Show Rooms: A Cultural History of Domestic Sitcom Set Design  on American Radio and Television, 1929-1959

LaPlaca, Laura N

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-jn8b-x738

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Show Rooms: A Cultural History of Domestic Sitcom Set Design on American Radio and Television, 1929-1959

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This project centers set design as the primary aesthetic, economic, and sociopolitical driver of the sitcom genre’s emergence and development during the first half of the twentieth century. My work treats sitcom set design as a category of historical architecture that can be (and has been) mapped, toured, built, and lived in. In exploring this genre’s codeterminate evolution alongside the plastic arts of architecture and design in the United States, I demonstrate how sitcoms served as major sites for aesthetically and discursively negotiating changing cultural definitions of “domesticity” during the thirty year span from the Depression era housing emergency through the post-World War II era of suburban aspiration. As a novel, radically flexible, and distinctly Modern type of architectural form, sitcom set designs overlaid the built environment of American domestic life with electronic meanings and memories. The genre had a profound bearing on how the idealized family home was imagined, represented, arrayed, moved through, and lived in during this formative period in the history of domestic architecture. Four sitcoms comprise the central corpus of this dissertation: The Jack Benny Program, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, I Love Lucy, and The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show. These shows’ contributions to the cultural history of American housing and domestic life have proven highly durable and, as I argue, these spaces should be considered no less real, and certainly no less significant, than other historical architectures for having been built on the air. Ultimately, I hope that my elevation of sitcom set design as a potent cultural force and historical record will demonstrate the more general value of considering media – and especially episodic broadcast media – as dwelling places.

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