TUBE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (3)

By: Adrienne Crew
August 3, 2018

One of 25 installments in a series of enthusiastic posts analyzing and celebrating a few of our favorite TV shows from the Fifties (1954–1963).

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MY THREE SONS | 1960–1972

As a kid, whenever I heard the catchy, accordion-flavored theme song of My Three Sons, I’d run to watch the show. Fred MacMurray’s character, Steve Douglas, is a widower; with the assistance of his dead wife’s father, Bub, he is raising three sons — Mike, Robbie, and Chip — without any nagging mother around to ruin the fun. The show challenged ’50s norms about gendered roles… and, growing up without brothers, the show’s whole “no girls allowed” vibe fascinated me. (In the pilot episode, Steve teaches Chip how to fend off a little girl’s advances; meanwhile, he has to practice what he preaches.) However, once I grew up and watched Double Indemnity, the 1944 movie in which MacMurray plays the murderous Walter Neff, I began to think of My Three Sons in a new way; perhaps it’s a proto-Dexter, depicting a serial killer’s domestic life?

Why do people in Steve’s household keep disappearing? His deceased wife is almost never mentioned — not even by her own father. And then Bub disappears, too, in the fifth season, replaced by his cranky brother Charlie. Was Bub asking too many questions? When Mike marries, he’s never mentioned by name again… and he’s quickly replaced by Ernie, Chip’s orphaned friend. (Robbie would later vanish, too.) In my lurid fantasy scenario, Chip and Ernie were sired out of wedlock with a hot little number who couldn’t keep her trap shut — so Steve found a way to get her out of town until he could kill off his wife, whom he’d convinced to raise Chip as a foundling. Six years later, he finally adopts his other illicit offspring… but what happened to Ernie’s mother?

The series ended before Steve could really let his inner psycho loose. Instead, one of his other personalities emerges — as his long-lost cousin Laird Fergus McBain Douglas, with MacMurray playing both roles. Instead of killing off yet another relative, producers finally bumped off the show.

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TUBE YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Series Introduction | Luc Sante on LOONEY TUNES | Chris Spurgeon on THE THREE STOOGES | Adrienne Crew on MY THREE SONS | Barbara Bogaev on ROCKY & BULLWINKLE | Devin McKinney on THE TWILIGHT ZONE | James Hannaham on THE NAT KING COLE SHOW | Mimi Lipson on THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES | Jessamyn West on THE JETSONS | Gary Panter on THE OUTER LIMITS | Peter Doyle on THE MANY LOVES OF DOBIE GILLIS | Mark Kingwell on ROUTE 66 | Josh Glenn on THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW | Lynn Peril on THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW | Rob Walker on LEAVE IT TO BEAVER | Dan Reines on DAVEY & GOLIATH | Adam McGovern on HIGHWAY PATROL | Erik Davis on HAVE GUN — WILL TRAVEL | Greg Rowland on THE PHIL SILVERS SHOW | Annie Nocenti on THE AVENGERS | Elizabeth Foy Larsen on GUNSMOKE | Sarah Weinman on NAKED CITY | Douglas Rushkoff on THE HONEYMOONERS | Kio Stark on ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS | Gordon Dahlquist on PERRY MASON | Brian Berger on CAR 54, WHERE ARE YOU? | CODA: Crystal Durant on Marc Anthony & Pussyfoot shorts | CODA: Mike Watt on “A Stop at Willoughby”

MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

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