Television I Recall

Found at The Tablet (no not the Catholic weekly):

Tilly Edelstein, the future Gertrude Berg, was born in 1898 on New York City’s Lower East Side...by 1929 she had launched her own career with The Rise of the Goldbergs, a series she penned for New York radio about a Jewish family not unlike her own...The Goldbergs (”The Rise of” was quickly dropped) became the No. 2 show on radio after Amos ‘n’ Andy—but while the latter is famous for its wild caricatures of blacks, who were voiced on the show by white actors, the former realistically portrayed urban Jewish life. Every morning, Kempner says, Berg went down to the Lower East Side with a notepad to gather material. In 1933, she conducted an entire seder on the air.

In 1949, Berg adapted her show for television, creating the sitcom that brought her to the peak of her fame. Despite the show’s obscurity today, the image of aproned Molly Goldberg kibitzing in the window—and, often as not, trying to sell the television audience vitamins or knives—has become iconic.

“The apartment with people constantly coming in and out, the product placement, are industry standards now,” Kempner said. She pointed to Seinfeld and Friends as shows that employ the former; as for the latter, Berg wasn’t just marketing instant coffee, but also her own lines of dresses, toys, comic books, and cookbooks.

The show lasted until 1955, when, according to Kempner, two things did it in: suburbanization, and the blacklist. The show’s final season took place in the suburbs—the Goldbergs had risen indeed, but in the process, lost the trappings of tenement life that made the show what it was. More tragically, Philip Loeb, who played Jacob Goldberg, was blacklisted. Berg fought back, but ultimately the show was dropped by its sponsor and forced to switch networks; it never recovered from the loss of both Loeb and its prime slot. Loeb committed suicide; Berg continued feverishly working the spotlight until her death in 1966, but her career never completely recovered.

The main reason The Goldbergs isn’t on the air today, though, is frustratingly banal: like other very early TV shows, Kempner said, it was never syndicated...

And if you have some more time, watch this perspective.