Past shocks! The TV rerun becomes social history
It's 1982—do you know where your children are? If they watch as much daytime and syndicated television as their elders, they are probably lost somewhere in time—maybe as far back as 1951, taking in an old I Love Lucy show. Perhaps they are watching the most famous episode of Lucy, the birth in 1953 of Little Ricky. Frantic father-to-be Ricky Ricardo wants to cancel a performance of his nightclub act to join his wife at the hospital; Lucy, whose antic zaniness has been transmuted into the madonna-like calm then attributed to every expectant mother, sends him off to work with the unchallengeable claim: "You can't be where I am, anyway." And sure enough, when he takes her to the maternity ward, a nurse insists that the Ricardos kiss goodbye in the lobby. No husband is allowed upstairs because menfolk have no business meddling in childbirth.
Such nostalgic—and telling—reminders of the way we once were are increasingly available to the TV viewer. Nearly half the homes in the U.S. can tune in to a Lucy rerun. Such venerable series as Hogan 's Heroes and the Andy Griffith Show have been selling in syndication for more money than ever. "In the past ten years, there has been a significant increase in the number of independent stations," says Dennis Gillespie, a senior vice president of Viacom International, the world's major supplier of syndicated shows. "And those stations are buying more and more syndicated programs."
TV is often, and rightly, regarded as a mirror of the social realities of the present. It also serves as a kind of time machine for backtracking into social history.
Perhaps the most appealing—though on reflection disquieting— glimpses that TV reruns give us are of wifehood, motherhood and family life, back when those alone were supposed to make a woman happy. Even before Little Ricky's birth, for example, Lucy Ricardo stayed home as a housewife. Her urge to take a job and fulfill ambitions of her own was considered one of the wackier aspects of her humor. Lucy's contemporary Peg Riley (in William Bendix's The Life of Riley, 1953-58) stayed home too, despite the constant money worries stemming from Riley's modest wage as a riveter. And the handful of working women in '50s TV were mostly man-hungry spinsters like Eve Arden's schoolteacher in Our Miss Brooks (1952-56) and Ann B. Davis' jill-of-all-trades Schultzy in the Bob Cummings Show (1955-59).
Nearly two decades later, Edith Bunker stayed home too, but from the first season of All in the Family (1971-79) her joblessness was an issue. A husband who didn't want his wife to work was not just manly and protective, he was insecure. Now that the majority of married women work, so do the characters of TV. Indeed, of the ten top-rated weekly entertainment series this season, only Dallas and The Jeffersons are about families with wives steadily at home—and neither Sue Ellen Ewing nor Louise neither Sue Ellen Ewing nor Louise Jefferson fits snugly into conservative demographics.