ECP Episode 313: The Trouble with Father - "Stu's Holiday" (November 4, 1950)
A new sitcom for a new era of the blog
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 Arnold Belgard, and guest starred Ralph Hodges, Frank Hagney, Teddy Infuhr, Gene Roth and Syd Saylor. It aired on ABC at 7:30 pm on Saturday, November 4, 1950 and is available to watch on Internet Archive.
Starring: Like many of the early TV stars, Stu Erwin was a long-time Hollywood journeyman. He had begun acting in the 1920s, including co-starring alongside Bing Crosby and Judy Garland and receiving an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. He also appeared in Disney movies like Bambi and Son of Flubber. He was 47 by the time he started The Trouble with Father, starring alongside his real-life wife June Collyer.
What happened: Joyce, a 9-year-old girl, complains about her homework assignment to write about the most interesting character she knows, but she doesn’t know any interesting characters. Not a great sign for the show ahead, there. The teenage daughter Jackie is more interested in boys, and wants to go to the country club to see her beau Ralph. This conflicts with the younger girl, who wants to go to a weenie roast. Dad Stu comes in the room and decides that neither of them will go where they want, because he’s going to spend the whole holiday, Admission Day, in bed.
There’s an odd scene where mom June speaks to Willie, a black man hanging out outside the home, and tells him to be quiet, before telling her daughters to do the same. The next day, June delivers Stu pancakes in bed. A young boy named Dudley visits to stare at him eating. He has the same assignment to write about an interesting character, and has selected Stu. June tells Willie to mow the lawn, but the noise disturbs Stu. Meanwhile, Jackie and Ralph try to come up with a way to get Dad out of his single bed.
Jackie decides to force her father from the bed by running his razor to interfere with his radio. Stu tries the trick of banging it, but it doesn’t work. Stu’s aunt also calls, but he refuses to talk to her. He discovers Ralph’s trickery, and finds a way to electrify his bed to play a trick on him. I’ll be honest, I’m not entirely sure how the science works here, but I’m sure it made sense in 1950.
Willie starts vacuuming inside, and everyone yells at him. The sink gets stopped up, and Stu rushes downstairs to show that he can fix it himself without calling a plumber. Dudley tells June that “Men are the cross that women must bear”, so presumably he goes on to invent second-wave feminism. Of course it falls on Willie to actually fix the sink, as Stu futzes around with the pipes and possibly opens up a gas valve. Well, if these folks die of carbon monoxide poisoning, I won’t be all that upset. There’s a bit with Stu and Willie yelling back and forth, and eventually they think they have it fixed, but Stu’s housecoat ends up getting pulled up through the pipe instead.
June objects to Stu walking around his own house in full-body pyjamas. What if the neighbours walk in! Willie continues pulling things up from the basement with his hook, including an umbrella, a shoe, and eventually Dudley himself. There’s a misunderstanding, and Stu comes to believe that Dudley has been pulled up through the pipe, when he actually just ran upstairs. They end up crossing the gas pipe with the water one, in the process ruining dinner. The roast! This leads to some absurd imagery with fire coming out of the sink and Joyce getting a drink of water from the oven.
Finally, an actual plumber arrives, followed by two more, because this job obviously requires a team. A distressed Stu agrees to take the girls out after all. One of them is Dudley’s dad. Stu pays each of the plumbers $7.50 a piece, or $750, which seem too cheap and too expensive respectively when considering 1950 dollars. Stu even agrees to do Dudley and Jackie’s homework for them.
What I thought: This is only the fourth or so sitcom we’ve looked at, but we’re already getting a picture of the “typical sitcom family”: white, hetero but also kind of asexual, a husband with a nice white-collar job that isn’t too interesting (Stu is a high school principal, although it doesn’t really come up in this episode) and a housewife, with 2-3 kids, with nobody having any particularly unusual interests, personality, or physical traits. Trouble with Father definitely fits into this mold. I hadn’t seen an episode before, but I felt as though I instinctively knew these characters.
Trouble with Father also adds an uncommon Black character, played by Willie Best, although Willie’s role in the household is a little uncomfortable. I suppose that he’s a neighbour or something, but on the show Stu and June order him around like a servant, and unlike the plumbers he doesn’t seem to get paid for helping them to fix their plumbing. Best is noted as an imitator of Stepin Fetchit, sometimes known as “Sleep ‘n Eat”, and while there aren’t really any jokes at his expense here, he still slots into the role of the happy-go-lucky servant that white America convinced itself most Black people were.
While it’s easy to be cynical about the cookie-cutter nature of family sitcoms, there’s a good amount of comedic craft that goes into each one, and there are definitely sections of Trouble with Father that feel a lot better than they needed to be. The extended sequence involving the pipes features some good physical comedy and ventures much further into the absurd than one would expect from the largely mundane sitcom around it, with water shooting from oven burners and fire coming from taps. It’s reminiscent of a good silent comedy short, with the comedic premise just escalating and escalating until it reaches something truly ridiculous.
I can’t say I can fully recommend Trouble with Father based on this episode, but I am intrigued to see what other installments are like. If the show leans more into absurdist visual humour and figures out something less patronizing to do with the Willie character, it could end up being one of the better 1950s sitcoms.
TV Guide: If you’re interested in a broader idea of what was on TV in November 1950, the Internet Archive has an issue of TV Forecast, a Chicago-area program listing magazine, from this date. Most of the issue is taken up by channel listings, but there are also a few feature articles at the beginning of end, including an assurance that colour TV would be arriving within the next year and lead to more TV stations (whoops) and a profile of Mary Hartline that places a strange amount of emphasis on her cooking skills. There are also profiles of legendary boxer Sugar Ray Robinson and Chicago wrestler Frankie Talaber, the latter of whom we’ve seen in action and the former who we will hopefully see relatively soon.
Coming up next: Gene Autry returns to serenade us once more.