Episode 170: The Life of Riley – “Home Sweet Home” (February 21, 1950)

What I watched: The twenty-first 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.  “Home Sweet Home” aired on NBC at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, February 21, 1950, is available to watch on the Internet Archive.

What happened: Riley puts up a plaque with the episode title on the wall, which Peg thinks is a corny decoration. Riley hammers a hole in the plaster while trying to put it up, so now they have to hang it up to cover the hole. This prompts Peg to say that she wishes they could move, which her husband also disagrees with. There’s a decent gag where Riley hides the shards of plaster in a vase.

Riley actually says “”What fun can you get from putting a silly thing like this in your mouth and blowing ?” I’m starting to think this stuff is intentional.

There are police sirens, and it turns out that Junior is in the back of the cop car. (I guess they just turned the sirens on for fun.) The cop says that he was shooting at girls in the park with a peashooter, which must have been the 1950 equivalent of a school shooting. He says that his father taught him to do it, and Riley demonstrates this by blowing into the peashooter and breaking the vase. Yep, I’m going to have to dip back into Freud.

Babs also comes home, with good news: her photo is in the school paper. But it’s because she’s in the chorus line of the musical, and Riley freaks out about the skimpy outfits. Phew, for a second I thought we would leave one family sitcom trope unused. When Riley and Gillis come home after bowling the next day, Babs is practicing in her outfit, and Riley practically blinds his friend trying to stop him from getting horny for his daughter.

Junior is playing with a water pistol, yelling stuff like he’s a six-year-old, which causes his father further consternation. Gillis blames all of these “problems” on Riley and his failure to make his house a home like a picture in a magazine. He resolves to force his kids to enjoy their home life. This involves sitting everyone down in front of the fireplace and forcing them to smile. Predictably, this doesn’t go well, and the fire ends up filling the house with smoke.

After escaping this deadly situation, Peg returns and decides that Riley was right, and they should spend the night at home. She explains that Riley didn’t have much of a home life growing up, so he wants to cherish it now. He comes in and orders them all not to leave tonight, which is meant to be humorous I suppose. But he promptly falls asleep in the recliner, and everyone else goes out to the movies anyway. We end on this heartwarming moment of family togetherness.

What I thought: This episode is mostly a mess, beginning by making good two-shoes Babs and Junior into juvenile delinquents for five minutes before promptly forgetting about it and going into an ill-defined conflict about staying home for the evening. It seems like a week where the writers really didn’t have an idea and decided to go with a theme they couldn’t really articulate. However, there was one moment that kind of piqued my interest, for reasons probably different from those intended by the show.

Did you know these people had a fireplace?

The major set-piece in this episode consists of Riley trying to rearrange his family to meet the image of a domestic idyll he finds in a magazine. Such images did fill American periodicals at the time, most notably Norman Rockwell’s covers for the Saturday Evening Post. The scene acts to expose the absurdity of these blissful images: everyone is supposed to be smiling, although they aren’t really doing anything worth smiling about, nor do they seem to have any particular purpose other than being happy. This works all right, as far as it goes.

The funny thing is that Life of Riley aired in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the precise era where this conformist ideal was supposed to be dominant in culture, particularly on television. Indeed, the family in the series meets most of the requirements of the idealized sitcom family that would later be parodied: the beatific wife, the well-behaved teenagers who say “golly” and “jeepers”, and the suburban home. If the series was more well-known, it’d probably be mentioned alongside The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriett and Leave it to Beaver as portrayals of squeaky-clean domesticity.

And yet here, very early in the conformist 1950s, we can already see these conventions being mocked and subverted. The Rileys are funny and relatable, it is suggested, because they fail to live up to these idealized images, even if three-quarters of them come pretty close. This scene suggests that the audience of these portrayals knew exactly what they were seeing — only stupid Riley thinks that this bliss is something a family should actually expect from themselves.

The thing is that seemingly every sitcom family is marketed this way — as the family that fails to live up to the norm, that is funny because they are dysfunctional. I remember seeing early promos for Malcolm in the Middle that marketed its characters as “The Simpsons‘ crazy next-door neighbours” — even though the Simpsons themselves were meant to be a dysfunctional parody of sitcom families. It’s an endless chain of alleged subversion, with each link assuring itself and its audience that it is not like the last one.

Real families behave in the same way. Just about every family I know talks and jokes about themselves as unconventional and nonconforming to typical images of the family. Everyone believes that their family is uniquely fun-loving, uniquely crazy — or, for those with a dimmer view of their relations, uniquely stifling or uniquely abusive. If there is a family that believes themselves to be average and unexceptional, then they are very strange indeed.

And yet despite this, there is such a thing as social expectation and social pressure, and it’s something which causes people a good deal of stress and agony, as well as compelling a lot of behaviour. This moment in an otherwise forgettable sitcom episode is perhaps a reminder of how frequent, and how limited, irony and humour is as a response to such pressures. Even if we don’t believe in the ideal family, we nonetheless feel as if they are somewhere out there, judging us.

Coming up next: Another adventure of the Lone Ranger, who never has to worry about family. Except for his shitty nephew.

-“What fun can you get from putting a silly thing like this in your mouth and blowing…”)

Episode 169.5: The Ruggles – “Charlie’s Lucky Day” (February 19, 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 Lucky Day” was written by Fred Howard and Irving Phillips and directed by George M. Cahan. This episode aired on February 19, 1950 on ABC.

What happened: We get a glimpse of the opening credits through the mail-slot of an idyllic suburban home. This leads to a silent pan over the Ruggles family, with the two sons and two daughtesr getting up to their various activities in identical striped shirts. Family patriarch Charlie is bored, so he starts singing some scales and playing the xylophone, to the annoyance of his children. His wife doesn’t want anything to do with him either, as she’s busy fixing up some clothes.

I think I bought this shirt at Old Navy.

Charlie’s boredom is finally relieved by a man at the door, Mr. Melcher, who proclaims that he’s won an enormous prize. He comes complete with a photographer who wants to take pictures of the lucky family. Melcher talks a mile a minute, refusing to explain himself. He’s soon bothered by another guy, who promises him a guaranteed winning at the racetrack. Next up is Mr. Snodgrass, who Charlie takes to be a plainclothes police officer. Snodgrass is quickly suspicious of the tinker-toy that the twins are building.

It’s soon revealed that, instead of a police officer, Snodgrass is an inventor trying to get Ruggles to invest $10, 000 in his latest idea, a tool to rid the world of ants by leveling their hills. Charlie lets him out the door. Following this, there’s some sort of an ad break, followed by a voice-over narration summarizing the plot of the first half. The rest of the family has heard that a TV crew is stopping by to report on the prize, and that the house has to be wired for sound. Mom gets a call from her own mother, and the rumoured prize is now up to $15, 000.

The family comes to suspect that they’re the subject of a radio prank show. Someone else is at the door: it’s Mr. Ash, who claims to be from the IRS, and has heard a rumour about $20, 000. There’s a lot of IRS jokes, as Ash urges Charlie to be careful with his newly-won money. The TV crew arrives, complete with flood lights and a novelty cheque. The whole family gets together to pose for a photo.

Speaking directly to the camera, the host welcomes the Ruggles to the Tender, Delicious Raspberry Show. Charlie just has time to notice that he’s being described as “T. D. Ruggles” before the show launches into commercials. He’s being given the award ($1000 and a year’s supply of raspberries) for having the same initials as the product. However, when Charlie points out they’ve got his name wrong, the show immediately breaks down, with the company owner demanding to fire everyone. It turns out the show copied the wrong line from the phone book. The crew leaves in a flurry. Everyone quickly gets back to their quiet evening pursuits, and Charlie starts singing again.

What I thought: It’s hard to nail down from this episode exactly what The Ruggles is, or wants to be. With the other early sitcoms we’ve looked at, there’s a strong lead character with an obvious comedic hook. Riley is a hothead, Molly Goldberg is a busybody, and both cause comedy despite their attempts to help their family. Charlie Ruggles is obviously meant to be the central figure in the show, with his name the only one before the credits, but his comedic hook is… being a little annoying? Liking music? I’m not sure.

Giant novelty cheque technology was extremely primitive back then.

Charlie Ruggles had traveled a long road to make it to TV. He was born in 1886, and had been part of the film industry since the silent-movie days. He had first became a headline name on radio with The Charlie Ruggles Show before moving into early television. This means he was 64 years old during the first season of The Ruggles, about 15 years older than his on-screen wife Erin O’Brien Moore. In fairness, Ruggles doesn’t look a day over 48.

Like The Life of Riley, but distinctly unlike most series of the day, The Ruggles was shot on a stage in Los Angeles. This would have meant it aired off Kinescopes in most of the country, but it was still filmed in the live-TV style, without a live audience. Because of the limitations of a single set, most episodes took place entirely within the family home, including “Charlie’s Lucky Day.” It kind of seems like a “worst of both worlds” situation to me, but hey, nobody really knew what the TV sitcom would be at this point.

The plot of this episode is indicative of how self-reflexive early TV could be. Charlie and his family unexpectedly become the subject of a TV program, specifically a crassly commercial give-away. (We don’t have much of this type of program in our list so far, possibly because nobody bothered archiving them, but I really associate these kind of big give-aways with radio and later 50s TV.) Of course, television is revealed to be intrusive, gaudy, and hopelessly in thrall to its commercial sponsors. Ruggles was one of the first comedians to embrace television, but he nevertheless couldn’t help doing jokes about how it was basically worthless.

There’s a looser, more abstract element to this show than The Life of Riley or The Goldbergs. The opening scene, with the whole family working in quiet silence, is obviously artificial, and the wacky events which unfold are comedic to the point of absurdism. There’s obviously less focus in The Ruggles on creating a believable world and more on using the stock characters and setting of the family sitcom as a setting for cartoonish gags. Comedies would get much more absurd over the following decades, but even in 1950 there’s an emerging split between realism and pure comedy.

The Ruggles would continue to run for three seasons. Not many episodes survive, but there are a few available on YouTube and the Internet Archive. We’ll see if some of the wild generations I provided above continue to hold true in other episodes. And maybe at some point, I will be able to find out what exactly The Ruggles is.

Episode 166: The Life of Riley – “Valentine’s Day” (February 14, 1950)

What I watched: The twentieth 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.  “Valentine’s Day” aired on NBC at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, February 14, 1950, is available to watch on the Internet Archive.

What I thought: Riley and Gillis come home, and imply they’ve been waiting for an hour for Babs to open the door. (I wouldn’t give Riley a key either.) Gillis finds a valentine addressed to Babs, which Riley finds confusing as he thinks Valentine’s Day is on March 15th. Junior is also heading out to see his girlfriend, and Gillis makes a rather surprising joke about him knocking his girlfriend up.

The valentine refers to Riley as Peg’s “everloving slave”, which I’m not even touching.

The shoe finally drops for Riley, and he realizes that he forgot to get a valentine for Peg. Gillis finds the whole idea strange. Peg says that she wasn’t expecting Riley home, and tries to rush him out the door to play poker. She also reveals that she has received a valentine, assuming it was from her husband.

Riley swears to not leave Peg’s side so as to not give the “antelope” a chance to swoop in. He starts pestering Peg, trying to figure out her secret admirer’s identity. Riley suspects her old flame Sidney, who he did try to hook up with her in a previous episode. He makes an expensive long-distance call to Brooklyn to check that Sidney hasn’t slipped back to the West Coast.

Meanwhile, Peg is letting someone on the phone know that her husband isn’t home (this was before the meme.) Junior says that he’s taking Babs to the basketball game. I guess neither of them have dates, or maybe they’re just keeping it in the family. An old-looking guy comes to the house looking for Peg, but Riley chases him away.

The next morning, Riley is still so paranoid that he refuses to go to work. Gillis shows up and takes his lunch. Peg whispers on the phone, trying to get her husband out of the house. But it’s not a lothario, just a carpenter coming to check out the spare room. Babs tries to get her dad to go to a movie with her called The Green Monster, which I assume is one of the many now-disavowed Hulk movies. Peg reverse-psychologizes him out the door.

That night, the carpenter is there to start constructing the den, which is meant to be a surprise to Riley. He eavesdrop on the conversation, has a typical misunderstanding, and rushes in to fight the carpenter. He headbutts a plank of wood, but Peg is happy because he loves her enough to be jealous. It turns out that Junior was the one who sent the Valentine, on Riley’s instructions from a year ago. And so Riley discovers that his enemy is the most fearsome foe of all: the self.

What I thought: After the rash of birthday episodes and the flashback episodes, we see Life of Riley turn to another familiar device for churning out twenty-odd sitcom episodes a year: the holiday episode. And this episode aired on the actual holiday, as opposed to contemporary shows where Christmas episodes air in early November. So, still no points for originality, but at least points for timeliness.

I’d say the show should do more physical comedy bits like this, but the directors don’t really know how to shoot them.

Valentine’s Day has a history going back to the fifth century, and the modern tradition of sending valentines to a loved one was popularized in the 1800s. But this episode seems to suggest that the current practice where February 14 is an overdetermined focal point for romantic love is much more recent then that. Despite the fact that the whole episode is about Valentine’s Day, nobody in the Riley family seems to really care that much.

In a contemporary sitcom (or indeed, in a contemporary reality), a husband forgetting the day would be a major source of conflict, but here it’s treated as a minor occurrence. None of the characters seem to have romantic plans for the evening — Riley and Peg don’t have a dinner or any other kind of celebration planned, and Babs and Junior are abandoning their respective paramours to go see some hoops. Gillis seems to find the whole idea of adults participating in the festivities silly, and there’s no suggestion that he’ll be in trouble for this.

Instead, Valentine’s is presented as chiefly the exchanging of gifts, done primarily by young people — Riley getting his wife a card at all is seen as charmingly romantic but slightly juvenile. I can’t really say if this more low-key portrayal was typical of the era, but it is interesting. Maybe this is before the hospitality and jewellery industries really got their hooks into the culture, or maybe this is another sign of the Rileys’ working-class status.

The actual story of the episode is pretty by-the-numbers, with Riley once again imagining a suitor for his wife that doesn’t exist. The only thing that makes it a little interesting is that the identity of the “secret admirer” and the carpenter misunderstanding is kept secret from the audience for as long as it’s left unknown to Riley, a marked break from past episodes which practically rubbed our noses in the dramatic irony.

Peg, of course, always responds to these jealous fits with affection, in this case even remodelling an extra room in the house for his pleasure. (What happened to that boarder they took in?) Perhaps this is why Riley doesn’t care about Valentine’s Day. Who needs it, when your wife is defined purely by her love for you?

Coming up next: Suspense marks the holiday with the most romantic celebration of all: suicide.

Episode 164: Life of Riley – “Acting Lessons” (February 7, 1950)

What I watched: The nineteenth episode of The Life of Riley, an early sitcom. The episode starred Jackie Gleason, Rosemary DeCamp, Gloria Winters, Sid Tomack, Jimmy Lydon and Fay Baker. It was directed by Herbert I. Leeds, and written by Irving Breecher, Reuben Shipp, and Alan Lipscott.  “The Gambler” aired on NBC at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, February 7, 1950, and is available to watch on the Internet Archive.

What happened: Babs has signed up for acting lessons at the theatre. You know, I’ve been thinking a lot of people on this show could use them. She’s paying for the lessons with her own money, but she’s still worried about her dad getting mad about it. Simon is coming over to help write the play, so apparently she’s back together with him.

Riley comes home early, and re-establishes how much he hates Simon. We get our second awkward cut in the first four minutes, so you know this was a real hack job. Gillis wants Riley to come over and player poker with the boys. Peg practically rushes him out the door, so he gets suspicious.

Simon holding the manuscript of collected Eternal Couch Potato.

After ANOTHER weird cut, Simon finally arrives with his typewriter and a manuscript-sized play. His play is a Wagnerian epic involving ancient gods. This puts Peg to sleep. They then start practicing a scene where Simon, as Thor, asks Babs as Venus to run away with him, and a returning Riley overhears. This misunderstanding is cleared up surprisingly quickly, but Riley again gets mad at the news that his daughter is acting and paid money for the privilege. However, he’s eventually won over by Simon’s affection for his daughter.

Gillis thinks the whole acting school thing is a scam, and Riley swears to get the money back. Riley goes to their instructor, Professor Van Planten (Baker). Because she’s an actor, she acts weird, praising Riley for his stance and entrance. He doesn’t immediately get that she’s the professor, because she’s not a man. Aw, how lovable! She wants Riley to be an actor, and does a lot of touching, proclaiming how big a star he will be.

But it’s not too long before she’s asking for money to help finance his first play. He ends up giving over the money in the form of his paycheque (could she cash this?), and being cast in the role of Thor in what appears to be Simon’s play. (Oh boy, here we go.) Riley comes home and is talking in the same airy actor-speak as the professor. This is what finally convinces Simon that she’s a scammer, and he has apparently gotten the money back off-screen. He pretends that Riley has returned the money, and everything is returned to normal — except that Riley has to listen to Simon’s play.

What I thought: The episodes of Life of Riley available online are, for the most part, edit jobs: the series was originally a full 30 minutes, perhaps including a commercial plug, and it was re-edited so that it could be syndicated to some unfortunate modern audience with commercial breaks and all. For the most part, I appreciate not having to watch an extra ten minutes of this show, but there are time when the cuts just multiply the confusion created by the narrative.

This is a little uncomfortable. Maybe it’s a good thing 50s shows were so chaste.

“Acting Lessons”, in particular, seems almost to have been cut down from a full hour or two. We shift rapidly between premises and conflicts, between Babs’s desire to hide her acting lessons from her father to Riley’s hatred of Simon to Riley’s swindling by the teacher. In theory this could be a fun, Simpsons-like chain of events, but in practice it just seems like the writers couldn’t make any one of these conflicts interesting enough to sustain an episode. Despite this, there’s room for an inordinately long and unfunny scene of the acting teacher trying to physically seduce Riley. Did Jackie Gleason put that in?

One of the oddest parts of “Acting Lessons” is that acting is depicted as a fundamentally silly, high-faluting profession. Those engaged in it are untrustworthy and pretentious, and find themselves in conflict with the Riley family’s working-class values, as in “The French Teacher.” And yet, of course, Gleason and everyone else on the show is an actor, and the audience is tuning in to watch acting. The need for Hollywood to portray itself as a voice of the people leads it to constantly cast its heroes against a fictitious class of stuck-up, snobbish actors and critics, the very class which makes up the actual Hollywood.

Okay, I promised myself I would stay away from the Freudian stuff, but something has to be said about the whole business with the play in that episode. Simon’s epic is about a romance between the mismatched pair of Thor and Venus, with the latter played by Babs. The acting teacher seduces and cons Riley by offering him the role of Thor — in other words, offering him the ability to replace Simon as his daughter’s paramour. This proves too compelling to resist.

This detail is Oedipal in a very literal sense — mapping psychosexual anxieties onto plays about gods and ancient heroes was, after all, what the ancient Greek dramatists did. Even if one doesn’t want to agree with some of Freud’s bolder claims, it seems obvious that the fear of a father being replaced in a relationship with his daughter is one that has been a common trope throughout fiction, and one whose incestuous undertones are always protested too much. This is exacerbated in the family sitcom, in which a male actor has tot pretend he has an erotic relationship with one adult female co-star and a completely familial relationship with a different adult female co-star. It takes a lot of acting lessons to pull that off.

Coming up next: The Lone Ranger, who has never taken acting lessons in his life.

Episode 161: The Life of Riley – “The Gambler” (January 31, 1950)

What I watched: The eighteenth episode of The Life of Riley, an early sitcom. The episode starred Jackie Gleason, Rosemary DeCamp, Sid Tomack, John Brown and Lanny Rees. It was directed by Herbert I. Leeds, and written by Irving Breecher, Reuben Shipp, and Alan Lipscott.  “The Gambler” aired on NBC at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, January 31, 1950, and is available to watch on the Internet Archive.

What happened: Riley comes home looking for Junior. Peg doesn’t know where he is, but frequent home invader Gillis does. He says that Junior is at the candy store, playing the slot machines. Candy stores were a lot different in 1950, I suppose. Riley is very upset by this development, fearing that his kid will soon become an addict.

Riley and Gillis confront Junior at the slots. He’s trying to get money so that he can take Marilyn to the dance tonight. Gillis wants to whip him, which is treated as humourous. Riley tries to teach his son a lesson by gambling the money that he’s set aside to buy Junior a new bike. Of course, he hits the jackpot, and coins come spewing out.

This is me when the Raptors are down.

Back at the house, the adults are still trying to prove to Junior that gambling doesn’t pay. They pick a lame horse for him to bet on. Riley listens to the race over phone, which was apparently a thing. They taunt Junior about the money they’re losing him, but the bad horse ends up winning after being stung by bees, with Riley and Gillis’s.eyes bugging out (10:00).

Junior now has $200, which I assume is enough money to retire on in this era. Riley decides that this is because he’s a “born winner” and has “the golden touch.” After an abrupt cut, his Italian friend Tony comes over. Riley takes the $40 that Tony has set aside to pay rent, as well as some money from an old lady who saved it for a train ticket to visit her daughter. He asks Junior to take the money down to the bus station and bet it on an underdog boxer.

When she hears about this, Peg is furious, but Riley is convinced he can’t lose. His boxer gets off to a great start, but predictably gets knocked out. The old lady slaps him, with a corny coconuts-knocking sound effect. But it turns out that Marilyn interrupted Junior on the way and stopped him from placing the bet. So in the end, everything returns to the status quo. Hurray?

What I thought: When you watch enough sitcoms — which is more than, say, two or three — the jokes start to become predictable. This episode of Life of Riley, for instance, is structured around the comedic “rule of threes” — the comedian or writer forms a pattern with two things, and then breaks them with the third. It’s the third element which is generally the punchline — for instance, a lot of Star Trek goes like “He’s a great general, in line with Alexander, Napoleon, and Zynon the Conqueror.”.

Hence, it becomes immediately obvious that Riley’s first two gambles will be successful, and his third one will fail. Moreover, all of Riley’s efforts will go against his stated intention — that when he wants to fail he will succeed, and vice versa. That the episode lays it on pretty thick establishing the inevitable outcome as improbable only makes it more predictable and tedious.

This is not to say that the overall plot structure and the jokes being predictable necessarily ruins a show. For many viewers, the appeal lies less in novelty of the writing and more in the “chicken fat” elements of comedy, the offhand wordplay or Jackie Gleason’s bug-eyed reactions. For others, the predictability of a sitcom is precisely the point: it is a familiar habit, where you always know what you’re going to get.

There’s also the question of how familiar this really was at the time The Life of Riley aired. The sitcom genre had only been established twenty years prior with (ugh) Amos ‘n’ Andy, and was still almost entirely new to television screens. I doubt that even a 1950 audience would find these jokes novel, but the structure may have not yet seemed rote to them, in the same way large numbers of people today are still engaged by the twenty-year-old superhero movie genre.

We also see the dying days of people gathering around the radio to listen to sports. I guess the writers thought it would be too implausible for a working-class LA family to have a TV.

One other thing I found interesting in this episode was how it portrays the culture of sports gambling. Gambling on most sports was illegal, but the kind of illegal that was generally seen as harmless enough to show sitcom characters doing. Nevertheless, “The Gambler” makes a clear point of ultimately imparting the lesson to the audience that Riley tries to impart to his some: that gambling is reckless and leads to ruin.

It’s interesting to look back on such a storyline in a period where gambling is being decriminalized and destigmatized, but at the same time is being medicalized as an addiction. What would a contemporary version of “The Gambler” look like? Well, to find out I would actually have to watch contemporary sitcoms, so I guess I’ll just have to wait until this project reaches 2019 to find out.

Coming up next: We enter Feburary 1950, which looks a lot like January but with a new game show.

Episode 159: The Life of Riley – “Insurance” (January 24, 1950)

What I watched: The seventeenth episode of The Life of Riley, an early sitcom. The episode starred Jackie Gleason, Rosemary DeCamp, Gloria Winters, Lanny Rees,, John Brown and Sid Tomack. It was directed by Herbert I. Leeds, and written by Irving Breecher, Reuben Shipp, and Alan Lipscott.  “Insurance” aired on NBC at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, January 24, 1950, and is available to watch on the Internet Archive.

What happened: We open with Riley calling Peg from a butchershop, apparently because he’s avoiding an insurance salesman. We find out why soon, as the fast-talking salesman corners Riley and forces him back into the television booth. Peg wants him to get beef heart and chicken liver, which sounds disgusting to me, but is necessary to set up the plot. Riley is forced to let a third, cigar-smokingman into the telephone booth while he tries to avoid the salesman’s aggressive pitch.

Later, Riley is at the doctor’s, getting his vitals checked. Back at home, Peg orders Junior to go to the butcher to pick up their order. The kids both get separate phone calls and record them on a piece of paper. Riley comes in and reads the note, and assumes that the butchers’ message “heart’s all gone, liver’s no good” is about his body. And hence the sitcom misunderstanding is set up. Riley phones Peg, but decides not to burden her with the bad news.

At least it’s a spacious phone booth.

He immediately assumes a sickly image, wrapping himself in a shawl and talking to Junior about how he’ll have to be the man of the household. Eventually, he tells Gillis that he’s sick, and his friend sympathizes as much as he can while trying to claim Riley’s snazzy new jacket.

One of Peg’s old boyfriends, Sydney, stops by, presumably to pick the bones. When Gillis suggests that Peg will probably marry them after Riley dies, he decides that the most responsible thing to do would be to help them get together. But it turns out that Sydney is just trying to sell her a book about how to resist aging, and that he’s kind of a jerk. Peg tries to kick him out, while Riley tries to hook him up with his wife. This show has certainly taken a turn.

After the boyfriend takes off, Riley says he feels a pain in his heart, but it turns out he’s been pricked by a safety pin. The whole family gathers around as Riley tries to give a melodramatic death speech. The misunderstanding is suddenly cleared up. Upon learning that he has to continue carrying out this charade of family life, Riley is angry and delivers his signature catchphrase “What a revoltin’ development this is.”

What I thought: “Insurance” starts out quite promisingly, with the confrontation between Riley and the pushy insurance salesman in the phone booth. This kind of more physical, manic comedy brings out the best in both Gleason and the show’s direction (the image of the butcher calmly wading in and out of this madness is genuinely funny.) Whereas most Life of Riley episodes seem resigned to stretching out a meagre array of jokes, here the gags seem to be almost overflowing, with too much to pay attention to at once. It makes me wonder about a different, better version of the show that embraced more manic, over-the-top humour.

Sadly, the insurance salesman doesn’t reappear, and it appears his purpose in the script is merely to introduce the concept of mortality. Indeed, most of the episode is rather grim, as Riley falsely believes that he’s going to die shortly and spends the next fifteen minutes in stunned self-mourning. It’s a rather drastic turn for the series, and one which doesn’t quite fit its tone. I had expected the insurance man to return, with Riley buying a foolishly expensive life insurance policy, but this particular plot twist never manifests.

Maybe Peg will at least let them move the beds together.

The referent I couldn’t stop thinking about while watching this episode is The Simpsons episode where Homer eats blowfish sushi and is convinced that he’s going to die shortly. That’s a better episode of television, mostly because The Simpsons is a much better show than The Life of Riley, but also because it maintains the audience’s suspense as well as Homer’s. (Indeed, Homer’s eventual survival is an unexplained moment, in what feels like a statement on the miracle of being alive.)

In “Insurance”, the audience knows from the beginning that Riley is fine, which should theoretically allow them to find the situation funny. But for me this episode was an example of the tremendous psychological cruelty that sitcoms inflict on their characters. Part of it is Jackie Gleason’s acting: Gleason does almost too good a job making Riley a sympathetic figure, stunned and soft-spoken. We feel the anguish that anyone would feel when having to confront death. As Riley’s final regretful line suggests, even if he is physically fine, the experiences of this episode have damaged him.

As in The Simpsons, of course, we don’t really need to see how the misunderstanding forms to know that Riley isn’t going to die. The rest of us may have to worry about sudden death around every corner, but sitcom characters are guaranteed eternal life barring cancellation or contract disputes. (Of course, the actors are no more immortal than the rest of us, as The Simpsons has found out.) Hence, Riley’s final words are a kind of curse: without the release of death, he is doomed for more psychological torture every week.

Coming up next: The other show I write about on this blog.

Episode 156: The Life of Riley – “Riley’s Firstborn” (January 17, 1950)

What I watched: The sixteenth episode of The Life of Riley, an early sitcom. The episode starred Jackie Gleason, Rosemary DeCamp, Sid Tomack, Maxine Semon, and Bill George. It was directed by Herbert I. Leeds, and written by Irving Breecher, Reuben Shipp, and Alan Lipscott.  “Riley’s Firstborn” aired on NBC at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, January 17, 1950, and is available to watch on the Internet Archive.

What happened: It’s the weekly canasta night at Riley’s house. One of the guests is Hal, a young man who works at the same plant as Riley and Gillis. Gillis makes some jokes about how he hates his wife..Hal has apparently been distracted lately because he’s worried about his upcoming baby and how to support it on a factory worker’s salary. Riley tells him that he’s got to be a pillar of strength for his family.

As Riley heads out, everyone else decides to reminisce about how Riley really reacted to having a baby for the first time. We get our first recorded version of the TV ripple flashback. We’re back in Brooklyn, and everyone is wearing wigs. Peg meets with her doctor to discuss the pregnancy, but she hasn’t told Riley yet.

Let’s bring this style back.

Riley and Peg are living in a dingy basement, where they serve as the janitors. It’s like me, except he has prospects for the future. Riley and Gillis come in wearing super-plaid period clothes. After a long time trying to give him the news in a roundabout fashion, Riley finally figures things out. He seems happy enough.

However, problems arise: when Riley asks for a raise, he’s fired, and re-hired at a lesser rate. That’s why you need a union, kids. After a quick fade to black, Peg is ready to have the baby. Riley hails a cab to the hospital, but forgets to bring his wife the first time. It’s Riley who’s looking sick by the time they get there.

After another convenient fade, baby Barbara is out. We don’t actually see her though, because filming with babies is a pain in the ass. Back in the present, Riley is back, and they’re almost ready to play canasta. They get a call saying that Hal’s wife has already given birth, to twins. Man, pregnancies were a lot faster back in the day.

What I thought: This episode of Life of Riley introduces us to another sitcom staple — the flashback episode. If you can’t think of something new to do with the characters, you can always stick them in a bunch of wigs and hilariously dated fashions and play out an established part of the backstory. It’s a foolproof plan.

The only problem is that this episode of Life of Riley doesn’t really have much of a story to tell. The available film is even shorter than normal, clocking in at a slender 18 minutes. The putative point of Peg’s narrative is that her husband freaked out when the baby was on the way, but we don’t really see much in the way of irrational behaviour. He’s worried, but he has good reason to be worried, with a child on the way that he can’t afford and little job prospects. Okay, his need to be comforted during the delivery is a little outlandish, but it’s not exactly funny.

“We gave you a tranquilizer during labour, like in that episode of Mad Men. Pretty cool, huh?”

I should probably pay some attention in these write-ups to Rosemary DeCamp, playing the fairly thankless role of Peg. Most of the focus of writing about the show (and of the show itself) was on Jackie Gleason, whose exaggerated expressions would make him perfect for TV. But DeCamp would also go on to have a long career in television, both in recurring and guest roles.

For the most part, she glides through Life of Riley as the archetypical housewife, but she actually puts a lot of effort into this episode’s performance. In a sense, DeCamp is almost giving a dramatic performance, conveying a real anguish over her changing life and how much she cares for her family. It’s not Emmy-reel stuff, but there’s a genuine emotion to much of her acting here which is absent throughout the series.

If the overall plot of the episode isn’t that interesting, than neither is the frame narrative which sets up this extended flashback. I sometimes talk about sitcoms as instruction manuals for the heteronormative family, but this episode takes this role literally, with . The nominal crisis is Hank’s inability to focus at work: to address this, making him unproductive in his role as breadwinner. So he must learn from Riley’s example and not allow himself to be overwhelmed with emotion.

At the heart of this narrative is an association of masculinity with stoicism. Paternal love is taken to be a positive emotion, but one that is not to be indulged too much. Riley is the butt of the joke precisely because he is unable to control his love for his family and his anxiety about his future. Hank has just started his instruction, but he’s well on his way to being the kind of bitter, indifferent father represented by Gillis.

Coming up next: Suspense marks the dead of winter with an episode called “Summer Storm.”

Episode 152: The Life of Riley – “Junior Drops Out (January 10, 1950)

What I watched: The fifteenth episode of The Life of Riley, an early sitcom. The episode starred Jackie Gleason, Rosemary DeCamp, Gloria Winters, Lanny Rees,, and Bob Jellison. It was directed by Herbert I. Leeds, and written by Irving Breecher, Reuben Shipp, and Alan Lipscott.  “Junior Drops Out” aired on NBC at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, January 10, 1950, and is available to watch on the Internet Archive.

What happened: Junior is pacing back and forth, waiting for his father to get home. Apparently Riley’s been having a battle with the landlord over a malfunctioning “icebox.” Waldo arrives with some information for Riley in a manila envelope, and “does a little bit of yogi” on the nightstand. It’s actually a pretty decent visual gag.

Proof that sitcoms have been doing yoga jokes for seventy years.

Riley comes home, and it turns out he’s failed to confront the landlord over getting the new fridge. He’s brought home a giant block of ice, but Peg insists on an electric fridge. Instead of paying rent, he’s put his money into Junior’s college fund. But Junior says he wants to quit school, much to the consternation of his parents.

He says that he’s sick of school and wants to start working already. Hearing about the college policy Riley bought doesn’t change his mind. They yell at each other, and Junior storms off. Riley decides to hit him with some reverse psychology, signing his “working papers” to make him see how he likes it. Peg protests that she already convinced Junior to go back to school, but Riley is sure that his way is best.

The next day Junior is exuberant after his first day of work at a warehouse. Riley calls Peg “Mommy” when he gets home, adding to my Freudian dissertation. Junior even pays for his mom’s hat with his wages. This infuriates Riley, who tries to lay all the tasks of “the head of the household” at his feet. Yep, definitely Oedipal.

Babs comes out with the real reason for Junior’s sudden industriousness: he’s trying to impress Marilyn, who has a rich suitor he’s trying to compete with. Riley, resuming his role of “head of the house”, tells Junior that he can’t go out until he agrees to go back to school. Marilyn comes over and says that she can convince Junior to go back to school. She does it with one sentence, and they go off to the dance.

What I thought: I’ve mentioned this before (and will probably mention this again), but the idea of teenhood as a life stage is a fairly recent invention that wasn’t really codified until the postwar era — in other words, the exact period in which The Life of Riley graced early television screens. This episode directly places two different conceptions of the teen — as a young adult or an old child — in opposition to each other. As such, “Junior Drops Out” is virtually a chance to watch the concept of a teenager develop in real time.

Riley and Junior’s similar working duds (and haircuts) confirm the threat of him not advancing past his father.

For much of American society, namely those who worked working-class jobs like Riley, boys of Junior’s age would have been expected to enter the workforce. The reasons for this are present in the episode: financial pressures are too much for the elder breadwinner to take care of, and the younger boy has no real interest in higher education. Richer families may have pushed for their kids to go to college, but for most the added income was much appreciated.

On the other hand, with postwar upward mobility and something close to full employment, teenhood was being reimagined as an extension of childhood. Comics, film, and television would conjure a world full of carefree high-schoolers hanging out on beaches or at malt shops. Indeed, this is more or less the world depicted in The Life of Riley. Even Junior’s attempt to enter the workforce is revealed as ultimately motivated by romantic entanglements rather than material needs.

While his job seems grueling to my eyes (working piecework in a warehouse), Junior’s employment is presented as harmless by the show. Nevertheless, the series comes down firmly on the side of the more recreational vision of adolescence. .The end goal is the vision of the child going off to college and gaining access to opportunities that their parents didn’t. This is explicitly stated by Riley, who effuses that “The world’s got to improve”, tying the idea of generational uplift together with the postwar belief in teleological progress.

The high school-to-college-to-white-collar job life path Life of Riley presents here is a normative one, but it’s also a quietly gendered one. Babs is older than Junior and by all appearances smarter, but there’s never any suggestion that she’s looking forward to college, or that her parents have saved any money for her. Higher education was still seen as finishing-school for girls, not a pathway to a career. Then again, given how this show likes to repeat things, maybe we’ll get a “Babs Drops Out” episode in two weeks.

Coming up next: Suspense takes us back to the front.

Episode 150: The Life of Riley – “Peg’s Birthday” (January 3, 1950)

What I watched: The fourteenth episode of The Life of Riley, an early sitcom. The episode starred Jackie Gleason, Rosemary DeCamp, Gloria Winters, Lanny Rees,, Sid Tomack, Bob Jellison and Maxine Semon. It was directed by Herbert I. Leeds, and written by Irving Breecher, Reuben Shipp, and Alan Lipscott.  “Peg’s Birthday” aired on NBC at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, January 3, 1950, and is available to watch on the Internet Archive.

What happened: The episode opens with Babs and Junior surprising Peg in the morning with birthday presents — she forgot. They got her perfume and a purse. Riley has already left, so the kids assume that he’s forgotten her birthday . Junior tells his mother she’s beautiful in an oddly earnest tone. Do you see what I mean about the Freudianism?

Later that day, Riley is showing a wrapped box to his friend Waldo. It’s not a present, however: he found it on the seat next to him on the bus. Waldo thinks that this is thievery, and he should give it to the bus company to return. Riley agrees, but he looks inside the box and discovers it’s a fur made from a silver fox. Peg has apparently always wanted to drape an animal carcass around her neck.

In the 50s, nothing made a woman hornier than a dead animal.

When he gets home, however, Riley discovers that it’s Peg’s birthday, and has the fur whipped out of his hands and taken for a present. This makes her rapturously happy. Riley, of course, doesn’t manage to tell her the truth. Later that night, he’s pacing outside, trying to find a way to tell her, and Gillis comes by to complain that his wife wants fur now too. Waldo is also there, because apparently everyone just wanders around at night, and he lays a guilt trip on Riley.

Peg, meanwhile, assumes that Riley spent too much money on the fur, and says that they’ll have to return it to pay the bills. Babs also tells her mother how wonderful and attractive she is. Waldo and Riley decide to place an advertisement in the newspaper lost and found section, but he’s worried about being scammed, so he makes the description too vague to possibly be useful. Gillis apparently overhears this on something called a “party line”, and joins in the haranguing.

Riley comes up with a plan: stealing the fur, making it look like a burglar took it, and giving her a present he had saved at the shop yesterday. For some reason, Waldo thinks this is a good plan, and joins in the “robbery”, which involves wearing bandanas for some reason. Things don’t get very far before they give up.

In the morning, Gillis’s wife (apparently named “Honeybee”, and played by Semon) has seen the lost and found ad, and comes over to lord it over her friend. Riley admits to his misdeed, and Peg feels humiliated. They’re both sullen for about two minutes, and then make up. Riley gives her his actual present: a locket with pictures of the family inside, and curls from the kids’ hair. That last bit seems a little creepy to me, but Peg loves it.

What I thought This is already the third birthday episode we’ve done in the series — I think only Babs has yet to go through the procession of humiliation and misunderstanding that seem to define celebrations on this show. Life of Riley certainly has no fear of repeating itself. But there does seem to be a departure here from past birthday episodes, and one which perhaps speaks to the 1950s (that’s right, we’re in the 50s now!) gender divide.

In my article on Riley’s birthday episode (hey, if the show can repeat itself this much, then so can I), I half-jokingly described the aggressive gift-giving process as depicting Indigenous practices of potlatch. There are some aspects of that philosophy in this episode too, with Riley’s ability to give an expensive present taken as a sign of his masculine prowress. But, more than episode, this episode upholds the American code of property.

Riley’s “discovery” of an expensive fur on the bus is perhaps the most harmless transgression against property possible. He doesn’t actively or maliciously steal it, and is clearly not depriving anyone of an essential or even important possession. The episode makes no attempt to impress on us the consequences of the loss of the fur: we never even see its owner. But nevertheless, everyone in the episode (even the wayward Riley) seems to immediately recognize that the moral thing to do is return it.

What does this mean in hankie code?

Maybe it’s precisely because the fur has value only as a marker of wealth that Riley’s “theft” is assumed to be so obviously immoral. He is attempting to impersonate someone above his means. As in “Assistant Manager”, Riley has the image of class ascendance dangled before him only to have it revealed to be all an illusion. One’s identity as a member of the working class must be displayed at all times in all ways.

If you’ve noticed that I’ve written a lot about Riley in the above paragraphs, it’s because he’s still the episode’s main focus. While the premise would seem to suggest that this could be a showcase episode for Rosemary DeCamp’s Peg, she’s firmly a supporting character in it. The only real character moment she gets is saying that she knows she’ll have to return the fur for the sake of the family. Look, I get it: if you have Jackie Gleason, you want to use him. But this episode only reaffirms Peg’s status as the dullest, least-defined member of a generally dull and ill-defined family.

There’s also a gendered dimension to Peg’s role in the story. Whereas Riley and to a lesser extent Junior are consumed by their own desires on their birthday, Peg is constantly trying to keep the family afloat. The feminine role is that of constant self-abnegation, never enjoying anything for too long. In the end, when she gets a present to keep, it only reinforces her role as a wife. At the dawn of the 50s, it truly appeared as if that limited role would stretch out forever.

Coming up next: We move into the non-public-domain episodes of The Lone Ranger, and I go hunting for pirate uploads.

Episode 139: The Life of Riley – “The Boarder” (December 27, 1949)

What I watched: The thirteenth episode of The Life of Riley, an early sitcom. The episode starred Jackie Gleason, Rosemary DeCamp, Gloria Winters, Lanny Rees, Sid Tomack and Alan Reed. It was directed by Herbert I. Leeds, and written by Irving Breecher, Reuben Shipp, and Alan Lipscott.  “The Boarder” aired on NBC at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, December 27, 1949, and is available to watch on the Internet Archive.

What happened: We open with Riley auditing the family expenses, and discovering that things aren’t adding up. Gillis, who has once again made himself part of the family meeting, comes up with a solution: taking in a boarder. Babs is against the idea, saying that the house is already too crowded.

A busy frame full of busybodies.

After a fade, the deal has already done, and the boarder has agreed to move into the closed-in porch. It turns out that Riley hasn’t even met the guy he agreed to lend the room to, but he has a recommendation from Gillis. Junior reads a newspaper, and hears that there’s a killer on the loose in Los Angeles. Give this man a ride, sweet family will die.

Riley finally meets with the boarder, a middle-aged man named Ferguson who looks like he’s on his way to a supporting role in a crime movie. He immediately asks to go to his room and avoids making conversation, which makes him the most relatable character on this show. The rest of the family continues to suspect him of being a murderer. He sends a suspicious phone call, then everyone starts thinking he’s a gangster.

Gillis once again sticks his nose in, and joins in the mass hysteria. Ferguson tears out the newspaper article about the killer and goes to take a bath. Gillis tells everyone to throw him out. Riley goes through the boarder’s bag, and discovers that he has a gun and a blackjack. Everyone panics and rushes to call the cops. They hear that there’s a $10, 000 reward, and promptly begin to argue about who would get the money.

After a fade, the cops have arrived and are ready to make the arrest. Riley draws Ferguson out by saying that he’s wanted on the phone. But, of course, it turns out that Ferguson is actually a cop himself. Riley faints. A few days later, things are still nervous, with Riley’s jokes about cheating the phone company not going over well. Anyway, Ferguson doesn’t move out by the end of the episode, so I guess we have a new cast member.

What I thought: This episode portrays a situation that would have been familiar to a 1949 audience but faded from the family sitcom shortly thereafter: a family taking in a boarder to help pay the rent. During the Depression and the lean war years, arrangements like this were likely common, but they stopped seeming normal in an age of postwar abundance. Of course, that’s not to say no one rented out a spare room, particularly among poorer families or empty-nesters, but it stopped being a part of the idealized nuclear family presented on sitcoms.

But now this scenario is relevant again! In the age of AirBnB, Craigslist roommates, and hyper-inflated rents, what could be more relevant than sharing space with a stranger to make ends meet? In fact, the familiarity of this plot reminds us (or at least reminds me) that the nuclear family was always a historical blip, a social phenomenon that lasted a few generations before household relationships became as complicated as they always had been.

Of course, most people’s boarders (in the 1940s or 2010s) weren’t cops. That twist, on top of being tonally odd for The Life of Riley (were we really supposed to believe that the family was about to be axe-murdered?), perhaps reflects the normalization of a professional police force that was simultaneously beginning to happen through early cop dramas (all of which so far have been lost to time.) The policeman is no longer an individual only encountered in extreme situations, but now a member of the family.

“And one more thing — stay away from the greenhouse out back.”

To return to my Freudian reading, the placement of a police officer in the family home represents the return of the regulatory superego, a position that is supposed to be filled by the father, but which Riley is inept at following. Indeed, Riley’s suspicion of the boarder reflects — okay, okay, I’ll stop.

Speaking of complicated family relations: what is the deal with Gillis? In these episodes he seems to pop up with little rationale as to why he’s hanging around another family’s house. The writers even lampshade his omnipresence by having him make jokes about it. Are things not well at the Gillis house? Does he harbour homoerotic desires of his own? Hopefully this will be explored more in the second half of The Life of Riley.

Coming up next: Suspense returns with a tale of a Victorian-era adulteress. You won’t believe what happens to her!