“How did that girl get her part?” I’d wonder. “Who wrote that terrible script?” And the lovely, mindless coasting feeling would be gone.) When the Douglasses or the Nelsons or the Petries or the Ricardos or the Stones were in true form, though, I didn’t ever wonder how the show would turn out, or why anyone was doing what he did. Like pleasant grade-B detective stories I read with no desire to turn first to the last page and find out what happens, I never felt suspense as to how “The Donna Reed Show” would turn out. If I’d seen a show before, it didn’t matter, because every show was a replay of the classic pattern anyway, and I could see them over and over just as I can hear the refrain to a song time and again.
Not just the outcomes, either, but the whole world the characters inhabited was reassuringly familiar. I knew where Harriet Nelson kept her stainless steel and where the phone was at the Petries’ house and where Beaver Cleaver sat at the dinner table before he left it (his pie untouched), as he always did when he was in trouble, with “Uh, Mom, could I be ’scused?” I got so I could predict punch lines and endings, not really knowing whether I’d seen the episode before or only watched one like it. There was the bowling ball routine, for instance: Lucy, Dobie Gillis, Pete and Gladys, they all used it. Somebody would get his finger stuck in a bowling ball (Lucy later updated the gimmick using Liz Taylor’s ring) and then they’d have to go to a wedding or give a speech at the PTA or have the boss to dinner, concealing one hand all the while.
We weren’t supposed to ask questions like “Why don’t they just tell the truth?” These shows were built on deviousness, on the longest distance between two points, and on a kind of symmetry which decrees that no loose ends shall be left untied, no lingering doubts allowed. (The surgeon general is off the track in worrying about TV violence, I think. I grew up in the days before lawmen became peacemakers. What carries over, though, is not the gunfights but the optimism that shone through all those hours spent in the shadows of the TV room, the memory that everything always turned out all right.)
Motivations stemmed from the most basic things in human nature and so I recognized all that I saw from what I knew of myself. The way Beaver tried to look jaunty, tossing his cap in the air and swinging his lunch box, hoping to conceal the weight of the bad report card inside, the way Dick Van Dyke crossed and uncrossed his legs when he was nervous and rubbed his chin and scrunched his hands deep in his pockets so that his shoulders came up, the way Patty Duke arranged her face just to talk on the telephone, and the way her dumb-nice boy friend Richard looked when he ate a cake she’d made for him and burned—showing us that it tasted awful at the same time he was trying to show her how much he liked it, which showed us how much he must like her.
There was a congruence to everything that happened on those shows, so that the outcome seemed fated, which excused my passivity and powerlessness as I lay stretched out on the sofa for hours on end, eating grapes, experimenting with red nail polish. (Thy will be done, and not a thing I could do about it, even if I tried—reason enough not to bother.) It was all unstoppable. Steve Douglass would have three sons, one of whom would marry and become the father of, naturally, triplets—three sons. Desi would give Lucy a new dress for Christmas, and he’d be sure to find that Fred Mertz next door had bought one just like it for Ethel. Everything fell into place, just about geometrically, yet watching it happen never seemed dull.
Many people are shocked and dismayed by the tranquilizing sameness of so many TV shows, I know. They call TV “the boob tube” and speak of the apathy and passivity they feel it produces in young all-day viewers, and often they’re right, it does. I think a lot depends on how a
Not just the outcomes, either, but the whole world the characters inhabited was reassuringly familiar. I knew where Harriet Nelson kept her stainless steel and where the phone was at the Petries’ house and where Beaver Cleaver sat at the dinner table before he left it (his pie untouched), as he always did when he was in trouble, with “Uh, Mom, could I be ’scused?” I got so I could predict punch lines and endings, not really knowing whether I’d seen the episode before or only watched one like it. There was the bowling ball routine, for instance: Lucy, Dobie Gillis, Pete and Gladys, they all used it. Somebody would get his finger stuck in a bowling ball (Lucy later updated the gimmick using Liz Taylor’s ring) and then they’d have to go to a wedding or give a speech at the PTA or have the boss to dinner, concealing one hand all the while.
We weren’t supposed to ask questions like “Why don’t they just tell the truth?” These shows were built on deviousness, on the longest distance between two points, and on a kind of symmetry which decrees that no loose ends shall be left untied, no lingering doubts allowed. (The surgeon general is off the track in worrying about TV violence, I think. I grew up in the days before lawmen became peacemakers. What carries over, though, is not the gunfights but the optimism that shone through all those hours spent in the shadows of the TV room, the memory that everything always turned out all right.)
Motivations stemmed from the most basic things in human nature and so I recognized all that I saw from what I knew of myself. The way Beaver tried to look jaunty, tossing his cap in the air and swinging his lunch box, hoping to conceal the weight of the bad report card inside, the way Dick Van Dyke crossed and uncrossed his legs when he was nervous and rubbed his chin and scrunched his hands deep in his pockets so that his shoulders came up, the way Patty Duke arranged her face just to talk on the telephone, and the way her dumb-nice boy friend Richard looked when he ate a cake she’d made for him and burned—showing us that it tasted awful at the same time he was trying to show her how much he liked it, which showed us how much he must like her.
There was a congruence to everything that happened on those shows, so that the outcome seemed fated, which excused my passivity and powerlessness as I lay stretched out on the sofa for hours on end, eating grapes, experimenting with red nail polish. (Thy will be done, and not a thing I could do about it, even if I tried—reason enough not to bother.) It was all unstoppable. Steve Douglass would have three sons, one of whom would marry and become the father of, naturally, triplets—three sons. Desi would give Lucy a new dress for Christmas, and he’d be sure to find that Fred Mertz next door had bought one just like it for Ethel. Everything fell into place, just about geometrically, yet watching it happen never seemed dull.
Many people are shocked and dismayed by the tranquilizing sameness of so many TV shows, I know. They call TV “the boob tube” and speak of the apathy and passivity they feel it produces in young all-day viewers, and often they’re right, it does. I think a lot depends on how a
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