Amazon’s new series Fallout starts with the end of the world: News reports of an international crisis interrupt a children’s birthday party, mushroom clouds appear outside, and chaos ensues. The year is 2077, but it feels like the 1950s. In this world, the Cold War never ended, and neither did the consumerism that defined mid-century America.

Two centuries after the opening sequence—when the plot of Fallout shifts into gear—cities are devastated, and communities have descended into violence. But brands endure. Advertisements for “Nuka-Cola” and “Super Duper Mart” litter the new American wasteland. Meanwhile, deep underground, a parallel society of Vault Dwellers live in high-tech shelters, cooking with “Atomic Queen” ovens, watching movies on “Radiation King” VHS players, and snacking on “Sugar Bombs.”

Lucy and Hank MacLean enjoy some relaxation in Vault 33, where it feels a lot like 1950s America. Courtesy of Prime Video.

The show, which might easily be dismissed as suburban nostalgia, is rooted in messy historical reality. In mid-century America, conspicuous acts of consumption defined a society facing the end, spurred in large part by the macabre influence of the bomb—evincing fascination and discomfort.

Today, trotting out the bomb to advertise goods might seem misguided at best and exploitative at worst. But in the 1940s and 1950s, the dawn of a new technological age promised an unleashing of scientific potential, and audiences were entranced. Walt Disney produced the 1957 television special for schoolchildren “Our Friend the Atom,” and President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched a very public pro-nuclear campaign called “Atoms for Peace” to reassure the public that the nuclear future was not just about destruction. Meanwhile, atomic advertisers tapped into the excitement of technological modernity while trying to sidestep the true horrors of nuclear war.

Still from a 1950s U.S. Army information film, which appears in the documentary Atomic Café.

So, just as the fictional characters in Fallout sip on Nuka-Cola, real-life Americans of the era sipped a popular cocktail inspired by the atomic bomb. On August 6, 1945, less than an hour after reports of the successful attack on Hiroshima, members of the Washington Press Club mixed gin, Pernod, and vermouth, charging 60 cents a pour for the “Atomic Cocktail.” It was a smash hit with members of the press—and went on to become particularly beloved in Las Vegas, where atomic tests were a 1950s tourist attraction.

Fallout’s soundtrack features hits such as the Ink Spots’ “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” (1941) and Five Stars’ “Atom Bomb Baby” (1957), harking back to a time when songs about the end of the world routinely climbed the Billboard charts. And its reimagined advertisements for “atom powered” wind-up robots and washing detergent that’s as “tough on dirt as a nuclear blast” refer to genuine Cold War-era products that stocked shelves at Macy’s and Sears.

But sometimes marketers weren’t successful in striking a balance between sensationalizing their products and terrifying their audience. Such was the case with a product central to both Fallout and the real-life Cold War home front: the fallout shelter.

One of the show’s main characters is Cooper Howard, “star of stage and screen” and “pitchman for the end of the world.” In advertisements for Vault-Tec, he sells shelters “strong enough to keep out the rads and the Reds.” His pitches close with a promise, made directly to the camera: “You can be a hero, too. By purchasing a residence in a Vault-Tec vault today. Because if the worst should happen tomorrow, the world is going to need Americans just like you to build a better day after.”

A 1951 prototype basement fallout shelter sits on a New Jersey boardwalk. Courtesy of the National Archives.

In real life, a similar directive came from an even bigger celebrity. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy delivered a nationwide address encouraging ordinary citizens to build their own fallout shelters. Speaking to around 25 million viewers, Kennedy argued, “We owe that kind of insurance to our families and to our country.” That September, President Kennedy opened an entire issue of Life magazine dedicated to fallout shelters with a letter that made the remarkable claim that “97 out of 100” citizens might survive the next war if they took survival into their own hands. Outsourcing survival to the private sector gave rise to swarms of local businesses. Newsweek estimated that in one week in October 1961, over 31 shelter companies applied for business licenses in Atlanta. In the same month companies like Peace-O-Mind Shelter Corporation in Texas, Survival-All Incorporated in Ohio, Survival Construction Specialist in Denver, and Diamond Blocks in Boston all opened their doors for business.

Driving profit was no afterthought in the development of the Cold War home front; it was central to its social function. Historian Lizabeth Cohen describes America immediately following the end of World War II as a “consumers’ republic” defined by the rise of powerful new political language that equated good citizenship with effective consumerism. Shelter businesses, then, attempted to marry two eminently successful ideological constructs of the era: national security and the self-made, individualistic, suburban consumer family. But there were limits to even the best salesman’s pitch. Fallout depicts a nation duped into life underground. But many real-life American households were not so easily convinced—and shelter salesmen routinely went bust, even as the atomic clock ticked close to midnight.

Take James Byrne, a Detroit-based plywood businessman who described the shelter trade as a “can’t miss proposition,” with every political statement from the Oval Office a “million-dollar free advertisement.” As international tensions rose in the summer and fall of 1962, Byrne went door to door trying to make a buck—and failed miserably. “People listen to the sales pitch, take all the literature,” Byrne’s best salesman, Sal George recalled, “ask questions and then just walk away.”

Getting desperate, during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, Byrne and George loaded up a flatbed truck with their model shelter, drove it around town, dropped the price by $100, and posted a sign reading “FALLOUT SHELTERS—WHILE THEY LAST.”  There was not even a “nibble of a sale.” Eventually, they offered it up free of charge, and a Michigan family hauled the shelter away. “Last I heard from them they were having trouble assembling it. But I’m not asking questions,” said Byrne.

His experience was not unique. Between 1961 and 1963 an estimated 600 shelter companies across the United States filed for bankruptcy. Given the opportunity to purchase their families’ safety, most citizens rejected the salesmen’s pitch.

“The future, my friend, is products,” a fellow actor tells Cooper Howard in Fallout. “You’re a product. I’m a product. The end of the world is a product.” Maybe in their world. But history shows us that when faced with the prospect of total annihilation, Americans never really embraced the idea that survival should be a consumer choice.

The post What If Cold War Consumerism Never Ended? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

’Tis the season.

The season for television shows to chug too much eggnog, forget their earthly cares for an hour or so, and jump the proverbial yuletide shark.

The result, whether it’s treacly sweet, outrageously theatric, or capable of bringing an audience to tears, comes like clockwork each December, when—for good or bad—television cuts away from its regularly scheduled programming to tap into the spirit of the season.

I’m talking stars. I’m talking spectacle. I’m talking, more than likely, somebody dressing up as Santa.

I’m talking, if it’s not clear, about the holiday special.

I grew up with an appreciation for the scripted counterpart of this, the holiday episode—from dinosaurs and cavemen singing along to Christmas carols on The Flintstones to the cast of Community transforming into Claymation toys to the annual Doctor Who drop that had high-school me in an absolute chokehold: Tears (me, at the exit of David Tennant)! Dickens! The better-than-it-should-be Murray Gold novelty song!

But I came of age too late to fully appreciate the shmaltzy old-school celebrity Christmas variety shows of yore (you know the ones, packed with musical numbers, guest stars, dancing, and zany surprises). Over the last few years, though, I’ve found myself actively seeking out the latest generation of these specials. Tuning in to NBC’s “Christmas at Graceland” this year, the first live musical televised holiday special at Presley’s old estate, helped clarify what it was that draws me, and so many others, to them. As Lana Del Rey performed her rendition of the classic 1955 song “Unchained Melody,” an Elvis favorite, I realized that I was witnessing something timeless, something so many of us really do hunger for, especially in these uncertain times.

The holiday special first came on the scene in 1950, another year badly in need of comfort. The world, still recovering from the impact of World War II, was bracing for more conflict; the Korean War had broken out just months earlier, the first major proxy war in the Cold War, and the fighting foreshadowed the long, bloody years ahead. The early holiday special served as a balm of sorts, inviting families to gather together for some seasonal cheer.

Technically 1950 wasn’t the first year Christmas came to television. In America, early offerings, like a 1946 televised “North Pole Toyland” from Wanamaker’s DuMont Studio, showed children playing in “toy world,” carolers singing, and even a Santa workshop (who played Santa in that show is anyone’s guess—1946 was, notably, the first year that male Santas outnumbered female Santas again since before World War II). In 1948, “Surprise From Santa” featured noted stage and screen actor Whitford Kane playing that famous “snowy-bearded gentleman” on television, and debuted a new song, “Sleighbells,” by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz. And of course, long before television came around, radio had already set a precedent—was the “ur-Christmas special” really the Royal Christmas message, first delivered in a radio broadcast by George V in 1932?

But 1950 was different. Like the snow falling outside, Christmas blanketed programming. It was, truly, “Christmas on the airwaves” as a New York Times’ television programming guide proclaimed, announcing that “most regularly scheduled programs will abandon their usual formats to bring … viewers programs of a seasonal nature.”

Among the listed specials to be aired on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day: “Herald of Goodwill,” which featured Christmas carols from different nations; “Nativity,” depicting images of Jesus’ birth by master painters; a televised church service; a candlelight mass from the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.; and the first-ever TV adaptation of the Christmas-themed musical Babes in Toyland (which is sadly lost to time).

The biggest splash was “One Hour in Wonderland,” Walt Disney (and his company)’s first real venture into television.

“Fair warning to all mothers and grandmothers preparing dinner for Christmas Day,” wrote L.A. Times critic Walter Ames. “Don’t set your dinner table between the hours of 4 and 5 PM. If you do, the food is liable to get cold.” The reason? That “spectacular” Disney Christmas special he’d seen a preview of, hosted by ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, his dummy Charlie McCarthy, and the actress Kathryn Beaumont. The special, sponsored by Coca-Cola, was set up like a Christmas party at the Disney studio. A magic mirror opened the portal into the fantasy of Disney, unlocking previews of Alice in Wonderland (which would hit theaters the following summer), giving airtime to a host of characters from Mickey Mouse to Donald Duck, and behind-the-scenes peeks at Walt Disney Productions.

Just a small percentage of U.S. households even owned a television in 1950 (a 13-inch set cost the equivalent of around $2,000 today). But for those who did tune in, maybe using a screen magnifier to make the tiny black-and-white picture appear a little larger, they were enraptured. The television special garnered an estimated 90% of viewers—and as Richard T. Stanley joked in The Eisenhower Years: A Social History of the 1950s, “possibly helped sell a gazillion Cokes.” The reviews were raves: “After seeing it, I know why television was born,” Hedda Hopper announced in her gossip column that week.

“One Hour in Wonderland” was such a hit that it became an annual tradition, rebranded as “The Walt Disney Christmas Show” the following year with a record television budget of $250,000.

Though the Disney special may have made the most visible impact in 1950, less remembered (perhaps because it aired on NBC a few weeks late) is arguably an even more seminal program that aired that season: the inaugural “Bob Hope Christmas Show.”

“We want you to just get back into the holiday spirit, and imagine you’re back around Christmas time,” joked Hope at the start of the special to set the scene. Guests included film actor Robert Cummings, opera singer Lily Pons, and tap dancer Betty Bruce. There were laughs—like one skit of four department store Santas commuting home on the subway—and there were poignant moments, notably the ending, when Hope brought Eleanor Roosevelt out on stage.

She started by thanking Hope for his recent tour to visit military bases in Korea, Japan, and Alaska.

“When you travel you get a chance to meet and talk to all kinds of people,” Hope commented. He paused a moment before adding, “These days you find many people are confused and more than a little afraid of the future.”

“That’s understandable in times as troubled as ours,” Roosevelt agreed.

It was the first of 44 Christmas shows Hope would film over his lifetime. Other celebrity hosts, from Bing Crosby to Dean Martin and more, followed his playbook to bring a dose of holiday spirit to the season. But by the turn of the century, when Hope’s final special aired in 1994 (the same year that fellow holiday stalwart Perry Como wrapped his last Christmas special), the future of the seasonal variety special seemed up in the air.

Rather than turn into a corny relic from TV’s past, a new wave of specials in the 2000s showed there was something more substantial to the formula. At first, celebrities returned with a bit of a satirical wink: Stephen Colbert for Comedy Central in 2008 or Bill Murray for Netflix in 2015. But in recent years, hosts have cast irony aside in favor of embracing what the holiday special first set out to do. From Lady Gaga and the Muppets to Kacey Musgraves to Mariah Carey (unofficial patron saint of Zócalo Public Square), celebrities are once again finding success by leaning into the shtick of it all.

Like in the earliest days of the holiday special, fewer may be watching now, in this age of streaming. But for those like me who are still tuning in, I suspect, whether or not they celebrate the season, they are watching in search of some age-old winter cheer to help warm up these long winter nights.

The post Why We Hunger for the Holiday Special appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In September 1955, 67 TV critics got the opportunity of a lifetime: An all-expenses paid trip to London for a week, courtesy of Johnson & Johnson and Wildroot Cream Oil.

They were there to learn about a new TV program called The Adventures of Robin Hood. The series was the first British-American co-production, and one of the very first programs available in the UK’s then-fledgling commercial television landscape. The half-hour episodes starred Richard Greene as the title character and Bernadette O’Farrell as love interest Maid Marian. It filmed at England’s historic Nettlefold Studios, renamed Walton Studios.

The junket was something out of Mad Men. The critics boarded a martini-and-cigarette-laden charter out of Idlewild Airport, which would later become JFK Airport. They stayed at London’s new Westbury Hotel, and luxury buses shuttled them around to the usual tourist draws, including Nottingham and Sherwood Forest.

Then, there were parties on the actual set at Walton, where the entertainment journalists could mingle with the show’s producers, set designers, actors, and directors.

But not the writers.

The writers of Robin Hood would never be made available for interviews. And they would never be credited for their work on the program, at least not with their own names. Indeed, some of the writers of Robin Hood would not have been allowed to leave the United States.

That’s because they were among Hollywood’s blacklisted—media workers victimized by Sen. Joe McCarthy’s persecution of those accused of communist ties and banned from working.

Had the writers’ identities been discovered, the show couldn’t have proceeded. Johnson & Johnson and Wildroot would have immediately withdrawn their millions of dollars in investment. And this loss of investment would have led to the withdrawal of Official Films, the U.S.-based distribution company that sold the program to CBS-TV in America and the CBC in Canada. Naturally, the broadcasters themselves would have withdrawn their commitment to air it.

So why did the show use these writers despite those risks?

The answer to that question was Hannah Dorner Weinstein.

Weinstein developed the series with leftist writers Ring Lardner Jr., Ian McLellan Hunter, and others. She’d worked with many of them on FDR’s 1944 re-election campaign, as executive director of the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (ICCASP), which she co-founded. They’d also worked together when she was a vice-chair and co-founder of Progressive Citizens of America.

Lardner and Hunter had both been targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and were unemployable as screenwriters. Their involvement in Robin Hood was known only by Weinstein and two or three others on the show who were sworn to secrecy.

In making Robin Hood, Weinstein followed a formula she developed two years earlier with two other blacklisted writers, Walter Bernstein and Abraham Polonsky. With the writers using pseudonyms, they’d created a single-season detective program called Colonel March of Scotland Yard. That series, featuring actor Boris Karloff (a friend of Weinstein’s), caught the attention of British mogul Lew Grade who decided to help Weinstein build her own studio. She did, and in 1954, Sapphire Films was created.

Still under surveillance by the FBI and the CIA for her own political activities back home in New York, the petite former journalist implemented a strict procedure for getting scripts and notes back and forth across the Atlantic. She did the same with getting the writers paid—no easy feat, considering they had to use pseudonyms for everything. Weinstein, 44 and a single mother of three, sweated mightily each time a journalist asked to speak to one or more of the show’s writers. She’d redirect the questioner to a trusted producer or assistant who would then find a way to deflect.

Weinstein’s choice of the legend of Robin Hood to challenge the cultural climate of the Cold War, and allegorize the contemporary geopolitical conflicts of the period was an apt one. As historian of blacklist-era entertainment Andrew Paul summarizes, Robin Hood “was an outlaw with a keen sense of social justice…His antagonistic attitude toward the authoritarian Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham had the potential to reflect midcentury antifascist sentiments. And his empathy toward the poorest of England’s inhabitants could reflect socialist and Popular Front positions on wealth distribution.”

For example, in one episode of the show, called “The Miser,” a lord collects double rents from his tenants to cover his own taxes. Robin tricks him into thinking that an alchemist can turn buttons into silver and returns the money to the villagers. In another episode, “A Year and a Day,” Robin assists a serf who has taught himself how to do surgery by helping the man gain his freedom so he can treat the poor for free.

Lardner and Hunter weren’t the only blacklisted writers involved. Episodes were written by Adrian Scott, John Howard Lawson—members of the Hollywood Ten along with Lardner— and Howard Koch, Waldo Salt, Gertrude Fass, Fred Rinaldo, and Robert Lees (creators of the Abbott & Costello franchise), Arnold Manoff, and Hyman Kraft. Lardner headed up a writing cadre in New York; Scott did the same for Los Angeles.

Weinstein’s productions gave blacklisted writers the ability to put food on their tables, while allowing those same writers to impart sociological subtext about fascism, persecution and, leadership (good and bad). She also allowed them to take aim at the injustices of the Hollywood blacklist.

In “The Vandals,” for example, the sheriff interrogates a village ironsmith to make the man confess that he has made arrow tips for Robin Hood.

“I know you are a decent citizen now,” the lawman goads him, mimicking the language used by Congressional inquisitors who baited former radicals into naming the names of communists and fellow travelers.

Above all, though, Robin Hood was entertaining. The series was a huge hit in the U.S., Britain, and Canada, often taking a spot among the top 20 programs. It was in production for four years and wound up with 143 half-hour episodes. Before its first season was half over, Official Films and sponsors commissioned more seasons of it—and of Sapphire-produced costumed dramas The Adventures of Sir Lancelot and The Buccaneers, featuring a very young Robert Shaw (1956) and then Sword of Freedom (1957).

Ironically, the popularity of these Sapphire programs made life even more difficult for its writers. Talent agents wanted to poach them, but could not find out who they were. The writers couldn’t be at the 1955 junket, and they weren’t ever available stateside, either. The job of deflecting chiefly fell to story editor and trusted lieutenant Albert Ruben, who ran interference between the production company and these types of requests from press or advertising executives.

What made it all work was that Weinstein and her writers trusted each other, perhaps because she faced the same risks that they did. In 1950, she had been fired from her job as a public relations executive for her leftist activity, and her appearance on McCarthy’s list of “concealed communists.” The listing was incorrect—she was not a communist. But, had she not left the country, it was likely she would have been subpoenaed by some arm of McCarthy or the House on Unamerican Activities Committee, or had her passport revoked, or both.

So it was that, in the mid-1950s, this woman who had been outspoken for decades made a shift and let her television productions be the face of her activism. “Meet Hannah [Weinstein],” a British, syndicated columnist wrote in 1959, “the Quiet Woman of television. You won’t have seen her on your screen. She rarely makes news in the papers, avoids interviews if she can. But the fabulously long-running Robin Hood, Sword of Freedom, and Sir Lancelot all owe their tele-creation to this petite American.”

Their writers quietly owed their livelihoods to her, and never forgot.

The post When Screenwriters Won an Uncredited <br>Victory appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Since The Truman Show premiered 25 years ago, the premise—about a man unaware his entire life has been a reality TV program—has gone from thought experiment to reality.

Jury Duty, which recently debuted on Amazon Freevee, is the latest example. The docu-style show follows a group of jurors through a civil trial. The process looks and feels real, but everything, from the judge to the jurors to the case itself, is fictional with the exception of one “juror,” a likable 29-year-old contractor from San Diego named Ronald.

What I find most interesting about Jury Duty is how it positions itself. It wants us to know that it means well. Yes, Ronald doesn’t know he’s being duped, but everyone behind the scenes is looking out for him—rooting for him, even, by setting him up for a hero’s journey. “We never wanted to do a show where we were punching down and Ronald was the butt of the joke,” co-creator and executive producer Lee Eisenberg told AP. “I think that the show has a warmth and an optimism and feels winning, while still being hilarious and weird and surprising.”

In this way, Jury Duty comes off like the kinder, gentler cousin of The Rehearsal, comedian Nathan Fielder’s experiment in human behavior, which came out last year. Fielder, who is working with HBO money, goes to extreme lengths through elaborate sets and hijinks to help participants “rehearse” major moments in their life to family, friends, acquaintances that don’t know they’re part of it. But the “Fielder Method” does not coat itself in niceties. Instead, the show’s genius is the constant state of unease and downright discomfort it projects on the audience. The result makes all of us feel culpable in the culture of media surveillance and voyeurism that this kind of TV format has normalized.

We’ve been wading into these uncomfortable waters all the way back to the forerunner of contemporary reality TV shows. Starting in the late 1940s, the pioneer of them all, Candid Camera, used early hidden-camera techniques to capture unguarded moments of ordinary people for mass entertainment.

Candid Camera creator Allen Funt saw himself as a “student of human nature.” Born in Brooklyn in 1914, he attended Cornell University where he briefly was a research assistant to the influential social psychologist Kurt Lewin. After graduation, he worked as an adman until he joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps, where he brought his fascination for human behavior to radio. But it was while he was recording GI life that he encountered an issue: The soldiers he interviewed tensed up when he started his recorder and only let their guard down when he stopped it. What, he wondered, would happen if they didn’t know they were being captured on tape?

Candid Camera was his answer. Starting as Candid Microphone on the ABC Radio Network in 1947, it moved to ABC Television a year later. Using recordings—first audio captured by hidden microphones, and later video by hidden cameras—the show sought to catch unsuspecting people “in the act of being themselves.”

From the start, Funt wanted to create the most realistic situation possible: “[A] good conceptual idea is only the start,” he would later write in an article for Psychology Today. “You have to make lots of adjustments to create viewer believability and really involve the subject. You need the right setting, one in which the whole scenario will fit and make sense to the audience even when it doesn’t to the actor.”

The setups were endless: Buster Keaton played a klutz at a lunch counter. Jayne Mansfield a damsel in distress on the way to the airport. Over several appearances, Muhammad Ali offered a range of performances, from pretending to be a messenger delivering packages to appearing on a schoolyard to surprise kids. The show revealed the gag at the end of each stunt, with its famous catchline: “Smile, You’re on Candid Camera.”

Audiences were enraptured, but critics called foul on the deceptive nature of the show. After all, when you broke it down, Funt was putting unsuspecting “marks” on national TV for entertainment. In Real People and the Rise of Reality Television, historian Michael McKenna writes that over the years Candid Camera was charged with being everything from “invasive,” “misrepresentative,” “exploitative,” to “cruel.”

Fred Nadis, a scholar of Candid Camera, writes that these accusations may have hit home for Funt, and even inspired him to create Pictures of People, a show where he traveled the country, asking people who knew they were being recorded to speak candidly about their lives and experiences. But if you’ve never heard of Pictures of People, there’s a reason. The 1963 program only lasted a year.  

Audiences didn’t want transparency, they wanted Candid Camera. Solid ratings mixed with cheap production value unlocked a formula for success that’s continued to be replicated and advanced to this day.

By the time The Truman Show debuted in 1998 (six years after a 1992 play by Mark Dunn called Frank’s Life, also about a man unaware his life is a reality TV program), the spectacle of the O.J. Simpson murder trial had already kicked off the era of reality TV as we know it.

The Truman Show attempted to pump the breaks, asking us to consider if the future of televised “reality” was worth the human cost involved. At an early stage in production, director Peter Weir even tried to make this point more explicit by having cameras pointed at audiences in movie theaters to make their reactions become part of the film. Was this what we really wanted?

Roger Ebert praised Weir in his review of The Truman Show, observing that “the underlying ideas made the movie more than just entertainment” and the film brought “into focus the new values that technology is forcing on humanity.”

But while The Truman Show became a critical and commercial success, there was no putting the genie back in the bottle. Audiences might have seen the mirror being reflected back on them, but they didn’t care. Candid Camera continued to run in various iterations until 2014, when it was surpassed by bolder offerings in the format from Punk’d to The Joe Schmo Show. More advanced technology and methods of surveillance continue to pave the way for the age we’re readily entering today where everything from iPhones to Amazon Ring doorbells enable us to turn nonconsenting strangers into viral content.

It’s what stopped me from watching The Rehearsal at first. Yes, at least the people involved in the show knew what they were signing up, but it was hard not to see them as civilians all the same. Who signed off on this? Did they get any media training? The Rehearsal takes these questions and runs with them. It all comes to a head in the episode “Pretend Daddy,” where Remy, one of the child actors cast to play Fielder’s son, gets confused and starts to think Fielder is his actual dad and tells him he loves him. Remy’s mother explains that his real father is absent from his life, and Fielder attempts to explain that they’re just acting, but Remy just doesn’t understand. It’s a deeply uncomfortable episode, and Fielder holds the lens unblinkingly as it unfolds. He implicates not just himself but us watching along at home, viewing this footage that’s ostensibly billed as entertainment.

Jury Duty gives the audience an easier pass. Since the show came out, Ronald himself has said in interviews that the experience is one that he’ll never forget.

Even so, it’s hard not to see him like one of the “marks” on Candid Camera. Because Ronald never opted in. This was a path that he was unknowingly put on, so that we on the other end of the camera could enjoy watching him navigate this fantasia.

The actor James Marsden, who plays an exaggerated version of himself on Jury Duty, has spoken about how he only wanted to do the show if it supported Ronald. “I needed to make sure it was more than just getting a laugh out of it.” But it’s hard not to read the discomfort in his comments when he addresses the ethical questions around the show. As he said himself at one point, “We’re kind of playing god a little bit in this.”

The post Smile, You’re on <i>Jury Duty</i>! appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It spiraled from there, an easy escape from what was becoming an increasingly rough year.

Ever since the sitcom emerged in the late 1940s, the format has offered a bulwark against reality.

The first sitcom, short for “situation comedy,” featured real-life married couple Mary Kay and Johnny Stearns. The domestic comedy, characterized by its screwball sensibilities, drew from the couple’s own experiences as newlyweds. (As Stearns later explained, “If Mary Kay got stuck in an elevator, it would give me an inspiration for us getting stuck in an elevator.”) By the time Mary Kay and Johnny wrapped in 1950, the early sitcom ecosystem was flourishing as adaptations of American radio comedy programs began making the leap from the airwaves to television, with shows like I Love Lucy and The Goldbergs establishing the familiar lexicon of the genre we know today.

From the beginning, there was a reassuring sameness to the narrative structure. Turn on an episode, and you knew what to expect; should you have to step out for a moment, you could trust that when you returned, you’d find the same familiar faces interacting together on screen, like no time at all had passed.

Most importantly in sitcoms, there’s an implicit understanding: nothing will ever go that wrong. That’s because the sitcom is an episodic fantasy of life. Sure, the real world peeks and prods at the edges of the sitcom universe, but you know that here a resolution will always be forthcoming in 30 minutes or less.

It’s what makes the sitcom such an ideal comfort watch. Or at least that’s what it’s been for me the past few months, after some unexpected health issues led me to spend a good chunk of it in bed.

It was when I found myself rewatching the same episode of Frasier for the third time in as many months that I started to realize just how swept up in sitcoms I had become.

The season four episode is classic Frasier, with a stream of jokes, including a set up where Frasier’s brother, Niles Crane, takes out a magazine advertisement in hopes of expanding his private psychiatry practice. The script was intended to read: Jung specialist servicing individuals, couples… groups… Satisfaction guaranteed… Tell me where it hurts.

Niles is played by David Hyde Pierce, whose comic instincts verge on poetic, and the punchline comes when he learns that the magazine got the copy wrong. Flustered, he storms into the room to tell Frasier what happened. Rather than Jung specialist, they’d printed “hung specialist.”

Without missing a beat, Frasier asks, drolly, “Any calls?”

A white-faced Niles responds, “It’s a telethon.”

I could probably watch his delivery 100 times, and it would still make me smile.

Maybe, I told myself, this is me coping. Research does suggest that repeated exposure to positive distractions and familiar fiction can have beneficial health effects.

But it also felt a little too easy to get lost in this rosy glow of syndication—a gleam you can now live in perpetuity, thanks to streaming.

It made me think about the late French sociologist Jean Baudrillard. Toward the end of the 20th century, he argued that society was losing the distinction between the cultural products we consume and the real-life things that they are based on. He didn’t point to the sitcom, but surely, it’s an example of this—a simulacrum of American life. We’re watching a writers’ room’s idea of a make-believe U.S., drawing comfort from a false nostalgia of a world that was never really there in the first place.

The sitcom’s departure from reality is only becoming more pronounced with time. The genre has traditionally centered on the lives of “middle class” characters, but while the signifiers of class on television have always been aspirational, as the financial gulf widens between these characters and their real-life counterparts off screen, it has made sitcoms feel increasingly fantastical. For a point of comparison, at the start of the ’70s—the decade that brought us The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Jeffersons, Laverne & Shirley, and the list goes on—61% of American adults were considered middle class, according to Pew Research Center data; by 2015, amid rising inequality, only half of the population fit the definition.

This could be one of the reasons why, today, there’s such a demand out there for classic sitcoms. We can’t live these lives in the real world, so we can at least live them second-hand on screen.

The escape into sitcoms increased in the pandemic, with Nielson reporting an audible uptick in viewership during COVID’s height, noting that “when audiences needed a break from reality, they traveled back in time to tried-and-true picks like Friends, Family Matters, The Golden Girls, and Two and a Half Men.”

In an unprecedented moment that wiped away so many of the things that sitcoms promise—connection, community, stability—is it any surprise that more people sought the comfort of these fables of what life could look like?

It’s certainly what’s drawn me to them now.

I’ve come to think of this year as my year of sitcoms, to crib off the title of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the Ottessa Moshfeghi novel that’s neither restful nor relaxing.

Like Moshfeghi’s heavily medicated narrator who tries to escape her life through sleep, I know on some level, I’m hiding away in the well-worn grooves of these characters’ healthy, happy fictions.

But the pull of the sitcom is seductive. Watching them can feel like living in a day dream. You’re staring across the screen at lives that, on the surface, seem like they could resemble your own, except here, everything is shaped around human connection, and the worst thing that can happen to you is that you’ll learn a life lesson. 

I know life is not a sitcom. But the more of them I watch, the more I wish we could take inspiration from the worlds they’ve imagined and bring the best of them into our own. Because all I know is that I’m not ready to wake up yet.

The post My Year of Sitcoms appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the first episode of AMC’s superb television adaptation, the white, aristocratic Lestat propositions Louis, in this iteration a Black Creole business owner, to “be my companion … be all the beautiful things that you are and be them without apology for all eternity.”

This Black queer reimagining—still set in New Orleans, but in the Jim Crow rather than the antebellum era—isn’t some anomaly in vampire fiction, but rather follows the larger cultural transformation that the bloodsuckers have undergone over the last two centuries.

After all, vampires never really die (Rice, for one, wrote 13 Lestat novels), but each generation continues to reincarnate them based on the fixations of the present.

British writer and physician John William Polidori is often credited with kicking off the gothic subgenre in 1819 when he published the short story “The Vampyre; A Tale.” But it’s less remembered that the same year Polidori’s narrative debuted (famously modeling the titular vampire after his demanding hypochondriac patient, Lord Byron), an American author knocked off the concept, immediately linking vampirism with race.

Set just before the Haitian Revolution, the novella, “The Black Vampyre; A Legend of St. Domingo,” begins after a slave owner attempts to kill a boy who cannot be killed. At first, the vampire seeks revenge, but after marrying and turning the slave owner’s wife, the two not only form a family unit but eventually take a cure that enables them to return to their human forms and to Christianity. But their happiness can only go far in a world defined by skin color; the ending reveals that their mixed-race descendant, now a resident of Essex County, New Jersey, finds himself also experiencing “the thirst of a vampire.” As Katie Bray argues in her dissertation “Haunted Hemisphere,” the plot takes a wide view of race in America, questioning “not only putatively pure racial lines but also uncomplicated U.S. national narratives.”

Homosexuality, too, was present in early gothic vampire literature. J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, serialized from 1871-2, became the prototype for the lesbian vampire novel, told through the perspective of a young girl named Laura who catches the attention of a mysterious stranger who comes to stay with her family following a graphic carriage incident. LGBTQ scholar Ardel Haefele-Thomas’ analysis of Carmilla and 1897’s The Blood of the Vampire, Florence Marryat’s story about a mixed-race psychic vampire named Harriet, suggests that both plots vacillate between “demonizing and showing empathy” toward their undead characters. This ambiguity—epitomized by Laura’s torn recollection of her vampire companion Carmilla, remembering her as “sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend”—underscores how these stories were not intended to be read as clear-cut morality tales. But if Carmilla and Harriet aren’t wholly demonized, their vampirism still makes them, ultimately, a stand-in for society’s fears, rather than fully realized characters with whom the reader can sympathize and identify with.

As it so happened, the same year readers discovered The Blood of the Vampire, Bram Stoker’s immortalized the vampire trope as we know it today with Dracula. To the Victorians, the bloodsucker was still, above all, a gothic monster.

It would take another half century before the vampire could begin to be re-imagined as a romantic lead, and daytime television is partly to thank for our change in appetites.

Dark Shadows, the ABC daytime soap opera that ran from 1966 to 1971, acquired a cult following thanks in part to Jonathan Frid’s magnetic portrayal of the immortal Barnabas Collins, a vampire disgusted by his own habits. Then, five years after it off the air, came Interview with the Vampire, the debut novel of a 34-year-old graduate student in New Orleans. The novels in Anne Rice’s gothic horror series The Vampire Chronicles weren’t romances, but they humanized vampires, depicting them as three-dimensional characters.

Notably, Rice, who died in 2021, was a vocal champion of gay rights, and by treating her characters with care and giving them a clear homoerotic undertext, she invented a modern vampire. Joseph Crawford, a scholar who’s extensively researched the origins and evolution of the paranormal romance genre, argues that Rice helped to shift public mores, priming readers to be ready to accept this reimagining.

“The figure of the vampire has historically been used as a representation of marginalized and vilified social groups,” he writes in his definitive book The Twilight of the Gothic? and led by Rice, the “revisionist vampire fiction of the 1970s was, to some extent, a symptom of changing social attitudes towards such groups.”

Steamy vampire stories that were more sympathetic toward the undead skyrocketed in popularity, first in the U.S. and then abroad. Nearly a century after Stoker’s Dracula, even the Count was ready to be given a love interest by the 1990s with Francis Ford Coppola’s reimagining (a genre-shifting, queer-coded blockbuster that Coppola made at the same time he was working on a project on the AIDS epidemic).

Vampire romances have continued to be in hot demand in the 21st century with the rise of properties like The Twilight Saga, The Vampire Diaries, and True Blood. Over this period, the vampire may have picked up some new attributes (like being sparkly or “vegetarian”), but its basic DNA hasn’t changed; what’s changed is our perspective of the vampire’s condition. More and more, the public is considering what it means to date the other instead of demonizing it.

“Every age embraces the vampire it needs,” notes Nina Auerbach, a scholar of late 19th-century English literature.

Maybe there’s something especially hopeful, then, in the way AMC’s Interview with the Vampire continues to build on this context, bridging race, sexuality, and romance, with all their inherent nuance and complications.

Watching the show is a reminder that though the undead may be timeless, us mortals caught in their thrall are constantly changing. In this way, we, too, crave new blood.

The post Every Era’s Vampires Require New Blood appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

While the movie itself isn’t interactive (something that could have helped rehabilitate the plot), the release reflects Netflix’s growing interest in choose-your-own-adventure-style programming. Since the debut of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch back in 2018, the streaming service has been steadily investing in these titles. It’s easy to be a little cynical about this interactive programming push, which feels like a ploy for Netflix to find new relevance as a mobile gaming platform, especially now as it reports its first subscription losses in a decade. Nonetheless, I’m excited to see where it goes, because this format is ripe with the potential to break us out of linear narratives and democratize storytelling, giving each viewer the power to explore possible scenarios and decide what should happen next. 

A page from a Song Dynasty (960-1279) printed book of the I Ching (Yi Jing, Classic of Changes or Book of Changes). Public Domain.

The concept behind interactive storytelling isn’t new. Arguably, it goes all the way back to the I Ching or Book of Changes, the ancient Chinese manual of divination and prophecy that employs cleromancy (the tossing of lots) to read its predictive text. Before the computer age, contemporary scholars Anthony J. Niesz and Norman N. Holland make the case for expanding the definition of the rudimentary interactive form to include “alternate endings to any narrative, either from authorial revision (as in Great Expectations [1861]) or deliberately (as in The Threepenny Opera [1928])”.

But it’s American authors Doris Webster and Mary Alden Hopkins who get credit for pioneering the concept as we know it today with the 1930 publication of Consider the Consequences! The romance novel, which included 43 alternative endings, empowers the reader to decide the fates of Helen Rogers and her suitors Jed Harringdale and Saunders Mead.

Scholar James Ryan, who shed light on this forgotten novel in 2017, pointed out that while the concept of the plot may seem obvious to us now, Webster and Hopkins’ interactive branching narrative was revolutionary at the time. “It’s a radical idea,” Ryan said in an interview with KZSC Santa Cruz, “that you can pack multiple plot paths into a book and let the reader decide which paths to take.”

Another foundational text during this era was Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges’ 1941 short story “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” (“The Garden of Forking Paths”). While the philosophical work is not interactive itself, the paths and directions of alternative realities it suggests became an important early offering to the field of interactive fiction—and is even considered the earliest precursor to hypertext, as defined by computer programmer Theodor Holm Nelson, who coined the term more than two decades later, in 1965, as a form of non-sequential writing—or “a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways.” (Of interesting historical note, Borges’ contemporary, American scientist and policymaker Vannevar Bush, also foreshadowed the concept of hypertext with his fictional “Memex” machine, which used “trails” to link books, records, and other forms of communications in a kind of nonlinear narrative.)

Advances in technology continued to push interactive fiction out of the theoretical and into the conceptual. Jumps in movie-making, for example, led to the debut of the first interactive film, the Kinoautomat, in 1967. Premiering at the Czechoslovak Pavilion at the World’s Fair in Montréal, the film (which was originally titled Člověk a jeho dům: One Man and his House) was shown in a custom-built theater with green and red buttons installed on every seat. During the screening, the action was paused every so often, so that a moderator could appear on stage and ask the audience to vote on questions that propelled the plot forward, such as:

Should Mr. Novak let a woman clad only in a towel into his apartment, just before his wife arrives home?

Should Mr. Novak rush into an apartment despite a tenant blocking his way?

Should Mr. Novak knock someone out to bring attention to a small fire?

However they answered the prompts, the movie always ended in the same way: a building in flames. Was the film a political statement against fixed elections? A satire of determinism? These questions swirled as it became a smash success of the World’s Fair, and awakened filmmakers to the possibilities of interactive cinema. According to director Radúz Činčera’s daughter Alena, after its debut “all the big Hollywood studios” wanted to license the Kinoautomat, but the Czech government, which owned the film, refused to sell.

Dustjacket of the 1930 first edition of Consider the Consequences! by Doris Webster and Mary Alden Hopkins. Fair Use.

If things had gone another way, the Kinoautomat might have become a household name, pushing Americans’ idea of what interactive technology was capable of. It joined the ranks of other experimental literature emerging at the time, such as Julio Cortázar’s 1963 book Rayuela (translated to English as Hopscotch in 1966), which let the reader “jump” through 155 chapters with the help of a “table of instructions,” and Robert Coover’s disquieting 1969 short story “The Babysitter,” where a night of babysitting could be as mundane as a quiet night watching TV or end in increasingly disturbing scenarios, like the babysitter being stalked, raped, and murdered.

Instead, most Americans’ first encounter with interactive fiction came thanks to the mass-market success of the Choose Your Own Adventure novels. Lawyer Edward Packard thought up the concept in 1969, as he was telling his daughters a bedtime tale about a man on a desert island. “I couldn’t think of what should happen next,” Packard later recalled to Marketplace, so he asked his kids what they would do. The girls provided two different answers, and Packard saw a genre with potential. “They could not just identify with the main character, but they could be the main character,” he said.

Packard struggled to sell the concept at first—“It was just too strange and too new,” he later said—but publisher and author R.A. Montgomery, having worked in role playing-game design himself, finally recognized its potential. In 1979, the Choose Your Own Adventure series officially launched with The Cave of Time, where you might encounter a T-Rex or a UFO, depending on which route you opted to hike.

The series attracted a wide readership; however, its formulaic style gave the genre a bad rap. As one English scholar put it bluntly, “in terms of literary quality, many of the multiple-storyline books are true skunks.” But it’s important to remember that the series was marketed toward children, who loved the straight-forward simplicity of the questions, like, “If you take the left branch, turn to page 20. If you take the right branch, turn to page 61. If you walk outside the cave, turn to page 21.”

Today, books, video and computer games, television and films continue to push the boundaries of what interactive fiction can do. The potential control readers can have over the story can, at times, feel downright radical (take author Stuart Moulthrop’s mind-bending hyperfiction text Victory Garden). But the decisions don’t have to be extreme to make an impact; there’s something to be said for the more quotidian of the choose-your-own plots that continue to crop up (for me, one of the most anticipated offering on the horizon right now is the first interactive rom-com). After all, whatever weight the decisions carry in these plots, the act of choice remains central to each of them, and helps to remind us that not only is there a multiverse of possibility out there, but that each of our decisions can create a ripple effect.

As Consider the Consequences! argued back in 1930, “life is not a continuous line from the cradle to the grave.” Rather, the novel explained in its introductory text, our journeys are made up of “many short lines, each ending in a choice, and a branching right and left” that lead us on to ever more choices.

The post Why Do We Love ‘Choose-Your-Own-Adventure’ Stories? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Maybe that’s why earnest entertainment typically induces my gag reflex.

I promise I’m not a total monster—if I’m in the right mood or have found the right topic, I can also submerge myself in this genre of programming that, at its best, feels like taking a warm, soothing bath. But too often I’m left cold, dreading the moment when the show I’m watching will lose any sense of critical distance.

That’s why I put off watching Abbott Elementary. The breakout freshman ABC comedy about an underfunded primary school in Philadelphia follows in the excellent footsteps of The Office and Superstore before it. But because it’s been called the most earnest of these workplace sitcoms to date, I shied away from it at first.

When it returned from midseason break, and the hype hadn’t subsided, I finally gave it a shot. Unexpectedly, now I’m hooked, too. My mom has been a public elementary school teacher in Los Angeles for over three decades, and seeing these fictional teachers show up, day after day, for their students isn’t just comforting; it also feels honest to the work in a way that’s surprised me. It’s an example of how earnest storytelling can be done without losing touch with reality—in fact, creator Quinta Brunson’s willingness to engage with and even play against the messiness of the world to achieve this effect is an essential part of Abbott Elementary’s appeal.

It got me thinking about why earnest shows so often struggle to take off their own blinders. As it turns out, the answer has to do with when earnestness came of age in the Victorian era.

Earnestness flourished in 1800s, riding a wave of Christian evangelism: As Heidi Klum would put it, the high-spirited Regency dandy was out, and the morally earnest Victorian was in.

“This emphasis on earnestness was a backlash … against the frivolity and inconsequentiality of ‘old leisure,’ and against the easy assumptions of what the Evangelicals attacked as ‘nominal religion,’” historian Wendie Ellen Schneider explains in her fascinating book Engines of Truth: Producing Veracity in the Victorian Courtroom.

Victorian changes in social mores, which called on people to look toward society rather than the individual, gave rise to a host of charitable ideas and efforts (everything from the Salvation Army to the Ragged School movement, which provided free education for children who couldn’t afford to pay for it, came out of this period). However, the movement’s religious DNA also turned earnestness into a moral purity test of sorts. People, in turn, altered their behavior to appear righteous, above all else. “Truth,” as Schneider writes, “was often most highly valued as a sign of good character, rather than as of an end itself.”

Earnestness’ most famous critic, Oscar Wilde, did not mince words when it came to denouncing this farce. The poet and playwright, who was once the toast of Victorian London, was persecuted and prosecuted for his sexual orientation; he had no illusions about how dangerous earnestness could be. Which is why, as scholar Kerry Powell writes in Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s, Wilde used his most famous drama to take on that “keystone Victorian ideal of earnestness—with its aura of zealous effort, sincerity, and high seriousness.” Importantly, by the end of The Importance of Being Earnest, upright protagonist Jack and his wild alter ego Ernest have become one. In turn, Wilde shows us the absurd nature of earnestness. Because to be earnest, or well, Ernest, in Wilde’s mind, was to be “the ‘true liar,’” as Powell explains, “who overcomes dreary actuality with charming delusions… without reference to clumsy fact.”

It’s a damning indictment, but also one that might suggest why earnestness remains alive and well in popular culture today: because earnestness offers its own escape from the messiness of reality.

It’s no accident that TikTok, which may as well be ground zero for earnest content, has become the most downloaded social media app in the world. When the algorithm locks onto your taste, you lose yourself in the scroll, as the screentime tracker on my iPhone can surely attest. With features like Stitch, which lets you add other viewers’ video to your own, and hashtags like #DontLetItFlop, which encourages you to upvote a video someone has worked hard on, the app can make you feel part of a closed ecosystem that’s supportive and collaborative. The company even commissioned a Nielsen study to prove as much, arguing the findings showed that “users feel like they can be themselves [and] trust others to be authentic and genuine as well” on TikTok.

Of course, aside from the well-documented toxicity that plagues the platform, it’s easy to forget just how much artifice is literally baked into TikTok. In 2020, the Intercept reviewed internal documents that showed moderators had been instructed to narrow the audience for posts created by “undesirable” users who didn’t fit the age, socioeconomic status, or appearance profile TikTok was courting. To quote Powell, the Wilde scholar, those clumsy facts, indeed.

That’s why Abbott Elementary, which has not shied away from addressing the many issues facing public schools—I particularly loved an episode where the teachers launch an academically gifted program and have to confront what being “gifted” means—feels like such a welcome change. It’s a big-hearted show about teachers who care about their students and their futures, but doesn’t exist in some happy alternative universe.

I’ll always be a 30 Rock girl at heart, but this has given me a newfound appreciation for earnest content. Which is a good thing, because earnestness isn’t going away anytime soon. We may be seeing an increase of it in this moment, but like cynicism, earnestness is always in a constant cycle of rebirth, moving through the culture in different forms based on the needs of the present.

Take Parks and Recreation and Hamilton, both of whose DNA helped set the scene for this age of earnestness. Out of the thrall of their immediate cultural moment, it’s easier to see them as products of Obama-era optimism that don’t always look critically enough at their subjects. But it’s not a surprise that both properties resurfaced earlier in the pandemic, one with a reunion special and the other with a film adaptation. That’s because at their best, they radiate the kind of human connection and warmth that people need.

Maybe this is too earnest of me (or maybe I’ve been watching too much of The Kelly Clarkson Show, yet another offering to this earnestness cycle that has unexpectedly given me joy) but I think earnest culture has more to give us yet—that is if we’re willing to see the true importance of being earnest.

The post The Importance of Watching Other People Being Earnest appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What possessed writer-director Aaron Sorkin—a man who’s openly stated that I Love Lucy is “not a show … we’d think was funny” today—to make a film that dramatizes a week of the sitcom’s production is a mystery. Sitting through the biopic, though, I thought back to the “Scary Lucy” situation with new sympathy. Suddenly I understood the frustration of feeling Lucy’s image was being shaped by the wrong hands.

It also got me thinking about why—amid a spate of new Lucy content, including the Amy Poehler-directed documentary Lucy and Desi and even Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, which inserts “Lucille Doolittle,” a Ball composite character, into its 1970s San Fernando Valley coming-of-age story—we’re still having a hard time getting the “real” Lucy right today.

Ball, born Lucille Désirée Ball on August 6, 1911, in Jamestown, New York, lived multiple lives as a model, showgirl, and “queen of B-movies” before the success of her CBS Radio comedy My Favorite Husband led the network to invite her to develop the show for television. Ball famously agreed—so long as she could play opposite her real-life husband, Desi Arnaz.

The result, ultimately, was I Love Lucy, one of the most watched and influential television shows of all time.

While Lucy Ricardo is beloved for her hijinks and heart, it’s easy to forget that Ball’s character was also emblematic of the changing role of the American housewife in the postwar era. In 1951, when the sitcom debuted, women who’d entered the nation’s workforce during World War II were being pushed out of it and into the suburbs.

“She’s a transitional figure—she’s on the cutting edge,” said Leslie Feldman, a professor of political science at Hofstra University and author of The Political Theory of I Love Lucy.

Ricky constantly dashes Lucy’s dreams of becoming an actress, beginning in the pilot episode where he tells her, “I want my wife to be a wife, I want you to bring my slippers when I go back home, prepare my dinner, and raise my children.” But throughout the show’s six-season run—where it never left the top three in weekly ratings—Lucy pushed back, enacting various harebrained antics, with the help of neighbors Ethel and Fred Mertz, to become a star.

She’s often successful: When the Ricardos go to Hollywood, MGM offers Lucy a contract; when they go to England, the Queen herself requests to “meet the lady that did the comical dancing.” But each time Lucy gets a taste of fame, she’s put in the uncomfortable position of having to choose between her career and her family.

This struggle “represents the conflict of women in the second half of the 20th century,” said Feldman. “Are they going to stay home and be wives and mothers? Are they going to go to work? Or are they going to do both? And what if they really do better and earn more money than their husbands? What about that? That’s an element of Lucy, too.”

The real Lucille Ball faced these same questions. Ball was 40 years old when she started filming I Love Lucy, and she’d devoted herself to her career. “She was very serious-minded, and an incredibly hard worker,” said biographer Kathleen Brady, adding that Ball was the “first to say she was a workaholic.” On the other hand, family was extremely important to her, and growing up in the Great Depression, she had a traditional view of how that dynamic worked. “Certainly, her idea was that women cater to the men, wives cater to the husbands,” said Brady.

What Lucy Ricardo achieved on the show—a happy home and family life—is what Lucille Ball wanted off screen. But her great success as an actress, a comedian, and later, a businesswoman came at a personal toll.

A tribute paid to Ball by actor and comedian Taylor Negron, who’d enrolled in a comedy class she taught in the late 1970s, speaks to this. “Lucy paid a heavy price for fame; she knew its depthless, lonely suspension,” he wrote in “The Pink Gorilla (Tuesdays with Lucy),” a moving reflection on the eight-weeks he spent learning from her at the Sherwood Oaks Experimental Film School. But it was this insight into the human condition, he argued, that gave her comedy so much depth. “Lucy was a realist who made the world a happier place to be in because she mocked the sadness in her life,” he wrote.

“Scary Lucy” statue in Celoron, New York. Courtesy of Adam Moss/ CC BY-SA 2.0 .

The public did not see much of that sadness. Throughout her life, Ball worked hard to shape her image, something instilled in her by the Hollywood studio system she rose up in.

“She wanted to present her best self, and she felt this was an obligation,” said Brady, the biographer. While as Lucy Ricardo she was fine wearing a fright wig and blackening her teeth, as Lucille Ball, she spent hours in makeup and hair. She also went to personal expense to respond to every fan request that came her way. “She took the love of the public seriously,” said Brady. “I think she always knew it could go away in a minute.”

Because of this, Brady believes that in this recent slate of Lucille Ball biographical work, the star would likely approve of the Poehler documentary, Lucy and Desi, the most, calling it a “valentine” to Ball and Arnaz’s relationship.

It replays the tale “we want to know—that Lucy and Desi always loved each other, and that this was a great love story,” Brady said. But, of course, that’s only part of the truth: “There were years,” she said, “where they genuinely and truly hated each other.”

Both Lucy and Desi and Being the Ricardos chose to write about Ball through her relationship with Arnaz. But the story of their partnership isn’t the only narrative around Ball to tell. Lucy and Desi, in fact, offered a tantalizing glimpse into another account of the star that one day I hope gets its own feature treatment. That’s her relationship with I Love Lucy co-star Viviane Vance, specifically during the era they starred together in The Lucy Show.

The sitcom debuted in 1962, the year that a recently divorced Ball reluctantly bought Arnaz’s interest in their production company Desilu. In The Lucy Show, she and Vance reunite on screen as two single women making a go of it together. The show is the first to feature a divorced woman (Vance’s character) on primetime television, just as off camera, Ball navigated life after two decades of marriage to Arnaz and adjusted to being the first woman to head a Hollywood studio.

Putting the focus on Ball and Vance would make space for a truer, and more complicated look at Lucy to surface. It also would offer a reminder that I Love Lucy was not just about the love story between Ricky and Lucy.

After all, while it is Arnaz’s Ricky who famously sings “I love Lucy,” the line could have easily been said by Vance’s Ethel. Their friendship served as its own emotional heart of the show. Because, as Feldman, the political scientist, pointed out during our conversation, “Ethel loved Lucy, too.”

The post Will the Real Lucille Ball Please Stand Up? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Forever,” with its catchy “oh-oh-oh, ooh” refrain, and the HBO teen drama it was composed for, Euphoria, share a big, aching quality that has made the show, which wrapped its second season this week, a phenomenon. From glitter eyeshadow to moody neon pink and blue lighting, Euphoria’s carefully curated look, mood, and sound have led its Gen Z audience to engage with it on social media not just as a show but as an aesthetic in its own right.

Internet aesthetic trends, like Euphoria, function as a kind of highly stylized form of self-expression. Their rise is commonly traced back to Tumblr, the visually friendly blogging platform that launched in 2007; today, they have become even more widespread on platforms like Instagram and TikTok in our increasingly digital world.

Even if you aren’t super versed in youth culture, you’ve likely come across at least one or two of the most pervasive of these aesthetic trends, whether it’s cottagecore, a nature-based romanticization of domesticity, heavily influenced by English countryside (think straw hats and peasant dresses), or dark academia, a Gothic upper-crust liberal arts academic experience replete with secret societies and tweed jackets. (Aesthetics Wiki catalogues many more and even suggests how you can find your own aesthetic.)

While the way people engage with online aesthetics may appear superficial, they—like their eponymous branch of philosophy, which explores the nature and appreciation of art, beauty, and taste—can have a deep impact on the way we live.

Aesthetics influence everything from “our choices regarding romantic partners, where we wish to live, how we dress, which objects we surround ourselves with, and the activities we pursue in our leisure time,” as a recent journal article asking why cognitive science should care about aesthetics argues. Because of this, aesthetics can also be used as a political tool.

That is something that the German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin warned about nearly a century ago in his most well-known treatise, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

There, Benjamin first introduced the concept of the aestheticization of politics, linking it to the ascendancy of fascism.

“The logical result of fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life,” he wrote, asserting that in the hands of fascists, aesthetics could be made to distract people from their worst impulses, thus making inhumane acts palatable.

Benjamin was writing in 1935, during Italy’s nationalist war of aggression against Ethiopia, an invasion that is now seen as one of the episodes that led to World War II; his essay is a sobering read today, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Notably, in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin cites the 1909 futurism manifesto, written by its founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the charismatic Italian poet.

The manifesto, which was published on the front page of the newspaper Le Figaro, sets out to glorify the aesthetics of war. “War,” Marinetti asserted, “is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks.”

Historian Selena Daly, an expert on futurism at Royal Holloway, University of London, explained that literal war and metaphorical war “underpin a huge amount of futurist ideology right from the very beginning.” And it was through this enmeshing of art and politics that Marinetti sought to wage it.

“The idea is this is not just the reinvention of cultural life,” Daly said of futurism, but rather nothing short of “the complete reconstruction of the universe.”

In turn, no aesthetic space was left untouched—from poetry to art, fashion to furniture, ceramics to yes, even cooking. In The Futurist Cookbook, which was published in 1932, Marinetti called on Italians to abolish pasta because they needed to use imported wheat to make it. “We can see here how something that is ostensibly aesthetic—cookery as an aesthetic performance of pleasure—also has this really important link [to the policy Marinetti advances],” Daly said.

Aesthetics, of course, can also be used for the political good. Yale philosopher Jason Stanley’s book How Propaganda Works shows, for instance, how aesthetics have subverted harmful status quos. Citing an analysis of John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” from musicologist Ingrid Monson, Stanley writes that in the hands of Coltrane in 1961, the show tune from The Sound of Music turned popular Christmas song became “a way of taking a white aesthetic ideal and using it to represent the Black American voice and experience.”

Rosa Crepax, a cultural theorist at University of Hertfordshire, who’s written about how aesthetics on Instagram are informing the feminist movement, studies how aesthetics in the digital space continue to enmesh the serious and surface in the present day, and what that means for all of us.

Over email, she explained that today we’re living in a time where “everything, from politics to friendship and mental illness, is becoming aestheticized on social media.” Amid this, she sees that “the aesthetic distraction that Benjamin talked about is very much alive.” However, she added, “digital culture also opens up new possibilities for active participation, and an engagement, through aesthetics, with potentially radical forms of creativity.”

Of course, there is also something to be said for just engaging with aesthetics on social media simply as a way to relax. And for that, some comfort might be found in the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, of all people.

Northern Michigan University philosopher Antony Aumann chuckled when I asked him what the 19th-century Danish philosopher would make of the way we’re engaging with aesthetics online today.

Kierkegaard was critical of the aesthetic experience—his writings encouraged people to move away from the aesthetic sphere of beauty and enjoyment toward a more ethical, ultimately more religious way of life. So, if Kierkegaard saw our embrace of these contemporary aesthetic trends as a way to avoid civic mindedness, he likely would disapprove.

At the same time, Aumann thinks the Dane would approve of using aesthetics as a way to promote social good. “If people are using it to capture the attention of the masses and then redirect it toward a moral or political agenda, that would be like a deeply, deeply Kierkegaardian way of going about doing things,” he said, pointing to the fact that Kierkegaard himself used literature to inspire people to behave more ethically.

But there’s a possibility that Kierkegaard could even see the value in engaging in escapist aesthetics purely to unplug.

“We experience so much stress in our modern lives from the demands of work to the demands of morality, even, that we’re overwhelmed, and we need a moment away,” Aumann said. Observing that aesthetic trends function “kind of like a dopamine-based escape from the stress of modern life,” he mused that Kierkegaard might see it as a means to his end, “because it gives you a moment of relaxation, to recover and then return” to the mission-driven work.

In other words, if you need a beat, it’s OK—go ahead and break out that soft neon lighting filter and try out that Euphoria makeover tutorial, if you haven’t yet. Just make sure you don’t stay in that one-hour loop of “Forever” forever.

The post Is <i>Euphoria</i> a TV Show or an Aesthetic? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.