Episode 296: The George Burns & Gracie Allen Show – Gracie The Artist (October 26, 1950)

What I watched: The second episode of the first season of The George Burns & Gracie Allen Show. In addition to the title duo, the series starred Bea Benadaret and Hal March. This episode featured guest appearances by Truman Smith, Bob Fosse, and Mary Ann Niles, was directed by Ralph Levy, and was written by Paul Henning, Sid Dorfman, Harvey Helm, and Willy Burns. “Gracie the Artist” aired on CBS on Thursday, October 26, 1950, and is available to watch on YouTube.

What happened: George opens the show, telling us about the huge response the first episode of the show has gotten. He jokes about the advice he got from Jack Benny and Fred Allen for working on television. He then takes us to “Beverly Hills”, where Gracie is beginning the sitcom plot by going to an art gallery. A fussy curator (Smith) talks to her about the value of art compared to the trash they show on TV. This museum apparently has the Venus de Milo, The Thinker, and Aphrodite, so apparently Gracie went all the way to Paris. She ends up alarmed at the nudity. After initially thinking she’s joking, the curator realizes that Gracie is really an idiot, and tells her to go home. Gracie hears that the art is pricelss and decides to get rich by becoming an artist.

George is back monologuing about Gracie, and how he loves her despite her ditzy ways. He then steps into the sitcom, where he receives a number of art supplies Gracie has ordered, including an “artist’s weasel.” He goes back to the archway to talk to the audience some more, and introduces he dance act Fosse and Niles while we wait for Gracie to come home. They do some brief tap dancing.

This scene is inexplicably shot at a Dutch angle.

Back in the story, Gracie and George finally interact, as he reminisces about their old Vaudeville days. They do a little dance to remember the old days, occasionally interrupting to tell a joke, as per their act. We drop in on the couple’s neighbours Blanche and Harry Morton (March), whose husband keeps going on about how stupid Gracie is. Blanch defends her, but admits Gracie is a little strange.

George breaks the fourth wall some more by telling us that Blanch is played by Bea Benaderet (SP?) who doesn’t like him in or out of character. Harry comes over to find that Gracie is mixing paint in an egg beater, and has resolved to make one masterpiece a day. Sounds like some Mr. Turner stuff. George proposes that she paint Harry in the nude. Harry tells a joke about a cow, which turns into an ad for Carnation Milk.

George ends up being the one who poses for Gracie, who swears the picture is a perfect likeness. Blanch comes by and thinks it’s a picture of a cab. We don’t actually see the picture. Gracie cries at not getting the response she wants, and George promises to buy her all the clothes she wants. As it turns out, Gracie is just sad because her feet are sore, and still thinks the picture’s a masterpiece. You go girl! After another plug for milk, George and Gracie come out to say good night to the audience.

What I thought: 1950 was the year that a number of big radio stars moved to TV as part of NBC and CBS’s drive to compete with each other, and the married couple team of George Burns and Gracie Allen were among them. The duo had worked together for decades through vaudeville, film, and radio, all with the same basic act: the ditzy and absurd Gracie and the straight man George. In television, that formula would prove a success in yet another new medium.

The most immediately interesting element of the show is the way in which it blends aspects of the sitcom and the variety show. George is part of the action, but he also frequently steps outside the show to interact with the audience, breaking the fourth wall. The sitcom plot is periodically interrupted by variety-style acts as well as George’s stand-up. The transition helps to establish George as the above-it-all smart-aleck. Gracie, on the other hand, is entirely guileless, only existing in the show-within-the-show.

This makes The George Burns and Gracie Allen show an early example of the gradual transition from variety to sitcoms as the genre of choice for light entertainment, although variety would still be dominant for most of the decade. Like Your Show of Shows, it uses the structure of a live variety show as a frame for a miniature sitcom. This was only their second show on TV, and one of the few that would be broadcast from New York instead of California, so maybe the variety elements were toned down over time, but it makes for a very unique presentation.

This format perfectly suits the plot, which would be too thin to spend a full thirty minutes in. The story sees Gracie trying to become a famous artist, drawing on a few high-art references that would have been familiar to the audience (and relatively recent, in the case of Rodin) at the time. I understand why the episode chose to not show us Gracie’s apparently very hard-to-comprehend painting, but it would have been nice to see what the props department came up with. Hey, representational art was on the way out, so maybe Gracie could have been a big deal.

One of these people would go on to be the subject of a FX miniseries.

I have some more immediate thoughts, including whether the whole George-and-Gracie dynamic is misogynist, but this show ran for eight years, so I’ll save something in the chamber for now.

What else was on: In a sign of the new competition for eyeballs, George and Gracie were opposed by fellow star Groucho Marx, hosting You Bet Your Life. You Bet Your Life was the higher-rated show over the course of the season, finishing #17 overall, and based on seeing one episode of each I’d probably have picked it too. ABC’s game show Stop the Music, also a radio emigre, also finished ahead of Burns and Allen at #23, despite ABC’s smaller reach.

Up against this line-up, DuMont ceded the hour, having stations show local programming. In the New York hours, viewers could watch dueling local talent shows: Talent Parade on WOR and Stairway to Stardom on WATV. The latter show, which has no relation to the later public access series, was one of the first TV shows with a Black host and is sadly lost to time.

Coming up next: Kukla, Fran, and Ollie features a visit from someone named “Sweet Williams.”

Episode 209: Parade of Stars (June 12, 1950)

What I watched: An episode of Parade of Stars, a comedic short. It starred Fanny Brice and Habley Stafford, and aired on CBS on June 10, 1950. The episode is available to view on the Internet Archive.

What happened: We open with an ad for Popsicles, which I just learned is a brand name. We are then introduced to a beleaguered dad and his daughter Snooks, who insists on having a big chocolate rabbit for Easter. They go into a store, and he buys her a Popsicle. She wants him to buy the “soda jerk.” More product placement happens.

We get back to the “action”, with the father taking Snooks to a museum to learn about art. The museum apparently has the Venus de Milo in it, whose armlessness and nudity alarms Snooks. This leads to a joke about burlesque shows, which I’m sure the kids loved.

They do some jokes about evolution and “the missing link”, who looks like Snooks’ Uncle Louie, and the artist Whistler. They then start looking at an off-screen mural featuring gladiators being devoured by lions. This upsets Snooks, but not for the reason that.he thinks. We’re then invited to sing along to the popsicle jingle by following a “red dot.” It’s a black-and-white medium, guys.

What I thought: This is one which firmly fits into the historical-interest-only bin. In this case, the historical interest is one of the few on-screen appearances of Fanny Brice. Brice was chiefly a radio comedian, best known for her character Baby Snooks, a bratty little girl. (She’s also known as the subject of the Barbara Streisand musical Funny Girl.)

Dad notes that Snooks is “more like her mother every day”, just adding further weirdness.

From this fifteen-minute short, it becomes obvious why Snooks was a radio character and not a film or television one. Seeing a grown woman acting like a sugar-crazed six-year-old is more uncomfortable than funny. It feels a bit like the viewer has stumbled into someone’s fetish play. The lack of an actual audience, and the cheapness of the sets, makes the whole thing come off eerie.

Even if it was just a voice, or an appropriately-aged actress, I’m not sure I see the appeal of the character. Sure, it’s a decent satire of the way kids can be annoying, but it mostly does this by being even more annoying than a kid at their worst. There are a couple decent punchlines, but the character is far too grating to make them seem worthwhile.

Judging from the incessant commercials for Popsicle, Parade of Stars was mostly aimed at children. I wonder how kids watching this would have reacted to the Baby Snooks act. Would they have identified with the character, thought of her like their bratty younger siblings, or thought of it as grownups having a joke at their expense? Overall, I ended up thinking of this episode as another forage into the world of extremely crummy children’s entertainment, putting minimal and annoying material between as many ads for sugary treats as you could get away with.

I haven’t been able to find much information on what Parade of Stars was like as a series. Based on the intro, I guess this was sort of a cut-up variety show — skip the host, and just give a different act their own fifteen minutes every episode. That format could work, but this episode really makes the series seem like the most rudimentary kind of network filler.

Fanny Brice would die of a cerebral hemorrhage less than a year after this episode. Watching her act, I’m reminded of the episode of Marvelous Ms. Maisel that features Jane Lynch as a gimmicky 1950s female comedian. She says that for a woman to be funny she had to be turned into a thing. I don’t know much about Brice, but those words certainly come to mind now.

Coming up next: Speaking of crummy kids’ shows, it’s once again Howdy Doody Time.

Episode 192: The Goldbergs (April 3, 1950)

What I watched: A first-season episode of The Goldbergs, one of the earliest sitcoms. The episode starred Gertrude Berg, Philip Loeb, Eli Mintz, Larry Robinson, Arlene “Fuzzie” McQuade, Betty Walker and Bertha Belmore. It was directed by Walter Hart, written by Berg, and produced by Worthington Miner. This episode aired on Monday, April 3, 1950 at 9:30 pm on CBS, and is available to watch on Internet Archive and Shout Factory TV.

What happened: After letting us know about the “modern miracle” of Sanka decaffeinated coffee, comparable to splitting the atom, Molly sets about composing a letter. Her son does the actual writing while she dictates, presumably because of her language skills. She has a window-to-window conversation with her neighbour Mrs. Kramer, who promised her apartment to British woman Violet without thinking.

This distracts Molly from the process of writing the letter, which is meant to introduce Mrs. Kramer to a resort owner in Florida. Mr. Kramer comes over to join Philip and Uncle David’s game of cards. He objects to the impromptu subletting. The Kramers immediately begin having an extended argument all over the Goldbergs’ apartment. It turns out that Violet’s mother is visiting, and she wants to hide the fact that she’s separated from her husband.

Later, the Kramers have left on their sunny vacation, and Violet has left to meet her mother. Molly swears not to meddle in the situation, which we obviously take with an oil-drum’s worth of salt. After seeing a photo of Violet’s handsome husband, she decides to speak to him in an attempt to get them back together. The separation has apparently stemmed from her husband’s pursuit of higher education, which I can confirm is a great way to repel women.

We hear that everyone in the building is out on the stoop to see the unfolding drama. Not a lot of entertainment in those days, you know. Molly gets a call from Mrs. Kramer, on vacation in a studio facsimile of Florida. She wants Molly to call Violet’s husband at UPenn. (Go Quakers!) Violet’s mother gives a very British-accented introduction to the Goldbergs, and they promptly begin imitating her “cheerios.”

The stampede of Brits is a nice absurdist touch in a generally realist show.

Molly tells Violet about Mrs. Kramer’s attempted interference, which she doesn’t take well. Her mother comes in with a whole army of visiting British mothers. They travel in packs, you know. Violet’s mother is so delighted that she says she’s not going home until she meets her son-in-law. Violet gets a call from her husband, who ironically enough turns out to be in England as an exchange student. Wuh-oh!

The Goldbergs fret about what to do with this dilemma, especially with the Kramers supposed to come home soon. Violet’s mother comes back from the cinemas, beginning to suspect that the jig is up. But Molly fakes a telegraph saying that the husband’s business trip has taken him to London, and mother and daughter can both go back together. The old British ladies all shill for Sanka coffee, which may be the most unbelievable part of the whole episode.

What I thought: Having just recently concluded the first TV version of The Life of Riley, we also have the last available episode of the first TV version of The Goldbergs. The two series represent opposite poles of of the family sitcom: one driven by tightly-wound and generally contrived plots, the other using more of a rambling structure with frequent interruptions

Mmm, cookies… wait, what was I filming?

While watching this episode, I was struck by a shot in which the camera panned down to look at the cookies Molly had baked, and spent about half a minute staring at them while the conversation continued between faces just out of frame. You would never see a shot like this in a sitcom today. It reflects both the amateurishness of 1950 television and the directness: it feels as though the camera’s eyes are our own, distracted from the conversation by our desire for a tasty snack.

It’s a shame that we’ve missed the last few months of Goldbergs episodes, because this is a story that really depends on our knowledge of the series’ supporting cast, which was presumably fleshed out over the course of many episodes. This is the type of episode that typically happens later in a show’s run, with the title characters mostly acting as meddlers in the dramas of others. (We were, at least, introduced to Violet as Mr. Goldberg’s potential love interest in an available episode.)

This episode brings us a different type of accent-based humour than Molly’s trademark German-Jewish malapropisms. Instead, we have a cavalcade of fussy British old ladies, who serve as a humorous contrast to our protagonists. Both groups are European immigrants, but their social meaning is completely different, with the Brits representing prestige and tradition (if a faintly silly one) and the Jews representing a crude underclass. This latter association would change fairly quickly, but the general trend of immigrants being sorted into desirable and undesirable groups sadly would not.

I’d be lying if I said I was laughing my ass off while watching The Goldbergs, but I still wish there were more of these early episodes available. Gertrude Berg would win the first Emmy for Best Actress this year, and it’s hard to argue that she didn’t deserve it: this episode, and the series, doesn’t work at all without her grounded portrayal of Molly, who is both relatable and humorous in her foibles.

The Goldbergs would soon fell under the kind of suspicion that the immigrant group it depicted routinely dealt with. In June, Philip Loeb, who plays Jake in this series, was named in the bestselling book Red Channels as one of the Communists working in Hollywood. Loeb denied this, but sponsor General Foods (the owners of Sanka) began pressuring the series to replace him. But we have one more episode with Loeb in it, about a year in historical time from now, so I can put off the rest of this sad story for another time.

Coming up next: We keep the dial tuned to CBS as The Goldbergs is immediately followed by Studio One‘s adaptation of The Scarlet Letter.

Episode 190: The Life of Riley – “Five Dollar Bill” (March 28, 1950)

What I watched: The twenty-sixth and final episode of The Life of Riley, an early sitcom. The episode starred Jackie Gleason, Rosemary DeCamp, Gloria Winters, Sid Tomack, John Brown and Lanny Rees. It was directed by Herbert I. Leeds, and written by Irving Breecher, Reuben Shipp, and Alan Lipscott.  “Five Dollar Bill” aired on NBC at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, March 28, 1950, and is available to watch on the Internet Archive.

What happened: We open with Riley once again getting upset about money. It turns out that he gave Peg four $5 bills a week ago, and now one of the bills is missing. This leads to them pointing fingers at each other. Riley sees that Junior has a box, which contains a basketball. He reminisces about his days playing for NYU (the New York Upholsterers), then sees that the ball cost $5. (Hey, it was cheaper than a medium Blizzard.)

I will hear this stupid whistled theme song in my dreams.

Riley naturally jumps to the conclusion that his son is a thief, and sends him to his room. Gillis strolls in, and the Rileys all complain about his home-invading ass. After overhearing the whole theft issue, Gillis tells Riley to give his son a spanking.

This convinces Riley to begin abusing his son, despite the protestations of his wife and daughter. He calls Babs a “radical” for presuming her brother innocent, then feels sorry for himself about “having” to do it. He goes up to Junior’s room to enact the punishment, but struggles with ultimately going through with it. After a lot of hesitation, he only manages a light slap.

Junior doesn’t seem to care about being hit, but vigorously protests not being able to play basketball that night. Babs begs her father to relent, and Peg gives him a withering glance. Digger O’Dell shows up to do his schtick. He finds Riley’s ruby ring, that he gave to Junior. It turns out that the kid pawned the ring for $5, thus explaining how he bought the basketball. Digger gets applause after he leaves for some reason.

Peg eventually connects the dots and realizes that Junior is innocent. Riley happens to have the same pants on as this day, and finds the missing $5 bill in his pocket. Peg yells at him until he feels bad. He apologizes to his son for the false suspicion, and the show ends with everyone standing around being happy, I guess.

What I thought: There’s no reason why the TV version of Life of Riley shouldn’t have been a success. The show was based on a popular enough radio program. The jokes weren’t great, but at the same time they weren’t all that much worse than the ones on the variety shows. And you had a major emerging talent in Jackie Gleason in the lead role. Yet the series vanished after this, the twenty-sixth episode, becoming a single-season flash in the pan. It’s only remembered at all today because it, unlike most of its contemporaries, was shot on film and hence survived to the present.

Part of Life of Riley‘s failure was politics. There were disagreements between producer Breecher and sponsor Pabst over money, leading the beer company to pull their sponsorship two-thirds of the way through the agreed-upon 39-episode season. Even if these difficulties had been worked out, NBC executive Sylvester Weaver hated the show — he thought it look cheap, with sub B-movie production values. (He wasn’t wrong.) Weaver believed that television couldn’t beat film at its own game, and The Life of Riley was proof of this. Instead, Weaver wanted television to focus on live programs, in particular theatrical “spectaculars” and intimate talk shows. Canned sitcoms were not on the table.

Weaver’s strategy would prove successful in the short term, but ultimately the TV comedy would look more like The Life of Riley and less like Weaver’s spectaculars. Indeed, the series’s predictable comedy and cheapness would soon come to be the type of thing network execs looked for (particularly at more film-friendly CBS.) As unambitious as it was, Life of Riley was ahead of its time.

I wish I could say that the series went out in a blaze of glory, showing us its strongest side, but “Five Dollar Bill” is just another formulaic episode. It plays on the familiar theme of Junior being potentially lead astray. Despite the character being the very image of a gee-willickers 1950s teenager, we’re always supposed to believe that he’s on the verge of becoming a juvenile delinquent. The eventual resolution of the episode, that the money was stuck in Riley’s pants pocket all along, is rather lame and unearned.

The most uncomfortable part of the episode for a modern viewer is the discussion of corporal punishment, a practice which is now rightly seen as child abuse. It’s hard to find the humour in Riley’s commitment to whip his son. Still, what makes him supposedly sympathetic is that he doesn’t really have the nerve to hit his child, and finally fails to go through with it. This is perhaps a sign of changing cultural attitudes around physical punishment — a dunderhead like Riley should be in favour of it, but ultimately his squeamishness reflects well on him.

Then again, maybe there is something Oedipal going on here…

I can’t say that I’ll miss The Life of Riley. I’m still not sure there’s that much of a gap between it and the more acclaimed comedies of this era, and it had a strong bench of comedic supporting characters. Nevertheless, the sitcom plots that were already fairly cliche in 1950 come off as incredibly stale today. You can tell the series lost me about the time I started making up cockamie Freudian readings for this blog.

This wouldn’t be the end of Chester A. Riley on television, however. A second series, starring original radio star William Bendix, would debut in 1953 and run for six seasons. Maybe the audience just wanted to see Bendix instead of that nobody Gleason. In any case, I’m glad that series is a long way off.

Coming up next: Meanwhile, The Lone Ranger has no end in sight.

Episode 184: The Life of Riley – “The Banned Book” (March 21, 1950)

What I watched: The twenty-fifth episode of The Life of Riley, an early sitcom. The episode starred Jackie Gleason, Rosemary DeCamp, Gloria Winters, Sid Tomack and Lanny Rees. It was directed by Herbert I. Leeds, and written by Irving Breecher, Reuben Shipp, and Alan Lipscott.  “The Banned Book” aired on NBC at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, March 21, 1950, and is available to watch on the Internet Archive.

What happened: We open with Peg using Junior as a stand to shape her wool around. Evidently this is some ancient household inconvenience that everyone would be assumed to be familiar with. Babs is going to a classical concert, as teens do. Riley comes in and says that he’s fed up with trying to fix the refrigerator. Riley tells a bad joke and says that he could be on TV like Milton Berle, a nice meta-gag if a little out of character for a LA family.

At least they’re trying to do something visual to spice up these talky scenes.

Riley opens his newspaper and reads about a book that’s being banned in Boston. He’s against the concept of censorship, until he finds out that Babs is reading the smutty book, Me Lady Jezebel. Peg says that she’s doing a book report for school, which seems a little inappropriate for

Back in her room, Babs tells her sophisticated androgynous-looking friend that she thinks the book is badly written, and is planning to pan it in the school paper. To keep the smutty book out of Junior’s hands, she’s switched the covers with a girls’ adventure novel.

Naturally, Riley goes looking for the book, and finds the swapped one. Gillis comes in and is turned into a slobbering creep by the bodice-ripping cover. They thumb through the book, looking for smutty parts and not finding them. The other book turns out to be a Victorian-style Christian novel in which a girl defends her chastity from a notorious rake. Riley deems the book okay.

Indeed, Riley is so impressed with the book that he recommends it to Junior, ordering him to buy Me Lady Jezebel instead of his usual comic book. He also buys and donates a copy to the Catholic Boys Club and other community organizations. Suspicious, Peg opens a fresh copy, and gasps.

Before she can explain why the book is inappropriate, a whole host of religious leaders and the District Attorney come into the house. They accuse Riley of trying to corrupt the youth. To prove his innocence, he reads from the book, only to be embarrassed. I’ve read worse on Literotica, honestly. Peg finally unveils the source of the misunderstanding, and Riley is apoplectic. The religious figures apologize, saying that they should have read the book. Riley swears to never read another book as long as he lives.

What I thought: This is the penultimate episode of Life of Riley, at least this version of it, and for the most part the last several episodes have just felt like running down the clock. Here, however, we see the series attempting to stretch its wings a bit, taking on an issue-driven comedy plot. In theory, this episode should be something like All in the Family or South Park, using a hot-button issue of the day.as a jumping-off point for absurd character interaction.

I feel like Babs’ androgynous friend has a very-special-episode or two in her.

The problem is that a 1950 sitcom can’t really deal with hot-button issues. Television already had to fend off charges of brainwashing children and cheapening entertainment — it didn’t need controversy, especially not from a cheap taped sitcom. So instead of dealing with an issue like civil rights that would be controversial to its actual audience, we get an antiquated-seeming controversy around smutty books.

The fictional book which features in the episode, Me Lady Jezebel, seems like a take on Lady Chatterly’s Lover — another frequently-banned book which was accused of using a veneer of sophistication to peddle smut. That book first came out in 1929, although the unredacted version and the final wave of obscenity trials didn’t happen until 1959-60. Still, with the emergence of film and television there’s something very old-fashioned about being afraid of books.

Life of Riley doesn’t take an exact stance on book-banning. Perhaps we’re meant to emulate Babs, being unafraid of smutty books but ultimately recognizing how silly they are. At the same time, Riley’s inadvertent attempts to spread the book to young readers are presented as a serious offense. The episode feels the need to bring in a whole panel of religious leaders to absolve him of his sins at the end, a clear sign of the ideological framework creaking.

Perhaps the strangest thing about this episode is that it deals with sexual desire — not just the puppy-love that Babs and Junior go through, or the marital husband-and-wife bond, but flat-out horniness. It’s a little uncomfortable seeing Riley and Gillis flipping through a book looking for saucy bits. To be honest, I had imagined everyone in the show having Barbie-smooth genitals prior to this.

In a way, “The Banned Book” is forward-looking. The initial conflict between Riley and Babs foreshadows a generational divide between the sexual conservatism of the “Greatest Generation” and the more matter-of-fact way in which their children would treat sex. But for now, that struggle was a long way off.

Coming up next: It’s already time for another episode of Suspense.

Episode 181: The Life of Riley – “Junior and the Bully” (March 14, 1950)

What I watched: The twenty-fourth episode of The Life of Riley, an early sitcom. The episode starred Jackie Gleason, Rosemary DeCamp, Gloria Winters, Sid Tomack, Lanny Rees, Bob Jellison and Alan Reed. It was directed by Herbert I. Leeds, and written by Irving Breecher, Reuben Shipp, and Alan Lipscott.  “Junior and the Bully” aired on NBC at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, March 14, 1950, and is available to watch on the Internet Archive.

What happened: We open with the incongruous sight of Riley and Waldo practicing judo, or maybe it’s jiu-jitsu — it mostly looks like dancing. Peg finds this disgusting. Riley wants to train his son in the art, seeing as how he’s a natural athlete. But Junior comes home with a bloody nose. It turns out that another boy has been picking on him, and Riley ran instead of fighting back. It’s this second part that Riley is most upset by.

Not only is Peg kinda racist in this scene, she’s racist in the worst way — against martial arts.

Riley decides to further go down the road of combat sports, buying boxing gloves to start training his kid. Peg thinks he was right to run away. (I’m with her.) Junior says that he had a reason for not fighting. The next thing we know Riley and Waldo are boxing, a sight that looks like those old silent films of funny punching. Junior steps in and kicks Waldo’s ass, but Gillis still thinks that Junior is scared of his bully.

Riley is confronted on the steps, with the grown-ups looking on. The other kids, who all look substantially younger than Junior, taunt him by calling him a momma’s boy. One of them is Buster, a juvenile delinquent and the chief bully. Junior runs away again, and Riley does his best Gendo Ikari by insisting he stay and fight.

At the dinner table, Peg insists that Junior explain his reasons for not fighting. He tells her on the condition that she doesn’t tell Riley. It turns out that Buster is Marilyn’s brother, and she says she’ll never speak to him again if they fight. He doesn’t want to tell his dad because he doesn’t want to be called pussy-whipped.

Riley’s next plan is to hire a washed-up boxer named Punchy Clyde (Reed), previously mentioned in “The Gambler.” His thing is that he goes berserk when anyone mentions the name of Jack Dempsey. Riley wants him to play an easily-defeated bully so that he can show Junior that his tormentor is a coward.

You can probably guess how this goes wrong. The goofy pantomime takes place, but a passing Gillis mentions Dempsey, and Riley gets his ass beat. Waldo is able to calm him down by banging pots, simulating the ringing of the bell. Riley’s new lesson is that peace is the only way. I welcome the new convert to my anarcho-pacifist political movement. But the episode ends with Junior slugging Buster anyway. I guess he’s going to lose his girlfriend, but hey, there are only two episodes left anyways.

What I thought: I never had a bully as a kid. There were people who did things in middle school that could certainly be considered bullying — stepping on shoelaces, mocking my speech impediment, following me down the hallway with joking professions of love only designed to highlight my undesirability — but I never had a Biff Tannen-like nemesis. There was no one I could reach out and slug, no one I fantasized about getting revenge against, just a crowd of hostile normal kids that seemed to change faces every week. I was, for them, a passing distraction, to be discarded when the next thing came around.

It’s the short bullies you have to watch out for.

I went to something of a magnet high school, a conglomeration of gifted classes and rich kids, and all of it stopped. Freed from opposition, I became even more bully-able, washing rarely and wearing goofy hooded sweatshirts with dragons on them. My self-imposed silence let most of the few connections I had drift away. Without any sense of the normal, I showed who I was and it was repellant.

During this time, I became interested in the type of well-regulated violence featured in this episode. I started reading about mixed martial arts, then breaking into the mainstream, and pro wrestling, in its long descent from the highs of the Attitude Era. I found that both fandoms, which I had expected to contain the pimply jocks who bullied me, were instead full of nerdy, unathletic people like me. The characters fascinated me, the different levels of competition, the ramshackle systems into which they were organized.

If I were writing, or reading a short story about these events, my martial-arts fandom would be clearly comprehensible as an attempt to capture the power of violence that once oppressed me. Perhaps my politics, a rather antiquated idea of pacifism, would be part of the same development or an opposing one. Maybe that’s true. But I don’t think of things that way. Being bullied was simply a thing that happened to me, like being caught in a storm or having chicken pox, and not worth reflecting on afterwards.

Nowadays, when I see depictions of bullying in media — like this Life of Riley episode, for example — I roll my eyes and think of them as corny, cartoonish, overstated. I do it doubly so for pronouncements by celebrities and politicians about how bullying, cyber- or otherwise is a scourge upon society and must be stopped. It reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut saying he would be writing an anti-war novel, only for a friend of his to comment that he might as well write an anti-glacier novel. But then again, the anti-glacier people seem to be winning these days, so who knows.

Wait, what was I talking about again?

Coming up next: I surely won’t need to result to personal anecdotes when Lee Marvin comes to the world of SUSPENSE!

Episode 179: The Life of Riley – “Riley’s Quarrel” (March 7, 1950)

What I watched: The twenty-third episode of The Life of Riley, an early sitcom. The episode starred Jackie Gleason, Rosemary DeCamp, Gloria Winters, Sid Tomack, Lanny Rees, Bob Jellison and Maxine Semon. It was directed by Herbert I. Leeds, and written by Irving Breecher, Reuben Shipp, and Alan Lipscott.  “Riley’s Quarrel” aired on NBC at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, March 7, 1950, and is available to watch on the Internet Archive.

What happened: A dazed Honeybee wanders into the Riley house and announces that she’s leaving her husband Gillis. Well, it’s about time. Apparently the trouble started when he refused to allow Honeybee’s mother to come into the house. Peg calls this a small quarrel and decides that she wants to help patch things up. In the meantime, Honeybee invites herself and her mother to stay at the Riley house. They can stay in that cop’s room, I guess.

Is Gillis going to a wedding or something?

Riley doesn’t like this resolution and heads next door, but first runs into Waldo, who’s apparently heard all of the latest gossip. They go over to see Gillis, who seems pleased as punch about developments. He says that he expects, and wants, a few days off from the marriage. Riley is understandably put out by this, and insists that his friend take back his wife. Gillis reluctantly agrees.

Some time later, Riley is telling his kids about how much he and Peg love each other. He gets a package, which turns out to be a monogrammed “mustache cup” that he ordered with his latest paycheck. This predictably leads to a fight between him and Peg over excessive spending. He says that she should do more laundry, which leads Peg into a righteous fury about how much work she does around the house.

Riley recounts his troubles to Waldo and Gillis, the latter of whom is still not getting along with Honeybee. Riley blames him for starting the whole topic. Meanwhile, Peg is berating her greengrocer over the phone, and gets further insulted when he calls her a “penny-pinching old fishwife.” I need to trot that one out sometime.

Junior is out playing in the yard. Riley tells him that married life is a battle between male and female, and tries to get him to spy on Peg to see what kind of mood she’s in. Peg is still going on about the grocer, and Junior overhears and thinks that she’s getting a divorce. Junior and Riley act genuinely broken-up about it.

He tries to bribe her with gifts, but she still thinks it’s from the vegetable guy. Riley storms in and apologizes to her, and the misunderstanding is entirely cleared up. Peg doesn’t even remember their fight this morning. This, of course, is the cause of another fight. And so the dysfunctional household continues. A happy ending?

What I thought: This is another bog-standard sitcom episode. The rule of the genre is that the family has to come back together in the end, but sometimes you really wonder if a healthy divorce wouldn’t be better. If these people are on the verge of leaving over a minor dispute, clearly there isn’t much love left there. (Although it is a little strange that nobody mentions the Gillises’ son during their apparent divorce.)

Like Gleason, Rees portrays the son of a potentially divorcing couple a little too well here.

There’s a bit of a weird structural thing that Life of Riley does from time to time. The first eight minutes or so of the episode involve a minor conflict which is more or less settled before the halfway point of the show, although referenced afterwards. This provides context for the struggle that Riley himself faces latter. Here, the marital problems of the Gillises both foreshadow and lead Riley to exaggerate those of him and Peg.

I would suspect that this is the result of trying to adapt a fifteen-minute radio sitcom story into a 22-minute TV episode. Adding a separate conflict doesn’t require the first one to be stretched out. It’s an interesting structure, but I can see why it didn’t become part of the sitcom toolbox going forward. Ideally you want the audience to be motivated to stay through the first act break, not go away thinking that everything has been resolved. Of course, that depends on the story being interesting enough in the first place, and this week that certainly isn’t the case.

What else was on?: Suspense aired “The Ledge”, an unavailable episode starring Dick Foran. DuMont aired Cavalcade of Bands (all of these variety shows used the same pool of like six words for titles), with the Eddy Duchin Orchestra as guests. ABC affiliates aired local programming in this timeslot.

The New York Times reported that schools and teachers were becoming concerned about kids watching too much television, A study from the Burdick School found that 78% of kids watched at least some TV, and that children with “their own sets” watched an average of 27 hours a week. (In fairness, that’s just two seventh-season episodes of Sons of Anarchy.) NBC executive Joseph H. McConnell expressed happiness with the results of the study. The numbers likely would have been lower anywhere outside the New York area

The Times also writes about a tech demonstration for a new type of television set created by DuMont, intended for industrial use. The set, which is estimated at $19, 985 (a lesser paper would have rounded up), was said to use wires and cables to achieve greater detail than residential sets and include colour. I wonder what that looked like.

Coming up next: Speaking of shows kids watched too much of, it’s yet another Lone Ranger!

Episode 175: The Life of Riley – “South American Job”

What I watched: The twenty-second episode of The Life of Riley, an early sitcom. The episode starred Jackie Gleason, Rosemary DeCamp, Gloria Winters, Sid Tomack, Lanny Rees and Maxine Semon. It was directed by Herbert I. Leeds, and written by Irving Breecher, Reuben Shipp, and Alan Lipscott.  “South American Job” aired on NBC at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, February 28, 1950, and is available to watch on the Internet Archive.

What happened: Riley comes home, and is obviously despondent, leading to the rest of his family to start waiting on him. He regrets not taking a job from Peg’s father when he married into the family. It turns out that Gillis has been made his foreman, which Riley sees as the ultimate insult. Honestly, I don’t blame him.

I kind of hate how much Tomack mugs for the camera.

Gillis and his wife come in dressed to the nines to lord it over his new subordinate. Honeybee also rubs her new fur coat in Peg’s face. Riley decides that he’s going to confront his boss tomorrow and ask for a promotion. Surprisingly, this works, although we don’t actually see the conversation. Riley tells his family that he’s getting a job supervising the paving of a new plant outside San Diego, and that the family will have to move for six months.

Riley then promptly decides to turn around and lord his superior salary ($140 a week!) over Gillis. But Gillis puts two and two together and figures out that the plant is actually outside of Santiago, Chile. Riley promptly freaks out, but decides that he has to go since he’s given his word. His family begs him to stay, saying that they don’t care about the money.

We cut to the office, where his boss Stevenson is berating him for trying to back out. Riley says that he’s afraid of the jungle, with all the snakes and headhunters. (His boss at least corrects him.) Back home, Peg decides that they should let Riley go and seize the opportunity. The kids gradually agree to the idea. So when Riley and his boss turn up, he’s disappointed to see that his family have all had a change of heart.

Later, Riley is getting ready to leave while Babs tries to teach him Spanish. He and Peg both realize that they assumed the other one wanted him to go. He still tries to go, but at the visa office his mixed-up Spanish leads him to say “down with Chile,” Riley says a tearful goodbye at the door, but it turns out that his malapropism cost him his visa and the job. And so Riley is resigned to a life of stagnant wages. What a happy ending!

What I thought: Here we see yet another sitcom staple that was already fully developed by 1950: the episode where a central character threatens to move away but doesn’t. These episodes pose an unconvincing threat to the familial unit at the core of the show. We know, of course, that Uncle Jesse isn’t really going to take the job as a roadie and be out of the show, but I suppose the pleasure — if there is any — is in seeing how the characters react to the threat, and how the writers get out of it.

They could at least have given him a funnier hat.

Of course, in real life many people — perhaps most people — take the job. My mother, my sister and myself have all spent extended time away from home for jobs, often with less promise of advancement than Riley receives here. From my perspective, it seems an outright bad idea for a man whose children are mostly grown to not be willing to spend six months abroad to double his salary.

But this is precisely the fantasy of the sitcom: that the family unit will always remain in tact and primary, that money can be a problem but never the problem. After this episode, of course, the whole South American proposal will be forgotten and Gillis will go back to being Riley’s equal and we’ll never see Riley and Peg in their sixties unable to retire or pay the mortgage because he ruined his chances of advancement. The sitcom promises viewers an escape from the messy and compromised families in their own lives.

The question of where the other place is seems also relevant here. South America was an object of popular interest throughout the 1940s, particularly in World War II when “hemispheric solidarity” was thought of as essential to the war effort. (Probably the most interesting part of this craze was Orson Welles’ uncompleted film It’s All True.) South America represented a liminal place, wealthy enough to be a destination for corporate projects but poor enough to be exotic and scary to someone like Riley.

In the end, the episode doesn’t do much with these associations. Ultimately, the whole problem is resolved with a sitcom mix-up, a rather convenient way for them to resolve the problem without any of the characters actually doing anything. Life of Riley has always been a show run on the cheap, but these last few episodes seem to be especially threadbare, with few guest stars or sets outside the home and lots of long conversations between Riley and his family. In comparison to their homebody protagonist, the show’s creators just seem desperate to get to the end and then get out. And, to be honest, I’m feeling the same way.

Coming up next: We close out February 1950 with another spooky episode of Suspense.

Episode 172.5: The Ruggles – Charlie’s Promotion (February 26, 1950)

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.

This Sound of Music remake leaves something to be desired.

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.

There’s no credits for guest stars, so I don’t know who this guy is, but he did an okay job as Billings.

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.

Episode 172: The Ed Wynn Show

What I watched: An episode of The Ed Wynn Show, an early variety show. This week’s guests were Gloria Swanson, Bill Sterling and Ella Logan. Ralph Levy directed, while the script was written by Hal Kanter, Leo Solomon, and Seaman Jacobs. This episode aired at 9:00 on KTLA on Saturday, February 25, 1950 and was re-aired on the East Coast on CBS the following week.. The episode can be viewed on YouTube

What happened: Ed opens the show by informing the crowd that they don’t have a guest star tonight because the scheduled one cancelled. The announcer Bob Lamond comes out to say that they announced a replacement. Wynn wants to guess who it is like a quiz show contestant. He’s blindfolded and Gloria Swanson comes out. Of course, his guesses are all terrible, until Gloria tells him she just finished filming Sunset Boulevard. Hey, that’s a movie I’ve actually heard of! He wins a one-way trip to Honolulu.

Wynn presents his great idea that will make them both famous on television: they’ll be puppets. The puppeteer comes out, but he comes on to Gloria way too strong, and she runs away. Wynn says that he wrote the play so that he could “make love to” Swanson. He’s using that phrase in the Victorian sense. I hope. The puppeteer hands him his strings: a noose. While they’re on the subject of killing yourself, Wynn introduces a commercial for Camel Cigarettes.

When we come back, Ed is acting out his morning routine, getting some coffee. He writes a letter to William Paley, the real-life head of CBS, on his Dictaphone. A young man wants to see Ed, but he makes him take a number. The man is Bill Sterling, who is auditioning for the role of singer for the puppet show. A female singer, Ella Logan, comes in, and Wynn decides to immediately hire her instead. Sterling protests, so Ed decides to put them both in the show. They immediately launch into a romantic number about candy bars and hearts going boom-boom.

This is followed by another one of Wynn’s impassioned pleas for Camel cigarettes. Somehow this is less charming than when he was shilling for watches. Ed shows off his latest invention: a water pump to put out cigarettes.

Finally, we get to the puppet show.. Swanson comes on stage, apparently suspended by strings with her arms and legs jerking up and down. It’s a very game performance.Wynn comes on stage and is even more ridiculous. The two human-puppets then set about playing their “favourite song”, but Wynn gets mad at the puppeteer He tries to abandon the show, but the puppeteer won’t let him leave until he physically breaks free. I’m not sure if it’s funny or creepy.

What I thought: In Billy Wilder’s 1950 classic Sunset Boulevard, Gloria Swanson plays a has-been actress whose self-delusion ensnares a young man. In that film, Swanson embodies all of the derogatory impressions that patriarchal society imposes on middle-aged women who refuse motherhood. She is presented as a ridiculous, desperate imitation of the kind of attractive young starlet who the male gaze wants to see on the big screen.

In the same year, and after she had finished filming Sunset, Swanson also appeared on the small screen as a guest on The Ed Wynn Show. Here, her age is obliquely acknowledged as experience, but she is presented in a dramatically different way than in Wilder’s film. Swanson is still a star, and still attractive enough to bowl Wynn over. It is as though her Sunset Boulevard character achieved her dreams by making the move to television.

Indeed, while television would certainly retain cinema’s obsession with the young female body, it would also give greater opportunity to older actresses. But I think the difference here is fundamentally more one of genre than of medium.The Ed Wynn Show is, after all, a variety show. On the variety show, and their sickly descendant the talk show, Hollywood celebrities are perpetually pleasant and beautiful, and everyone gets along brilliantly.

The variety show at least nominally presents its guests as being a real representation of themselves. Swanson is presented here under her own name and as an actress, not as a character. And this is what Hollywood would ideally have its audience think: that no matter how villainous or pathetic on-screen characters may be, in real life all of the actors are charming and friendly and deserving of your financial support. (These days, the effect is mostly accomplished through social media.)

But it’s also fairly clear, even to the comparatively naive audience of 1950, that this is just another role that Hollywood stars play. The “Gloria Swanson” that appears on Ed Wynn is ultimately just another character. In its typical metatextual way, the show even acknowledges and mocks this in its feature sketch, where both Swanson and Wynn are reduced to puppets man-handled across the stage by a cruel and arbitrary puppeteer.

At its most obvious level, the puppet sketch is a parody of TV puppet shows like Howdy Doody, a frequent target of Wynn’s, or perhaps the plays on the rival Toast of the Town. (Did they get Kukla, Fran and Ollie out in LA?) But I think it’s also a kind of confession, bubbling out of the show’s formal contradictions. Wynn, who pretends to be smart and cynical about the new medium, is here revealed to be just another puppet.

After the sketch Wynn, always happy to show his work, talks about the “philosophic premise” of the sketch. He says that “you cannot go through life without someone pulling strings for you.” The play on words here hits on an uncomfortable truth in postwar Hollywood: the same tools that gave you advantage and unearned privilege were those used to control you.

Coming up next: Charlie is made redundant on The Ruggles.