If it's New Year's Day in NYC, then it must mean The Honeymooners marathon on WPIX.
Before All in the Family and The King of Queens, The Honeymooners was the first and still the best show about working class life in NYC.
Each of its 39 episode was basically the same. Brooklyn bus driver Ralph and sewer worker Norton would think up some idiotic get-rich-quick scheme, Ralph's wife Alice would bust his balls nonstop, and Norton's wife Trixie would stand by her man. Inevitably Ralph's scheme would fail and Alice would be proved right.
Throughout the episodes Ralph would threaten his wife -- "Bang! Zoom!" -- but he'd never actually hit her and, at the end of each episode, they'd embrace and Ralph would exclaim "Alice, you're da greatest!"
Although these days, more than 50 years later, jokes about domestic violence fall flat, remember that Alice was always presented as the smart one and that Ralph was all talk and no action. In many ways, The Honeymooners was really the first great feminist show -- and this was before The Feminine Mystique.
Before All in the Family and The King of Queens, The Honeymooners was the first and still the best show about working class life in NYC.
Each of its 39 episode was basically the same. Brooklyn bus driver Ralph and sewer worker Norton would think up some idiotic get-rich-quick scheme, Ralph's wife Alice would bust his balls nonstop, and Norton's wife Trixie would stand by her man. Inevitably Ralph's scheme would fail and Alice would be proved right.
Throughout the episodes Ralph would threaten his wife -- "Bang! Zoom!" -- but he'd never actually hit her and, at the end of each episode, they'd embrace and Ralph would exclaim "Alice, you're da greatest!"
Although these days, more than 50 years later, jokes about domestic violence fall flat, remember that Alice was always presented as the smart one and that Ralph was all talk and no action. In many ways, The Honeymooners was really the first great feminist show -- and this was before The Feminine Mystique.
Broadcast live from NYC in 1955 and 1956, The Honeymooners remains a classic.
P.S. "The Man from Space" episode we all saw in Back to the Future was not broadcast in November, 1955 but on December 31, 1955. It was a little bit of temporal artistic license on the movie's part.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please keep it civil, intelligent, and expletive-free. Otherwise, opine away.