Queen for One Day at a Time

Abstract

GROWING UP during the childhood and adolescence of television in the forties and fifties, I learned, as sacred truth, that TV did to your mind what Coke, potato chips, and too much chocolate did to your teeth and complexion. While the roofs of the houses in our upper middle class neighborhood, and particularly those belonging to members of certain ethnic and racial groups, were positively bristling with two, three, or even four pieces of right-angled metal sculpture, the pristine purity of the skyline above our fake Tudor house remained a point of pride for my scrupulously WASP parents until the Nixon-Kennedy debates brought them to their knees. Traces of this early training remained with me until quite recently, taking the form of a conviction, expressed in action if not in words, that prime time television was directed to, and rated by, a group that did not include me in its numbers. What could be more disturbing, then, than to find myself, a dues-paying member of the Modern Language Association, sitting in front of a television set cheering at five of ten, or weeping at twenty past eight? Yet this did indeed happen this fall and winter as I was gathering material for a course in Popular Culture. I will give you some of the instances that produced this unseemly, and at times embarrassing reaction, all taken from situation comedies named after the leading female character or focused on her life and problems.