The Donna Reed Show

5. Legacy of The Donna Reed Show

Chapter 5 Legacy of The Donna Reed Show 117 Ihave argued throughout this book that The Donna Reed Show is an important television milestone that exemplifies the cultural tensions that marked the shift from the conservative postwar Eisenhower era to the more liberal social context of the 1960s and 1970s, just as it marked a significant transitional moment as the film industry shifted to television. The sitcom, with its central place in American (and indeed global) television and its focus on familial and interpersonal relationships in the home or in the workplace, provides a site from which to explore how cultural meanings are made and from which to consider the relationship between television and culture. Domestic sitcoms such as The Donna Reed Show provide a glimpse into family life as it is conceived at a particular historical moment. They provide an often idealized behind-the-scenes look at gender and family relationships within a fictional community. In so doing, they are part of the communications apparatus that works to produce ideology; that is, they construct social reality and reproduce social relations. Lipsitz (1986, 107) writes that “Television , and other forms of electronic mass media, so effectively recapitulate the ideology of the ‘historical bloc’ in which they operate that they touch on all aspects of social life—even its 01 Morreale text.indd 117 8/24/12 10:13 AM 118 Chapter 5 antagonistic contradictions. While the media serve to displace, fragment, and atomize real experiences, they also generate and circulate a critical dialogue as one unintended consequence of their efforts to expose the inventory of social practice.” While in most cases television comedies attempt to smooth over contradictions, as we have seen with The Donna Reed Show, there is often trouble in the text that its melodramatic structure cannot contain. The show demonstrates Althusser’s (2005, 255) principal of uneven development in social transformation : there are traces of older and progressive ways of thinking that coexist alongside dominant ideas and practices. In many ways, The Donna Reed Show remains within the confines of the conventional situation comedy and the ideology of domestic containment. Throughout the show’s 275 episodes, the Stones’ universe remains circumscribed: problems are slight and easily resolved, and there is little character development or transformation . The show in no way has the psychological depth, complex worldview, and serial narrative structure that formed the cosmology of the so-called quality sitcoms that emerged in the 1970s, often delineated by the troika of All in the Family (1971–83), M*A*S*H (1972–83), and The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–77). However, in attempting to provide realistic accounts of family and social life, The Donna Reed Show contains progressive, even contradictory, impulses that work to alter the terms of public discourse around gender and the family. The dialogue opened up by The Donna Reed Show articulates with its comedic brethren, from the contemporaneous Dick Van Dyke Show to the contemporary Modern Family. Donna Stone Meets Laura Petrie Although Donna Stone remained ensconced in the cultural context of the 1950s and early 1960s, her character exhibited an unusual degree of independence. In some episodes, she could be seen at the wheel of the family car, an image that was quite 01 Morreale text.indd 118 8/24/12 10:13 AM 119 Legacy of The Donna Reed Show unusual for sitcom women—and especially housewives—even in the 1960s. The shot of Mary Richards driving her own car in the opening credits of The Mary Tyler Moore Show was considered quite progressive in 1970, although Donna Stone had done it first. In many ways, Donna Stone prefigured the more liberated sitcom women who came after The Donna Reed Show, whether Laura Petrie in The Dick Van Dyke Show, Mary Richards of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (with a show also named after the main character), or even the matriarchal Roseanne. While The Dick Van Dyke Show, which aired on CBS from 1961 to 1966, is often cited as one of the first liberal Kennedyera sitcoms, in many ways Laura Petrie is no more modern or independent than Donna Stone. Although The Donna Reed Show began three years earlier, both ran until 1966 and shared many similar themes. In fact, in 1961 both shows feature episodes in which Donna Stone and Laura Petrie, at the goading of a friend, dye their hair blonde to become more attractive...