Tim Tucker
Screenwriter
- Joined
- Jun 10, 2006
- Messages
- 1,023
- Real Name
- Tim Tucker
The odd thing is that I first saw The Lucy Show in syndication in the '70s, and the Lucy/Viv episodes were always in black & white.
Two of Maude's husbands died, and she divorced the other. Walter Findlay was #4.Originally Posted by Joe Lugoff
P.S. After submitting this, I remembered that the title character in Maude, although currently married, had been divorced several times, hadn't she? And that was three years before One Day at a Time. But that's still ten years after Viv.
So instead CBS glorified divorce and lampooned and belittled marriage with One Day at a Time to make sure America got the message.Originally Posted by Joe Lugoff
" More significant was the network's concern over the American viewer's readiness to accept a divorced character. CBS waited until 1975, when Bonnie Franklin became television's first divorced character in the sitcom One Day at a Time."
I don't know. I always assumed that Vivian Bagley had divorced Fred and that the late, lamented Mr. Carmichael had spoken with a Cuban accent.Originally Posted by MatthewA
I heard that rumor of people thinking Mary Richards would have divorced Dick Van Dyke...in fact I read it on the box of the early 1990s MTM Home Video release of the first two episodes of that show. So before the internet even the production company started to believe rumors about its own productions. I seriously doubt anyone would believe that.
Keep in mind also that not only were syndicated reruns of DVD Show still fresh in everyone's mind but Dick and Mary had also just the year before reunited in a highly rated TV special "Dick Van Dyke And The Other Woman". The idea that they were afraid of was that Mary Richards divorcee could easily seem like Laura Petrie divorcee (and understandable in that it's NEVER easy for someone widely identified with one TV role to shake that image right away).Originally Posted by Rob_Ray
CBS just felt that after audiences had seen her happily married to Dick Van Dyke for five years, it would just make audiences uncomfortable to now see her as a divorcee and that subconciously audiences would be imaginging her ex-husband as looking like Dick Van Dyke, thus giving this new show a bad first impression with potential viewers. I doubt CBS executives thought audiences would *literally* think she had divorced Dick Van Dyke.
I couldn't agree more. To me the Norman Lear sitcoms are very overrated because they ushered in the trend of using sitcoms as a vehicle for agenda preaching at the expense of entertainment, and the agenda preaching was always one-sided.Originally Posted by Gary OS
So instead CBS glorified divorce and lampooned and belittled marriage with One Day at a Time to make sure America got the message.
Oh how I hated those preachy, liberal sitcoms from the 70's where every virtue became a vice and every vice became a virtue. Not all sitcoms from that era fell into this trap, but many did.
Originally Posted by Jack P
I couldn't agree more. To me the Norman Lear sitcoms are very overrated because they ushered in the trend of using sitcoms as a vehicle for agenda preaching at the expense of entertainment, and the agenda preaching was always one-sided.
"All In The Family" I give a partial pass to only because of the brilliant comic timing of the actors and the fact that when the show stuck to traditional ways of doing comedy the results were hilarious. When Archie gets locked in the basement for instance, that's an example of when the show is great fun to watch. But listening to the dumb sermonettes of Meathead, who was ultimately totally out of synch with where the country was heading makes the show cringe-inducing on many occasions (and considering that Meathead was being given the privilege of free room and board he would have been well-advised to show more tact and tolerance for Archie's vices)
I think the main reason people assumed it was because in reality there is no Danfield NY, but there is a Danfield CT. Danfield NY is strictly a fictional location.Originally Posted by Joe Lugoff
Yeah, I once had this big Internet argument with a guy over the Connecticut-New York issue.
People assume it's Connecticut, because that's where the Ricardos were living when "I Love Lucy" ended.