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Gender and Television
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Gender and Television Gender and Television: Something Old Something New By: Vernon L. Bigelow Idaho State University In the article “All in the Formula” by Emily Nelson we learn that sitcoms are, “The financial backbone of network TV. NBC’s ‘Friends’ brings in several hundred million dollars a year in advertising and it pulls viewers into other NBC shows, driving up overall advertising rates. The studio producing the show also gets mote than $1 billion for selling repeats” (Nelson, 2003). So the success or failure of a new sitcom is big money for lots of people. The problem is that all sitcoms must follow tried and true conventions while somehow making it all appear new. In the article Ms. Nelson says, “Writers must balance TV’s hunger for something new against a rigid set of conventions laid down in the 1950s and honed to a science in the decades since” (Nelson, 2003). An example of this the arrangement of the sitcoms set. The convention of a living room with a sofa in the center and a staircase behind it has been established as a successful convention since the early days of TV. Ms. Nelson mentions “Father Knows Best” as the earliest use of this convention but I believe it predates even that. I can remember in the earliest episodes of “I Love Lucy” that they used the sofa in the center of the living room from the very beginning. They also use a stairway to get back and forth from their landlord’s, Fred and Ethel Mertz apartment. In the new sitcom “Happy Family” the writers added an alcove off the living room with a dining table. This is not really as new as it had been used in “The Bill Cosby Show”, “All in the Family”, and is used in “That 70s Show”. One thing I have noticed that is different today than in the 1950’s is bedrooms. I don’t remember ever seeing a bedroom in “I Love Lucy”, or the “The Honeymooners”.
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