I remember an episode of Courtship of Eddie’s Father, which was about a widowed man raising a young son. One of Eddie’s friends has a single mom and he sets them up on a date which ends up being the dad making her dinner at their apartment. The kicker is that the mom is a black woman and the kids don’t think to mention it.
They kind of laughed at the awkwardness and carried on with the date anyway but only as two people having a nice time because, of course, there was no potential for romance. The point was how cute it was that the kids didn’t think of mentioning race and that was good hope for the future. But for the adults it was still out of the question.
Yeah, that was a season 3 episode, "Christmas Came a Little Early ". The dying girl was played by a a pre-Brady Bunch Eve Plumb. It’s an extremely depressing episode.
If you squint and look sideways, I Love Lucy had a few episodes that–for the time–were kinda enlightened. (How’s that for a mild endorsement? And I should mention that ILL is one of my favorite sitcoms, so I can deal with the problems inherent to the era.)
The episode where Ricky is trying to get a promotion and, after being frustrated by Lucy’s making them late for a dinner with his boss, puts her on a sharp time schedule. When the boss’s wife overhears Ricky boasting of having Lucy jump like a trained seal, Lucy teams up with the wife and Ethel to give the world’s fastest and least satisfying dinner party. The Boss realizes that Ricky’s being a dominating asshat and that he makes a bad husband… but a good manager. The schedule’s torn up and Ricky hugs Lucy. Happy ending for all.
Not that there aren’t dozens of other subsequent episodes where Ricky attempts to wear the pants in the household, so to speak (Lucy does wear trousers, which actually is relatively unusual for most of 1950s family sitcom moms). But many times his chauvinism gets a comeuppance, although of course it’s not called chauvinism yet.
In the famous “Job Switching” episode, Ricky/Fred mock the work that Lucy/Ethel do as lolling about eating bon-bons playing cards and “goss’pin’” as Ricky might say. So they swap places for a week in a completely unfair way (IMHO instead of getting brand new jobs, Lucy should be going to the club and rehearsing with the band, and Ethel should be doing whatever b.s. Fred does, which is mostly be a grump and not fix drips in the sink!). The girls flop at one job, but the guys make an unholy mess of everything and anything. It can be taken as an equal drubbing, but at least it showed the fact that being a housewife was difficult.
So… yeah, it’s not like there was an episode called “Lucy Gets Woke” but at least there were some little hints that they knew Ricky/Fred could be domineering jerks at times and so they knocked their smugness down a few pegs.
Westerns (both the adult and kid versions) always had a strong undercurrent of social messaging. Just watch any old episode of The Lone Ranger or Roy Rodgers that has the bad guy victimizing Indians or Mexicans, and substitute black people (not that natives and Mexican-Americans didn’t have their own injustices!)
I don’t know if people will consider it a social-consciousness issue, but almost every sitcom from I Love Lucy to the Brady Bunch had a road-trip episode where the stars are pulled over by a rural policeman who, when they get to town, turns out to also be the bar or hotel owner … and the judge who’ll decide their ticket. :eek: Which was at least theoretically possible because many states had mayor’s courts or aldermen’s courts that would decide traffic cases and ordinance violations. And many others had justice of the peace courts where the justice kept a portion of the fines he assessed as his direct pay. Imagine all the issues with speed-trap towns magnified by taking a neutral judge out of the loop.
Interestingly, Illinois got rid of all such courts in 1960, right in the middle of sitcoms using that trope. It seems to me that it isn’t mere coincidence; the sitcom writers were reflecting a real-life concern to cross-country motorists, albeit in comedy form. The sitcom plots highlighted the absurdity (or at least flaws) of a system that arose before the widespread use of the automobile when most people a mayor’s court or justice of the peace would be trying and fining would be locals. I’d be curious if other states abolished such courts around the same time.
Something like this happened to me in Texas in the late 1970s. A regular cop pulled me over in a rural country near Denton, but a week or so later when I returned to the area to pay the fine. The “courthouse” was a filling station and the judge out pumping gas.
Two pages and no one has mentioned Julia, with Diahann Carroll?!? :eek: Pretty mild stuff today (it was a “gentle” sitcom, like Room 222), but in 1968, it was almost revolutionary. And, like 222, it was “relevant.”
The satire in MAD Magazine was hilarious. Toward the end, she goes out on a date with Bill Cosby and orders filet mignon and champagne:
COSBY: I thought you said you wanted “soul food.”
CARROLL: To me, that IS soul food!
COSBY: Would you like to dance?
CARROLL: I’d **love **to, but I have no rhythm. Do you believe that?
COSBY: After tonight, I’ll believe ANYTHING!
BTW, I strongly disagree there was anything “socially conscious” about Amos ‘n’ Andy. Yes, I know it’s considered “racist” today, but their being black was never an issue on the show, not even when a New York cop thought Kingfish was trying to cover up a crime (he’d had his car painted just as the police were looking for one identical to it). It was, incidentally, a *very *funny show (and far less offensive than any of Norman Lear’s ethnic sitcoms, IMHO). It was brilliantly written and had wonderful comic actors. It also showed blacks in positions of authority (e.g., lawyers and psychologists). Amos (the straight man) even owned his own taxi company! Sometimes there was even a gentle “message,” as in the wonderful Christmas episode with the 23rd Psalm. You could take the same scripts today and use them to film episodes of an all-white sitcom without excising a single malaprop.
Poor choice of words. I meant “socially relevant,” in that it didn’t really matter what color the characters were. As I say above, white comic actors have been doing the same bits for years.
When I watched the show in the '60s (yes, I was young and relatively innocent back then), it never once occurred to me that blacks were being singled out for ridicule.
It seems to me that it isn’t mere coincidence; the sitcom writers were reflecting a real-life concern to cross-country motorists, albeit in comedy form. The sitcom plots highlighted the absurdity (or at least flaws) of a system that arose before the widespread use of the automobile when most people a mayor’s court or justice of the peace would be trying and fining would be locals. I’d be curious if other states abolished such courts around the same time.