My mind is still on Marvel’s WandaVision and the sitcom itself. With The Nanny returning to streaming with HBO Max, it reminded me of how much sitcoms were a part of my understanding of white middle-class expectations. As a Black girl from the city, the suburbs were a place as fantastical to me as Hogwarts.
Sitcoms have historically been primarily a middle-class-centric storytelling device. Being middle class just offers more mobility for characters to rotate through the world. It also, falsely, has allowed the “violence” and stakes of a show to be fairly minimal. The city is seen as the basin of street violence and savage Black and Brown bodies that are a threat to white female bodies.
Being able to have a house, back when it was an “attainable” aspiration, was shorthand for what you’d expect: a hardworking husband, a dutiful wife, and two-to-three children, minimum. Black people in a sitcom were, therefore, also a way of telling that a family made it. The Jeffersons’ theme song “Moving on Up” highlights the step up from Harlem or working-class Queens (All in the Family) to the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Working-class sitcoms certainly exist, but they tend to be hyper topical because it is in working-class environments that you interact with the most difference. The Norman Lear-style sitcoms are absent from WandaVision because they are simply not wish-fulfillment sitcoms. They exist to entertain, but also to give substantial class consciousness that is progressive and funny.
Bewitched and The Dick Van Dyke Show certainly weren’t inherently regressive. In fact, they very much had progressive undertones, but it very much worked within the safe middle-class structure of that brand of sitcom. That, to me, is interesting when it comes to Wanda, because the closest we get to that is the Malcolm in the Middle episode, but that is more for the reference than the themes.
Wanda is retreating into the safety of those spaces because, as someone who grew up in poverty, the norms of The Dick Van Dyke Show are a comfortable AU for her—a two-family household that she can easily paste herself into without any conflict to deal with and hijinks that are easily resolved at the end of each episode, as Wanda’s own sitcom slowly gets more complicated at the end of each section.
WandaVision may have ended up in a CGI magic slugfest at the end of it, but the way it told us a lot about Wanda’s mind with the entirety of the show and its premise is something I’ll definitely enjoy revisiting time and time again.
But it is also worth looking at the class framework through which we have been comfortable telling stories and how to improve it.
(image: Marvel)
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