Gilligan's Island

The Existential Island

3 The Existential Island explicit. All television allegorizes the isolating nature of American “island” life and our communal attempts to overcome its consequences; Gilligan’s Island is simply the most explicit show in the history of the medium concerning these circumstances. Over the course of many years, I came to fall in love with the seven castaways on Gilligan’s Island as a special experiential part of my love of television itself. Seeing the islanders in syndication each weekday afternoon after school became a refuge from the troubles of real life. Coming into our homes with familiar characters who, if a show is successful, visit us for many years, television provides the possibility of coming to live with fictional characters on a symbolic island utopia. Whether Morowitz is correct or not in arguing that the contradiction of Gilligan’s Island is reducible to capitalism’s foibles is one of the projects of this book. Drawing from Morowitz’s and similar insights into the cultural possibilities engaged by the show, this book offers a passionate defense of Gilligan’s Island, a seemingly idiotic 1960s telefilm sitcom, from a perspective emphasizing the narrative and social productivity of its obvious minimalism. The Existential Island By placing seven stereotypical characters on an isolated island, the show’s creator, Sherwood Schwartz, is able to engage in absurdist comedy that interrogates without distraction basic questions of human behavior. As such, the show’s primary intertext is, unexpectedly, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953), a play in which two characters stand on a stage waiting to be “rescued ” by Godot, and yet he never arrives. Similarly, the seven castaways on the island try to get rescued for ninety-eight episodes only to be forever stranded in the South Pacific when the show was canceled by William Paley’s wife, Babe, who enjoyed Gunsmoke (CBS, 1955–75), even though that western series was, by 1967, poorly rated and equally exhausted of new ideas, 01 Metz text.indd 3 1/20/12 12:00 PM 4 Gilligan’s Island Dodge City being just one more 1960s televisual island (Stoddard 306). Even the afterlife of Gilligan’s Island testifies to its radical endorsement of perpetual stasis: in the three made-for-TV movies released years after the cancellation of the show—Rescue from Gilligan’s Island (1978), The Castaways on Gilligan’s Island (1979), and The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island (1981)—the castaways almost immediately return to the island from which they purportedly were so desperate to escape. At the end of Rescue from Gilligan’s Island, the castaways find mainland America so corrupt that they take another cruise to escape and are once again shipwrecked on their old island. In Castaways, they run a hotel to share the joys of their island with others. For their part, Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s play end each day deciding enthusiastically to leave their plot of land, but each time the stage directions indicate “they do not move” as the lights go down to end the act. Furthermore, Waiting for Godot offers a testament to the transformative power of love: Vladimir and Estragon while away the time by telling jokes, being mean to each other, fighting , just talking. In short, they love each other as if they are married. Similarly, the seven castaways love one another: they feud, they scheme in petty ways (Who is the most beautiful woman on the island? or, Who should be president?), but they continue caring about one another week after week, which, as Nel Noddings suggests, is a central aspect of radical feminism. I have dedicated my career to mining the similarities in the humanist caring and intellectual merits of high and low culture; in Sherwood Schwartz—the much-maligned creator and executive producer of Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch (ABC, 1969–74)—I find the great televisual auteur of such values. Schwartz began his career studying biology in Southern California . After he began successfully writing jokes for Bob Hope’s radio show, he built a new career in television comedy writing for such shows as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (ABC, 01 Metz text.indd 4 1/20/12 12:00 PM 5 The Existential Island 1952–66) and The Red Skelton Show (NBC/CBS, 1951–71). After supervising the scripts for My Favorite Martian (CBS, 1963– 66), Schwartz got his pilot for Gilligan’s Island...