THE WALTONS

I was thinking about the '70s TV show The Waltons.  I liked it at the time (some seasons more than others--didn't care for the first and fifth), but I now realize that I had no taste!  Rouen native Gustave Flaubert said about his hometown, "Disliking Rouen is the beginning of good taste." Well, for me disliking The Waltons was the beginning of good taste!

The Waltons were never poor poor.  The Great Depression was a minor inconvenience for them:  you never saw them getting Relief. (To too many middle-class viewers, that would have made them unsympathetic.)

Let's consider the episode "The Odyssey," written by--why not name her?--Joanna Lee. (It was particularly cheesy that they'd always start by showing the episode title, almost always in the form of "The ______.") 

Homer it isn't.  It starts with narrator Earl Hamner telling us something like "A boy went out that day but a man would return!" Ho hum.  John-Boy goes out to a shack to write or something and meets a young woman who's about to have a baby.  She's there alone because her husband is off making a living with the WPA. (The Waltons didn't do single motherhood.) Of course, John-Boy ends up delivering the baby.

But what's really ineffable is the sub-plot where young Jim-Bob tries to raise tomatoes to win a prize at the agricultural fair but they get ruined by a rainstorm.  At Grandpa's suggestion he heads to the kitchen to make them into preserves.  So we get a scene where he's in an apron peeling them, and his teenage brothers come along and start chanting "Jim-Bob is a mommy's boy!" and he almost attacks them with his kitchen knife. (The Waltons didn't really do subtlety either.)

Then Grandma gives the teenagers a speech something like, "Did you know, the most famous cook in the world is a man--he has a big house with lots of servants..." Something bugged me about this speech and I recently realized, She's talking to these teenagers as if they were little kids!

And of course, The Waltons was written as if all its viewers were little kids.(Someone said, "All television is children's television.") You can also see it in a later scene where Grandma brings Jim-Bob and his preserves to Grandpa and says, "He made them, all by himself!"

I also recall "The Thoroughbred," in which John-Boy, an 18-year-old college student, enters the family mule in some big horse race. There's a scene where he's annoyed about some competitor was the title steed looking down his nose at him and expresses his anger to Pa. Pa says, "I don't know if I should let you go in the race with that attitude," dismisses John-Boy's resentment with "He isn't my son.  You are!" and gives him some hard-nosed speech about how he should only race "for the fun of it."

Think about it.  This guy's son opens up to him and tells him how strongly he feels, and he responds with a threat to forbid him from going in the race. (Isn't John-Boy a bit old for such measures?) Some expert parenting there! Someone gave a rule for parents raising teenagers: "Listen without judging." It isn't that I want TV parents to do everything right, it's that the show expects us to ignore what this says about the father, and just consider what it says about the son and his "attitude." Cheesy, cheesy, cheesy!

And there's a later episode "The Conscience," in which they're starting up conscription in 1940 and Jason considers becoming a Conscientious Objector.  He talks to a recruiting sergeant and leaves just as a couple of louts are coming in to enlist, and the sergeant adds as one last thing, "I hope you talk to your parents about becoming a CO." (My emphasis.) So of course the louts bully Jason later on.  I'm not saying that nobody is careless to that remarkable degree, but I resent a plot that requires a character to be that way!

I could go on, as if you didn't know...