‘You couldn’t make a show like that today.’ This refrain was the subtext or text of countless headlines and think-pieces from 2010ish up to the early 2020s. The gist was that even relatively recent shows (Friends, The Office, The Big Bang Theory…) didn’t adhere to the higher level of sensitivities now expected. The phrasing presupposed a linear idea of progress: the past was the bad old days, whereas we know better now. That which was passé was not just unfashionable but offensive. Or the preferred term for when someone couldn’t pinpoint a specific issue beyond datedness: problematic.
This way of looking at old shows never made sense to my rerun-loving self. Sure, when you watch old shows, you might wince at dated terms (“coloured,” “homosexual,” etc.), and you may encounter different sensibilities in terms of how delicately topics come up. But if you pare it down to the question of whether everything up to 2018 give or take was the Dark Ages, the answer is an easy no. Some things were better, some worse, some just different.
What am I thinking of, specifically? Too many things to name, but here are some: The matter-of-fact treatment of Ricky Ricardo’s Cubanness on the classic 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy seemed neither ahead of nor behind the ways identity would come to be addressed (bits of each, therefore a wash). The Mary Tyler Moore Show depicts a universe more feminist and sex-positive, sometimes even less homophobic, than the one around me when watching it as a 30ish millennial, the same age as Mary on the show.
Are You Being Served?, the innuendo-filled 1970s-1980s department-store Britcom, could be looked at as regressive on the gender front (the background includes both bimbo characters and busty mannequins, with much manhandling of both), but it’s fundamentally a show about labour strife, from the perspective of the workers. The Mr. Humphries character, the salesman ever-ready to measure a male customer’s “inside leg,” is either a mockery of camp gay men or just… a camp gay man, played by John Inman, a gay actor known for his work as a pantomime dame, a kind of old-school British precursor to the drag queen.
I will now have to add to this list a show I have not seen: The Goldbergs. Emily Nussbaum, New Yorker staff writer and author of Cue the Sun!, has written a must-read article, “The Forgotten Inventor of the Sitcom,” about the show’s star and creator, Gertrude Berg. Much as Cue the Sun! was both a history of reality television but also a new way into the question of why Trump happened, Nussbaum’s piece about Berg is a brilliantly executed television history, but also about something else: the one-step-forwards, two-steps-back nature of progress.
What was The Goldbergs? What began in 1929 as a radio show about a Jewish family in a Bronx tenement apartment, and ended in 1956 as a television program about that same Jewish family, relocated to the suburbs. If you’re thinking as I would have been thinking that this sounds a bit like I Love Lucy, about a fictional family whose own suburban move took place at the same time, you’d be right, but you’d have your chronology wrong.
Nussbaum explains that The Goldbergs (the original, not the 2010s-2020s show of the same name) was (much!) older than I Love Lucy, but lost out in time slot and ultimately legacy. Antisemitism? Not exactly: McCarthyism. Philip Loeb, who played matriarch Molly’s husband, was blacklisted for suspected Communist tendencies. The details of this upsetting turn are in Nussbaum’s piece, along with analysis of how The Goldbergs addressed the Holocaust and where the Jewish sitcom was left post-Goldbergs.
Nussbaum mentions 1972 as the year with the next Jewish sitcom star, a reference to Bridget Loves Bernie, a short-lived show about a Jewish man with a Catholic wife. Was there even one other show with a Jewish woman protagonist until 1993 and The Nanny? I about to type, it depends where you stand on the Jewishness of the women on Friends, but then checked and that only started in 1994. The Golden Girls, that icon of the 1980s, felt plenty Jewish, but Bea Arthur and Estelle Getty were ‘Italian.’ Effectively, it took over three decades, from the 1956 cancellation of The Goldbergs to Fran Fine strutting into Mr. Sheffield’s townhouse, for the prospect of an unambiguously Jewish woman not to ruffle the feathers of… well whose feathers, exactly?
Nussbaum mentions that one group for whom the Goldbergs were too Jewish consisted of certain Jews, leading to one of the most startling of the piece’s many reveals, and one regarding a Canadian-American Jew to boot. “Berg’s most beloved creation struck assimilated Jewish sophisticates as a corny throwback: the architect Frank Goldberg changed his name to Gehry because his wife hated the association.”
I am well aware of the dynamic Nussbaum describes, but finding it all but impossible to classify along progress-regress lines. Were the Frank Gehry-né-Goldbergs of the world, or their relatives, exhibiting self-hatred when they winced, or did they balk what they perhaps anachronistically classified as ethnic caricature?
There’s much in there to think about, but what I want to focus on here is the zoomed-out takeaway:
“Berg, like many Jews of her generation—including my own grandmother Malka, known as Molly, who passed through Ellis Island the year The Goldbergs débuted on the radio—had been a fierce optimist about America, a true believer in cultural progress and in a democracy that opened its heart to new arrivals. But, in the end, Berg’s life became proof of a darker truth, one that is newly relevant in the Trump era: doors that swing open can also slam shut.”
In other words, The Goldbergs could not have been made in the decades after it aired. Not because it would have offended the more enlightened sensibilities of audiences in the 1960s and beyond, but for the opposite reason: because it was too progressive, too associated (justly or not) with the far left, too ethnically specific, too Jewish, for the era that followed.
Also, because it was not sexist enough—Nussbaum points out that the Jewish mother trope became something else entirely not long after, thanks to, among others, Philip Roth and Woody Allen: “By the nineteen-sixties, Jewish women were rarely portrayed as protagonists, and, when they did show up, it was often as cruel stereotypes: the spoiled princess, the homely meeskite, the castrating mother.” Molly Goldberg, Berg’s protagonist, was too likeable of a character to make sense in the newer conceptions of Jewish womanhood. You could have a Jewish woman be the kindly, inoffensive star of a show, until you couldn’t.
This is all part of a larger story, to do with time itself more than Trump specifically. He’s more symptom than cause. (After all, he’s where he is because someone voted for him.) Things seemed to be moving one way, but then they did not. Models are skinny again. Movie and pop stars are (openly) smoking cigarettes again. High heels are back, after one had been reassured that they were obsolete, torture devices from the past, and that thanks to designer Phoebe Philo’s 2011 personal-style choices, even the chicest women now just wore sneakers.
Things that feel over—good ones, bad ones, and the unclassifiable—regularly start up again. And so, as we sit on what can feel like the precipice of a Third World War, or possibly (one can hope) the aversion of the same, it seems as if the time has come to chuck the idea that things behind us were always worse.
The CJN’s opinion editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. Subscribe to her podcast, The Jewish Angle wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll have more updates on Substack and The CJN’s own daily newsletter.
