Ricky, Riley, Edith and Maude

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Past shocks! The TV rerun becomes social history

It's 1982--do you know where your children are? If they watch as much daytime and syndicated television as their elders, they are probably lost somewhere in time--maybe as far back as 1951, taking in an old I Love Lucy show. Perhaps they are watching the most famous episode of Lucy, the birth in 1953 of Little Ricky. Frantic father-to-be Ricky Ricardo wants to cancel a performance of his nightclub act to join his wife at the hospital; Lucy, whose antic zaniness has been transmuted into the madonna-like calm then attributed to every expectant mother, sends him off to work with the unchallengeable claim: "You can't be where I am, anyway." And sure enough, when he takes her to the maternity ward, a nurse insists that the Ricardos kiss goodbye in the lobby. No husband is allowed upstairs because menfolk have no business meddling in childbirth.

Such nostalgic--and telling--reminders of the way we once were are increasingly available to the TV viewer. Nearly half the homes in the U.S. can tune in to a Lucy rerun. Such venerable series as Hogan 's Heroes and the Andy Griffith Show have been selling in syndication for more money than ever. "In the past ten years, there has been a significant increase in the number of independent stations," says Dennis Gillespie, a senior vice president of Viacom International, the world's major supplier of syndicated shows. "And those stations are buying more and more syndicated programs."

TV is often, and rightly, regarded as a mirror of the social realities of the present. It also serves as a kind of time machine for backtracking into social history.

Perhaps the most appealing--though on reflection disquieting-- glimpses that TV reruns give us are of wifehood, motherhood and family life, back when those alone were supposed to make a woman happy. Even before Little Ricky's birth, for example, Lucy Ricardo stayed home as a housewife. Her urge to take a job and fulfill ambitions of her own was considered one of the wackier aspects of her humor. Lucy's contemporary Peg Riley (in William Bendix's The Life of Riley, 1953-58) stayed home too, despite the constant money worries stemming from Riley's modest wage as a riveter. And the handful of working women in '50s TV were mostly man-hungry spinsters like Eve Arden's schoolteacher in Our Miss Brooks (1952-56) and Ann B. Davis' jill-of-all-trades Schultzy in the Bob Cummings Show (1955-59).

Nearly two decades later, Edith Bunker stayed home too, but from the first season of All in the Family (1971-79) her joblessness was an issue. A husband who didn't want his wife to work was not just manly and protective, he was insecure. Now that the majority of married women work, so do the characters of TV. Indeed, of the ten top-rated weekly entertainment series this season, only Dallas and The Jeffersons are about families with wives steadily at home--and neither Sue Ellen Ewing nor Louise neither Sue Ellen Ewing nor Louise Jefferson fits snugly into conservative demographics.

In the old days, nearly all the working mothers were no longer married, and they were figures of pity. How was a woman to cope without a husband? They tended to be widows, not divorcees. Who could be expected to admire a woman who failed to hold her man? Even as recently as the early '70s, when Maude blossomed as a divorced-and-remarried woman, she was presented as a squawking caricature: a klaxon-voiced termagant making life tough for husband No. 4. Moreover, CBS refused to let the pioneering Mary Richards of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77) be a divorcee. The first episode set the tone: Mary merely broke off an affair. Not until One Day at a Time (since 1975) did sitcoms deal with a divorcee who is at once loving, a free spirit and the essence of responsibility.

Nowadays macho is often a term of derision, and the submissive, clinging-vine woman scarcely survives even as a comic stereotype. Probably no modern producer would consider a show title as explicitly steeped in male chauvinism--however mockingly at times--as Father Knows Best (1954-63) or portray, in similarly straightforward terms, a family in which the wife and children are seemingly so deferential to even such a benign dictator. Certainly wife-beating is unthinkable as a subject for comedy; it is a staple of intensely self-serious drama. Yet enough lingers of bygone sexual roles that children learn to laugh when The Honeymooners' Ralph Kramden threatens his wife with "One of these days, Alice, pow! Right in the kisser!"

Reruns still permit us to glimpse patriarchal conviction when, in The Real McCoys (1957-63), Grandpappy Amos' flinty eyes blaze and he snaps: "Doggone it. It ain't people. It's a woman! And no McCoy ever crawled to a man, let alone a woman." In this era of men's consciousness-raising, children and, it may be argued, adults still absorb lessons about stoic silence by watching Fred MacMurray, the widowed father in My Three Sons (1960-72), avert his face and lower his voice when his sons have gratified him. He falls mute, he explains later, because "I'm liable to say something corny."

My Three Sons embodies another enduring message of reruns from the 1950s and 1960s, at odds with the feminism and sexual egalitarianism that seep through TV today: that men by nature find themselves at a loss when rearing children. The bachelor father prompted recurring jests then (one series even had that title); invariably he recruited help, sometimes from a matronly woman, more often from another man. Because child care was women's work, the male helper was usually treated as desexualized, either by age (William Frawley and William Demarest in My Three Sons) or race (Sammee Tong as the beleaguered Japanese houseboy in Bachelor Father, 1957-62) or mere girth (Sebastian Cabot in Family Affair, 1966-71).

Beyond the vagaries of home and family, reruns bring back a whole range of social attitudes that are purportedly bygone. In Gilligan's Island (1964-67), for example, everyone kowtows to the millionaire, even on an island where his money means nothing. In Hazel (1961-66), a normal middle-class family can find, afford and need a servant--and not because the mother is working or has more than one child. In The Odd Couple (1970-75), two men of a certain age can live together, in traditional masculine-slob and effeminate-fussbudget roles, without an automatic assumption that they are homosexual.

Reruns are sustained commercially by an audience of adults as well as curious children. Some of the audience's affection is only for the familiar. But some, plainly, is for a world that seemed simpler and safer--if not always in reality, then at least in the idealized views of TV programmers of the day. It is probably no accident that the Christian Broadcasting Network's over-the-air and cable services rely heavily on wholly secular reruns from the self-confident and squeaky-clean '50s. Adults are likely to be wistful, and children intrigued, about a time when society's rules were clearer and conformity with them more satisfying--and when, as awestruck viewers of The Millionaire (1955-60) have learned, a dollar was really a dollar.

--By William A. Henry III

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