“Lance Sterling will get through!”
If the Andersons were well-off, they would see a black person everyday - cleaning house and cooking the family meals.
No, many upper-middle-class families did not have any servants.
Thank God those days are safely behind us!
Without going through the trouble of quantifying it (i.e. I am largely pulling this out of my ass) I do find it interesting that there was much more emphasis on calming societal fears back in the day. "Cheer up everybody! You’re a useful, happy cog in the machine."
These days it seems to more about provoking them. Yes, that computer AI is definitely coming to take your job. “Sorry, man - you’re just a doomed and helpless cog in the machine.”
The ones in 1950s TV shows and movies do. That’s what this thread is about, right? Not reality.
So let’s not pretend that 1950s American television had anything to do with reality.
So, let’s pretend 1950s American television is a realistic portrayal of 1950s America? Please note that the comment you refuted was about a fictional family.
I started to watch this but the mannerisms of pretty much everyone annoyed me so I didn’t get past around five or six minutes. One kind of funny thing. The second panelist is an actor named Betty Furness. When she was first announced the audio is a little garbled and the captions said Betty Friedan. It confused the hell out of me.
I loved when Sam Levenson introduced Furness (who did commercials for some refrigerator company) as “the sweetest thing you can find in a refrigerator”.
In the radio version of FkB, Jim was a bit more human: rattled by encounters at work, and prone to overreactions - when there was going to be a series of physical competitions at an upcoming town picnic, he and the other fathers got to bragging about how well they’d do, and each and every one of them exercised themselves into incapability before the event.
Zelda was clearly the winner - cute, smart, and willing to date Dobie. A triple-threat. Tuesday Weld was pretty, but not compatible or particularly interested in Dobie. A few years ago, I read a book by Walter Jon Williams which had a character using the name “Chatsworth Osborne Jr.” as a pseudonym which was a nice reference to Dobie Gillis - Chatsworth was the rich kid that Dobie knew.
The Andy Griffith Show often works out that way - Andy misunderstands what Opie is doing, and punishes or berates him, then learns that he was wrong (or Andy realizes that Opie is copying Andy’s bad behavior and has to do better)/
The actress who played Kitten has spoken and written extensively about her abusive childhood, and Robert Young long battled depression, which he self-medicated with alcohol until he decided he was sick and tired of being sick and tired. He came to my fair multi-city, where a childhood friend practiced psychiatry and he felt he could be anonymous here, and provided seed money for the mental health center that still bears his name. I’ve had to explain that name to more than one member of the Younger Generation, and in fact didn’t know it was him until someone told me. I just assumed it was, oh, Dr. Robert Young who founded it, that kind of thing.
I’m sure that those same people actually believe that that’s what the country was like in the 50s.
Just remember…those sitcoms are not reality TV, but a scriptwriter’s version, filtered thru network guidelines and censorship. Example: Lucy couldn’t say she was pregnant or show her figure during her pregnancy due to the network’s Hayes-code, 50’s-era mindset.
Subversive? I’d have thought “hegemonic.”
Let’s not pretend that mass entertainment in general has much to do with reality.
Does anyone here think all the poor people in Bedford Falls would really hurry to save George Bailey? Did any London orphan really have an unknown half-brother to rescue them in the last chapter? Could three grown men really poke each other in the eyes, hit each other with hammers and cause life-threatening disasters at work, and not only remain uninjured but continue to be friends for 190 episodes?
We don’t want to see our real lives in mass entertainment, we want nice, sympathetic characters and easily digestible stories that reinforce what we already believe and get wrapped up in a neat bow.
Hey, I resemble that remark!
Bill Bryson’s mother worked for the newspaper when he was a kid. My Mother also worked, both during and after the War.
Yeah, the richer people we knew had someone come clean their house once a week or so, plus maybe a gardener. But a live-in 24 hour servant? Maybe in Beverly Hills.
Not Father Knows best, nor Leave it to Beaver. Ozzie and Harriet had “help”- as above, but no servants. In Hazel- 1961, but of course that was about a maid.
Can anyone think of any?
Nitpick: that was indeed the initial position of the sponsor’s minions, and hence the network’s position, but it was later overruled by the sponsor’s chairman. It was one of the contentious points in which Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz pushed back against antiquated tradition, the other one being resistance by the network to cast Desi as her husband, to which Lucy said “no Desi, no show”.
So while the sponsor and network initially objected to portraying Lucy’s pregnancy, Lucy and Desi were adamant that it should be part of the show and old outdated sensitivities cast aside. IIRC, this was the issue that caused Desi Arnaz to appeal directly to the chairman of Philip Morris, the show’s major sponsor. By that time I Love Lucy had become a major hit, and the chairman sided with Desi. Though the story may be apocryphal, he allegedly sent a memo to executives at CBS saying “don’t fuck with the Cuban”.
I think it’s fair to say that while Father Knows Best was firmly entrenched in the contemporary zeitgeist and anxious to maintain it, I Love Lucy blazed some new trails in television history.
I’ve been following this thread, and while I’ve never seen Father Knows Best, I know enough about it, thanks to this thread and from other sources.
I’m reminded of nothing more than the 1998 film, Pleasantville, with Tobey Maguire (as David in 1998 and as Bud in the 1950s) and Reese Witherspoon (as Jennifer in 1998 and as Mary Sue in the 1950s). How it happens is complicated, and not germane to the thread, but somehow, David and his older sister Jennifer are transported back into the 1950s world of the TV show Pleasantville, a Father Knows Best kind of show. Heck, they become Bud and Mary Sue Parker, the kids of the family around which the Pleasantville TV show centres.
It’s a fun film. But the big thing is that you’ve got two 1990s teens transported back into a completely artificial TV world of forty years ago that likely never existed. That’s where the hook of this film lies: instead of thinking that she only has one future, and preparing to be a housewife, Mary Sue teaches a boy a thing or two up at the lake (and introduces her mother to orgasms, and don’t ask how). Bud introduces the soda jerk at the Soda Shoppe to real art—the soda jerk is interested in art, but all the art books at the library have blank pages (a TV show doesn’t need them if all they’re going to be is book spines displayed on a shelf). Consequently, the soda jerk paints a nude mural of Bud and Mary Sue’s mother on the wall of the Soda Shoppe.
If there’s a point, it is this: we cannot judge Father Knows Best by today’s standards. Pleasantville demonstrates that. Things have changed, and we can’t go back; there are enough people who would refuse to accept the strictures of the 1950s lifestyle. I’d suggest that Father Knows Best is still an enjoyable entertainment, as long as we don’t look at it as a model for the way things ought to be today.
There were people in the 1950s who refused to accept the strictures of the 1950s lifestyle, and even more people on whom the strictures of the 1950s were an oppressive yoke, but I assume the corporate advertisers did not see any reason to produce a TV show based on them.