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13 October 1988 (slrpnk.net)
submitted 3 weeks ago by to c/foxtrot@slrpnk.net
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[–] 1 point 3 weeks ago (4 children)

I toast your interesting thoughts!

I Love Lucy, Bewitched

These are reasonable suggestions, but I feel like it's not decisively clear that the 'stay at home' spouse in those cases was notably smarter & more talented than the other, unlike Foxtrot, The Honeymooners and The Simpsons. I feel like in all three of those latter shows, it's near miraculous that the husband was able to bag the attractive smartie, so to speak.

Actually, in I Love Lucy there was indeed something of a super-improbable marriage, in old man Fred somehow marrying much younger Ethel. I do recall reading that Vivian Vance felt borderline humiliated by being matched with chronic drunkard William Frawley, who was on thin ice in terms of taking 'one more strike' before being fired. He turned out to be pretty great though, IMO.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago (3 children)

    Oh, I'm sure my examples weren't the best. This was all off the top of my head.

    There are better examples, I think, but they come from shows where the cast was large enough and the plots complex enough that the drama of the show wasn’t as necessarily centered on husband/wife conflict. Many shows aren't like this and in these, if you have a competent partner, most likely you will be a buffoon.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

    I dunno... kinda seems like you're off an a tangent there, which is a very interesting tangent IMO, but still not really what I was trying to focus in on.

    I'm not gonna state my theme point ad nauseam, but I suspect there are some very significant reasons why shows like The Honeymooners were rare in terms of the skewed husband-wife dynamic. Patriarchy probably being first. Patriarch and patriarchical tradition across pop media.

    That is the real point I was trying to get at, explaining why it took so very long for a show like The Simpsons to finally break through.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    Ah, I see. Because your original comment seemed to confine the question to American media and TV specifically, I thought your interest was more in the mechanics of storytelling in that genre than it was.

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