HI, HONEY, THEY'RE HOME

http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/3982/28/

Ave atque vale
Wednesday, 27 April 2011

Madelyn Pugh, 1921-2011
Sol Saks, 1910-2011

Two figures from television's Golden Age died in recent days - Madelyn Pugh, at the grand old age of 90, and Sol Saks, at the even grander age of 100. Miss Pugh helped keep Lucille Ball at the top of the ratings for over two decades, and Mr Saks created one of the many sitcoms that followed in Lucy's wake - "Bewitched".

Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll Jr had a writing partnership that endured for over half a century. Nobody ever gave them "a break": they made their own. One day, back in the Forties while they were working on Steve Allen's radio show, they got a yen to write for Lucille Ball's new radio show, "My Favorite Husband". So they paid Allen to write his own show that week while they worked on a script to submit to Lucy.They wound up creating Miss Ball's highly popular and lucrative sitcom persona, and then kept it in business pretty much until Lucy's death, and in reruns ever after. Its great quality was its flexibility: All they had to do each week was ask "What would happen if Lucy decided to..?" So one week on "I Love Lucy" she decides she'd like to learn how to be one of the boys - specifically, one of the boys in Ricky's band. ''That's easy,'' says Fred. ''Stay up late, don't eat right and read nothing but the racing form.''

You know how it's gonna go, but it's beautiful to watch it unfold: Lucy buys a zoot suit and tries talking hep (''Greetings, gate. Slip me some skin'') and still doesn't land the saxophonist's gig. Miss Ball, Miss Pugh and Mr Carroll created a character and watched her become a type. There's a lot of mileage in unconventional females trying hard to be conventional wives. In the Fifties, it was enough to be a kooky redhead. By the Sixties,with "Bewitched" and "I Dream Of Jeannie", they were actual witches and genies. Sol Saks created the former in 1964, and his template proved durable enough to hold down primetime real estate until 1972. "Bewitched" used many of the same running gags as "Lucy": Just as Ricky Ricardo's mother-in-law never called him by the right name, nor did Darrin Stevens'. In lieu of Lucy, Elizabeth Montgomery played the twitchy-nosed Samantha, a wife whose supernatural powers would naturally rattle the insecurities of  your typical Sixties husband — and "Bewitched"’s husband was so typical that, as someone sneered in the recent film version, they switched actors and no one even noticed. (Not strictly true: Everyone knows the first Darrin was the best.) Anyway, the basic joke in Bewitched is a witch struggling hard to adapt to the challenges of domesticity without using her magic. From Sol Saks' script for the first episode:

"You’re going to have to learn to be a suburban housewife," Darrin tells her. "You’re going to have to cook and clean house..."

"Darling, it sounds wonderful," coos Samantha. "We’re going to be a normal married couple!"

Saks' premise was so ingeniously simple that Nora and Delia Ephron's big-screen revival couldn't wait to complicate it to death. Bewitched The Movie wasn’t a remake of Bewitched The Sitcom. It was a movie about a remake of the sitcom. But the wrinkle was that the gal they hire to play Samantha the TV witch is herself a real-life witch. So it was a meta-"Bewitched" rather than a pseudo-"Bewitched" - or, if you prefer, Kiss Me, Kate to the sitcom’s Taming of the Shrew.

The film lost, in every sense, the magic. In the third episode of the sitcom, one of Darrin’s clients gets fresh with Sam and she turns him into a poodle. Unfortunately, before she can turn him back, he’s whisked off to a poodle parlor and gets shorn and primped. When she restores him to human form, his hair’s been permed and has a ribbon in it and his eyebrows have been ruffled and extravagantly styled. It's a lovely visual gag of a kind contemporary sitcoms seem to have lost the knack of. The charm of "Bewitched" was that it was household magic — supernatural powers on a human scale. In the first show, Saks has Darrin’s ex-girlfriend invite them to dinner and is a total bitch. Samantha causes her dress to collapse and her wig to fly off. Four decades later, with a vaster budget, the film version went to the trouble of recreating Saks' opening episode but with a total lack of comic brio. As he could have explained to them, you can write all the comedy you want, but there's no laughs without the performance.

By the Seventies, meanwhile, Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll Jnr were still scripting for Lucille Ball, in her third sitcom incarnation. Received opinion has it that by 1970 television's first lady was past her best, but Here's Lucy had its moments - all arising from the same question the writers posed two decades earlier: "What would happen if Lucy...?" The Season Three opener began with guest star Richard Burton trying to shake off a mob of screaming women. He has the inspired idea of borrowing Sam the Plumber's clothes:

''Boy, wait'll I tell the boys down at the shop that I loaned my overalls to. . . the guy who's married to Elizabeth Taylor.''

Unfortunately, garbed as a plumber, he's dragged off by an unsuspecting Lucy to fix her dripping faucet. Confusions multiply, culminating in a legendary bit of sitcom business: Miss Ball gets Elizabeth Taylor's famous ring stuck on her finger; Lucy on the air with diamonds. 

These days I'm Mister Squaresville, as Rob Long would be the first to assure me, and there's a tone to sitcom writing I tire of very quickly. It thinks it's smart and ironic, but it's actually a pseudo-irony that's boringly parochial and circles around only within the ebbing shallows of the conventions the likes of Madelyn Pugh and Sol Saks helped create. I like the sound of big laughs, for real, and they gave us a lot. Rest in peace.


-- 
dadl-ot mailing list
http://mail.thehood.us/mailman/listinfo/dadl-ot_thehood.us
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.music.dadl.ot