About TV period pieces - core post #2 - week 4

In “The Meaning of Memory,” Lipsitz breaks down how TV helped engineer consent for consumerist capitalistic values in ethnic working class America. Viewer identification was generated through a false on-screen, historical authenticity and its association to sponsor products. Through this appeal, TV encouraged viewers to “think of the TV show at hand as the kind of history that might be created in their own home” (379). In other words, the screen facilitated the transition from traditional, thrift- and family-oriented working-class values to consumerist values and created a “structure of domination that offers commodities as the key to solving personal problems” (367). The media-advertiser complex already exited in the age of radio, but the medium of television brought characters to life to an unparalleled degree of familiarity and relatability, through the magic of the moving image and the primacy of family living room access. As the TV set became part of the family, the modern, consumption-driven lifestyle it encouraged slowly became the norm. 

Through analyzing shows like The Goldbergs, Amos n’ Andy and The Honeymooners, Lipsitz points to how TV programs addressed “some of the moral, psychic, political obstacle to consumption among the [1950s American] public at large” (361). Lipsitz exemplifies the idea of urban ethnic working class situation comedies as a means of addressing “the anxieties and contradictions emanating from the clash between the consumer present of the 1950s and collective social memory about the 1930s and 1940s” (358) and points to TV’s role in legitimizing the “transformations in values initiated by the new economic imperatives of postwar America” (359). 

I do believe that period pieces, although they are set in a long-gone and often idealized past, are never intended as pure nostalgia, but rather as way for the society contemporaneous to production time to process its timely concerns. The 1950s ­­–– a liminal era between 1920s/30s liberalization of womanhood (with regard to both politic of sexuality and employment) and the 1960s/70s rise of social reform in the form of civil rights ­­–– have recently been used as TV production playground to champion characters such as Midge Maisel. As the lead from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, she is a woman who rises to success from the ashes of her blown up marriage, turning setbacks into glory –– giving present-day women the warm, delightful, and rewarding dose of empowering mythology of a woman who is unapologetic about her own growth, pursuit, and relationship status that resonates with the present-day needs of women who more than ever are choosing their field of professionalization and need to persevere in order to succeed.