing book, and reads that children at Junior’s age may come to hate their father. (“How can he hate me when I’m so lovable?”) This spurs him to be nice to his son, asking him to lay down on the couch and tell him who his father is. This sounds weirdly sexual to me, but maybe that says more about me than the show. Playing psychiatrist, Riley tries to force his son to admit that he hates him, becoming increasingly angry when he insists that he has only love for his dad.
Next Riley hears that his son has made something with needle and thread. Seemingly resigned to his son’s femininity, Riley decides that his son will be a part of the art world, running a “saloon” in Paris. But it turns out that he was making a yo-yo. Our protagonist sardonically proclaims that his son is a failure at fifteen. Harsh, dude.
Conveniently, the school is hosting an event celebrating fathers and sons. Gillia starts boasting about his son Egbert again, and invites him on stage to perform a chemistry experiment. While he’s preparing things, Riley is press-ganged into making a speech. He blusters his way through half of it, before asking his son to finish it off. Junior is no more interested in public speaking than his father.
Egbert completes his experiment, and it blows up in his face and singes off his eyebrows. Junior knows exactly how to treat the injury, and some convenient crowd member says he’ll make a fine doctor. When Gillis threatens to sue the school, Junior knows why they aren’t liable, and says the odds are “5 to 1” that he’d lose. This leads Riley to proudly proclaim that his son will be a doctor, a lawyer, and a bookmaker.
What I thought: So far I’ve watched three episodes of The Life of Riley, and the last two have had plots concerning the protagonist’s teenage children. This puts it in sharp distinction with the other extant sitcom from this year, The Goldbergs, which only had one episode about kids among its surviving fives, and even that was mostly about the parents’ ego. Whereas The Goldbergs presents family as a relationship forged essentially among equals, Riley presents the act of child-rearing (the protection and development of inferiors) as central.
I don’t want to revisit the comparison to the two series too much, but they are the only two data points in a study of 1949 sitcoms, barring any lost episodes of Mama (reportedly a very Goldbergs-esque show) appearing online. One difference that’s very noticeable in the episode is the way in which The Life of Riley cycles through several related comedic premises — Junior as a bad cook, Junior as bad with animals, etc. This structure has lead the series into trouble in the past, when it runs out of ideas and has to insert an inane misunderstanding, but I think in this episode everything more or less works. This is very different from the structure of The Goldbergs, which explores one premise much more thoroughly.
This set of two episodes about parental anxieties also highlights how said anxieties are innately gendered. In “Babs and Simon Step Out”, Riley worried about losing his daughter to a young man, and more importantly losing her virtue. In “Egbert’s Chemistry Set”, he worries about whether his son will have a successful career. Girls must be protected from the outside world, while boys must be thrust into it.
This deal is not particularly good for either gender, although girls get the worst of it. In both episodes, Riley’s desire for his children to fit into a heteronormative social mode leads him to insult, belittle, and control them — all activities that we are meant to see as overly exuberant but essentially right-minded. And of course, these sets of gendered expectations feed into each other. Just as a woman who resisted the straightjacket of male control was seen to be herself manly, Junior’s failure to adhere to a serious career path is presented as effeminate. Riley snidely comments on Junior’s long, unblemished fingers and insults him for his interest in cheer-leading. If work is the key to entering the kingdom of wedded, heterosexual bliss, then to fail at work is to risk becoming queer.
Having spent a decade steeped in humanities education, my ears naturally perked up when Riley’s wife derisively referred to him as “Doctor Freud,” While psychoanalysis was gaining popularity in the United States, popular culture still typically portrayed it as silly, if not emasculating (just think of the mobster-on-the-couch skit in Admiral Broaway Revue.) The Oedipus theory was then, as now, held up as the ultimate evidence of Freud’s absurdity.
And yet a Freudian reading of “Egbert’s Chemistry Set” would be a strong one. The explicit reference to psychoanalysis represents The Life of Riley‘s too-insistent denial of the Freudian hypothesis that father and son are rivals. Riley certainly treats his son as an enemy in this episode, deriding his interests and attempting to control his actions. Perhaps his readiness to accept the idea that Junior hates him is because he, in a subconscious way, hates Junior. As with Babs, the most infuriating thing about children is how they are experienced emotionally as extensions of the parents’ self, but are not controllable like we think a part of the self should be.
This reading is a bit tongue-in-cheek. Life of Riley is, after all, a stupid sitcom, even if it did tap into commonly-felt familial anxieties. But it does seem notable that, after refusing the psychiatrist’s couch, this episode is only able to resolve its conflict via plot contrivance. As easy as he was to ridicule, Freud highlighted something that most television would prefer to ignore: that families were not either loose assemblages of kooky personalities or workshops for producing well-adjusted adults, but in fact something darker and much more complicated.
Coming up next: The grind continues with more The Lone Ranger.
The Eternal Couch Potato 