This started with a brief Facebook post of mine last evening, to wit:
I’ve always been a sucker for old TV shows. Lucy, “Honeymooners”, Dick Van Dyke, all the classics. But you learn quickly that “old” does not necessarily mean “good.” The “Classic TV” channel on Pluto TV is airing “Dennis The Menace”, the live action one from the 50’s. Can’t stand it, and I couldn’t stand it when it was on Nick at Nite either. Dear Lord that kid is annoying. If I was Mr. Wilson I’d have staged some kind of unfortunate accident involving a blunt gardening implement.
This stirred up quite the discussion about “Dennis The Menace” (also not-liked by some) and other vintage TV series. So I thought I’d spell out some old TV series that I can’t stand, and why. Note the absence of hour-long dramas: very few of them from any decade interest me. “Perry Mason” is fun and “The Twilight Zone” is of course brilliant. I’ve also enjoyed some “Gunsmoke” in my time. But I’m mostly a sitcom guy, so these are sitcoms I hate from an era I love. As always, your mileage may vary! Free free to argue with me about any or all of these in the comments.
The Donna Reed Show. There were a lot of “family sitcoms” in the 1950s and early ’60s–“Ozzie and Harriet”, “Father Knows Best”, “Leave It To Beaver”, and my personal favorite “Make Room For Daddy” (aka “The Danny Thomas Show”.) Each of these series had least a few moments of genuine humor in every episode…some more than others. I’d say Wally and the Beav were the best-loved of the lot.
But “The Donna Reed Show”…I just can’t find anything to like about it. It was on Nick at Nite for over a decade and I saw a lot of it waiting for better shows to start. Never laughed once. It was a situation something….but I’m hard-pressed to call it a situation comedy. The modern verdict would be “weak tea.” The weakest.
Hazel. Another domestic show…this was on the CBN cable network in the 80s (not even good enough for Nick at Nite)…and in those days I would watch anything vintage. But rare was the time I made it through an entire episode of “Hazel” without seeing what else was on. It was a dopey show about a domineering maid (played by Shirley Booth, best known today–if at all–as the voice of Mrs. Santa in the Rankin-Bass classic “A Year Without A Santa Claus”). The family she worked for were so forgettable I can’t recall their character names. (Although the Mother was played by Whitney Blake, who went on to create the 70’s classic “One Day At A Time”.) I think Hazel called the husband “Mista B.” Or “Mista D.” It was lot of typical sitcom misunderstandings, what they used to call a “comedy of manners”. Just dull as the dishwater in Hazel’s sink.
F Troop. Soooo…when I was a kid, I mean like 8 or 9, “Gilligan’s Island” was on every day after school. And our local station had that in their schedule for years. I loved the show because when you’re 8 years old, people getting hit in the head with coconuts and chasing monkeys around is peak hilarity. I haven’t watched an episode of “Gilligan’s Island” in quite a long time…but it has a special place in my heart, so much so that I wrote a murder mystery set on the island for our community theater group.
So, here’s “F Troop”, a show with a group of people basically stuck somewhere (like “Gilligan”), a lot of silly slapstick (like “Gilligan”), a lot of guest characters visiting the regular cast in ways that stretch believability (like “Gilligan”). So why don’t I like “F Troop”?
Because I met the seven stranded castaways at age 8, and I met the men of F Troop at age 21. By that time I had been exposed to better comedy: your SCTV, your “Dick Van Dyke Show”, and the like.
“Dennis The Menace.” Well, I have to include this. It started the whole thing. The Dennis character was just so incredibly annoying, and it came clear to me when the show came on Pluto TV the other night. In that episode little Ronny Howard appeared as a friend of the Menace…and it was like he was in a different series. Dennis YELLS EVERYTHING AT THE TOP OF HIS LUNGS! Mr. Wilson YELLS EVERYTHING! Jesus!
Now Ritchie on “The Dick Van Dyke Show” yelled everything too (probably coached that way so the studio audience could hear him). But he had like 5 lines or less in most episodes. And you sort of expect people to deliver lines in that stagey way on a multi-camera show. “Dennis” was single-camera, no audience, still tons of yelling.
“The Munsters”/”The Addams Family” This one may be controversial. There were a lot of “gimmick” sitcoms in the ’60s. Some were better than others. In the case of both of these series, it was gimmick-on-gimmick-on-gimmick. “Bewitched” is about a man whose wife is a witch. “The Munsters” is about a Frankenstein whose wife is a bride of Frankenstein, whose Grandpa is a vampire and whose son is a werewolf. The Addams Family is even more populated with wacky elements. The thing the two shows had in common for me was this: You’ve seen one episode, you’ve seen them all. The plots were basic sitcom–in fact, many episodes of “The Munsters” were written by “Leave It To Beaver” creators Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher. I think it’s telling that both series debuted in the same year and were both cancelled after two seasons.
So there you go. Again, feel free to argue with me.