When Women Invented Television | NY Times Bestselling author Jennifer Keishin Armstrong - 80s TV Ladies

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Weirdy Weird medio eightiesles hand So Pretty through the City.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Getting Welcome to eighties TV Ladies with your fabulous hosts
Sharon Johnson and Susan Lambert Hadham.

Speaker 1 (00:30):
Hello, I'm Sharon and I'm Susan. Today's guest is very
special to me. I was reading her book, loving it
and thinking the whole time, well, heck, we should have
her on the show. And then guess what, Sharon, we
got her.

Speaker 3 (00:44):
Woo And in kicking off season three, we wanted to
get another overview of the television landscape and history like
we did at the beginning of season two when we
talked with our friend and the creator of the podcast
Advance TV her history, Cynthia Bemis Abrams.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
And I wanted to bring on someone this season who
could give us even more context about the history of
women in television. So why not the woman who wrote
the book on it, When Women Invented Television by Jennifer
Kashin Armstrong.

Speaker 3 (01:13):
Jennifer has written eight books, including New York Times bestseller
Signed Feldia, the afore mentioned When Women Invented Television, Mary
Lou and Rhoda and Ted, as well as Sex and
the City and.

Speaker 1 (01:25):
Us her latest book, So Fetch, A Cultural History of
Mean Girls, published in January twenty twenty four.

Speaker 3 (01:34):
Jennifer, Welcome to eighties TV Ladies. Were thrilled to have
you with us this afternoon.

Speaker 4 (01:38):
Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
We are really happy. I have to tell you finding
your book When Women Invented Television, which I have right here,
gave me such great context when I was starting the podcast,
and I had not heard about Gertrude Berg, so that
was very exciting. And then I realized you had also
written the Mary Tayler Moore book, so I was like,
I wonder if I could get them on the show,

(02:02):
and we did well.

Speaker 4 (02:04):
That makes me very happy because those are two of
my favorites.

Speaker 1 (02:08):
They're fantastic names, they're really fun reads, and I enjoy them.

Speaker 3 (02:12):
So why don't you tell us a little bit about
what your process is when you start writing one of
these books, how you choose a topic and so on.

Speaker 4 (02:21):
Those two books that you mentioned are both a little
different from each other, so they had slightly different processes.
But a book like the Mary Tyler Moore Show book,
which I've written several books about, you know, like specific shows, SEINFELOWD,
Sex and the city. In that case, you know, it's
a little more focused, just because you're kind of going,
you're looking at a list of TV shows right to
start with, and I literally do that sometimes and then

(02:45):
it's kind of like there's some ineffable qualities right in
some cases, I'm waiting for time to pass. I feel
like we just got to a point where I could
start writing about like two thousands shows. You know, there's
you have to know for a fact that it's sticking
around and still has resonance and all of that stuff.
Then I'm looking for a story to tell.

Speaker 3 (03:06):
Right.

Speaker 4 (03:07):
It isn't just I like the show. People love to
at cocktail parties say to me like, you should do
whatever name the show, and I always just say like, yeah, baby,
you know, but really I'm thinking, like, here's all the
reasons that won't work. And you know, a big part
of like the Mary Tyler Moore Show book was yes,
the show was super important to me. Yes, I loved

(03:28):
the show, but it was also that I was interviewing.
At that time, I worked at Entertainment Weekly, and I
was interviewing a lot of women that at that time
current like television and comedy, which would have been the
twenty and twenty tens, and they would all mention, you know,
Julia Luis, Jureyfus, Mindy Kaaling, all of these people would

(03:48):
mention the Mary Tyler Moore Show and that So that
was the first like, hmm, that's interesting that people are
still looking to that show. And then also once I
did some research, I realized that it was the first
show to have kind of multiple women writing for it,
as opposed to like one woman on staff who was
paired with a man. Then I thought, oh, there's a
story to tell, which I was correct about, and I

(04:12):
really focused my interviews on those women who wrote for
the show. They were all bringing their own lives into
the show, and of course, by definition, women who were
these pioneers are going to have great stories. And so
that was why I really started to think, Okay, there's
something very much here. So that's the kind of thing

(04:32):
I'm looking for. And I'm also personally very interested in
specifically social resonance. So I want to see a show
that had an artistic impact on shows after it, and
I want to see a show that made a social
impact as well, that changed. I always like to think
of it as like the changed actual people's actual lives,
whether it's as simple as they quoted a bunch of times,

(04:54):
or they see themselves in the characters and it changes
the way they act, or in this case, it was
an act avatar the entire feminist movement of the nineteen seventies,
and it kind of ended up channeling what was going
on in activism into a television show. And not all
of the activists loved it, but it was in fact,
you know, Mary throwing her hat in the air is

(05:16):
the emblem of female independence, and so all those things
came together for me and that was why I thought like, oh,
this is going to be good. And with when women
invented television, it did come from my research on Mary
Tyler Moore Show, specifically Jim Brooks and Alan Burns, who
made the Mary Tyler Moore Show. When I asked them

(05:38):
what the inspiration was for Roda, the character who is
Mary's best friend, they mentioned a lot of different things.
It wasn't just this, but one thing they mentioned in
passing was they mentioned, oh, and you know, we were
thinking about Jewish women in television and media from the past,
and we were thinking about Gertrude Berg. And really I
think what they actually said was Molly Goldberg, her character's name.

(06:00):
And I was like, I don't hold the phone. I
have no idea what you're talking about, right, And they
were like, oh, you need to go look her up.
She was super famous. And I'm like, that's weird that
I don't know who that is when I kind of
consider myself a nerd about television history and women in particular,
And indeed, when I looked it up, it's like she
was the Oprah of her time. You know. She had

(06:20):
the first successful family sitcom period. She wrote, start in, directed,
produced the whole thing. She was on the radio for
twenty years before that, and then brought it to television.
The show was so successful that it was the first
show made into a movie. She had a line of
house stresses, she had a cookbook, all of this stuff.

(06:41):
She was really big, and I thought that's weird, and
I kind of filed that away. And the other thing
they said to me was that when we talked about
Betty White on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, they said, well,
it was sort of like a joke on Betty White's persona.
They described her in the initial script as a Betty
White type who has then kind of a horrible the

(07:03):
minute the camvus turned off, which Betty is not. Betty
was not, but you know, that was how they described it, and
they were like, oh, it was really funny because it
turned out we could get you know, Mary was friends
with Betty and we could get her. We didn't know
that was going to happen. We just described her that way.
And I was like, Okay, but that's weird to me
because I don't know what a Betty White type is
before the Mary Tyler Burshow. That was my first encounter

(07:24):
with her in television history, and so they said, oh, yeah,
she had a whole career before that, you should look
it up. And again I went, and it was shocking
because she was, along with Gertrude Berg, one of the
first women to produce her own sitcom. And in addition
to that, she was just one of the first people
I mean literally on television, like in a test screening

(07:45):
when she was a teenager. And then even so then
going forward, she was one of the first TV stars
in Los Angeles because she was on this morning talk
show and ended up being on just hours and hours
and hours a day because I just didn't know what
else to do. They've just in daytime television. They were

(08:07):
like more Betty, what you know, unscripted and they did
six days a week. That's so crazy, wild, right, And
then remember that she is then also going to shoot
her live sitcom on Friday nights. It's crazy just think
of how much she was working, how much she wanted this.
She like left her husband to be you know, he

(08:29):
said I don't want a career woman as a wife,
and she said, I will choose television because I love
my job that much. And again, this does kind of
dove tailing with what I was saying about the Mary
Tyler More Show in the sense that it's like, once
you start to see this, you go like, oh, there's
a story here. And then once I did a little
bit of research, I realized that there were tons of
women doing this work at that time. Pre Lucy is

(08:52):
kind of the way I was seeing it that Lucy.
I used to think, Lucy, Oh my god, it's amazing
that the first gigantic television start happens to be a
woman too. And that's true.

Speaker 1 (09:03):
She seemed to be a unicorn.

Speaker 4 (09:04):
Right exactly, But she wasn't. But she wasn't really, I
mean She's incredible in a million other ways. I don't
want to take anything away from that, but she wasn't
the only one. And that was what I sort of
saw as like, oh, I don't want to tell Lucy's
story because that's been told and then retold quite recently
in a couple of ways. But this was my way
of kind of saying, like, she was great, but she

(09:26):
wasn't alone. Gertrude was before her, and I ended up
choosing I made a big list and chose the four
women that I kind of focused on to kind of
tell the bigger story of women were doing all kinds
of different things in television, and two of them were
Gertrude and.

Speaker 1 (09:42):
Penny, and the other two Erna Phillips and Hazel Scott.
I knew of her from the piano stuff. I didn't
know she had television.

Speaker 4 (09:52):
Because it was so short lived.

Speaker 3 (09:53):
I don't think I knew anything about her at all,
so I didn't really either.

Speaker 4 (09:57):
And there are people, though, I would say, especially jazz people,
really did know.

Speaker 5 (10:01):
You know.

Speaker 4 (10:02):
When I would mention her, they go, oh, yeah, Hazel
Scott's she would play two pianos at once.

Speaker 1 (10:06):
Yeah, I think I saw that two piano clip at
some point and I don't know, Yeah, that was.

Speaker 4 (10:10):
Going around pretty recently. Alicia Keyes did a tribute to her.
In fact, at the Emmy Like she didn't mentioned it briefly,
she said, oh, I'm playing two pianos like Hazel Scott,
and a lot of people searched for it after that
and saw her. I usually describe her as the Beyonce
at her time, she was also shockingly famous for a
person that a lot of us don't like. Imagine if
in forty fifty years people didn't know who Beyonce was

(10:33):
all of a sudden, couldn't happen. But Hazel Scott, she
was so famous and then had this unfortunate downside because
she ended up being blacklisted and left the country. So
that's why you haven't heard of her. But at the time,
her TV claim to fame is she was this stunning
woman who was so charismatic, would dress perfectly, and she

(10:57):
was married to Adam Clayton Powell Junior, who was this
very famous congressman and they were kind of this power
couple and they were very active in early civil rights actions,
that kind of thing. She would not play segregated venues,
for instance, she'd walk out if she walked in and
saw that it was segregated, and then they'd kind of
purposely like call the press and do the whole thing.

(11:20):
So she got a television show on this fourth network
called the Dumont Network that died kind of shortly after,
But at the time, I think partly because they were
a fourth network, the others had come from radio and
they hadn't, so I think they were more willing to
take chances, and so they had more diversity than the

(11:40):
other networks. And you know, in the big cities, they
knew that they could get a black audience. Lots of
people loved her, including white people, but they knew this
was going to be great and jazz and all of
this stuff. It's so sophisticated, and they were really focusing
on the cities at the time because that's where most
of television was. So she had this variety show, and
it was very common at that time to have these

(12:02):
shows where you'd hire a musician and it was essentially
them playing for most of the time. They might have
some guests come on. Part of the reason we don't
know about this. And she was the first black person,
male or female, to host a primetime national television show period.

Speaker 1 (12:19):
And that was nineteen fifty nineteen fifty.

Speaker 4 (12:22):
Yeah, and so seemed to be going really well. The
reason that I can even tell you what happened on
the show is because I read all of the weekly
reviews in the trade magazines at that time, and they
were pretty descriptive. There are no recordings of this show,
and I really believe this is a huge reason we
haven't heard of her, because we can't see them the
way we could see I Love Lucy. It was live.

(12:45):
It was this network that died, and there is probably
apocryphal story that they dumped all of the tapes into
the East River after Dumont died and was bought by ABC,
that ABC was like, oh, I don't need this. I
don't really believe that that's true, but it's a great story,
it's a great visual and certainly what we do know
is we can't find tapes of this woman's show, so

(13:07):
we can't actually see it. But there were these descriptions,
and from what I understand from the descriptions, it was
this very elegant thing. She would wear these beautiful dresses.
She had full wardrobe approval for any project she did,
She was very very smart about this because she knew
where people wanted to railroad her, and she always had
to play herself and she always got wardrobe approval, and

(13:29):
this kept her away from what she called singing made roles,
which was extremely common at that time. That was like
your only way in is black woman, and she said, nope,
I'm going to play two pianos instead. It looked like
a beautiful New York City penthouse and she would play
her music and she looks great on screen, and it
was going really really well, and they were getting more

(13:50):
and more interests. More and more local affiliates were picking
it up. As the show went on throughout nineteen fifty,
the reviews were universally positive. They all kept saying, like,
we need more Hazel Scott's. She went from like fifteen
minutes to thirty minutes. She went from one night a
week to several and then this publication came out where

(14:10):
a bunch of people were named as possible communists, as
they say, and that was it. She was done, and
she was so fed up that she left the country.
I mean not right away, but she basically went to Paris.
And I think all of these things together are reasons.
We don't know who she is now, but she was
very big in her day, and Erna Phillips was the

(14:32):
essentially inventor of the soap opera genre. She started on radio.
They asked her to make something that appealed to women
because they wanted to sell women's stuff in advertisements. Of course,
this is always how it goes, and she came up
with essentially a serial, very very serialized family drama and
was incredibly successful at this. Even on the radio. She

(14:55):
was making something like two hundred and fifty thousand dollars
a year in the forties. Remember in the forties, this
is like millions of dollars equivalent. Now, she'd had this
huge empire, and eventually, after a few tries there it
was not easy to just hop it on over, but
she brought it over from radio to television and eventually

(15:18):
had both kind of her own empire. So like as
the World Turns and Guiding Light for her big inventions.
And think of how those I was going.

Speaker 1 (15:26):
To say, those memory, Yeah, I know of because they
lasted a very long time. Are they the longest running?

Speaker 4 (15:35):
Yes, Guiding Light was Guiding Light was because the record
is held over from radio too. She tried a few
like new ones on TV and they didn't work. But
her big brainstorm that worked was that she just was like,
why would just bring Guiding Light over this? Like one
day it's on radio and the next day it's on
radio and TV. So they would simulcast and you'd hear

(15:56):
the audio, so it was like, it's so she brought
her fans over to television, which of course they wanted
to see the people. Why wouldn't you want to see
the people? Right, that's so exciting at that time, and
that was the real key, is that you could actually
get it either place for a while, and from there
she was able to build this empire. And basically she

(16:16):
also mentored so many people in this form that all
of the shows that came after, even the other shows,
were still basically her proteges making those shows two Days
of Our Lives, all of these other shows, all My
Children or Agnes Nixon many people have heard of, and
that was a protege of hers. So you know, she

(16:36):
was just really like the at the center of the
soap opera, and I think of also just yes, there's
the daytime soap opera, and that even the organ cues
came from her. You know, the thing we think of
is kind of that schmaltzy like dantan and they look
at each other. She came up with that because Guiding
Light was about a priest initially, and so the idea

(16:57):
was supposed to be the organ sounded like the organ
at church. And she always said later she was like,
I'm sorry about that. I really didn't need it to
be like everyone did it. But she loved a long
dramatic pause. I looked at a lot of her notes
in her archive, and often there would be notes to
the directors that said more dramatic pauses, please. She loved that,
and she really knew her audience. She knew they were housewives.

(17:20):
She was very conscious of catering to them. She would
often try to like make sure they were explaining what
was happening on the show in addition to acting it out,
because the housewives might be like doing the ironing or
doing the dishes, and so it was like both her
radio training and thinking about their lives. The executives often

(17:41):
argued with her about this, but she knew better and
eventually turned it into the longest running television drama of
all time. In addition, to kind of coming up with
the idea of cliffhangers every episode, which I think of
Netflix now and how driven that is by us wanting
to keep playing.

Speaker 1 (17:59):
What's so interesting hearing you and reading about how she
was working this out right, It wasn't invented, right, she
had to invent it as the technology was inventing and
moving forward. And I was like, oh, it's like podcasts
because so many people listen to podcasts while they work
around the house, while they do their other errands of

(18:21):
the day or you know. And I was like, oh,
it's sort of this weird, like we've gone back. And
then Dumont Television the way you describe it too, which
I had never heard of, was kind of like the Netflix.
Like they were. They were a technology company, right, They
started just by inventing television stuff TV. Yeah, and then

(18:44):
they were like, oh, I guess we should have programming
because we're inventing television.

Speaker 5 (18:48):
Well, they invented cable in my own hometown of Allentown, Pennsylvania. Yeah,
the first cable company Dumont, that's right. Okay, they became Dumont,
but the first kople, the first coaxial cable was laid
down in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and their first office I was
looking at the pictures was fourteenth and two or something.

Speaker 1 (19:09):
Did you walk right past there in your childhood? Yeah?
Oh small, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (19:14):
Cable was invented, not for what we think of now
that it was invented to get TV to places where
they couldn't get the signals to reach. You know, it
wasn't everywhere at this time, which is actually very important
to things like, for instance, you could actually have more
women and more people of color on in those earlier
days when they were mostly only in cities. It was
really when they started going into rural areas and the

(19:36):
South that things got weird because suddenly they're getting complaints
that there are black people on television and those are
coming from the South. Betty White ran into this too.
She had a lovely dancer named Arthur Duncan when she
had her own talk show and got a lot of
letters that she wasn't ready for because she was used
to Los Angeles, and then suddenly she was getting letters

(19:57):
that were complaining and she was like, no, we're not
getting have been that's ridiculous. You know. It was this
weird time where all of a sudden it's like gertrue
Berg was super super Jewish. They would do a passover episode,
and when they first started, it just was fine for
everyone because they're alive and they're in mostly New York City.
And then it's like again, when they start going further out,

(20:18):
they start watering down the show, and that TV starts
getting watered down the same way. That's when we get
into The Father Knows Best Of.

Speaker 3 (20:25):
As far as Erna Phillips's concern, I as a soap
opera watcher and as a watcher as a world turns
in Guiding Light, amongst others. I knew about her, probably
because the soap opera press kept her alive in articles
and through her proteges who were now running all of
these shows. But you know, even though I knew if

(20:45):
Betty White primarily from the Mary Tyler Moore Show or
maybe initially, I had no idea until most recently about
her previous television career. What's your sense of why some
of this information has not carried forward on a number
of these women the way that it has for a

(21:06):
number of their male counterparts.

Speaker 4 (21:08):
I mean, there you go. It's pretty hard. We do
have the issue for some of them, for some of
these works of you know, not being able to see
the tape. But that's not true of Betty's early work.
I mean, some of Gertrude's lost, but I have the
DVD set and a lot of it does exist, so

(21:29):
that's not it entirely. So I really think there has
to be some overt sexism here. And it's like I
wish I could say something else, you know what I mean,
Like I wish I had a better explanation, But it's
the sexism and the Blacklist, which the Blacklist to me
is about sexism and racism to a large extent. It's
interesting how many women and people of color and Jews

(21:52):
were on the list right, just a quinteresting. It's like
they wanted to get rid of certain people. And I
would say also the white men. I've even I even
read stories of other white men who did get a
little sucked into the Blacklist and then kind of got out,
like kind of just weird how white men can just
sort of land on their feet, but you know, it
was much harder for other people.

Speaker 1 (22:13):
And quite honestly, the biggest people I know from the
Blacklist are white men. Like now that you're saying it
of course there were women and Jewish people and people
of color on that list. Of course there were, but
I couldn't tell you except for the ones that I
read about in your.

Speaker 4 (22:27):
Book, because they were never heard from again, whereas the
white men kind of recovered and then they could be like, oh,
this weird thing happened to me.

Speaker 1 (22:34):
What right, Yeah, they could talk about it.

Speaker 4 (22:37):
Yeah. And Gertrude also, we didn't mention this, but she
kind of got sucked into the blacklist in this weird
sideways way where her co star on her show, who
played her husband, Philip Lobe, was blacklisted, huge guy in
the labor movement in Hollywood. He was blacklisted for quite
obvious reasons. He's Jewish and this huge labor leader. And

(22:58):
he never recovered, and she resisted for a while. And
basically this is why I think part of why we
don't know who she is is her show was taken
off the air at its heights. The next thing that
was about to happen to that show was it was
going to be paired with I Love Lucy, which was new.
And you see how this is. This is actually that
they thought, oh, I Love Lucy might get a boost

(23:20):
from being with the Goldbergs, is what they were thinking
at the time because it was this new show, and instead,
I Love Lucy came on the next year and just
was a hit instantly, and it should have been with
the Goldbergs, but the Goldbergs was off the ear because
Lobe was blacklisted and Gertrude was being pressured and she
was saying no. So they were kind of in this

(23:40):
limbo state of negotiating behind the scenes to try to
keep him on, and she did that for a few
seasons and it just didn't work. So she eventually said
that you can decide for yourself if this is okay
or not, but it is what it is. She just said, like,
I employed a number of people here and I don't
want to let them down, and I can't have them
continue to be unemployed because we're doing this. So they

(24:02):
made a deal where Philip Love would be paid as
long as the show was on, but would not be
on the show. But going back to your question about
why we don't know them too, like I got this
book that was supposed to be this definitive history of
early television for research, and I just bought it without
even looking at it because I was like, sure, I'm
sure there's going to be stuff in here about these women.

(24:23):
And I went to the back to the index and
I looked for Gertrude Berg and she wasn't there.

Speaker 1 (24:28):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (24:28):
And I was genuinely shocked by this. I guess some
of the other women, it's like, Okay, maybe Erna Phillips
isn't there because we're focusing on primetime. And Betty White,
I think maybe at least got to mention because she's super, super,
super famous to this day. But I was really really
shocked by the lack. And I'm looking, I'm like, are

(24:49):
her years in here? Yes? The years are the year
she was active? Or here? You know, Milton Burrell is here,
who she was very good friends with. Why do we
all know who Milton Burle is? And I think he
would be mad that we all know who he was
and we do not know who she was, because she
was on his show a bunch of times as a
guest star, and he loved her and really was always

(25:11):
kind of a cheerleader for her and understood how talented
she was. It's fun to watch any of these women
if you go look them up online, all of them.
I mean, Erna wasn't on screen. But the other three
it's like, if you want to know what a TV
star looks like, any of these women have it, you
know that thing that's just you want to watch them
and have them in your living room all the time.

(25:32):
All of them had this, and Gertrude is a very
fun example of this. She really had a special talent.

Speaker 1 (25:39):
Are you hopeful that some of those lost things would
be found someday?

Speaker 4 (25:44):
I am. I mean, I know for a fact that
there's this ongoing attempt to find Hazel's lost tapes because
those are really like they're all lost. And then Gertrude,
we have a fair amount. I was able to watch
a fair amount of her show, which is great. It
was important to see that one in particular because it's

(26:05):
the family sitcom format and it's evolving before your eyes.
And I have to say, what's funny is some of
the best episodes are the earliest ones because it's kind
of weird. It's weird to watch early TV because they
actually didn't know what TV was supposed to look like,
which is very strange to think about, right that they
don't know what a family sitcom is. Yet they don't

(26:26):
know they have to have a sofa here and all
that stuff, though that is essentially what she is doing.
This is a little bit of bummer. But that show
has a really a little bit of a sad progression
if you watch it through, because it starts out it's
really innovative. It gets weird in the middle because of
losing Philip Lobe. At one point they're like, maybe we

(26:46):
should do fifteen minutes instead of a half an hour.
So for a while it's fifteen minutes, which feels like
more like sketch comedy than it is a sitcom. And
then they go back to thirty and then they go
with a syndicated service instead of network, and this is
when we start to get into Father Knows Best era,
and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, like they
become a Father Knows Best clone. They move to the suburbs,

(27:09):
and they kind of Didjewish if I a lot, and
it becomes all about like by that time, the daughter
has grown up and she's a teenager and she's hot,
and so all of a sudden, every episode is about
like Rosie's going on a date. Doesn't she look cute?
Like it's so strange.

Speaker 1 (27:27):
It's like you're watching the evolution of television.

Speaker 4 (27:30):
One show it's very it's it's interesting as a student,
but disheartening as a watcher, you know, because you can
kind of see Gertrude figuring out that she has no
choice but to compromise herself. I mean, there's this really
sad part. And I talk about this in the book.
There's an earlier episode where I don't know how she

(27:51):
gets involved, but she gets involved in like maybe somebody's
selling weight loss stuff, and she's very like the conclusion
is very like, I don't need that. And she's a
big woman also, like in her fifties by the time
she's on television, which is and she's like, no, it's fine.
I have small children, so you believe me. It's fine.
And then by the last seasons there's this other episode

(28:14):
that's extremely depressing where her husband basically says she's fat,
and she goes to a fat camp. She does rebel.
She like goes into town and brings a bunch of
cold cuts back to the what they literally call a
fat farm in this this is not me saying this.
So she rebels a little and then she gets kicked out.
But then when she goes home, her husband's like, no,

(28:36):
you're still fat, and she's like, oh, you're probably right,
and it's very sad she doesn't say, like screw you,
who cares. We've been married for, you know, thirty years.
Then she like goes into the kitchen and like sneaks
a bunch of spaghetti, and that's the episode. It's kind
of bleak.

Speaker 1 (28:53):
Like that's terrible, all right, and we have to take
a quick break, but then we're going to be right back, Yes,
and we're back. I'm so excited.

Speaker 4 (29:08):
I have to have Betty White and she's going to
kind of be my daytime talk person because she was
my trojan horse. To be honest, I wanted her in
there because I knew people would at least like, oh, buddy, White,
I love her. I was hoping to some extent they
might not know everything about her early career. I also
wanted people to understand, like, she isn't just like a

(29:29):
old lady who says dirty things and then we laugh.
This was a feminist, pioneer, bad ass, and you need
to understand what she did, you know, And a lot
of people, like you said, didn't know this about her.

Speaker 1 (29:42):
Yeah, I mean I think that it is sort of amazing.
When you realize just how long her career was, and
then to read about what early television was, which was insane,
and because it was all live basically, right. So the
idea that you would just sit down and talk for
five hours, Hello, we're just going to talk. I'm your

(30:05):
best friend all day long and We're just gonna sit
here and talk and like it's you know, that is
really fascinating and that she could just so she was
just like the original improv star basically of all time.

Speaker 4 (30:18):
Right right exactly. And to me, what I always say
too is with Betty, I think that explains so much.
Once you know this woman is on five and six
hours a day, six days a week, with no script.
There's nothing that could scare her after that, right, there's
nothing it's going to shape this woman in front of
a camera and she just knows how to be with

(30:39):
a camera. And you can find some of this online
her solo talk show that was national on NBC called
The Betty White Show. You can find some of the
footage and a lot of it is where she actually
looks directly into the camera and talks or sings sometimes,
which is fun and that is not easy to do,

(30:59):
you know, way that isn't weird, and she just talk
directly to a person through the screen and just had
this magic.

Speaker 1 (31:08):
I was also surprised to hear about the number of
women behind the scenes in the early television and it
reminds me of what was happening in early film too,
because nobody wanted to be there. It's right, that's exactly, yeah,
but it was an opportunity. And I think it's also
the same thing that happened with early music videos.

Speaker 4 (31:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (31:30):
It's how women got to direct early music videos was
because they were like the assistants in the office at
the music companies and they were like, well, we need
somebody to make this video, and they're like, well I'll
do it, like and suddenly you become a music video director.
Like in the book, you're saying like almost twenty five percent.

Speaker 4 (31:49):
Yeah, I believe that that's correct, and that's my own
by the way, that was me because of course there
had no numbers and it was also weird, but it's
basically me with Wikipedia making the best lists I could.
And there wasn't that much TV, so it wasn't that hard.
It was like looking at primetime, looking at you know,
you just go through and here we go. And yeah,
my estimation was it was roughly a quarter. And at

(32:10):
the time I was writing the book, that was the same.
It was the same percentage of women working behind the
scenes as showrunners and things like that. I think the
numbers have gotten a little bit better. I think we're
heading toward fifty percent. I think we're getting really close,
if we haven't quite gotten there. But that was pretty
shocking to me to realize, like in the era of

(32:31):
Shonda Rhymes. Yes, we have Shonda Rhymes and that's great,
but it's like, still, there's a huge drop. Like you said, essentially,
nineteen fifty five blows everything to pieces and there's no
women behind the scenes and then we basically slowly build
back up all the way till now.

Speaker 1 (32:47):
And what do you think that is? What do you
attribute that to?

Speaker 4 (32:52):
I mean, I thought a lot about this just for
framing the book and everything, and I have nineteen fifty
five down as like essentially the death Now Father Knows
Best is the best example, right, It's literally called Father
Knows Best. It's about a white family in the suburbs
where dad works, Mom wears a skirt while lightly cleaning

(33:13):
at all times, and like brings him a drink when
he comes home, and he knows best. It is the patriarchy, right,
and that show comes on right around that time. I mean,
when we talk about make America Great again, that's what
people are talking about. They're talking about a fake thing
on television from a very specific time, and that's it

(33:35):
that Like it was all suddenly white people in the
suburbs with two kids and a dog, and that's the
only people who existed. To me, what's important is that
television becomes big business, which it wasn't, as you alluded
to before. Like the reason women and people of color
were allowed to do things is because the white men
were overrunning radio still because that's where money was. The

(33:58):
minute there was money to be made here in that
most people had television. All of a sudden, it happens
real fast sort of. I mean we've all we've experienced
this in our lifetime with things like the Internet and
then streaming. Yeah. Remember, I mean I did stories not
that long ago where everyone told me everyone in the
industry was like, no network's going to be here forever.
Streaming is never going to take over. We're never going
to de bundle, you know, ESPN from this and HBO

(34:20):
from that, and it's like here we are, no one
has TV anymore. So very similarly, it just became ubiquitous,
it became powerful, it became a moneymaker, and then the
White men swept in and clean house. You know. I
quote some internal memos and things from NBC at that
time where they're literally calling women dames in memos, which

(34:41):
actually I kind of like was like they're talking dismissively about, like, oh,
dames like emotional upsets in their daytime television. They need
more emotional upsets on this Betty White show, so they
make her do like surprise reunions and things, which I'm
not saying isn't good television, but it's because but the
way they talk about it, it's not like because it's

(35:02):
good television, because it's like, no dames like this. One
of my other favorite examples from that actually is that
Eisenhower gets elected and everybody kind of notices women were
actually super important in electing him, both in working for
his campaign and also as voters, and so this is
a big news item. Oh my god, women helped I
get elected, and there's all this chatter behind the scenes,

(35:25):
maybe we should do something about this, this is so interesting,
and then they take a total wrong turn and they're like, oh,
this Eisenhower thing, women seem to be really important and powerful.
We should add more like fashion segments to the daytime
television show. Like, I can't even explain to you how
that was their thinking, but that was an actual memo
that I read. It was like, women are powerful, but

(35:48):
why wouldn't you give them political programming? If that's what
just happened, But they still couldn't see it that way.

Speaker 1 (35:56):
I'm suddenly reminded of the day after the Women's Life
first Women's March. That's right, right, millions, Well, the biggest
march in history worldwide, certainly across the country, the biggest
march ever in every city. Millions. Yeah, the front of

(36:18):
the La Times, big headline Women's March is huge. Can
it sustain? I was like, what do we have to do? Seriously? Yeap,
what do we have to do?

Speaker 4 (36:37):
Exactly? Yeah? So the men were in charge, and so
even if women were showing their power, the men didn't
get it. And men were in charge. So this is
just the way it was. And I cannot even believe this,
but Betty White got fired after one year doing her
national talk, I can you imagine I'm just imagining firing
Betty White. That's the part that I'm just like, you

(36:59):
could see the male exact sort of behind the scenes
in their memos trying to figure out what to do,
and they just couldn't. They didn't get it. They didn't
know what to do, and so she was fired and
she actually thought her career was over, which is hilarious,
but like, there's no reason she wouldn't think that at
that time, right, And for a while it was like
she's doing the Rose Parade, which is cool, and then

(37:20):
she gets on password and stuff from the sixties, and
it really isn'tntil the Mary Tyler Moore Show that we
see the comedic, actual genius she is. Everyone go watch
Betty White on the Mary Tyler Moore Show. It is unbelievable,
Like she's on fire. They don't even start counting women
in television until the seventies, which you know, like having
counts that we can see and know the percentage of

(37:42):
women working on things, and to be honest, they probably
didn't need to bother if you go look at things
like Bewitched or I Dream of Juni, which are female
centric shows, it's all men. I mean, there were a
couple of women, but it's barely any women. And so
really it isn'tntil the seventies and the women's movement and
shows like Mary Helen Moore show employing actual women to
write actual women's stories brilliant, and you know, you really

(38:06):
still needed male allies there, right, You needed people like
Jim Brooks and Alan Burns to go cool that we're
doing the show, but what if and hear me out.

Speaker 1 (38:18):
Why don't we talk to some women and get them
to write this show.

Speaker 4 (38:23):
That's why that show was so good and I think
noticeably different. I mean, that girl was important, and Marlo
Thomas is an incredible feminist activist, but it really wasn't
until Mary being thirty and the executives have been said like,
does she have to say she's thirty, and they were like, yes,
she's thirty.

Speaker 3 (38:42):
Single.

Speaker 4 (38:42):
She remained single for the whole show, which means most
of her thirties. Oh my god. She doesn't seem like
she's really worried about it.

Speaker 1 (38:50):
Yeah she's happy. Yeah, she's happy. That's the best thing
about that show.

Speaker 4 (38:54):
The weird thing is, like early days, they do a
lot more dating and then they sort of start to realize, like, eh,
nobody really cares about the dating. She goes on dates
sometimes they're not really good, and like you watch her
real trajectories, like she becomes this power suit wearing executive
by the time the show's over and gets this beautiful
apartment and is killing it and there's no hint of

(39:16):
a man, and that's amazing. But that's the first time,
Like the WGA starts to have a women's group within
it during the time of the Mary Tyler Moore Show,
and that is one of their first demands is we
need to start counting women so that we know how
many there are. And the great thing about the Mary
Tyler Moore Show was that those women were all mentored
from almost no experience. A few of them had, you know,

(39:38):
Treva Silverman was the one who had experience coming into it.
Everyone else it was like they were pulling secretaries. They're
pulling you know, do you have a story to tell?
Great will mentor you? And that to me was truly
Jim Brooks and Alan Burns were revolutionary in this act.
You have to give them credit for that that they
just their secretary was typing stuff up and she kept

(39:59):
adding jokes and they said, you're hilarious, why don't you write.
They were getting scripts sent to them from young women
through their dentists. They were, you know, like all of
this stuff, and they would really take a lot of
these women and mentor them through. And then these women
went out and did other things.

Speaker 1 (40:15):
In the spinoffs. The roodas Rhoda.

Speaker 4 (40:18):
For sure, first female showrunner ever, yes was Roda. So
a couple of them were involved in things like founding
Comedy Central, okaying the Daily Show, all of this stuff,
and that's where you really see you know.

Speaker 1 (40:31):
The payoff all right, Rooda Phyllis and Lou Grant all
spinoffs from the Mary Taylor Moore Show.

Speaker 4 (40:37):
I mean, Roda broke records, particularly when she got married,
which I don't know, I don't know what that society
and itself, but people were really stoked on Rhoda getting
married and that broke all kinds of records for viewing.
And there was like all these great little, you know,
classic anecdotes about how like Monday night football the guys
were talking about like you should probably go watch Rhoda's

(40:57):
wedding now, you know, like it was a now event.
Is really the point and it had some rocky you know,
it turned out they ended up not liking Rhoda's husband
very much and getting rid of it pretty quickly. Think
she got a divorce then, which was something. Yeah, that's right,
that too was pretty groundbreaking. When the Maria Tayler Moore
shows started, they had actually pitched the idea that she

(41:19):
was going to be divorced, and the network said, absolutely not,
because people hate divorce people. In fact, what they said
is people do not want to see divorce people Jews
or people with mustaches on television is what they said.

Speaker 1 (41:31):
Fascinating and by the way, I think we know what
that means. Yes, that means that cis white men don't
want to see that.

Speaker 4 (41:38):
That's correct. Yeah, that's exactly right. Oh and they also
said people from New York, which, like, if you just
think of so many classic successful shows like that knocks
out Seinfeld, if they just like had a mustache on Seinfeld.

Speaker 1 (41:51):
They would have hit everything right, Like, I.

Speaker 4 (41:54):
Mean, it's just it's hilarious but also horrible and bigoted.
So but if you think about then Roda comes along.
By the time her spinoff happens, she has become quite
overtly Jewish. She used to be kind of secretly Jewish
like many characters, but she became pretty overtly Jewish. Beal
who played her, Valerie Harper, was a you know, outspoken feminist.

(42:17):
She was on the cover of Miss magazine. She was
friends with Glorius Deinhem and so you can see just
in those couple of years the evolution that had happened,
and had had a female showrunner too, and tons of
the women who wrote for the marytyln War show this
hopped over and wrote for Roda.

Speaker 1 (42:33):
So that was great and got that very important second credit.
You have to get the second credit, you have to
find ways to move up, and then it gets easier
to get the third, fourth, you know, an ongoing career,
right even lou Grant, Yeah, a lot of the same writers.
There's a woman director in the list, and seven of

(42:56):
the thirty writers listed for Lou Grant are women. Not
as good as Mary Tyler Moore, but it's pretty good
for that time.

Speaker 4 (43:03):
It's pretty good for that time. And that's a drama too,
which I can imagine that some of the women maybe
wanted to make that pivot or have that quiver in
their era. You know, whatever, you know, and ed Asner
claims to have become a feminist essentially because of the
Mary Taylor Moore Show. That's what he told me anyway,

(43:23):
because he kind of came in very not really thinking
about it that much, and in fact, at first didn't
really love the idea of women writing for him. And
by the end, one of the writers showed me this
beautiful letter he wrote to her thanking her for writing
the episode that one of an Emmy. You know, he
did become active in women's causes an addition to all
of his other causes, and I believe that it really

(43:46):
did help him to kind of understand that the women
can write television too. And I don't remember if I
talked to him specifically about like getting women hired on
that show, but certainly I think he was open to
it at minimum, if not openly pushing for that.

Speaker 3 (44:02):
Well, I think if he had objections to it, it wouldn't
have happened.

Speaker 1 (44:05):
That's right. His character's name is on the show.

Speaker 4 (44:08):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (44:10):
So how did you get started in writing about pop
culture and women in pop culture? What's that journey look
like for you?

Speaker 4 (44:18):
The main answer to that is that I was on
staff for ten years at Entertainment Weekly, and that was
two thousand and two to two thousand and eleven, and
so that's like the short answer, you know. I started
as an assistant and kind of worked my way up,
and of course I had always been writing about pop
culture before that and loved it and et cetera. You
can't just show up there, and you know, I enjoy television. Yes,

(44:43):
everyone enjoys television. You have to be like a super
nerd and all of that stuff. But worked my way
up and also found my way through. I was the
assistant for what they called the News and Notes section,
which is like that front of the magazine where it's
just like a bunch of little things. So it was
kind of everything. And then eventually I worked my way
into the tele vision department. And I wouldn't have told
you necessarily that that was what was going to happen.

(45:04):
When I started there, I kind of felt like I
loved everything equally TV and movies and music, but ended
up in the TV department, and I was kind of
a nerd about television and TV history and I used
to like get my TV guides every week. I mean,
as a child, like when we would get the TV
guide and I would circle everything I was going to
watch for the week, and then I'd read all the articles,
so like it was there. And eventually, you know, was

(45:27):
a television writer and became a senior writer, I believe,
And that was a really nice job, especially at that time.
I mean it got tough near the end because cuts
and cuts and cuts and magazines. But I was there
for like a good chunk of kind of a powerly
beautiful like let's just stay at the best hotels and
you know, I went to Hawaii for a week to

(45:48):
be on the set of Lost. I was constantly going
to the set of Gray's Anatomy many many other things.
And in that process, you'd usually have a couple of specialties,
even within your specialty, if that makes sense, Like you'd
have a number of television writers, and then we'd all
have our little domains. And so Gray's Anatomy was one
of them for me, and that was partly because I
was like the women in television girl, a lot of

(46:10):
women in comedy. A big thing for me besides Gray's
Anatomy was essentially Tina Fane thirty rock. I was on
that set a bunch of times, interviewed her a bunch
of times. It was kind of the rise of Tina
fe At that time. That was the Palin thirty Rock
whole thing years, so she was a big superstar for
us and we were always covering her. I'm sorry to say.
I also did a lot of Apprentice in trump I'm

(46:32):
so sorry. Sorry, So that happened. And when I did
that Mary Tyler Moore Show book, no one understood this
idea of I'm going to write a book about a
TV show. The publishers were like eh. And I found
one that was like a big fan of the Mary
Tyler Moore Show and wanted to make it happen, and
he kind of got it. And it really wasn't until
I wrote my next book about Seinfeld and it became
a bestseller. That I mean, it's just true that it's

(46:55):
kind of what made this genre happen was when that
book became a success. Everyone oh, okay, And then now
you see lots of these kinds of books. It's very normal,
But it really was not normal until Seinfeldia happened and
then we saw that it was actually could be successful.

Speaker 1 (47:13):
What do you think is the hardest book of yours
that you wrote?

Speaker 4 (47:16):
That I love No one's asked me that, and I
love that question. That's such a good one. I'm going
to say when women invented television just because I mean,
I love it. It's actually probably my favorite too. But
it was different than what we're talking about. You know,
after Seinfeld, I did Sex in the City, and then
I was like, I kind of want to try something different,
and so I had this idea of percolating since the

(47:39):
Mary Tyler Moore Show and decided to try to make
it happen. It was hard to pitch. A lot of
places said no, a lot of places that things like
it's kind of depressing because they didn't all get together
and overthrow the patriarchy. And I was like, well, I
think they were depressed about that too, but they're pretty
bummed too that they didn't overthrow the patriarchy. But that's true. Yeah,

(48:02):
Like this is another Actually, it's another answer to why
don't we know their stories? I thought that was so
interesting in a like inside baseball way. There was this
real resistance to not having like this inspirational story, and
I had to kind of work to make them feel inspirational,
even though there was a little bit of a you know,
down slope to a lot of those stories because things

(48:24):
went poorly starting in nineteen fifty five, right. I thought
they were inspiring though regardless, like the fact that these
women did this is inspiring, and that's what I wanted
to focus on. But it took a while to kind
of figure all of that out. I was dealing with
four different women's stories. There's a lot of stories, and
they didn't know each other, yeah, and so that was complicated.
I wish they had all also been best friends. That

(48:46):
would have made my life.

Speaker 5 (48:47):
A lot of you.

Speaker 1 (48:47):
Ladies too, lunch, that's right, and television.

Speaker 4 (48:51):
I kind of feel like, I mean, I'm not saying
they had no friends and no friends in the industry,
but part of my perception was that they were so
busy just fighting for their lives all the time. They
did not have time to go find other women and
be like, are you having this problem too? There weren't
women's groups yet, and so there wasn't that camaraderie. They
were just fighting for their lives and so all of

(49:14):
those things, and then the fact that I went into
it knowing three of these four women are dead, long dead,
and they did have archives, and I loved that, but
It was a lot of both just learning a little
bit of a different kind of research and also putting
together a different story that was way more complicated, so
that I think was probably the hardest.

Speaker 3 (49:36):
Now, inspiration can come from seeing that someone tried, had
some success and then you know things went awry, because
it shows you the possibility. It shows you that somebody
else has already kind of started down that road, and
now there's room for me to try to go in
there and.

Speaker 1 (49:56):
Move the ball even forward.

Speaker 3 (49:58):
Yeah, the fact that they exis, the fact that they
had tasted is inspiring.

Speaker 4 (50:03):
It really is. And to be honest, like, we probably
don't know the half of what these women went through.
You know. People would always ask me. I'm like, well,
they didn't put in their arc, you know, I don't know.
People ask me things like you know, were they queer?
Were I'm like, I just know what they put out
there and we can guess it things. But I mean,
I hate to even think about it, but it's like,
just who knows the stuff they saw and just dealt with.

(50:27):
I was able to track some of it that alone
was shocking the amount of sexism, for instance, just overtly
in pieces that men wrote about Betty White is one example,
which again I cannot fathom being horribly sexist to Betty White,
but they were. My friend actually made it so beautiful.
She can draw, and she drew the four of the

(50:48):
women together for me and I have it framed, and
I love it because it's like I do think about
them if I'm having a hard time, if I'm having
a bad day, Right, it's like, well, think of what
Gertrude did, or think of what Erna did. They dealt
with so much more and like you said, paid the
way so that we don't have to deal with quite

(51:08):
that amount.

Speaker 1 (51:09):
Yeah, I think it's totally inspiring because it's it's like
hidden figures, right, Like it's like no one knew about them,
but now we do.

Speaker 4 (51:17):
That's right. We pitched this as hidden figures for early time. Okay,
like that was all. That was totally my pitch, you know,
because it's the way people can most sort of understand
this for sure.

Speaker 1 (51:28):
Yeah, all right, Well, do you have a new book.

Speaker 4 (51:30):
Yes, this is about the movie Mean Girls. And while
it is about a movie, so that's slightly different. That's
the first time I've ever done that. It has so
many ties to things I've written about before and really television.
It's as close to a TV show as a movie.

Speaker 1 (51:46):
Can be, right it is, and it's Tina Fey Tina Fever.

Speaker 5 (51:51):
Me.

Speaker 4 (51:52):
Yeah, that was the biggest draw for me initially was
just what's a way to write about Tina Fey's I
don't want to say legacy because that makes it sound
like she's not going to work anymore. But you know, like,
I think she has a significant legacy that we can
already see at this point. She was in that wave
of the two thousands of like we still didn't have
a ton of female showrunners, and I think of her

(52:13):
and Shonda kind of like coming out about the same time,
and for her starring in her own show too, And
I think she has the most or one of the
most influential comedic voices in television of our time. A
lot of things that came after thirty Rock are imitations

(52:34):
of thirty Rock. There is a certain like cadence and
she does I wish I had a better word for this,
but she does dense throw away jokes, just joke and
joke and joke and jokes and joke. And you can
watch thirty Rocks seven times before you get every joke
because they are just all coming all the time, and
so many shows after it started doing this, the kind

(52:55):
of non sequitor joke, but all of that, and she
pioneered that, and you can see it. It's not exactly
the same in Mean Girls, but it's there. And think
of the amount of quotable lines in that movie, like
on Wednesdays we Were Pink and Hue here has been
personally victimized by Regina George. Just so many things that

(53:16):
have become references. I call it seinfeld for millennial women
and gay men. Yeah. And because there's this really interesting
and I cover this in the book, there's this really
interesting trajectory where Mean Girls becomes way more popular in
it's afterlife, and it's because it came out in two
thousand and four, and it's like then the Internet. It's
just right at the time when social media becomes prevalent.

(53:40):
Facebook was invented the same year, and so it takes
off in the next few years, and then memes happen,
which who saw that coming. Memes need quotes, and Mean
Girls is like one of the first to be memed everywhere.
It runs into a lot of different interesting strands, like feminism,

(54:01):
of the two thousands, which I call like pink shiny feminism. Right,
there's like this like mainstreaming of feminism that mean girls
really embodies. There's like tabloid culture and Lindsay Loewen. My
favorite thing that I did is I talked to a
bunch of the people who played the ancillary, just the
high schoolers. They're all Canadians because they found Cadda. It's

(54:23):
amazing the high school is entirely populated by Canadians and
each of them has like one to three immortal lines. Right,
I have a wide set vagina heavy flow, all of these.
I talked to Glenn Coco, all of these people who
became memes, who are now famous for being memes, And
I'm fascinated by this, Like they too think it's the

(54:45):
weirdest thing. It's like one day they were just going
about their business and then around two thousand and seven
they woke up and were famous from the intranet for
one line. And then it's just like them in their
twenties on a loop saying one life, free eternity, and
they say, like their phones blow up at certain times
when one of their memes is used because of a

(55:07):
news event. They'll get a bunch of you know, they're like,
oh my god, it's someone dead, and they're like, no,
your meme is just being used a lot because you know,
Donald Trump's daughter's shoe line got dropped from Nordstrom, and
so the woman who says you should try.

Speaker 1 (55:20):
Seers, it's like suddenly suddenly is hot again.

Speaker 4 (55:26):
Suddenly is hot again for like twenty four hours. And
I'm fascinated by stuff like that.

Speaker 3 (55:31):
Was there anything you found in writing this book about
a movie that was different than writing about a television
show in some way?

Speaker 4 (55:39):
A lot of ways. Actually I was wary, And this
is why it is because a movie takes not very
long to make. This took I can't remember precisely, but
something like six weeks, yeah, to make. On the other hand,
when I wrote about Seinfeldt, it's like nine seasons of
stuff happening between people. It's sort of interesting in a

(56:02):
way because we put all this stuff on these people
and we imagine relationships among them and things like that,
and yet the girls really are still in touch. They
just did a great Walmart but like, and they're all
aware that, like they're famous in relation to each other,
but like they really in some cases only spent six
weeks together ever in two thousand and three, and that's it.

(56:26):
And so the production part is actually pretty quick and
it was a very nice production, sort of unfortunately for me.
It was a very nice production. I'm not even kidding,
Like these Canadians are so nice, Like they're so nice,
very nice. And I do think like Canada had a
lot to do with this, because you know, you're not

(56:47):
in Los Angeles while this is happening, and this really
has continuing resonance, I think because unfortunately this central problem
it's addressing has not abated. It probably has become right
as the Internet comes into play. It's like bullying and
all of that have become so much more of a flashpoint.

(57:08):
If you think about that movie's sort of funny because
it's like barely any cell phones. Regina has to make
photo copies of the burn Book in order for people
to see it.

Speaker 1 (57:17):
All.

Speaker 4 (57:18):
The New Musical movie addresses all of these things and
brings it into the modern age more. I think that's
a really good idea, like making it into a musical
and then making it into a movie musical. I think
it's all a trajectory that I'm into. I think it's
if you're going to do reboots, that's the way.

Speaker 1 (57:37):
To go about it. Yeah, the musical is quite charming. Ah,
it's really fun.

Speaker 4 (57:42):
It's really fun. I was nervous and it was fun.

Speaker 1 (57:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (57:46):
Well, I'm usually not someone who in general, I don't
like movies TV shows about teenagers. Every now and then
one comes along, that's the exception to the rule, and
Mean Girls was definitely one of those exceptions to the roles.
That's such a fun movie and I probably have to
go home tonight and watch it.

Speaker 4 (58:05):
That endlessly rewatchable. And I think the reason that you
feel that way about it, if I may, is that
it's good. You don't have to like the genre. It's
just unbelievably funny. And this is what I go back
to with Tina Fay and I make this point in
the book a lot is that teen girl stuff wasn't
allowed to be that funny. It's like, this is Caddishack funny. Yeah,

(58:28):
this is Blues Brothers funny, this is guy funniest. I
hate saying that, but you know what I mean by that, right,
is like, yes, Ghostbusters gets to be funny the original.
Let's not get into all that. But no other especially
teen girl thing, had been allowed to have this density
of jokes. It's just like I was saying about thirty Rocords. Yeah,

(58:49):
there's a joke and a joke and a joke and
a joke and a quotable line and a joke and
nothing else had been just relentlessly funny like that.

Speaker 1 (58:57):
Just to bring it back to our podcast, that's weird
an Eighties favorite ladies driven television shows that you watched
or enjoyed or might want to write a book about someday.

Speaker 4 (59:08):
I mean, Golden Girls is like the gold Standards, Yes,
the Ring. I mean, that's just that's another one where
you can watch it, and I think again has a
sweetness to it in addition to being really funny. Seeing
those women together is really what we love. And again
Betty White genius in addition to the other women, of course,
but unbelievable, unbelievable performances.

Speaker 1 (59:29):
And it's just Powerhouse after Powerhouse, both in jokes and
delivery in that show.

Speaker 4 (59:35):
Oh my god, I just was rewatching some clips and
fell down around you know, it's like, no, I have
to do other things. When I found like one clip
and then I was like just watching Golden Girls, and similarly,
it's so weird these two shows. But Designing Women, I
actually was like, I don't think I'm going to do this,
so I feel like I can say it, But that
was on my list when I was considering next books,

(59:56):
Like that was one where I was like, maybe I
don't know, and maybe still who knows, But I think
that one is so I mean, it's like avertly feminist,
super socially conscious. I mean, watching those speeches, right, there's
so there's so much great the suits.

Speaker 1 (01:00:12):
It's so great. It's so great. And we got to
talk to Linda Blood with thomasin, who's amazing and again
does not get her due completely for being one of
those groundbreaking women who kind of reopened television for women
at that time and just funny, beautiful.

Speaker 4 (01:00:33):
Writing, unbelievable, like women were not doing it then. There
were not women at that time really that much. Yeah,
she's one two where I'm like, oh, she's seen some stuff. Yeah, yeah,
you know what I mean, Like she did what she
needed to do and she got through some stuff. I'm sure,
but yeah, it was such a different time and honestly,
like I was also a kid in the eighties and

(01:00:55):
when I knew I was going to talk to you.
Like the thing that comes into my head when you
say like eighties women television, I go like facts of Life.
Facts of Life was like I can't even explain. It's
so foundational to me, Like I don't it's so weird.
I don't know. I was just truly you know when
you're a kid, the way you can be obsessed. I

(01:01:16):
just thought all of those women were so beautiful and cool,
and I just thought like, why don't I go to
a prep school and Peak Skill and I now live
near Peak Skill and it's so excited. I was like,
oh my god, Peak Skill's real and it's here and
every single one of them. That's what's so interesting to
me too, is like I was obsessed with all of them.

Speaker 1 (01:01:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:01:37):
Oh just Blair, Yeah, was so glamorous.

Speaker 1 (01:01:40):
But Joe was so cool and was so funny and was.

Speaker 4 (01:01:44):
So funny and Roller Skins And think of that though,
if you do think about that in the television landscape.
I mean I wasn't thinking that way then, but this
is a lot of girls on one show, YEP, that
was allowed to exist and for enough years that George
Clooney shows up and Mackenzie Aston shows up. What it

(01:02:05):
did that was revolutionary was taking girls problems seriously while
still being very very funny. Yeah, and I wouldn't make
the argument that Facts of Life was very very funny
in the same way. But it did take girls problems seriously.
And they did it all. They did all the things,
I mean, at least what they could, right. Yeah, they
did periods and sex and all kinds of things, And

(01:02:29):
I feel like it was really important to me. So
facts of Life, man, facts of life take the good
and the bad.

Speaker 1 (01:02:39):
You know. I thinking of Square Pegs, which had such
a you know, and implosion for so many reasons, and
yet this was a, you know, a mainstay for many years.
So a little bit fascinating to look up. Maybe we'll
bring you back.

Speaker 4 (01:02:56):
I would love to.

Speaker 1 (01:02:57):
Oh my gosh. So what's next for you? What do
you would anything you're working on that you can.

Speaker 4 (01:03:02):
Talk I am working on something, but I can't. I
can tell you after we're done recording.

Speaker 1 (01:03:06):
Okay, okay, I think you like it.

Speaker 4 (01:03:08):
But I can't. I can't say it publicly yet, we can't.

Speaker 1 (01:03:12):
Does I understand it? This has been delightful. You're super smart, super.

Speaker 4 (01:03:17):
Important, You're fun to talk to you about that.

Speaker 1 (01:03:19):
Thank you fantastic, Thank you very very much.

Speaker 4 (01:03:23):
It was really fun. By bye bye.

Speaker 1 (01:03:29):
In today's audioography.

Speaker 3 (01:03:30):
You can find Jennifer at our website Jennifer k Armstrong
dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:03:37):
From her website or our description below, you can find
links to her books.

Speaker 3 (01:03:41):
She's also on Instagram at j M k Armstrong.

Speaker 1 (01:03:46):
We're also going to have in our description some links
to clips of early nineteen fifties Betty Wide, Hazel Scott,
and gertrue Berg's The Goldbergs, as well as an episode
of Erna Phillips The Guiding Light, which I found on YouTube.
Thank you all for listening and for all your feedback
and comments. We really appreciate it. Keep them coming. We

(01:04:09):
really love hearing from you.

Speaker 3 (01:04:10):
So if you have anything you'd want to tell us
or suggestions, please send us messages at our website Eightiestvladies
dot com that's eight zero s tvladies dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:04:23):
And you can find us on Instagram, even Twitter and
Facebook at eighties tv Ladies. Oh also LinkedIn. We're on LinkedIn.

Speaker 3 (01:04:31):
Awesome, and if you like our podcast, please rate us
five stars really helps at whatever podcast platform you choose.

Speaker 1 (01:04:40):
That's right and Hey, tell your friends.

Speaker 3 (01:04:43):
As always, we hope Eighties TV Ladies brings you joy
and laughter and lots of fabulous new and old shows
to watch, all of which will lead us forward toward
being amazing ladies of the twenty first century.

Speaker 1 (01:04:56):
That's right, See you next time, babies.

Speaker 4 (01:05:00):
Dapend likes An so pretty as he's stap lit out
through the city and he's stabling at open train and getting.

Speaker 1 (01:05:10):
We're going hard for the money in a band world.

Speaker 4 (01:05:14):
Amids

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When Women Invented Television | NY Times Bestselling author Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}When Women Invented Television | NY Times Bestselling author Jennifer Keishin Armstrong