Core Post - Father Knows Best?

In “Television as a Cultural Forum,” Newcomb and Hirsch try to mediate between frameworks positioning television programming as either a unilateral communicative apparatus—one suited to the aims of the larger economic-industrial infrastructure subsuming it—or a multilateral aesthetic process—one ripe for a variety of negotiated and oppositional readings from scholars, critics, and viewers alike. The former domain, predominant in the social sciences’ approach to mass media, reduces a wider viewership to the delimitations of an ideal consumer of messages, which itself provides one arc of a vicious circle matched by hegemonic media’s creation of its own ideal viewing subject. From a certain perspective, one which I believe Newcomb and Hirsch share, this process can only reflect the politics that it captures in its analyses, without providing any means of intervention. The latter approach, on the other hand, sacrifices contextual understanding in the name of more general evaluations of excellence in creation or effect.

            The model of engagement Newcomb and Hirsch prescribe, that of the liminal ritual or forum, is an attempt to combine the social sciences’ focus on communication with the humanities’ eye for aesthetic form and production. In this context, the television producer is a bricoleur (563), the television itself takes up a “bardic function” (564), and televisual consumption becomes a site of social, cultural, and ideological negotiation. TV is not to be read as a unilateral communicator, as encoded and in need of decoding, but as a factory of codes of differing hues and timbres. It is in light of this approach that the authors reconsider what seem to be overtly antiquated sexual politics in the episode of Father Knows Best that we screened last week.

I agree with their assessment that “our emotional sympathy is with Betty throughout” and also that generally speaking the episode does not “instruct the viewer that her concerns are unnatural” (565). However, I balk at the notion that simply forwarding a driven female character as content is equal in importance to the aesthetic and cultural structures in which that content is embedded. Texts qua texts give us interpretive leeway, but only up to a point, and the episode’s (appropriately stunted, missing both a third act and a progressive viewpoint) structure certainly seems to make the argument that extra-domestic endeavors should ultimately be given up by the women who invest in them. A possible counterpoint, though, would be that I am erroneously treating the episode in much the same way as I would a stand-alone film. I can only pillory the episode’s missing third/final act (in which Betty would either use the date to her advantage or synthesize her career aspirations with her romantic interests) because I’m treating it as a closed domain of discourse, but the typical approach to television ontology would require a following-through on the possibility of serialized character and thematic development. Perhaps Betty’s genuine fulfillment comes in a later episode? . . .