Pass the Hotscakes!

"Hey baby... I know what we
can do with your hotscakes!"

Bucking a trend in which TV shows that were on in the last decade earned the lablel "classic", TV Land is airing episodes of some actual classic TV. On Sunday night, I was trying to fall asleep and I stumbled across a classic episode of Green Acres, entitled "School Days" (episode no. 47, first aired Jan. 4, 1967).

In case you've never seen an episode of Green Acres, it's about a Oliver Wendall Douglas (Eddie Albert), a man who -- longing for fresh air and "land spreadin' out so far and wide" -- buys a farm and moves his wife Lisa (Eva Gabor) from Manhattan to rural America. They live on the farm, and hilarity ensues when Lisa has trouble adapting to farm life, usually featuring a running gag about her inability to cook and/or her inability to pronounce common English words.

I hadn't seen any Green Acres in a while, and it was fun to watch, but I was astounded at how pronounced and strange the depictions of traditional gender roles are. Oliver consistently acts as if Lisa is a child. He tells her what to do, reprimands her when she misbehaves, and expects her to do his bidding whenever he asks. Her role in life seems to be to walk around in skimpy outfits, say silly things in her Hungarian accent, and ask Oliver to "smooch" whenever she's in the mood to get some.

The Freudian implications of their relationship are mindblowing. In the "School Days" episode, Oliver gets frustrated that she can't cook (she thinks you make fresh-baked bread by stuffing dough into the used bag the supermarket bread came in) and tells her to go down to the high school and enroll in a "domestic science" class. She does, ends up enrolling in the full 11th grade (including algebra and history), and causes a commotion in her classes. In order to rectify the problem, the principal calls in Oliver (who plays the role of parent here) to tell him that his wife must behave, as if Lisa is not an adult with whom the principal can talk. The episode features numerous discussions of Olver being her "daddy" and of Lisa being stupid and worthy of condescension.

So I was pretty fascinated. First, there's the fact that Lisa wasn't behaving that badly in school. In her history class, she politely added her perspective to a class lesson on Hungary, a contribution that I think the teacher should have appreciated, seeing as Lisa is from Hungary. In "domestic science" she tells her classmates that marriage isn't all what it's cracked up to be. What's so wrong with that? Of course, the principal runs a tight, discipline-oriented ship, so Lisa's behavior is apparently totally out of line, which I guess is not particularly surprising seeing as this was 1960s middle-America.

Then there's the fact that Lisa isn't that stupid at all. For example, we're supposed to laugh at how ridiculous she is for gluing the tea cups to their saucers. She explains to Oliver -- and to the comic delight of the laugh-track audience -- that she did it so that if a cup breaks, its saucer breaks with it, and she won't be left with an odd number of one or the other in the set. I didn't think the idea was funny in its stupidity, but in its brilliance. In fact, I'm actually considering crazy-gluing all my cups to all my saucers.

Last is the whole "smooching" thing. In Oliver and Lisa's relationship, Oliver makes all the decisions and treats his wife as if she's his daughter or his employee (both of which are unhealthy, I'd venture to say, for a marital relationship). But then, when it comes to kissing -- the only "sexual" contact they ever have -- Lisa's the boss. It occurs to me that Lisa plays the demure, incapable, bumbling country wife only to take control in the bedroom. Paired with Lisa calling Oliver her daddy, this is a pretty risque show.

Green Acres: Quaint 60s sitcom is really a front for a show about kinky sex. "Keep Manhattan, just give me that countryside," I say!

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