Core Response: Family Time! The ABC Afterschool Special and the Complexities in Challenging Domesticity

“’Containment’ was not only a defensive, military strategy developed as U.S. foreign policy in the 1950s; it was practiced on the domestic front as well […] keeping them [women] in the home” (Mellencamp 81).

The idea of the home as a utopic space for repose and tranquility is one of the major hoaxes in human history deployed by traditionalist to contain women in the domestic sphere. One could potentially read this as a practice of behavior modification depending on the context and angle. Migratory experiences from the urban to suburban facilitated a return to the preservation of Victorian familial values in a post-war period of mass consumption. Television is complicit in this process of containment by operating as an apparatus diffusing an ideology around domesticity, and thus informing how women are expected to excel in their menial duties. Tania Modleski’s essay touches upon several important points concerning the emotional, physical, and performative labor stay-at-home female figure invested in order to embrace a maternal role, where she writes “Not only is it the responsibility of the woman in the home to be sensitive to the feelings of her family, her job is further complicated by the fact that she must often deal with several people…” (70). One should keep in mind that Modleski’s article strictly studies women in relation to work and television’s presence in the home. What happens when televisual texts approach domesticity for the entire family (excluding the father)?

For this analysis, I bring an episode from the ABC Afterschool Special series aired in 1984, “Mom’s on Strike.” Before exploring this episode further, I would like to briefly refer to George Lipsitz essay with an investigative angle on his thought and dialogue section. Lipsitz draws on an imperative point relating to the formation of ideology circulating through conservative social circles and how media (or television) plays a major role in the injection of such an imagined thought. In order to assist in the maintenance of a thriving capitalist society (read: bourgeois, suburban, white) “cultural values and beliefs from the past, like religion or the patriarchal family” will be borrowed to justify “moral grounding for contemporary forces inimical to the interest of tradition” (98). If television participates in this machination, how are young people’s programming responding to notions of domesticity in neo-conserve 1980s?

The ABC Afterschool Special had a particular audience in mind: youth and their families.

The particular episode (as explained above) addresses a previously ignored social issue around domesticity and the role of women in the home. Much of the scholarship around televisual viewing practices of the 1950s culture centers mostly on women and familial practices, but little is written about programming content that challenge domesticity. At around this time (1980s) emerging discourses on television and its content become vehicles to discuss family viewing practices. In this episode, of the ABC Afterschool Special, through the perspective of the eldest teenage girl, a feminist theme is made ostensible. After a friend of the protagonist lauds her mother’s effort, the teenage girl rebuttals by saying “my mother is not a radical feminist, she’s just a happy housewife.”  As the narrative progresses, we become aware that the mother is displeased with her sense of devalued worth both in society and in the home. In a series of complex outcomes, other women join the growing movement and men counter-protest their efforts.

            At the conclusion of the special, everyone negotiates their differences and return to the cyclical repetitive nature of social discourse containment. Returning to our discussion of the family, it is interesting to find a children/youth program addressing domestic issues. Interestingly, the show appeared at a specific time slot to reach a larger audience. A few questions I am attempting to properly establish and answer are: 1) How did social issues discourses in children’s programming provide reflection of one’s own family dynamics, 2) What was the reception of such texts in feminine spheres and how did it differ in male circles? 3) In what ways did the series help families and young viewers negotiate/navigate domestic roles?

Link to the episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THVSMR8mT2g

(Excuse the quality of the audio).  

Works Cited

Lipsitz, George. “The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network Television Programs.” Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer. Eds. Lyn Spiegel and Denise Mann. University of Minnesota Press. Print. 

Mellencamp, Patricia. “Situation Comedy, Feminism, and Freud: Discourses of Gracie and Lucy.” Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture. Ed. Tania Modeleski. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986. Print. 

Modleski, Tania. “The Rhythms of Reception: Daytime Television and Women’s Work.”

CORE RESPONSE #2: Living Spaces

While interesting and thought-provoking, Lynn Spigel's seems to miss a couple of amplifying features of the mid-century domestic television shows she discusses. Well and above the public/private tension she describes around contemporary '50s interior design, one of the things that we notice in watching shows like Father Knows Best or Burns & Allen is just how public the sitting rooms in the show are. They constitute a space where tradespeople, neighbors, and guests have largely free access. The camera doesn't often pry into the bedrooms and closets of the private families in those shows. These shows seem to be underscoring the continued presence of the public in our private spaces and the theatricality that stems from that intrusion. In effect, the sitting room of an episode of Burns & Allen feels a lot like the city gates of the Greek theater or the street of a Moliere "sit com." The sitting room is emphatically the place in the home where any kind of comic story can be told.

But, further, I'd argue that this whole presentation of the domestic space was nothing new. The 'public' sitting room was a heavily theatricalized space long before Burns & Allen. Unlike earlier phases of drama, the Victorian parlor comedies (think of Oscar Wilde) and domestic tragedies reflected (and perhaps inflected) the idea of the sitting room as a space of public performance. Sitting rooms were the natural venue for interpersonal strife and for staged scenes. Not least because the sort of performance that'd we'd see represented on the stage in those spaces was already intimately familiar.

I turn to personal experience. I grew up with the closest thing a child of the '80s could experience to a Victorian stage sitting room. My grandmother was a bit of a throwback to an Edwardian theatrical tradition. She'd grown up in the classical theaters in Dublin, Ireland, in the '20s and '30s. She never turned her theatrical instincts off. Her sitting room was very much a stage. It was the site of real life theatricals: either cocktail parties and receptions where she would stage-manage gossipy conflict among her guests or literal spectacles when she would mount readings of Victorian parlor poetry. 

Strikingly, the geography of her sitting room looked a great deal like the ersatz living space George Burns steps into across the double proscenium (both the one upstage and the one left by the removal of the fourth wall of his living room). Her sitting room, like "his," was a stage. But it was also just a sitting room. There was no discontinuity between those functions because we ourselves were intended to be participants in the on-going drama of her devising. And the contrary is also true: George and Gracie's sitting room looks pretty much just like a sitting room because we know that public sitting rooms are stage spaces. At either angle, intimate life was the site of drama because drama was already at home in intimate life.

As Spigel points out, camera work gives the television audience a degree of intimacy with the drama that theatrical representation cannot muster, but it strikes me that that intimacy is merely an extension, and not a reversal, of the logic of the theatrical tradition from which the shows draw. By staging their scenes in the sitting room, the Victorian and Edwardian traditions were already reaching for the sort of effect Spigel attributes to television. We were invited to be intimate with the drama because the drama was supposed to be intimately familiar. The "illusion of presence" was already hard at work. 

Core Response: Commercial Consumption

I found Lipsitz article, The Meaning of Memory very informative in terms of television history… there is so much I have taken for granted in my TV upbringing of the 90s.  In watching episodes of The Goldbergs last week, which I too ( in agreement with Andrea’s comment) did not find too funny, I was struck by how much the program was an incorporation of advertisement…and then begged to ask the question, what would it have been like as  a TV writer back then? Scary? Debilitating? What was it like to be a pioneer?

As Lipsitz stated, “TV advertised individual products, but it also provided a relentless flow of information and persuasion that placed acts of consumption at the core of every day life” (77).  Talk about a shelling of product placement! Even the entire episode we watched was centered on a material item: a hat, something of a status symbol and (in truth) an unnecessary expense when it came down to it (as the other women in the apartments commented).  Lipsitz’s comments about the TV emergence into working class life reminded me of a conversation my mother had with her grandfather (Irish Immigrant) when she was growing up. He lived with my mother’s family, and when they got a brand new TV set and watched it for the first time, he complained at how it ruined their relationship to one another. As Lipsitz stated, “the entry of the TV into the American home disrupted precious patterns of family”; it served as a reminder of consumerism. My great grandfather never spent money on anything he didn’t need, and thus the introduction to commercials into TV programs on certain expenses felt to him like harassment. My mom tells me he constantly said (in thick brogue), “ya don’t need people who don’t know ya on some screen tellin’ ya to buy milk or shoes… they don’t know what you need. You buy them when you’re out and can’t live without them.” But as economy grew, the relation to keep up with it did as well, just like Mrs. Goldberg’s hat. These generational clashes enabled a venue for discussions of past and present and engaged a conversation of these family issues.

I also found a point that Lipsitz raised casually, one of intrigue… in all of these working class comedies of this time period, why is it we never get a beat of the workplace itself? The workplace is such a distance brunt of the joke, and yet that is where half of the characters spend their time… imagine 1950s The Office!

In a broader sense of consumerism today… do we feel we’ve distanced ourselves from the days of integrated commercials into the flow of programming? Are we numb to it?

CORE RESPONSE 1: Installing the TV Set

First and foremost, as a comedy writer, I have to take umbrage with Spigel's use of the word. After watching that episode of The Goldbergs, I can say, without a doubt, that it is not now, nor was it ever a comedy. Putting an ugly hat on a woman doth not a comedy make.
Second, I found this article to be quite interesting, specifically the idea of the television set as a window, and as a means to conquer space. Growing up, my grandparents had a tv that was a large piece of furniture that sat right on their lime green carpet (I'm old). I remember my brothers and I huddling around that thing-- trying to get as close to it as possible. It was just instinctual, but when I think back about what we were trying to accomplish-- I think we were trying to have that small screen fill up our entire field of vision. Block out everything else so that we were completely immersed in whatever it was we were watching (A-Team, probably). We were literally trying to delete the space between our eyeballs and the stuff on the screen so that we were one. Then my grandma would yell at us that we were sitting too close to the TV and had to move back because of all the radiation. I'm surprised Spigel didn't bring up the radiation fear in all her talk of "gaze" and dystopian discourse-- or was that just my grandma?
I find the concept of the window into other worlds, other lives, other realities fascinating. If part of the appeal of television is that in our isolated suburban lives it connects us to others, and as diverse an 'other' as we want, I will never understand why people choose to immerse themselves into horror, heavy dramas, or thrillers. It doesn't have to be utopia, but why would anyone want to be somewhere horrible? Voluntarily?! It's especially interesting to think about the rise of the "unlikeable protagonist" in this fashion, and why it's been such a struggle to get them on TV. In that context, it's similarly strange that I sit in front of a giant 65 inch television and invite Paddy's Pub, a filthy, derelict bar and a group of horrible people into my home every time I watch It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia.

“I’m Free”: Exploring the Female Emancipatory Potential of Sitcoms and Melodramas of the 1950s

In comedy and soap opera / melodrama, the two modes discussed in this week’s reading, the possibilities for the female protagonist are seemingly endless and far from normative.  Lucy can exhibit outrageous physical behavior (as analyzed by Pat Mellencamp).  Gracie can subvert the English language (also discussed by Mellencamp).  Soap operas / melodramas can provide heightened drama where exaggerated vice and virtue are played out against the domestic sphere.  But what is the ultimate effect of providing these exaggerated fantasies of escape from domesticity?    Does the space of the home and the space of the domestic sphere, whether conveyed in embedded advertisements (as discussed in the authentically reappropriated working class experience of The Goldbergs, Mama and other shows analyzed by George Lipsitz) or a normalizing conclusion (as we discussed last week with Father Knows Best), suggest these shows are less subversive than they initially appear?  In my view, these shows might be operating on one of two levels.  They might provide just enough of a spectacle of escape, whether in the high-flying drama of Lucy and Ethel’s scheme-of-the-week or the fantasy of outlandish affairs on the day’s episode of Guiding Light, to allow women a fantasy of liberation without actually encouraging them to leave the home (after all, Lucy goes back to her husband, virtue is rewarded and vice is punished in the end).  Or, in a more subversive turn, these shows might, through language or ideological critique, provide subtle alternatives to women, models ideologically counter to the ideal mother / obedient housewife which, despite a pat conclusion or condemnation of “deviance,” hold sway after the final scenes.

In some ways, the space of the home and the centrality of the television as discussed by Lynn Spigel, enforcing female subjugation to the confinement of the home, may be seen to speak to either interpretation.  If a women feels increasingly confined in the act of watching television, she will be increasingly drawn to the liberatory aesthetics of a show like I Love Lucy, which provides images of a woman temporarily free from the home, and thereby providing an “armchair (or stoveside)” view of another life.  This life, however, comes to an end at the end of each episode.  Much in the same way Tania Modleski writes about soaps habituating women for lives of interruption, these sitcom episodes habituating women for lives of only temporary escape, via television, from their “rightful places.”  However, it is notable that what is often most memorable about these shows, as evidenced by Pat Mellencamp’s analysis of jokes in I Love Lucy and The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show is not their endings but the humor.  If the jokes are outlandish or clever enough, then what strikes a viewer might not be the pat conclusion, but the potential for an empowering challenge to normative modes of representation sustained throughout the bulk of these shows.

The question then remains, what defines subversive television?  What is presented (the style of humor, structure of ending, etc.) or how a viewer interprets this information?  It seems, especially for humor or melodrama, much is left to the viewer, whether this reading is in line with or against what the producers / network, etc. may have intended.

-Allison Ross

Liveness Lives On (for a Limited Time Only)

NBC's decision to live stream the Super Bowl paid off  as expected. As  "the Super Bowl delivered 114.4 million viewers, ranking as not only the most-watched Super Bowl, but the most-watched telecast overall in U.S. history."

I consider myself one of those 114.4 million, and was in a room with 30+ others doing more or less the same--- especially during the Halftime show. Everyone crowded around the TV, playing the show live. In 2015 this isn't something you see every day--- live TV has become a special occasion.

http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2015/02/02/tv-ratings-sunday-super-bowl-up-from-last-year-the-blacklist-strong/357840/ 

The commercial play in this live stream event also has an impact on the liveness--- viewers don't want to miss out on the commercial "best of" competition ( or participation in such a vote) as well as seeing the Half Time show live rather than on YouTube.  Is this a trend related to social media? Is this a millennial need to record it or live tweet it for authenticity in participatory culture?

Television and Domestic (Dis)ordering

While engaging with debates on the relationship between television and women's domestic roles in this week's readings, I was reminded of this illustration which I first encountered on a t-shirt at a hip South Delhi store. Used as a poster advocating women's 'Right to Leisure', it was developed by Asmita, a grassroots-level research and advocacy group for women based in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Where the primary concerns of women's rights groups and government-sponsored campaigns were issues of female foeticide, infant and maternal mortality rates, and domestic abuse, this poster stood out for focussing on a seemingly trivial matter. The illustration gained circulation as part of the Poster Women project started in 2006 by the feminist publishing house Zubaan, which sought to archive and exhibit posters, pamphlets and other visual materials generated by the women's movement in India. These materials were later compiled into a book and printed on a variety of merchandise, and became popular among a more urban audience well-versed with the political language of feminism.

I find the image provocative not only for its ability to build affinities among women's experiences across class and regional divides within the Indian context, but also for its use of television to articulate the language of rights. In contrast to historical analyses which see television as regulating and merging with the rhythms of domestic life, the home here stands in a state of disarray as the 'time' for TV cuts into the 'time' for household chores. Books and newspapers strewn across the room while the woman watches television suggest that its consumption is distracted, but also distracting from the normative roles prescribed by the gendered division of labour. While the actual situation may be very different on the ground, the image offers an alternative imagination where the TV as an instrument of leisure can become an ally as it carves out time and space for women's enjoyment. Where would such an imagination fit into overarching historical narratives that limit the possibilities that can emerge from the conjunction of particular economic, political and social conditions? In other words, can we gauge the effects of television only through historical and sociological analyses, especially in relation to gender and domestic space, when it sets in motion possibilities that are not easily apparent and quantifiable?