Ashley Spurgeon is a lifelong TV fan — nay, expert — and with her recurring television and pop-culture column "And Another Thing," she'll tell you what to watch, what to skip, and what's worth thinking more about.
It is funny to me that my last column was all about watching colorful things, since Tennessee winter is typically so oppressively, monochromatically gray. And then boom! Prettiest week of snow in something like 10 years. (Isn’t it ironic?!) I acutely appreciated the brief change of scenery — sunlight reflecting off of snow makes the day so blindingly bright — but obviously, snowtime in Tennessee means leaving the house even less than usual. I don’t need hyper-pigmented TV shows at the moment (on account of the ground recently being covered in unknown trillions of crystals doing a bang-up job of refracting into that glittery rainbow spectrum we all know and love). I need the absolute dumbest, funniest entertainment I can find. It’s back to the basics.
Like, here’s where I’m at: Last night, we put on Money Talks during dinner (I deeply agree with Roger Ebert’s take on Chris Tucker in this film). But before I get too deep into film criticism, let me remind myself this is supposed to be about television shows. Television shows like, oh, say, Martin, which feature scenes of extreme puppet wrestling as well as your traditional “the boss is coming to dinner!” hijinks.
And because I am now thinking about the importance and beauty of Tisha Campbell specifically, I am reminded that she did voice-over work on an episode of the little-loved and extremely horny ’90s USA original (Characters Welcome) Duckman, because we for some reason just bought the whole series on DVD. (Again, the premise of this column is “I am becoming very, very dumb.”) Fun fact: One thing you can not binge-watch is Duckman, because there’s a hard limit to how long a hearing human can handle Jason Alexander’s voice ALWAYS AT THIS LEVEL. If you’re suspecting The Critic was also recently purchased, you are correct. (If you like movie parodies, do I have a cartoon for you!)
This confluence of ’90s deep trash plus an avowed appreciation of stunningly gorgeous women in comedy would of course eventually lead to Married With Children, one of the many cracked gems in the jester’s dumb comedy crown. The women of Fox, from Gina to Peggy and Kelly Bundy, pretty much carried their shows — what, are you going to turn on a Bud episode? Of course not. The pleasures brought by Married With Children are the dumbest of the dumb: the entendres are double, the feminism nonexistent, the brains set thoroughly in the “off” position, and there is way, way too much George Thorogood.
So I switched to I Love Lucy. (When you’re over caring about color fidelity, black-and-white is back on the menu.) The gauche ’90s fart-boy (not a typo) sexism of your Martin Paynes and Al Bundys was forged in the American midcentury: Fellas had jobs, dames knew their place, and Cold War-era propaganda was apparently taken at face value for generations to come. So yes, Lucy is given an allowance and has to say “Yes sir” to her husband Ricky, and they have cigarettes dangling from their mouths as they tuck their child face-down in his crib and cover him with blankets and stuffed animals, but hey — when it pops, it pops.
The jokes about Ethel being fat aren’t funny, and neither are the ones where Lucy seems to be legitimately concerned that Ricky might punch her in the face. But I find the key to enjoying I Love Lucy (indeed, the key to enjoying many a dumbass work of art) is to fill in the blanks with your own zany backstory. It is well established over the course of the series that Lucy is a liar and a thief — she straight-up embezzled hundreds of dollars from her women’s club to cook the household books — and Ricky is usually the person she’s lying to. So I’ve chosen to believe she fibbed to a young Cuban bandleader about a pregnancy (that’s one of the worst things a woman can lie about, and I assure you Lucy is more than capable of such deceit) in order to wed her way into his nightclub act. Ricky, a traditional man with a strong Catholic background, will basically never be able to bring himself to divorce her. Plus, he’s got a stupidity kink.
When old sitcoms like Martin or contemporary meta-commentaries like WandaVision yoink out the so-hoary-they’re-funny-again old clichés, they are in large part pulling directly from Lucy. Example: A midseries hinjink involves Lucy borrowing a black wig from the salon so she can flirt with Ricky and trick him into admitting he finds the Italian cut hairstyle chic and sexy — when she asks the stylist to borrow it, she flings her elbow over the back of the chair and literally winks, mouth agape, after explaining her scheme. It’s soooo broad and soooo stupid and, God help me, I laughed. But I mean, the multi-cams, the set builds, and the studio audience held the sitcom standard for 50 years — it’s not like they didn’t know what they were doing.
