What I watched: The fifth episode of The Life of Riley, an early sitcom. The episode starred Jackie Gleason, Rosemary DeCamp, Lanny Rees, Gloria Winters, Sid Tomack, and John Brown, with a guest appearance by Bob Jellison. It was directed by Herbert I. Leeds, and written by Irving Belcher, Reuben Shipp, Alan Lipscott and Ashmead Scott. “Nervous Breakdwon” aired on NBC at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, November 1, 1949, and is available to watch on Internet Archive.
What happened: As the episode opens, Riley is sneaking around his house with a box that he’s trying to hide from his wife. Junior doesn’t quite get the concept, thus furthering his father’s disappointment. Peg quickly realizes that something is up, and forces him to confess that his pay envelope is a little lighter than his customary $59. (Even I make more than that!) Riley, passing by an antique shop, has impulsively bought a diver’s helmet. It turns out he’s also sent in for a mail-order bee shipment. Peg is REALLY mad about him spending their money frivolously and driving them into debt.
In the next scene, Riley is meeting with an effete man in a scarf and bow tie (Jellison.) There is no explanation of who this person is, but he’s later identified as Waldo. Riley is complaining about his wife “flying off the handle” about these purchases, including a skeleton. Gillis comes by, and the group of men decide that Peg is having a nervous breakdown. The solution is for Riley to become “romantic.”
Our protagonist attempts to court his wife with a flower and kind words, but she angrily rejects him. Back with Waldo and Gillis, Riley regrets his poor behaviour, swearing to never again “act like a husband.” For some reason, this leads him to start cutting out bad news from the paper, so that her delicate sensibility won’t hear it. This effort even involves taking the tubes out of the radio. Needless to say, this does not make her less angry.
Riley’s next scheme involves spying on his wife while she cooks dinner. He sees Peg pouring something into his tomato juice, and jumps to the conclusion that she’s snapped and is poisoning him. (Could anyone blame her?) At the dinner table, he refuses the juice and any other food prepared for him. This naturally leads to him hungrily devouring custard the next night, but gets nervous too upon learning that Peg has made it “especially for him.”
He freaks out, and Gillis suggests that he takes an “antidote” consisting of raw eggs and vinegar. Naturally, this leads to him actually being poisoned, and lying on the couch acting if he’s going to die. Peg thinks that he’s suffered a nervous breakdown, and calls for the doctor. Friendly undertaker Digger O’Dell comes in — “early”, according to Riley. Digger tastes the bottle of “poison”, and proclaims that it’s a “harmless nerve toxin.”
There’s a bit of footage missing, and then a doctor has arrived to treat “the nervous breakdown.” Naturally, both spouses think that the other one is being treated for insanity. Riley explains all his strange actions, and thankfully no one is carted off to the nightmare of a 1950s mental hospital. Our leading couple laughs, and choose not to consider the long-term effects such mutual suspicion will have on their marriage.
What happened: Okay, so you know how a few episodes ago I explained how Chester A. Riley was a classic Freudian subject, but even I thought it might be a bit of a stretch? Well in this episode everyone finds it plausible that Riley is in the midst of a “nervous breakdown”, the most Freudian of ailments. Even the “real” events include a nerve tonic, a medicine whose concept reinforces the neurotic landscape of psychoanalysis. WHO’S OVERANALYZING THINGS NOW, PUNK?
But seriously, there’s probably a dissertation to be written on how psychoanalytic ideas entered American culture and became bowdlerized to the point where they could be the fodder for light comedy. Here, the medicalization of aberrant personalities has thoroughly saturated the domestic sphere. Peg’s irritability, or Riley’s eccentric behaviour, are not things to be worked out between people but conditions which require a medical institution to make right. Anything other than a frictionless familial love is a disorder.
As in all things, The Life of Riley is kidding, but it’s kidding on the square: it expects its central character’s actions to be relatable and understandable, if extreme. And so, when Riley jokes about his marriage being miserable and takes seriously the idea that his wife would try to kill him, we are meant to laugh, but also meant to understand that yes, marriage really is a pit of misery, and perhaps we are all a few steps away from violence. If pushed a little bit further, this episode could become unintentionally subversive, but as written it simply tells us that such unhappiness is normal and should be tolerated.
The initial source of tension in “Nervous Breakdown” is Riley’s insistence on buying useless junk and the debt it’s driving the family into. The former element is a good comedic premise that the writers don’t do much with before quickly moving on to the drama of marital suspicion. Peg’s mention of the financial effects of this habit could also ground the episode in actual material concerns: we actually get a dollar amount of Riley’s paycheck and his cost of living, which is a level of specificity even The Goldbergs didn’t get into. But, in a move characteristic of The Life of Riley and the American sitcom in general, the material pressures on a working-class family are quickly subsumed into psychological and interpersonal disorders.
(And hey, Peg suddenly has a personality! Okay, getting mad over foolish behaviour isn’t much of a personality, but it’s better than the Stepford-esque placid smiles Rosemary DeCamp had worn to this point. The fact that the script has a bunch of adult men deciding her rational anger is insane just furthers my idea that this could almost be subversion, and heavy-handed subversion at that.)
Five episodes in, a formula is starting to emerge for this series, with Riley’s controlling nature causing strife between him and a family member (different each week) and inevitably blowing up in his face. This episode pushes that structure even further than before, with Riley enlisting the help of the state in an attempt to medicinally imprison his wife. After this, where can they go?
Coming up next: Yet more SUSPENSE!
The Eternal Couch Potato 