Play It Yet Again, Lucy
By Richard Zoglin
Sooner or later, we always seem to wind up back in the candy factory. You remember the scene: Lucy and Ethel go to work on a candy-wrapping assembly line. A conveyor belt feeds them chocolates at a ridiculously fast clip. They try desperately to keep up, frantically stuffing the candy into their blouses, hats and mouths before the supervisor returns. A comedy classic.
And now a comedy cliche. Nearly 40 years after the scene was first aired -- on Sept. 15, 1952, as the opening episode of I Love Lucy's second season -- it may be the most frequently repeated bit of film in television history. One recent sighting came in October, on the NBC special Funny Women of Television. It got a vigorous workout during all those TV tributes to Lucille Ball following her death in April 1989. It is one of two episodes reprised in full on a laser disc released by the Criterion Collection to commemorate the show's 40th anniversary. And, of course, on any given day it is probably being shown on some local station somewhere, part of the endlessly renewable cycle of I Love Lucy reruns.
Has a popular art form ever been so infatuated with its past? Increasingly, it seems that we are not viewing television so much as perpetually re-viewing it. A network show that becomes a hit is only starting its TV life cycle. The next step is a big syndication deal, then years and years of reruns on local stations and cable. Virtually every TV anniversary, star's death or Emmy Awards show provides an excuse to trot out another edition of Scenes We Like to See Over and Over Again: Ralph Kramden bickering with Alice, Elvis gyrating on Ed Sullivan, Lou Grant meeting Mary Richards for the first time ("I hate spunk!").
Even network prime time is falling under the spell of the past. Last February, CBS drew stellar ratings for a two-hour special celebrating The Ed Sullivan Show, and did nearly as well with tributes to All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Last weekend the network launched another classic- TV binge, with homages to M*A*S*H and The Bob Newhart Show, along with a second compilation of Sullivan clips. In June, to much fanfare, the network introduced a new sitcom from Norman Lear. The show, Sunday Dinner, was soundly beaten in the ratings by the program that followed it -- 20-year-old reruns of Lear's All in the Family.
TV's recycling process has been pushed to peak capacity by a profusion of cable channels searching for low-cost programming to fill their schedules. Nick at Nite woos baby boomers each evening with campy sitcoms like The Donna Reed Show and Get Smart. The Family Channel has cornered the market in old westerns (Wagon Train, The Virginian), while the Arts & Entertainment Network, originally conceived as a haven for fine-arts programming, now runs oldies , like The Avengers and Mrs. Columbo. Ted Turner's cable operation may attract a lot of attention with MGM movie blockbusters and environmental specials, but its most dependable ratings grabber is that unglamorous, uncolorized war- horse, The Andy Griffith Show.
Newer cable outlets are being forced to scrounge ever deeper in the vaults for fresh oldies. Comedy Central, the all-comedy cable network, has resurrected C.P.O. Sharkey, a dog from the mid-'70s starring Don Rickles. Nostalgia Television, a six-year-old network aimed at the "mature" audience, has unearthed such forgotten chestnuts as Date with the Angels, a short-lived '50s sitcom starring Betty White, and The Dennis O'Keefe Show, a one-season wonder from 1959-60.
The godfather of TV's back-to-the-past movement is the Museum of Television and Radio, a 15-year-old repository of memorabilia founded by former CBS chairman William S. Paley. At its elegant new quarters in midtown Manhattan, visitors can wander in and out of four screening rooms, browse through a computerized card catalog listing some 45,000 items, and repair to one of 96 TV and radio consoles to enjoy anything from President Kennedy's Inaugural Address to Don DeFore's inaugural appearance as Thorny on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.
The museum's aggressive president, Robert Batscha, insists that his institution is not pandering to nostalgia but preserving an important social and cultural record. Sure enough, the museum has rounded up hundreds of kinescopes and tapes from TV's past that might otherwise have been lost. Its curatorial work, moreover, has sparked a revival of interest in such seminal TV figures as Jackie Gleason and Ernie Kovacs.
Rummaging through the museum's collection is rewarding on both levels -- nostalgic and scholarly. A Woody Allen TV special from 1969, for example, provides a rare glimpse of Allen in his transitional phase from stand-up comic to film innovator. One segment is a brilliantly realized silent-movie short, with Allen as the Chaplinesque hero and a young Candice Bergen as his co-star. But the show's most startling revelation is a guest appearance by the Rev. Billy Graham, who joins Allen for a lighthearted but essentially serious discussion of God, morality and premarital sex. It is fascinating simply because it could never happen on a TV entertainment show today.
The vogue for vintage TV can be at least partly attributed to the baby-boom audience, which grew up on TV and has a seemingly insatiable appetite for + revisiting the media icons of youth. But it may also reflect a rejection, by audiences of all ages, of the creative exhaustion and tired formulas of most current TV fare. Television of the past was, to be blunt, not only different but very often better.
An old drama series like The Fugitive (with David Janssen as Dr. Richard Kimble, on the run after being wrongly convicted of murder) looks hopelessly unfashionable today, with its melodramatic narration, simplistic characters and stubborn avoidance of social relevance (no date rapists to be found). It does offer, however, something rarely seen in current TV drama: dark, intense morality tales, pitting one man's instinct for survival against his instinct for doing good.
Not every recycled show holds up so well. Some fondly remembered oldies, like The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, seem dated, and neither time nor camp tastes have improved Mister Ed. But even middling sitcoms like The Patty Duke Show are more effortlessly engaging than most of the nervous joke machines that pass for comedies today. Good ones like The Dick Van Dyke Show remind us that the trivial plot lines of old domestic comedies were often a mask for shrewd satire of suburban neuroses. The best ones, like I Love Lucy, which invented the vocabulary for the modern sitcom, have the formal perfection and infinite repeatability of great pop music.
Yes, even that darned candy factory.