MuggsVision
I've been trying lately - not too hard, I'm busy - to track down J. Fred Muggs. From 1953 to 1957, he was a regular contributor to NBC's then-new The Today Show. He is also a chimpanzee, who is according to some sources still alive. A few months ago, and this morning, I tried to track down his caretaker for an update (Muggs is getting old for a chimp), and left my name and number with the tree removal company where he (the caretaker) works. I haven't heard back, but I'll update you if I do.
It's hard to imagine the Today Show today adding a chimpanzee to the roster, though no primate could add less than Megyn Kelly did. And I'll admit to being one of those sticks-in-the-mud who doesn't love animal acts and thinks animals should not have jobs other than service animals. So with the caveat that capturing a chimpanzee from Cameroon and raising him on TV is gross, I've gotta hand it to them: the first few decades of TV really could be experimental in a way modern TV rarely is (this is not going to be a space where I bash modern TV or claim the good old days are behind us - there's been plenty of trash and plenty that's transcendent and PLENTY of transcendent trash on TV as long as there's been TV). I recently watched (thanks to someone on Reddit who tracked it down for me) a 1958 episode of Camera Three that intercut scenes from Waiting for Godot with scenes acted out from the comic strip, all in service of a discussion of nihilism in the work of Samuel Beckett and George Herriman. That's what I mean when I say there was a spirit of experimentation that's rare today.
Anyway, all this is to say, in my final analysis, WandaVision's presentation of historical family sitcom tropes was a bit reductive. I thought a lot of the specific parody was on-point, and learning how it filmed in front of an audience was cool as hell. But I'm not a huge MCU fan, and I feel like I become less of one each day, so my view of the show was always going to focus on what it had to say about sitcoms, not about the comic book twists or that quote about grief that everybody got worked up over for no good reason. I feel like Gregg Turkington and superheroics are my DKR: "Just stick with the sitcom pastiches and enough with the shooting balls of energy at each other, which nobody cares about anyway."
So that said, to a large extent, the family sitcom represents stability and predictability in the WandaVisionVerse - it's revealed that the sitcoms imitated by WandaVision were shows that Wanda watched on DVD as a child before her parents were exploded, and so she is creating a suburban community that's as sedate and peaceful as those shows (in order to get over the death of Vision in one of the Avengers movies, and also the amazing Kathryn Hahn was messing with everything the whole time or whatever, nobody ask me to understand the plot please and thanks). Wikipedia lists the shows included in the pastiche: The Dick Van Dyke Show, I Love Lucy, My Three Sons, Father Knows Best, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Bewitched, The Brady Bunch, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Family Ties, Full House, Out of This World, Malcolm in the Middle, Modern Family, and The Office. I believe it's deliberate that the world of WandaVision becomes more chaotic and dangerous as the sitcoms move through time, allowing for the nuance and edge that sitcoms gain over time.
It's certainly true that network and sponsor censorship has always limited what could be presented on TV, especially during the first hour of prime time - not only did Lucy & Ricky sleep in separate beds on I Love Lucy, the show's producers famously consulted with a priest, a minister, and a rabbi on episodes involving Lucy's pregnancy. It's undeniable that anyone living in 2021 would see the world of these shows as stifling and artificial, and it's important to remember that they functioned that way to contemporaneous audiences, too - married adults had sex in the 1950s, and so did unmarried adults. But television has always included transgressive elements pushing back against and working outside of broadcast constrictions. I'm thinking offhand of Lucy and Ricky's marriage, which was originally objected to as unbelievable (despite, of course, Lucy and Desi's real-life marriage); or the Honeymooners' portrayal of a low-income family where they'd shout out the window to their neighbors because they couldn't afford a phone; or most relevantly, the way The Goldbergs explored the loneliness and isolation of living in the suburbs. Father Knows Best, in fact, has experienced something like Machiavelli's The Prince: its title was intended somewhat ironically, satirizing the notion that the nuclear family was being headed by its smartest member. According to star Robert Young, quoted in Jeff Kisseloff's excellent oral history of early television, "The Box,"
Originally, the show was supposed to be called "Father knows Best?" ... It was supposed to be a jab at Father, who always assumes he is the head of the household, but everybody else knows that Mother is. We thought "Mother Knows Best" would be too obvious, so we called it "Father Knows Best?" but the sponsor, Kent cigarettes, didn't like it." Today the show tends to be lumped in with Leave it to Beaver and other shows that venerate the patriarch.
I don't intend to exclusively defend the programming of the 1950s - we all know that it mostly existed in the Venn diagram cross section of "anodyne" and "deeply bigoted." But I do think it's a little rich for any Disney product to suggest that there's programming on Disney Plus that's subversive television. Disney Plus is a streaming service that censored the word "fuck" in Hamilton, and cut out the braid-fucking scenes from Avatar, for fuck's sake. And of course, Marvel has a long fruitful relationship producing content friendly to the US military. A Roma witch kidnapping a small town in New Jersey to work through her grief losing her robot partner is certainly not something that would have been common fare on television in the 1950s, but the fact that at the end of the series the bad guys get busted by the feds and the good guys have spinoff movies and series set up is the kind of broad-appeal family-friendly stakes that Disney/MCU makes its bread and butter.
It's only partly fair, I think, to judge old art by contemporary standards. We should absolutely be judgmental about the racism, homophobia, sexism, and so on, of old series - not least of all because of the extensive cotemporaneous accounts of antiracism and queer- and women's liberation battles. But let's also not judge modern art by old standards. Congrats to 2021 television for identifying the ways it's less restrictive than television from seventy years ago, but shouldn't we ask that TV today be at least as subversive (or strange), comparatively, as it has been? It's too much to ask of Disney, I suppose, and I enjoyed a lot of WandaVision just like everyone, but it reminded me that television can do a lot more.
Some stray notes:
- If anyone makes a movie or TV show set in the world of 1950s-1960s TV, please cast me as Ernie Kovacs, ESPECIALLY if it's barely any screen time.
- I haven't watched last night's On Cinema Oscar Special yet but I will when I get a chance.
- I was watching some old clips from Charles Van Doren vs Herb Stempel on Twenty-One and it's wild that anyone thought this show wasn't fixed. These questions are super hard!
- I'm very anxious about this whole thing, so I appreciate any feedback, or if there are things you want me to write about in the future please let me know!