Josh Hill wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Feb 2008 17:37:50 -0500, "John W. Kennedy"
>  wrote:
> 
>> Kirk and Number 6 come from a later era, Superman is not in a serious 
>> dramatic series, and Ralph and Lucy aren't comedies at all. I'm talking 
>> about the adult westerns and the drifter shows -- "Route
66" and its 
>> imitators. Not so much the cop or detective shows, since they tended to 
>> follow the "Dragnet" model of lots of one-scene
characters, just as the 
>> first half of each "Law and Order" does today. And, of
course, if you're 
>> offering a whodunnit, you /can't/ show too much of the suspects.
>>
>> (Odd thing about "Law and Order". As it happens we
didn't pick up the 
>> show when it first came out, and, until now, it's been 
>> late-night-in-a-motel and rainy-afternoon viewing, though we did pick it 
>> up this year. Until reading about it in Wikipedia this week, I had no 
>> idea it had any story arcs at all, though I've seen about 100 episodes 
>> over the years.)
> 
> Unfortunately, you've focused on a genre of which I have little
> knowledge. I'm not much of a TV watcher -- for the most part, I catch
> only the science fiction shows and the occasional extraordinary
> effort, e.g, The Sopranos. So unless it's one of those or a show from
> my youth, I'm apt to be fairly clueless about it, and whatever trends
> it embodies.

I suspect it's just that I'm a little older than you are.

> In any case, I had thought your original statement a generalization.
> Not many years separate The Adventures of Superman, Bonanza, and Star
> Trek, and the Prisoner. The first was oriented more towards children
> than the others, but it seems to me that the American shows share a
> common heritage. And while Kirk was modeled on Hornblower, Star Trek
> itself was modeled in part on Westerns -- a "Wagon Train to the
> stars," as Roddenberry described it.

"The Adventures of Superman" was a children's show. All prime-time 
television is aimed at adults nowadays -- well, that's the theory, at 
least -- but that was not the case in the early 1950s.

"Wagon Train to the stars" was a bit of fluff that Roddenberry invented 
to impress the suits. "Wagon Train", in fact, was a strong example of a 
show where the guest stars were at the center; this was reflected in the 
show's standard style for episode titles -- "The [guest star character] 
Story".

"Bonanza", too, frequently focussed on the guest stars, to the extent 
that they got a posed portrait shot at the top of the episode.

> Perhaps you'll explain why you don't consider The Honeymooners and I
> Love Lucy comedies? It seems to me that they almost define the sitcom
> genre.

Sorry -- I got interrupted, and finished the sentence the wrong way 
round. They /are/ comedies, and are ipso-facto not serious dramatic 
series, which was my original qualification. Sitcoms have followed their 
own evolutionary line.


-- 
John W. Kennedy
"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and 
Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. 
The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being 
corrected."
   -- G. K. Chesterton
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