(art by Aireen Arellano - to view larger version, click here)
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SHOW: I Love Lucy
EPISODE: “Job Switching”
FIRST AIRED: Sept. 15, 1952
In “Job Switching,” the Season Two premiere of I Love Lucy, Lucy and Ethel land jobs at a chocolate factory and find themselves battling the societal norms of the day – with mixed results.
Assigned to the candy-dipping department, Lucy lasts all of two minutes before she instigates a chocolate-doused slap fight with her co-worker. Later, the two gal pals attempt to wrap candy fed to them from a conveyor belt. Unable to contend with the belt’s unforgiving velocity, they resort to stuffing the chocolate in their hats, dresses, and mouths, leading to one of the show’s immortal lines:
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“Speed it up a little!”
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SHOW: The Twilight Zone
EPISODE: “The Invaders”
FIRST AIRED: Jan. 27, 1961
Submitted for your disapproval, an unspoken rule, a blasphemous observation, a cold hard dose of reality-shaking truth: half of The Twilight Zone’s episodes were just not very good.
Of course, the classics are the classics are the classics: “Where Is Everybody?” “The Midnight Sun,” and “The After Hours” live on as witty and memorable forays into the darkest corners of the human condition. But for every “Eye of the Beholder,” the writers served up a pile of other episodes that remain forgotten for a reason.
In looking at the lackluster1983 movie, the 1985 or 2002 TV reboots, or countless attempts to translate the Twilight Zone format to niche audiences (VH1 mounted a supernatural music anthology series in 2001 called Strange Frequency), one might wonder why no one can seem to replicate The Twilight Zone’s creative success. It may have something to do with the fact that the progenitor series had a middling success rate itself.
Rod Serling and company were anything but hacks. They were brilliant, daring dreamers who swung for the fences weekly. But the very nature of an anthology series nullifies the most reliable rules of thumb that writers follow to engage a television audience. Familiar characters, settings, and themes aren’t at the forefront. Ideas take center stage. Suggestions. Offerings.
This is what most if not all Twilight Zone episodes were: not taut stories but provocative “What if?” prompts meant to do nothing more than propose a devilish idea and pin it with a neat little twist. Many of these episodes weren’t fully formed works of fiction. They were narrative zygotes.
All of this makes Season Two’s perennial classic, “The Invaders” that much more thrilling: in a five-season collection of hit-or-miss episodes that lacked resolution, meaty character arcs, or (let’s face it) good old-fashioned logic, this macabre tale of man vs. monster really does have it all.
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SHOW: The X-Files
EPISODE: “Elegy”
FIRST AIRED: May 04, 1997
In nine years of ghosts, monsters, beasts, aliens, and vampires (one of whom bore a striking resemblance to Ham), Fox Mulder himself remained the most improbable X-File. Prone to absurd leaps of logic yet always right, he somehow remained employed at the FBI despite spending our hard-earned tax dollars chasing bumps in the night.
As the supposed central figure of The X-Files, he fulfilled every mythological definition of hero, man on a quest, man vs. the system, man vs. the world, man vs. himself. He’s everything taught in a high school English class. But while the show’s writers insisted on casting Mulder as a Christ figure (no, seriously), as his partner, Scully traversed a journey more human and humane. “Elegy,” Season Four’s exploration of the most funereal aspects of Scully’s inner workings, demonstrates that while Mulder reflected our primal desires for possibility, ideals, and untainted hope, Scully bore the burden of reality, uncertainty, and death. Mulder might have been out there, but it was Scully who contended with bleak truth.
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SHOW: Small Wonder
EPISODE: “Vicki’s Homecoming”
FIRST AIRED: Sept. 07, 1985
Delving into the history of syndicated television is like bargain hunting in a shady thrift store that smells like week-old meat, but offers shelves of tchotchkes that hum with novelty and history. Syndicated programming, which thrives in the off-hours of daytime and late night, has served as company to countless insomniacs, waiting room wanderers, stay-at-home parents, nursing home denizens, kids home with the flu, and dorm room loafers.
It’s the exact opposite of appointment television because it’s not designed to be talked about or, in some cases, even watched. While some of these shows, sold to local TV stations on an individual basis as opposed to broadcast networks, have been cultural touchstones – Baywatch, Wheel of Fortune, and Jeopardy! tops among the examples - most are produced just to provide content, to fill the hours, and, simply put, to be there.
Small Wonder was a gross and freaky syndication mainstay from 1985 to 1989. Many viewers alive during that time can probably remember watching some Small Wonder episode sometime somewhere, as hazy as the specifics might be. Revisiting the show in the harsh light of modern day, the best and worst of the show come back into sharp focus. Vicki the Robot was a cute oddity, the sloppy and weird character dynamics made for some strange implications, and the terrible jokes burned right through the bottom of the sitcom barrel. The biggest tragedy of the show is that, had the creators assumed that intelligent beings were actually watching and following the show, it could have been much more than the sum of its microchips here and there.
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SHOW: Golden Girls
EPISODE: “My Brother, My Father”
FIRST AIRED: Feb. 06, 1988
The Golden Girls has gained a new level of respect by a modern audience that did not necessarily watch the show when it first aired. The passing of venerable actresses Estelle Getty, Bea Arthur, and Rue McLanahan and the career renaissance of Betty White have cast a new light on this sitcom, which before may have been looked at as hokey nostalgia. While this might be a show you watched in the ‘80s while you were over at your grandma’s house because she loved it, it deserves a reexamination.
The Golden Girls is that, but it’s also more. Particularly in a television culture perpetually obsessed with youth, can you imagine a show where all the characters are women over 50 (or barely over 40, if you believe Blanche); a show that deals with “women’s issues” like menopause, or that devotes episodes to elder abuse, the difficulties in being divorced or widowed, living on a fixed income; a show that depicts these characters and their real concerns AND doesn’t cover up the fact that not only the young and beautiful are concerned about their sex lives? 50+ year-old women with dignity and sex drives? The Golden Girls had two decades on It’s Complicated. The show was ahead of its time.
Season Three’s “My Brother, Father” is about identity and masquerading: the characters are all deceiving someone. We all know the canonical reading of the girls: Rose (White) is the dumb one from St. Olaf, Blanche (McLanahan) is the oversexed one, Sophia (Getty) is the quintessentially feisty 80-year-old, and Dorothy (Arthur) is the sensible one who keeps the girls together. In “My Brother, My Father,” all of these familiar elements are turned upside down by deceit.
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SHOW: Taxi
EPISODE: “On the Job” parts 1 & 2
FIRST AIRED: May 07 & 14, 1981
Sadness. Despair. Dashed hopes. Broken dreams. Jokes about suicide. Welcome to the nonstop party room that is Taxi!
All sitcoms necessarily operate under the same mission statement: make them laugh, the end. Comedy writers deploy an array of tools at their disposal to get the job done. Pratfalls, double entendres, acidic insults, sight gags, sex, horrifying social situations, and bad behavior are the usual order of the day. And then there’s Taxi, the rare sitcom to have its feet planted firmly in melancholy.
Musings on regret, failure, and hardship are one of the richest wellsprings for laughter, yet not many studio sitcoms have really bothered to have their characters stare deep into the void of their own lives. Sure, most modern sitcoms have come to embrace the intertwining of comedy and tragedy with such fervor that the beloved term ‘dramedy’ has stayed in vogue for the past couple of decades. But unlike The Office or Weeds, Taxi’s brand of everyday bleakness was shot in front of a live studio audience. Weekly, the writers had enough honest chutzpah to take grounded and downright bummer situations and move a whole live audience to laughter.
Season Three’s “On the Job” gives our fearless crew of forlorn cabbies a new reason to laugh in the dark: they no longer have jobs.
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SHOW: Quantum Leap
EPISODE: “8 1/2 Months”
FIRST AIRED: Mar. 06, 1991
It’s as durable and tested as a law of physics: think about time travel long enough, and your head will start to hurt.
Quantum Leap is as smart and beloved as American time-travel franchises come, second only to maybe Back to the Future in terms of warm-hearted cult appeal, but its implied mysteries are as uncontrollable as those of any time-travel story when you start to track the plot’s implications into endless chains of “if, then.” Given the added dimensions of body switching and the cloudy idea of revising history “for the better,” more questions than answers are not only inevitable for a show like Quantum Leap, they’re tantalizing and expected and enjoyed… if you’re into that sort of thing.
Season Three’s “8 ½ Months” takes the show’s cans of worms to new echelons of weirdness, as the writers dealt themselves the tangled subject of a pregnant male time traveler deciding the fate of a teenage mother and her kid in 1950s Oklahoma. (Right?)
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SHOW: The Monkees
EPISODE: “Too Many Girls”
FIRST AIRED: Dec. 19, 1966
The Monkees is one of the most beloved rip-offs of all time. Its primordial soup is a cynical stew of corporate calculation, an A-to-B paint-by-numbers formula meant to cash in on the popularity of a certain 1960s rock band that also just happened to have a misspelled animal-inspired moniker, four bowl-cut guys with dimples and endearing personalities, and a sense of rollicking fun and romantic whimsy that pervaded their entire oeuvre onscreen, onstage, and on the turntable.
Still, despite what boardroom schemers may believe, eventually something new and exciting, unexpected and genuine has to enter somewhere into the boiling pot in order to capture our collective imagination. So even though The Monkees was constructed as a Hard Day’s Night-esque TV show first and a band second, and even though the group was widely known since its inception as “America’s answer to the Beatles,” what aspects of the whole enterprise transmuted it from mere carbon-copycatting into a fresh and memorable entry into the pop culture landscape?
As demonstrated in “Too Many Girls,” an enjoyable Davy Jones-centric outing from Season One of the half-hour sitcom, the magic of The Monkees depended upon two things: the creative team’s masterful use of the medium, and hey hey, the Monkees themselves.
art by Aireen Arellano (to view larger version, click here)
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SHOW: Get Smart
EPISODE: “The Groovy Guru”
FIRST AIRED: Jan. 13, 1968
The opening scene of “The Groovy Guru” finds our hero Maxwell Smart sporting an unfortunate mushroom coif and color-clashed getup that makes him look like a Monkee caught in a thrift store explosion. He meets up with an agent undercover as a hippie chick who spouts fresh-off-the-shelf slang that all the kids are using these days: “Enough here for the fuzz to peel and freeze.” Quoth Agent 86 in response: “Huh?”
It shouldn’t take long for a viewer even dimmer than Max to realize that this is going to be a Let’s-Make-Fun-of-Youth-Culture episode. Get Smart, one of the looniest live-action cartoons to ever bombard television, was a veritable funhouse of slapstick and satire, designed to poke fun at the Cold War, foreign policy, xenophobia, the spy genre itself, and anything else that heated up the pop cultural and current event thermometers between 1965 and 1970. Its roundhouse punchlines and absurd sight gags amounted to that double helix of “dumb humor + smart satire” alive and well in modern fare like South Park, Arrested Development, or Childrens Hospital.
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SHOW: The Wonder Years
EPISODES: “Math Class”/”Goodbye”
FIRST AIRED: Oct. 10, 1989/Apr. 24, 1990
Broken into its Greek roots, “nostalgia” literally means “the ache of coming home.” It’s no great mystery, then, that the word comes to mind for virtually anyone who ponders The Wonder Years, a show that, technically speaking, aired from 1988 to 1993 and took place from 1968 to 1973, but more appropriately exists in a forever-loop of an indefinite epoch known as The Hazy Long-Ago Past. We fondly remember the show that fondly remembers a time worth fondly remembering. The show isn’t nostalgia overload, but it’s certainly a nostalgia nesting doll.
Although The Wonder Years has its head and heart forever trapped in the cloud of yesteryear, Season Three’s episode, “Math Class,” and its bookend episode, “Goodbye,” both demonstrate why the series resonated back in 1989 and still resonates today for any fan relieved to see them on Netflix Instant after all these DVD-deprived years. The delicate and specific depiction of an unlikely relationship that arcs from “Math Class” to “Goodbye” has all the humanity and grace of something happening in the present. The two episodes employ the modus operandi of any indelible work of fiction: it plucks something from the stretch of the past and imbues it with the immediacy of the Now.
(art by Aireen Arellano / to view larger version, click here)
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SHOW: The Dick Van Dyke Show
EPISODE: “Coast-to-Coast Big Mouth”
FIRST AIRED: Sept. 15, 1965
Most enduring sitcoms stick in our collective consciousness because their central concepts play on some sort of universal yearning. The king and queen of social issue comedy, All in the Family and Roseanne, reigned due to their ability to cut through the pundit-speak bullcrap that permeated all spheres of class, race, and political party. On the extreme end of the kitsch factor, even the saccharin Technicolor nightmares that were The Brady Bunch and Full House were about families rebuilding themselves in the face of unexpected grief.
And then there’s The Dick Van Dyke Show, which despite its adult-oriented wit, exists in a kind of sitcom nether-universe. It’s half a workplace show and half a family show, but there’s very little struggle here. Rob and Laura Petrie love and respect each other and have a well-behaved son in a lovely little apartment. At Rob’s day job as a television writer for a popular show, his main task is to lob joke ideas back and forth with snappy co-workers Buddy and Sally. Even more than Leave It to Beaver or Father Knows Best, which “tackled” several at-the-time taboo issues like alcoholism, sex, and theft, The Dick Van Dyke Show was probably the most frictionless that sitcoms ever skewed.
It’s all too fitting, then, that “Coast-to-Coast Big Mouth,” one of the hallmark episodes of the show, revolves around the wild insecurities of Rob’s irascible boss Alan Brady. By pitting his vain-angry-schmuck act against the studied and earned perfection of the Petries, it spins the middle-class “nothing is wrong” fluff of The Dick Van Dyke Show into brilliant comedy.
art by Aireen Arellano (to view larger image, click here)
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SHOW: Friends
EPISODE: “The One with Five Steaks and an Eggplant”
FIRST AIRED: Oct. 19, 1995
Friends fans are legion and vocal, eager to belt the words to “Smelly Cat” or see if they can still name the Chandler Bing misnomer on his TV Guide subscription. But for every fan, it seems there’s someone in the vicinity just as vocal in their distaste for the sitcom, and their criticisms are many: that the show is just a parade of pretty people with problems, that it’s a paean to white middle-class heternormative homogeneity, that it’s the zenith of joke-punchline-laugh-track-gooey-sentiment hamminess, or that the characters’ lavish lifestyles are too incongruous with their purported incomes to reach any kind of authenticity. A chef and a waitress live in that Greenwich Village apartment with that wardrobe and those haircuts?!
The creative team behind Friends must have thought they were just making an entertaining show about people with charisma and chemistry, but throughout the show’s ten-year run, the six main characters became inadvertent talking points for the responsibilities of the media when it comes to stoking or abating the audience’s predilections for lifestyle wish-fulfillment. Since it’s an episode that throws focus on the characters’ jobs and incomes, “The One with Five Steaks and an Eggplant” seems poised to address the rampant criticisms regarding the show’s most improbable displays of socioeconomic delusions.
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SHOW: Mission: Impossible
EPISODE: “Illusion”
FIRST AIRED: Apr. 13, 1969
The Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible movies get an undue bad rap from students of the 1960s TV show. Certainly, no points were won among longtime diehards when the makers of the first film disgraced the iconic Mr. Phelps in favor of a new out-of-nowhere entity, Ethan Hunt, and fans do have a legitimate gripe that the show was never about extended gunplay or CGI chase scenes.
But most of the movies, including the fantastic if goofily named Ghost Protocol, do retain two key aspects that have been entwined in the Mission: Impossible franchise since creator Bruce Geller lit the first fuse back in 1966: the sexy high-wire thrill of seeing a team of professionals act as a single villain-thwarting organism, and the disturbing implications of protagonists who merrily play geopolitical chess with no serious sense of accountability or consequence. Season Three’s “Illusion” (available on Netflix Instant) has both on display and in abundance.
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SHOW: I Love Lucy
EPISODE: “Lucy Does a TV Commercial”
FIRST AIRED: May 05, 1952
You can find Lucy’s reeling, disgusted face, presiding over spoon and bottle, on T-shirts, magnets, lunchboxes, posters, postcards, and keychains. You can even buy Vitameatavegamin bottles filled with little heart-shaped candy. To swaths of fans, casual or diehard, this is the episode that defines I Love Lucy. For those who just know the show as a bullet in a pop-culture history encyclopedia, this is the only episode of “I Love Lucy.”
Truth be told, the episode’s classic status has more to do with the one memorable sequence than as a complete A-to-B arc. “Lucy Does a TV Commercial” is sketch comedy gold, functioning not only as another display of Lucille Ball’s mad brilliance but also as sly “bite the hand that feeds you” satire. Taken as a whole, though, the story falls flat.
The episode opens with Ricky in need of a spokeswoman for the commercial break of the television special he’s emceeing. Lucy overhears and pleads for the job. Ricky says no, so in one of her oddest gambits to prove her talent, she climbs into the Ricardos’ TV set to prove she looks good on the small screen.
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This is one of those era-specific bits that only could have existed in the time in which it was conceived. Any analogous scenario today would have involved Lucy making an ass of herself in front of a borrowed camcorder and trying to pass the resultant home video off as a legitimate commercial, but no kind of modernity would have been nearly as funny as seeing Lucy shove herself inside a home appliance and consider it rational behavior. Certainly, it’s hard to beat the delirious absurdity of Lucy dropping the cigarette pack and reaching out of the TV to retrieve it.
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Ricky is unmoved, but nonetheless, thanks to an intercepted phone message, Lucy worms her way into the job as the spokeswoman for a health tonic, immortally named Vitameatavegamin, a four-pronged portmanteau of its disgusting key ingredients. Lucy arrives on set for rehearsal, unaware that the drink also contains a 23% alcohol quotient.
She rattles off her dutifully memorized monologue with pep and professionalism, impressing the director. It’s only when she takes a spoonful of the stuff that the professionalism ends and the comedy begins.
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Lucy’s first reaction to the taste is probably the highlight of the entire half hour. Her peppy face melts into a sick frown, as if she just threw back a shot of sewage milkshake. She punctuates it with a shiver that indicates the liquid slithering like bitter cement down her throat. The director makes her do it again and again, and with each rehearsal take, Lucille Ball adds just one more hiccup and mismatched syllable. The joy in the comedic sequence, the reason for its timelessness, is that it’s not an assault of quips and pratfalls. It’s the slowest of builds. By the end, she’s turned the Vitameatavegamin table into a pub counter, setting the spoon on the table and pouring the liquid into it with all the delicacy of Jackson Pollock. She’s not just a drunk version of Lucy. Her mannerisms seem to indicate that she’s morphed into an entirely different character: Lucy’s drunk uncle, maybe?
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Storytellers in any medium love to talk about stakes. Stakes, stakes, stakes, stakes, stakes. You could mistake a writers’ table for a butcher shop. The curious thing about this episode, though, is that the writers chose to stage the main sequence during the rehearsal of Ricky’s show, not the actual broadcast, when of course a lot more would be at stake as Lucy would be a drunken mess on live television.
It’s a smart move, though. By setting it at the rehearsal, they’ve granted the audience a scenario in which Lucy repeats the monologue over and over again, getting drunker and drunker in the process. The writers have essentially traded in higher stakes for a practically endless negative feedback loop of comedy.
Also notable about the classic sequence is how it functions more as a satire on advertising than it does as another testament to how daffy Lucy is. If the original girl had shown up to the audition, she too would have ended up stumbling through the studio proudly waving her three sheets. In a writer’s mind, at least, who’s “to blame” usually turns out to be the dramatic impetus for the whole story. In this case, it’s not Lucy. It’s the product-makers.
When “I Love Lucy” aired, commercial spots like these were common: instead of a 30-second segment with flashy visuals, ad breaks often just consisted of a pretty spokesperson talking to camera about product features through a mannequin-like smile, and they were often for snake-oily products like Vitameatavegamin. Since of course those advertisers were footing the bill for “I Love Lucy,” it was a bold move on Desilu’s part to produce an episode in which the biggest idiot on display isn’t Lucy, but the product of the week. The original broadcast of this episode more than likely cut from Lucy drooling over the Vitameatavegamin table to a spokesperson holding up a can of Fluffo Shortening (one of the show’s original sponsors).
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So with the timeless comedic sequence and sharp satire, what’s missing from “Lucy Does a TV Commercial”? There’s not much in the way of narrative elegance here. After Lucy’s inebriated rehearsal, there’s a built-in suspenseful anticipation of what kind of havoc she’ll wreak on Ricky’s show and what the consequences of that inevitable disaster will be. Alas, the writers are all out of steam at this point – Lucy stumbles on stage during Ricky’s broadcast, he frantically scoops her up, and the episode is done.
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This is one of those episodes that just ends with no real resolution or final dramatic punch to wrap up the story. The writers of “I Love Lucy” were indeed capable of constructing crackerjack plots with satisfying and often surprising endings, and when they did, they rewarded their audience with insight, however broad, into the characters or marriage or friendship or whatever sitcom-universal topic they happened to be riffing on that week.
It seems like a nitpicky quibble, but leaving the narrative of “Lucy Does a TV Commercial” dangling like a frayed wire makes the whole episode feeling like empty calories. But ultimately, who cares? It’s so tasty, too!
~ C.J. Arellano
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About the Art: As C.J. noted, this episode is all about that hilariously disgusted look on Lucy’s face. My hope is that anyone who looks at this artwork feels a little sick themselves. I used the putrid yellow/green color of the liquid, bold fuchsia color of the background, and frantic nature of the lines as your tickets to Barf Town. I also wanted to convey humor by playing up the dissonance of the blatant grossness and the happy declaration in the speech bubble. ~ Aireen Arellano
art by Aireen Arellano (to view larger version, click here)
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SHOW: I Love Lucy
EPISODE: “Lucy Does the Tango”
FIRST AIRED: Mar. 11, 1957
By the sixth season of I Love Lucy, the creators moved Lucy and the gang from Manhattan to the Connecticut countryside, ostensibly to unpack new opportunities for comedy and storytelling. The change certainly underscored the show’s function as a spry comedy of manners, as Lucy now had to battle the rigid etiquette and refined neighborly protocol of upstate New England. Something, however, was lost in translation: much of the country episodes don’t have the same vitality as the New York seasons. Whether it was due to creative fatigue, Lucy and Desi’s increasingly strained personal and professional lives, or just the fact that country-based slapstick makes the show feel just a little too broad and square (not even I Love Lucy could mine suspense from a tulip contest), the show had lost a little of its luster in the relocation.
Still, “Lucy Does the Tango” is the best of the country set. This is the episode in which Lucy stuffs a bunch of eggs down her shirt, only to find herself doing the tango with Ricky. So absurd, unlikely, and comically sublime is the situation that it must have been the episode on everyone’s mind when the first person pitched the idea, “Hey, let’s move them all to the country!”