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These articles disagree, but the contours of the debate are subtle. Certain tenets are agreed upon: in the post-war suburban boom, women lived increasingly isolated lives, and television stepped into the social void. Television producers recognized both women’s isolation and the centrality of television to this new domestic sphere. The question for these authors is, how did television both mitigate and facilitate this social loss? In Spigel’s account, television takes part in modernity’s radical compression of space by bringing the public sphere into the living room; Lipsitz concurs, but adds on that by doing so a Trojan horse of social antagonisms is unwittingly (or sometimes wittingly created); Modleski reads soap operas as a genre built to mirror the distraction and flow of domestic work, and identification is a balm of nearness; Mellencamp sees a contained freedom in women’s humor. All of the authors identify, cautiously, small backchannels of mediated escape for women—and recognize escape as a concession made by hegemony. 

                  Something that I observed in the two episodes that we watched last class, but that I didn’t think was explicitly addressed in the readings’ discussion is the underlying hostility toward women that the humor and drama was premised on. For The Goldbergs, the husband’s overt contempt for his wife is the joke—her commitment to chasing off his mistress is the drama. The George Burns and Gracie Allen Showis perhaps even more openly hostile towards its female protagonist: the show opens with Burns inviting the viewer to marvel at her stupidity with him. He remains the the narrator and sane foil to his wife’s strange humor. I wonder how to factor this hostility into the accounts of marginal escape/distraction/companionship offered by these authors? It strikes me that Mellencamp’s account is particularly mute on the subject, despite her concession that Gracie is the subject and object of her jokes, and that George is the dominant party. Maybe I just need to watch more of the show but…couldn’t this equally be read as a spectacle of pure humiliation? As a show premised on its comradery with men, who view their wives’ language caricatured as nonsensical utterances?