Lucille Ball, the comedian who contradicted the prudish norms of the industry and opened the doors to women on television

Lucille Ball, the comedian who contradicted the prudish norms of the industry and opened the doors to women on television

 

 

 

'Being the Ricardos', with Javier Bardem and Nicole Kidman, portrays her television beginnings and how the comedian left the script, the plane, and contravened the prudish and conservative norms of the industry by opening the doors of women on television.

 

Perhaps one day there will be no need to review them, it will not be necessary to specify that they are creative women, but for now it is still necessary. And to explain when it all started, Being the Ricardos, with Javier Bardem and Nicole Kidman, has just premiered on Amazon, the new film by Aaron Sorkin (The Trial of the Chicago 7, The West Wing of the White House, The Newsroom, The social network). It tells the story of the television ins and outs of the series I love Lucy, the first sitcom, one of the founding and pioneering fictions of American television, (60 million viewers watched it) that, as we already know, invented almost everything. The film also dwells on the tumultuous love story of the protagonist Lucille Ball, and her husband, the Cuban Desi Arnaz, co-star of the iconic series who persecuted Senator McCarthy and his cursed witch hunt.

 

 

But aside from that political and personal vision (Sorkin mixes it up well, weaves it together so that it's clear to us that everything was connected), the most interesting thing about the film is the portrayal of what those television beginnings were like, how a comedian like Lucille It went off script, off the shot, and contravened the prudish and conservative norms of the industry. The series, which ran from 1951 to 1956, lit up the post-war atmosphere as a humorous comedy. There is an anecdote that is explained in the film: the department stores were open late on Mondays, but they changed it to Thursdays, because nobody left the house during the Monday broadcast of I love you Lucy. But in addition, and that is the most important thing, he left us an ambitious subtext for the story: you can always disobey, when the rules are not fair; we are our best allies; We understand each other and we like each other. And it laid some foundations for the audiovisual creators who came later.

 

 

For Lucille Ball, that founding mother of the American sitcom, some other creators had already paved the way for her. Gertrude Berg, for example, who in the 1920s created the radio soap opera, The Rise of the Goldbergs, which was a great success. It was about the story of a Jewish family in America and was broadcast at a time when Nazism was rising in Europe. As Joy Press recalls in her book Dueñas del show, Berg adapted the series for television years later: she wrote it, starred in it and produced it from 1949 to 1955 while maintaining creative control. It was one of the 10 best CBS series in the postwar period. Despite all this, Berg is an almost completely forgotten figure today.

 

 

She undoubtedly inspired Lucille Ball, a former chorus girl and film actress who glimpsed a future on television when she began to run out of roles as an innocent girl, as Sorkin's film explains phenomenally. She came to CBS and proposed to create her own sitcom. She convinced them to also hire her husband, with whom she set up a production company with which they filmed a live prototype on celluloid. Thanks to this innovative initiative (at that time the series were performed and broadcast live, but not recorded) they were able to sell the series, so Yo amo a Lucy was broadcast for decades on television and Ball became an example to follow for several generations of comedic actresses. And she got rich, that too. They weren't the only millionaires anymore.

 

 

The series was the most watched in the United States for most of the 6 years it was broadcast. Her creator, Ball, broke the current rule of hiring only male writers and put Madelyn Pugh on her team, as her right hand, who continued with her throughout the series. As seen in the film, Ball leaned on her, heeded her, they let themselves be carried away by her feminine point of view. Together they created a character, Lucy, who has gone down in television history. Pugh, who died in 2011, at the age of 90 had written for the radio, for the press (she was the editor of a student newspaper in Indianapolis, her hometown, where she had, by the way, a peculiar classmate, Kurt Vonnegut, who years later would achieve fame with books like Matadero Cinco, among others). There is a moment in the film in which Lucy asks her to be her and not her male screenwriter partner the one to give the finishing touch to the scene that they do not see clearly: «I care what works, Mady, I care what is funny , I care about you".

 

 

Ball and Pugh, as a creator and as a screenwriter, began a path, making small and large decisions that were revolutionary at that time, along which many others later traveled. After Ball, in the 1960s, came other women who followedThey were setting the standard, the first screenwriters who dared to break with the canons, who challenged the limits and therefore changed the industry.

 

 

 

 

Emancipated women were rarely seen on television at the time, but that changed with the 1966 ABC premiere of That Girl. The budding star that was Marlo Thomas, no doubt inspired by Lucille, had pitched a series based in part on her experience as a young independent actress living in Manhattan. She also hired women writers, although she was never listed as a producer in the credits… It was a pioneering series, and as Marlo says “one didn't have to be someone's wife, daughter or secretary, she could be that someone”. It was one of the first sitcoms, which aired until 1971, starring a woman who was not a housewife and did not live with her parents.

 

 

Then came The Girl on TV, by Mary Tyler Moore, (CBS, 1970-1977), and as Noel Ceballos recounts in his 3rd Rock chapter, Behind the laughter, from the essay book, Sitcom, the comedy in the living room, “upended the ironclad hierarchies of network television and effectively expanded the role of women in the production process. Not only did The Girl on TV amplify that girl's virtues in candidly portraying life as an independent 30-something in the modern world, she also made it a norm to hire female talent for writing and directing jobs." The result: years later Tina Fey worked for television and above all, "without the example of all those pioneers, the women of sitcoms would have continued to be housewives or daughters obedient to patriarchal authority for many more years, they were the ones who they got them the privilege of being stupid, alcoholic, idiotic, horny or irresponsible, just like men” says Ceballos.

 

 

That is to say, the television icon that Marlo had been passed the witness to another woman who was also single and working. Except that Marlo went a step further: “never had so many women been hired for a series, at some point, a third of the writers were women. They made their protagonists talk about experiences as a couple, double standards and labor conflicts, ”says Press.

 

 

So that Shonda Rhimes, Lena Durham and the like could create the fictions with feminine and feminist points of view, without ambiguity, which since 2015 have already flooded the screens, there were other creative women like Lucille Ball, who insisted on convincing the executives of what should be told in television entertainment. Women who laughed at the eternal feminine (as was done many years later in Desperate Housewives, for example). The TV we watch now is carried out by women who saw certain inspiring fictions. In the 50s they became empowered, in the 80s they became politically committed, and in 2022 they are everything.

 

 

In 2017, Lena Durham, creator of Girls (HBO 2012-2017) published in The New Yorker the text "Everything I learned from Mary Tyler Moore", after the death of the creator of The Girl on TV. She told Lena that the series had been a master class when she was ten years old and that it was fascinating to see a protagonist who was totally independent but insecure, and that she had crises and that she had personal and work conflicts and that she was anxious. Everything sounds like us, really.

 

 

 

Shonda Rhimes herself, creator of Grey's Anatomy, and who was 18 years old when Murphy Brown, another series of groundbreaking women, was released, was one of the first creators to practice what is called colorblind casting or the choice of actors without taking into account their ethnic origin. Result?: the famous diversity of Shondaland, as the empire created by this African American is called, where there are doctors, lawyers and politicians of all racial and sexual conditions. In fact, the success of Grey's Anatomy put an end to an industry prejudice: viewers will not watch series about women or people of color.

 

 

Los Angeles Times reporter Mary McNamara visited the show's writers in 2005, and Rhimes told her that "the male writers growl sometimes and say, 'That's too girly.' And I say, for those women's things I watch TV. So she stays” In that room, the journalist wrote, there were more than twice as many women screenwriters as men, so the male perspective was constantly overshadowed.

 

 

In the book Outstanding Men, which analyzes the unprecedented transformation of the television landscape in the late 1990s, author Brett Martin tells how, suddenly, a barrage of hitherto unusual female characters burst into a male and masculinized world. : “They could be corrupt, ruthless, foolish, and even heroic human beings on their own. They were relentless from the narrative point of view, they had no mercy with what could be the favorite characters of the audience, offeringfew catharsis or simple resolutions”. And they stayed, thankfully.

 

 

In 1975, Gloria Steinem wrote: “If aliens came to get an idea of ​​what American women are like, and could only find out from TV or movies, they would believe that there are twice as many men as women to begin with. They would think that women sleep with false eyelashes and heavy makeup (we could go here to a specific moment of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, an Amazon series that I recommend, where this is told as it is). Some of us would seem like a class of servants. Those of us who lived alone would almost without exception be widows, at least until recently. Steinem pointed out that two television series were challenging this absurd and old-fashioned idea and changing things: The Girl on TV and Norman Lear's series Maude (CBS 1972-1978). In it, the protagonist had been married four times, openly supported abortion, had character, strength and voted for the Democratic Party.

 

 

Ten years have passed since this quote from Steinem and the creator of Murphy Brown arrived to continue breaking ground. When the executives asked her to write that the protagonist had retired to a spa and not to a detox clinic, which was what she wanted for her character, she told them NO. Later many others would arrive and the television rules changed and the medium was populated with powerful female characters. They ceased to be simple obstacles or catalysts for the progress of the hero. And here we are, aliens.