What I watched: A first-season episode of early TV sitcom The Ruggles. The series starred Charlie Ruggles as himself, more or less, with co-stars Erin O’Brien-Moore, Tom Bernard, Margaret Kerry, Judy Nugent, and Jimmy Hawkins. “Charlie’s Promotion” was written by Fred Howard and Irving Phillips. This episode aired on February 26, 1950 on ABC.
What happened: We open on the two older Ruggle kids arguing about the value of sororities. Charlie tells us that he’s recently convinced his boss Mr. Williams to bring in an efficiency coordinator. He leaves, and everyone at the table reflects on how great Charlie is. Charlie gets to the office and stares at a report until he drops his glasses in surprise.
After an ad break, Charlie meets with the expert Mr. Billings, who is a model of efficiency, knowing everything down to the minute. It seems as though the “speed-up” approach is also being applied to Charlie’s department, and that the advisor has recommended firing Charlie and using his office for storage. Understandably, our guy is quite upset. Since his department is already a model of efficiency, there’s no more management work for him left to do.
Charlie calls Margaret and says that he’s coming home early. She immediately knows something’s wrong, and Charlie tells her the story. She tells him to stay in the office to protect himself. Margaret calls up Mr. Billings to give him a piece of her mind. She goes to her children and explains that she has a scheme for them to rehearse.
In the evening, Charlie comes around with Mr. Billngs, and all of the kids are formally dressed and well-behaved, even forming a conveyor belt to take the adults’ hats. The children continue to wait on them in mechanical fashion as Charlie tries to figure out what’s going on. Billings is jealous of the organization, admitting that his own home is not nearly as well-organized as his business. Margaret even shows off that the dishes are already done. Charlie eventually discovers the trick: the dirty dishes are hidden under the table.
Margaret makes her pitch to Billings over coffee: that every efficient system needs a key figure presiding over it. This convinces him to revise his report and remove the recommendation to fire Charlie. He even decides to recommend a raise and promotion, putting Charlie in charge of efficiency for the whole business. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief and starts arguing again the minute Billings is gone, and talk about how great the family is, until the kids each want their part of his “substantial raise.”
What I thought: I wrote in the previous article on The Ruggles that the show mostly took place entirely in the family home, which I took entirely from Wikipedia. This episode might be the exception to the rule, as the story follows Charlie to his office and includes a pretty substantial number of scenes there. At the same time, Charlie’s job remains pretty much as much of a plot contrivance of ever. We don’t really get a sense of what he does for a living, just a generic office job. (Here we may already be seeing the gentrification of the sitcom, with the move away from the working-class environments of The Goldbergs and Life of Riley.)
The topic of the episode is efficiency, and it proves to be a pertinent one. The 1950s were the height of Fordist production and trust in scientific management, where it was assumed that the management of people could be entirely rationalized. Charlie is a subscriber to the cult of efficiency, apparently imposing strict discipline on his department. But he himself becomes a victim of this quest for ever-greater profit, having managed his department to the point where he is no longer required for its smooth functioning.
This was not an uncommon anxiety in the age of the grey flannel suit. It was around this time that Kurt Vonnegut published his novel Player Piano, worrying about an automated society where human labour had been made entirely redundant. Others worried about the effects of social conformity imposed by capitalist culture.
The Ruggles is not really that intellectually concerned with capitalist efficiency. Instead, it derives most of its humour from applying the dehumanization of the factory line to the domestic home, assumed to be its antithesis. Ultimately Margaret’s argument in favour of Charlie is the one that countless capitalists would make over the following decades: no matter how much automated efficiency was available, it all needed a heroic overseer, preferably a well-paid CEO.
When watching this episode I also noticed just how loose and often repetitive the dialogue on The Ruggles is, with characters summarizing the plot to each other multiple times. This may have been a holdover from radio, when it was easier for the audience to lose the thread of what was happening in a scene, or it may stem from needing to fill time during a live performance. Either way, it makes the episode come off as somewhat sterile, with The Ruggles still not really finding a unique voice.
And now, a word from our sponsors: This episode of The Ruggles includes commercial spots from Kraft. I’ve noted this before, but it’s interesting how these ads explicitly address female homemakers, despite featuring in a primetime comedy with a male protagonist. Presumably this was because women were assumed to be the ones doing the cooking and grocery shopping, but it also perhaps speaks to the emerging reputation of television as a more “feminine” medium than cinema.
Coming up next: Charlton Heston returns to Studio One to once again overpower everyone with his manliness.
The Eternal Couch Potato 