Change Your Image
cathprism
Reviews
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959)
Dobie and Gracie - They Rule
My family obtained its first TV right before the 1st episode of I Love Lucy. So I remember that sitcom well. But the two sitcoms from that era I really remember are The Burns and Allen Show, and Dobie Gillis. I'll skip George and Gracie for now, except to say that that show in some ways provided the 'techniques' that made Dobie Gillis so special, primarily the commentary (out of the action) by George, in the earlier series, and Dobie (at the feet of Rodin's The Thinker)in the later series.
Dobie was special. Why? Because it dealt with the world of the American teenager. There was NO sitcom back then that did so. In fact, the teen-ager was just being delineated as someone special. Father Knows Best had Bud, and Ozzie and Harriet had Ricky and David, but no series had made its raison d'etre the American teenager. Dobie Gillis did, and beautifully so. It did so not by concentrating on the carnal appetites of young males, but by Dobie's heartfelt desire to find a heartmate. Around this character was created a world defined by Dobie's desires, that is, characters who were defined by how they might help or hinder his romantic quest.
The writing to enable the realization of this quest was top-notch, creating characters who interacted logically with Dobie's single-minded campaigns. Dobie's parents, his teachers, his pal - Maynard G Krebs - all these were realized in relation to Dobie's atesteronic quest for the girl of his dreams. He wanted someone to love, not a body to bed, and in some ways we might doubt whether he actually knew about 'the birds and the bees'. What he did know about, and this is where the wisdom of the series is found, is that 'the best laid plans of mice and men {including those of ardent suitors)are oft gang agley'.
I don't know of any other TV series that caught both the hope and the hopelessness of such endeavors with such marvelously comic results. It is tragic that no DVDs are available to allow us to see the richness of this early sitcom. Perhaps it is because Dobie's desires were chaste, and everyone knows that chastity is a downer, and that it is SEX that sells.