Positive and Uplifting, Likable and Fun: Television’s Golden Age of Family Sitcoms

Positive and Uplifting, Likable and Fun: Television’s Golden Age of Family Sitcoms
Audiences laughed at humor gleaned from situations and stock characters. Biba Kayewich
Jeff Minick
Updated:
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” wrote L.P. Hartley in his 1953 novel “The Go-Between.” If you’re looking for proof of Hartley’s claim, just tune in, as I recently did, to the early episodes of “The Donna Reed Show,” where you can time travel all the way back to 1958.

Alex Stone was a small-town pediatrician whose office is connected to the house. His wife, Donna (Donna Reed), was a homemaker. And both were articulate, bright, and witty. Their teenage daughter, Mary, and adolescent son, Jeff, sniped back and forth, but without any real rancor. Donna wore a dress while working around the house—gasp!—and the family took their meals together. (Double gasp!)

Jeff Minick
Jeff Minick
Author
Jeff Minick has four children and a growing platoon of grandchildren. For 20 years, he taught history, literature, and Latin to seminars of homeschooling students in Asheville, N.C. He is the author of two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust on Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning as I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” Today, he lives and writes in Front Royal, Va.
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