“What’s a Rerun?” dusts classic TV episodes off the shelf at random and aims to examine, through art and analysis, why we continue to watch and re-watch. Do these stories still have value in a relentlessly modern world of visual ephemera, or are some better left in the vault? (email us at whatsarerun [at] gmail dot com)
I LOVE LUCY - “Job Switching”
(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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THE TWILIGHT ZONE - “The Invaders”
(art by Aireen Arellano - to view larger version, click here)
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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.
TAXI - “On the Job”
(art by Aireen Arellano - to view larger version, click here)
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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.
THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW – “Coast-to-Coast Big Mouth”
(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.
FRIENDS – “The One with Five Steaks and an Eggplant”
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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I LOVE LUCY - “The Diet”
art by Aireen Arellano (to view larger version, click here)
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SHOW: I Love Lucy
EPISODE: “The Diet”
FIRST AIRED: Oct. 29, 1951
In “The Diet,” Lucy plunges into a crash diet to wriggle herself into a size 12 dress and into Ricky’s show. It’s no Vitameatavegamin or chocolate factory escapade, but this early episode conflates the most well-worn atoms that floated in the I Love Lucy writers’ brains: Lucy’s infantile desperation to get in the act, the audacious if not admirable extremes to which our heroine resorts to achieve her improbable goal, potent sight gags, a hammy nightclub toe-tapping number at episode’s end, and a common adult issue of the week – in this case, weight consciousness – so “relatable” in that broad sitcom sense that the episode could double as a magazine article. Only the fourth episode produced, “The Diet” is like Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, presenting the show’s most vital components in one finely drawn half-hour.
I LOVE LUCY - “Lucy Does the Tango”
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!”
