The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network Television Programs

Abstract

Almost every Friday night between 1949 and 1956, millions of Americans watched Rosemary Rice turn the pages of an old photograph album. With music from Edvard Grieg's Holverg Suite playing in the background, and with pictures of tur-of-the-century San Francisco displayed on the album pages, Rice assumed the identity of her television character, Katrin Hansen, on the CBS network program Mama. She told the audience about her memories of her girlhood, her family's house on Steiner Street, and her experiences there with her big brother Nels, her little sister Dagmar, her Papa, and her Mama--most of all, she said, when I remember that San Francisco of so long ago, I remember (Meehan and Ropes 1954). Katrin Hansen's memories of her Norwegian immigrant working-class family had powerful appeal for viewers in the early years of commercial network broadcasting. Mama established itself as one of CBS' most popular programs during its first season on the air, and it retained high ratings for the duration of its prime time run (Mitz 1983:458). The show's popularity coincided with that of other situation comedies based on ethnic working-class family life-The Goldbergs, depicting the experiences of Jews in the Bronx; Amos 'n Andy, blacks in Harlem; The Honeymooners and Hey Jeannie, Irish working-class families in Brooklyn; Life with Luigi, Italian immigrants in Chicago; and Life of Riley, working-class migrants to Los Angeles during and after World War II.' The presence of this subgenre of ethnic, working-class situation comedies on television network schedules seems to run contrary to the commercial and artistic properties of the medium. Television delivers audiences to advertisers by glorifying consumption, not only during commercial breaks but in the programs themselves (Barouw 1979). The relative economic deprivation of ethnic workingclass households would seem to provide an inappropriate setting for the display and promotion of commodities as desired by the networks and their commercial sponsors. Furthermore, the mass audience required to repay the expense of network programming encourages the depiction of a homogenized mass society, not the particularities and peculiarities of working-class communities. As an artistic medium, television's capacity for simultaneity conveys a sense of living in an