On an Influential Sit Com

Commercial television has been around for going on 75 years now. The potential the medium had for good, for education, for making the world somehow smaller and better, hasn’t been reached in the intervening decades, sadly. Former head of the Federal Communication Commission, Newton Minow, said as far back as 1961, that TV was nothing more than a “vast wasteland” of useless entertainment, the electronic equivalent of bubblegum.

On the other hand, the world has been brought together around their television sets a few times in the past years. The assassination of John Kennedy, the first human on the moon, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a handful of other events showed us that, at times, the medium can indeed bring us together in a shared human experience. Then again, many people, especially those in the United States, were united in watching certain episodes of television situation comedies. The last episode of the comedy-drama M*A*S*H drew almost 106 Million viewers, for example. These situation comedies used to be the staple of television in the United States, but streaming services and subscription networks have replaced broadcast TV viewing in recent years.

However, the sitcom remains popular in the modern era with shows like The Big Bang Theory and its spin-off, Young Sheldon, still drawing large numbers of viewers in the streaming age. They and shows like Seinfeld, The Office, Parks and Recreation, All in the Family, and Mary Tyler Moore over the years all follow the same basic formula for the sitcom–one or two often implausible plotlines that get resolved in 22 minutes or so. And they can all trace their formula back to a show in the 1950s that set the mold for the genre. It was a show called I Love Lucy. The plot of the series saw a ditzy red-headed housewife and her up and coming entertainer husband in New York City, their daffy neighbors, and the hijinks that resulted from those interactions. That part wasn’t so unusual for entertainment of the day, but that’s not really what made the show groundbreaking.

Early TV followed much of the formats set by radio programs before them. Sitcoms, game shows, westerns, soap operas, and even musical/variety shows all started on radio years before TV took off and co-opted those shows to the new format. Even then, the jury was still out on whether or not TV would take hold in America. The popular magazine, the Reader’s Digest, had a feature article in the early 1950s that proposed that TV would not become popular because there was no way that Americans would simply sit and watch TV all day. No, the article argued, radio allowed Americans to read or eat or do homework and perform other things besides simply sitting in front of a box and spending our time only watching. I Love Lucy changed all that. The show not only popularized TV, but it also remade the sitcom into something that we all recognize today. First of all, the sitcom was owned by the stars themselves. The Desilu (after the married actors Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball) Studio produced the show. Arnaz was the driving business force behind it. The show was filmed, not taped, and that gave it a permanence that allowed it to live on in the perpetuity of re-runs. And Arnaz used a three camera set-up that allowed for quick cuts between shots on set, not only one static camera into which the characters had to walk into the shot and out of it.

And, most importantly, the show was filmed before a live studio audience. That was one way to increase the reaction of the TV viewing audience at home; if the studio audience laughed, Arnaz said, that was like having a giant “applause” sign going off in people’s houses. For those later shows, the ones that have come after Lucy in the intervening years, not all of them were filmed live. But most of them added laugh tracks, again to tell the viewing audience when something is funny, thus following the I Love Lucy formula (M*A*S*H famously had a laugh track in all scenes except in the operating room of the hospital).

The show was incredibly popular from the start, with some years seeing it get a more than 70% viewership of those homes that had television. People went out and purchased TVs simply to watch Lucy as well. In its run, the show won numerous Emmy awards for acting and production. For most of the show’s five year run, it was the number one show in the land. Almost everyone in the nation tuned in to watch Lucy have her baby in season 3 (at a time having a pregnant woman on TV was unheard of).

And I Love Lucy did something else that was incredibly forward-thinking for the 1950s in the realm of American culture. That decade saw the increasing rise of the Civil Rights movement where non-white races and other cultures in the United States began to advocate for equal acceptance before the law. You see, Desi Arnaz was born in Cuba. To most Americans, he was Hispanic. And to have him, a Hispanic man who in real life was married to Lucille Ball, be on TV in a relationship where he kissed his wife and slept in the bed next to her, well, that was groundbreaking at that time.

And that’s part of the reason why, while most sitcoms come and go, I Love Lucy stands alone.

On a Cultural Change

Statisticians say that soon, and possibly even now, the nation of India is the world’s most populous. The country is hardly a monolith, with a wide range of cultures and mores, beliefs and practices as well as a disparate history spread across a country that is the seventh largest in area. However, one constant cultural tradition had endured in India for hundreds of years: Women experienced lives that had fewer rights and choices than men have. Now, that was often the case in the western world as well (see the differences in pay rates for women verses men even today in most western nations), but India’s discrimination against women often bordered on servitude. But the culture has experienced change in the prospects for women mostly in the past 100 years. Most of that drastic change has occurred in the past almost 40 years due to an interesting addition to the lives of most Indian families.

The typical Indian family used to be patriarchal, hierarchal, and relegated women to specific roles and jobs within the family. For example, traditionally, women in India couldn’t own land or have any sense of self-determination. Multi-generational households depended on keeping the men as the decision-makers and keeping women in the supporting roles. Again, this was true to a degree in the west as well, but in India, the oppression was somewhat harsher before the 1900s. Change began happening during the period of British control of India (one of the few good things to result from that period, perhaps); women were granted more rights, and a few upper class Indian women were even allowed to serve as governmental administrators.

And that’s an added layer of oppression for women in India, historically: The Caste System. The upper class, made up of priestly families, is followed by an administrative class, a skill worker and famer class, and then a laborer class is at the lower end. Even still, there is one more class below the laborers–the untouchables, the poorest of the poor and lowest of the low. The British not-so-subtly used this caste system throughout their occupation, using the upper classes and Christian Indians in governmental positions almost exclusively.

However, women in India were given the right to vote at almost the same time women in the United States were given it–1921. But the combination of a tight family organization and the caste system kept most women from achieving their dreams and ambitions.

That began to change dramatically in the 1980s, and it changed for an unusual reason. You see, the change began to happen because of the purchase of a consumer item by most Indian homes. It has been documented that, in the year 1988, for example, five of these items were sold in India every minute, and the purchase of the item radically changed women who were exposed to it. The women of India were introduced to other women through the item; they were able to see that there were options to the lives they were living and those their daughters could have in the future. And the laws in India in the modern era meant that there was nothing legally the men in the families could do to stop the women from pursing their dreams and goals. They began shunning old traditions, according to one source, and they began to become more independent. They began practicing self-determination without the control or interference of the men in their lives. That means that today an entire generation of Indian women have reached their 30s with this new mindset and this new-found freedom of self-determination.

And what was the instrument of this radical change in India society among the women there?

Television.

On a Crazy Idea

Mr. Tolman’s chemistry class was one of the school’s more popular ones. Besides the fact that he was one of the older teachers at the high school in Rigby, Idaho, his teaching methods and personality attracted students’ attention and respect. It’s why they came to him with their problems, questions, and even their brainstorms. It’s why one of his younger but also more creative students came to him with a crazy idea.

The young man was named Phil. He was barely 14, tall for his age, and skinny. Phil was quite the wizard at the electro-magnetic sciences despite his youth and the fact that he and his family had not had electricity on their farmstead for very long. Mr. Tolman recognized the boy’s savant-like abilities, and he agreed to tutor the young man outside of school hours when the farm schedule permitted it.

One day, while he was plowing a field for his father, Phil had a wild thought. What if he could send pictures through electrical wires–or even the air? This was the early 1920s, and radio was only then becoming the primary means of electronic media for the United States. Phil wondered if voices could be transmitted by both wire (telephone) and the air (radio), then why couldn’t pictures also be sent those ways? He finished the plowing, unhitched the horses and fed them and put them away, then made his way to the attic of the family house where his bedroom was and where he had set up a crude lab to work on his electricity ideas. There, he quickly sketched an idea of how such a contraption might work.

The next morning at the breakfast table before school, Phil told his father about his idea. The dad, while realizing that his son knew so much more about electricity than he did, still worried how other people–famers, like him, who were largely ignorant on how such things worked–would react to such talk of sending pictures through the air. The boy was using words like “electrons” and “tubes” and other jargon that the man simply didn’t comprehend. He told Phil to stop talking gibberish and get to school. This frustrated the boy, and he angrily grabbed his book-strapped texts and headed out the door.

When Mr. Tolman entered his classroom that morning, he found Phil standing before his wall of chalkboards. Drawings and diagrams covered the surfaces. “What’s all this?” Mr. Tolman asked. Phil spun around. “I have an idea.”

“What does this have to do with chemistry?” Tolman asked, looking at the maze of lines and squiggles. “Mr. Tolman,” Phil began, swallowing his frustration at his father’s response, “you might be the only one who’ll understand what I’m thinking about. Let me explain it to you.” And, over the next several minutes, Phil explained his concept to his teacher.

And, Tolman told the entire story as he testified in court many years later, when powerful companies tried to sue Phil over his claim that he, not they, was the inventor of the greatest mass-media innovation ever created

“Television?” Mr. Tolman had asked 14 year old Philo T. Farnsworth many years before in his Idaho classroom. “What’s that?”