"Burns and Allen" -- Three Walls Do Not A Variety Show Make
The extraordinarily inventive format that "The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show" presented in its run from 1950 to 1958 represents an achievement in creative television that has not been equaled, let alone surpassed, in the years since by any situation comedy. Only "Seinfeld" has had the boldness and insight necessary to utilize even a portion of the range of story-telling techniques presented by B&A's flexible format. While B&A shared with "I Love Lucy" the conceit of a married couple whose fictional and real lives were intertwined for the purposes of the comedic situation, B&A went far beyond "Lucy" by transforming the illusion into a formal device through which the viewers became confidential participants, insiders. The proscenium arch through which the viewers entered the sets, and they were clearly and unabashedly sets, that represented the homes of George and Gracie and their neighbors Blanche and Harry Morton, framed the action and defined it as a fiction, echoing the television screen itself, but it also gave a sense of immediacy to the actors, as though the viewers were present in the theater itself while the show was being filmed. It is this sense of presence, or participation, that transmuted the visibly artificial world of the sets into a reality that included the viewers. They became collaborators. In an era of live television drama and variety, this produced a show that had the sureness of foot of the filmed comedy but the seeming spontaneity of live television.
The sense of reality was further heightened by the solicitations of the actors, George in particular, of the viewers, who were become, in effect, the studio audience, to converse. George would step out of the play, directly addressing the viewers, breaking the barrier of the fourth wall, not only discussing the action that had preceded, but spying on the action as it continued in his absence, sometimes through the magic of a television set. The medium became indistinguishable from its content. With this peculiarly obtained knowledge of the play's events, of which he, as one of the characters in the play would ordinarily have been ignorant, he could plot with the audience to affect the outcome of the play. In these moments, George took on both the role of spectator and creator. Frequently he carried this familiarity back into the play, giving knowing glances to the viewers, saying that the bond that had been established was not broken. The viewers became spies upon the other players. They were in on the joke that George had set up.
The effect could be dazzling at times. In "Two Weeks Free Hawaiian Vacation," for instance, the conceit is extended to encompass the idea that George is making a verbatim record of the dialogue and action as the basis of a future episode of the "Burns and Allen Show." The concept of a show within a show undergoes yet another envelopment, folding in upon itself in a crazy confusion of artifices, until the author himself gives the thing up as hopelessly incredible. There is nothing even remotely as daring until the famous breakdown of the set of "Moonlighting," Not even "Seinfeld," which deftly used the wraparound commentary of Jerry's performances to set the mood for the episodes, and which wryly incorporated not only Jerry's standup career but also the creation of the show itself into its storyline, came close to B&A's handling of the relationship of the show to its viewers, of the nature of shared illusion, of the interchange of real and fictional events and characters in a completely manufactured setting.
All of this was not so much profound and inspired as a natural expression of the material, Gracie's infamous fractured logic. The format was a perfect metaphor for the strange world that Gracie built for herself and George, the world in which everything was viewed from her cockeyed perspective. There was always a lunatic rationality about her speech that the equally lunatic format allowed her to turn into a insanely balanced plot. Things always worked out, even though her view of the causes and effects was often both backwards and inverted. The viewers, having been admitted to that oddly shifting world of multiple realities, felt oddly comfortable with Gracie's anti-logic, which leapt spectacularly from one precipitous conclusion to another. Like an acrobat who exaggerates her danger and imaginary lack of balance, Gracie would seem from moment to moment to be only the point of knocking over the delicate pyramid of chairs on which she balanced, and yet she always gracefully escaped with a sweeping final bow of illogic.
In the aforementioned "Hawaiian Vacation," Gracie learns that her married wardrobe mistress from the show, Jane Adams, has won two tickets to Hawaii. Jane wistfully observes that Hawaii is the perfect place for a honeymoon, and observes what a shame it is that she is not a newlywed. Gracie takes this simple statement to mean that she must find Jane a husband before the trip, in order to fulfill Jane's wish. Of course, the viewers have already met Jane's husband, and, in the end, after misunderstandings about George and Gracie's own marriage, an attempt to arrange for Harry von Zell to marry Jane, and the utter befuddlement of a representative of a marriage bureau, everything works out neatly as Gracie pairs Jane with her very own husband. The plot is a fair farce, and might have arisen on any competent comedy of the period, but the genesis is pure Allen; as is the torturous path by which it travels, driven both by Gracie's peculiar ability to see things slightly askew and the infinitely pliable format that conforms to her vision. Everything fits, from the out-of-plot commercial diversions, the off-stage commentaries, and the knowing winks that George darts to the audience from within the play itself, to the seemingly divine madness of Gracie's all-too literal interpretations of the idiomatic.
"Burns and Allen" stands alone as an artistic success in the realm of television comedy.
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