Eternal Couch Potato 324: The Trouble With Father - "Dr. IQ Irwin"
Stu finds out how stupid he really is
What I watched: An episode of the sitcom The Trouble with Father, also known as The Stu Erwin Show. The series starred Stu Erwin, June Collyer, Ann Todd, Sheila James, and Willie Best. “Stu’s Holiday” was directed by Howard Bretherton, written by Les Pine and Oliver Crawford, and guest starred Frank Jaquet. It aired on ABC at 7:30 pm on Saturday, November 11, 1950 and is available to watch on YouTube.
Starring: June Erwin had a relatively long career prior to The Trouble with Father. She got her start in the last years of the silent film industry under the name June Collyer, but transitioned successfully to talkies. However, she stopped getting meaningful on-screen roles after 1936, until she made a return on The Trouble with Father. Being Stu Erwin’s real-life wife probably helped her ace the audition.
What happened: We open with June struggling to make the family budget meet while Stu falls down the stairs. He says that his friend has offered him a job as a regional manager at a toothbrush manufacturer if he quits as a school principal, but he’ll have to move to a small town in Arizona. His daughters object, especially Joyce, as there’ll be no boys to date. Stu teases them about it, but it’s clear he doesn’t really want to go through with it either.
Stu is administering a standardized test to his students under the watchful eye of superintendent Mr. Selkirk (Jaquet). The test is being covered by a magazine as part of a pilot program. Selkirk goads Stu into taking the test along with his students. He struggles to find a working pen, and then races to finish the test with the top student in the class, Pringle. This doesn’t turn out well, as Stu gets a failing grade on the test. Joyce’s friend Nancy overhears, but swears not to tell, which she immediately does. This quickly spreads around school, and Jackie even gets in a fight at school about it.
The women of the house all want to protect Stu from this knowledge, but it can’t help but cast a pall over family dinner. They all blurt it out at once. Stu thinks it’s June who got a low score, and there’s some business about the test machine being broken, until she eventually spits out that it was Stu who flunked. Stu is in despair, and calls the mother of Pringle to try to figure out if there’s been a mistake.
Stu is so broken up about the issue that Joyce suggests they leave town to avoid the bad reputation. Jackie proves to be the most understanding, but doesn’t want his help with her schoolwork any more. Stu is seriously thinking about the Arizona job. Selkirk stops by to visit the family, and Stu tries to hide but falls down to the stairs again. Selkirk, however, has good news: their school had the highest average on the standardized test. Stu confesses that he got a bad score on the test, and Selkirk is astonished.
Jackie comes down dressed in cowgirl garb, ready to head out West to blaze a trail. She tells Selkirk all about the toothbrush job, much to his consternation. He tries to stop the plan to print the story about Stu taking the test. However, the examiners explain the problem: because he filled out part of the test in pen, it wasn’t detected, and he actually had a perfect score. Selkirk is suddenly eager on having Stu keep his job. Stu is still thinking about resigning, until he gets a call offering him a raise.
What I thought: This episode didn’t have any of the living-cartoon gags that we saw last week, but it is a pretty enjoyable tweny-four minutes. It helps that Stu’s wife and daughters are genuinely funny, instead of the usual bland family members we get on this show. This instalment also gives us a better look at Stu’s work life, with a supporting cast including an old lady and his overbearing boss Selkirk. I’m not sure how long these characters will stick around for – Selkirk is only credited for 13 episodes on IMDb – but it always helps to have different members of a supporting cast you can bring in occasionally.
The actual story is pretty funny too, with Stu having to face the idea that he may be dumber than his students. To be honest, I was kind of hoping they wouldn’t reverse it at the end, even if I knew they were going to. Maybe the idea that Stu’s actual intelligence was less important than his ability to teach and lead the kids at his school would have been a better moral.
It’s also interesting to see standardized testing treated as a novelty in TV shows. The SAT had been in existence for decades, but was not as universal as it would later become, while the ACT had yet to be invented. The post-GI Bill expectation of college attendance for middle-class children was not yet fully in effect. So a test like the one in this episode is depicted as a new innovation with no real consequences, rather than something the students have been dreading for months. It must be nice!
Coming up next: Gene Autry tries to ride some “twisted trails.”