PERFECTION, WRETCHED, NORMAL, AND NOWHERE: A REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY OF AMERICAN TELEVISION SETTINGS BY G. Scott Campbell Submitted to the graduate degree program in Geography and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ______________________________ Chairperson Committee members* _____________________________* _____________________________* _____________________________* _____________________________* Date defended ___________________ The Dissertation Committee for G. Scott Campbell certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: PERFECTION, WRETCHED, NORMAL, AND NOWHERE: A REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY OF AMERICAN TELEVISION SETTINGS Committee: Chairperson* Date approved: ii ABSTRACT Drawing inspiration from numerous place image studies in geography and other social sciences, this dissertation examines the senses of place and regional identity shaped by more than seven hundred American television series that aired from 1947 to 2007. Each state‘s relative share of these programs is described. The geographic themes, patterns, and images from these programs are analyzed, with an emphasis on identity in five American regions: the Mid-Atlantic, New England, the Midwest, the South, and the West. The dissertation concludes with a comparison of television‘s senses of place to those described in previous studies of regional identity. iii For Sue iv CONTENTS List of Tables vi Acknowledgments vii 1. Introduction 1 2. The Mid-Atlantic 28 3. New England 137 4. The Midwest, Part 1: The Great Lakes States 226 5. The Midwest, Part 2: The Trans-Mississippi Midwest 378 6. The South 450 7. The West 527 8. Conclusion 629 Bibliography 664 v LIST OF TABLES 1. Television and Population Shares 25 2. Defining Programs and Common Traits: The Mid-Atlantic 26 3. Defining Programs and Common Traits: New England 135 4. Defining Programs and Common Traits: The Great Lakes States 223 5. Defining Programs and Common Traits: The Trans-Mississippi Midwest 376 6. Defining Programs and Common Traits: The South 447 7. Defining Programs and Common Traits: The West 524 vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation has logged a lot of miles. Portions of it were written on the window sill of a laundromat in Cañon City, Colorado, at an airport bar in Little Rock, Arkansas, and at countless coffee shops, libraries, and hotels in Illinois, Wisconsin, Kansas, and Missouri. Thanks to the folks I encountered in these places, who offered an encouraging word to (or who graciously ignored) the frazzled guy typing away in the corner. Thanks to my mentors and fellow students at the University of Kansas, who were always supportive of me, even when I refused to be supportive of what was happening down at Allen Fieldhouse. Thanks to Bill Johnson and Terry Slocum for jumping into this at the last second, and for making a stormy ―D-Day‖ in Lawrence a pleasant experience. Many thanks also to Barbara Shortridge, Jim Hartman, Doug Atkins, and Garth Myers. Your advice regarding this dissertation was indispensable, and I am still stealing material from your courses, which were superb. None of this would have been possible without the support of Pete Shortridge, whose work inspired me well before I arrived at KU, and who was kind enough to conceal his disbelief each time I told him I was nearly done. Thanks, Pete, for the guidance, patience, and for the conversations. Very special thanks to Bev Koerner, who went above and beyond the call of duty when it came to helping me complete my degree. She is an absolute magician when it comes to converting ABDs into PhDs. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Bev. Thanks to my friends and who kept pushing me forward, and, as always, to Walter Schroeder for getting me interested in all things geographic. Tip of the cap to the late, great E. B. White, whose essays inspired the ―eureka moment.‖ Thanks also to Dad, Mom, Lynn, Chad, Mike, Jeff, Ray, Ruth, Clarke, Olive, Frank, Donna, Scottie, and Ruthie, who are a better family than I deserve. Finally, eternal thanks to Sue, who did everything else so that I could do this. I love you more than baseball. vii CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION As work on this dissertation was drawing to a close, a colleague of mine asked how long I‘d been at it, and I responded, ―My whole life, I think.‖ It was a bit of weary sarcasm, of course, but a statement with some truth. Like most geographers, I acquired the habit of place exploration in childhood. I flipped through aging volumes of the World Book encyclopedia, reading about strange exotic places like Zaire, Paraguay, Czechoslovakia, and New Jersey. I traced maps out of atlases. When doing book reviews for English class, I always wrote about the settings of novels. I have been a geographer most of my life, although I was not necessarily aware of that fact until I wandered into Walter Schroeder‘s Geography of Missouri class my junior year at university. I‘ve also been fascinated by television history for some time. I grew up with the expected canon of important programs for someone of my vintage: Cheers, The Cosby Show, Newhart, and M*A*S*H. I was also familiar with some older shows, through the ubiquitous reruns of The Beverly Hillbillies, Gilligan‟s Island, I Love Lucy, and, of course, The Andy Griffith Show, a program that held near Biblical status in my childhood home. That said, I didn‘t become truly fascinated with television until the mid-1980s, when cable television‘s Nickelodeon channel began airing reruns of classic programs like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Car 54, Where Are You?, The Ann Sothern Show, The Danny Thomas Show, The Smothers Brothers Show, and The Donna Reed Show. It was about that time that my father bought a copy of Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh‘s The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows—a book that he probably never saw again, because it was always in my hands. I poured through it, reading about shows I‘d already seen, about those that I knew by reputation, and about the scores of television duds 1 that I, or anyone else, would probably never see again. Much in the same way that some become fascinated with wine, I became fascinated with television—I was interested in the quality of the stuff, of course, but my tendency was to think that the older or rarer a program, the better. The idea to combine these two interests—geography and television—did not occur to me for years, but I remember the precise moment when this study began to crystalize. I was living in Kansas, and was travelling to Boston for the wedding of a friend. I decided to fly to JFK Airport and drive from there, unable to resist the chance to spend a day or two in New York City. I was fascinated by New York, as I suppose a lot of people who grew up in small midwestern towns are, and my fascination had been sparked by popular culture. During one of my previous visits, I had spent the better part of a day trying to find the park bench from which Woody Allen and Diane Keaton had observed the Brooklyn Bridge in Manhattan—never finding it, of course, because Woody and Diane had actually been looking at the Queensboro Bridge. Most of my pop culture geography served me well though. I knew that the ―A‖ Train was the quickest way to Sugar Hill way up in Harlem, that Tribeca was the triangle below Canal, and that the airport I‘d flown into used to be called Idlewild. I knew to pronounce Houston Street as ―Howston Street,‖ and that one never called Greenwich Village by its proper name—it was just ―The Village.‖ I also knew about some of the other microregions of Manhattan—the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side, Midtown, Murray Hill, Chelsea, Alphabet City, the Bowery, Little Italy, Chinatown, and that the Bronx was up and the Battery down. I‘d learned most of this information from novels, music, movies, and, of course, television. I doubted that native New Yorkers knew quite as much about the geography of Carthage, Missouri. The idea of doing something with this intersection of pop culture and geography began as passing thought while I was headed up the New England Thruway the following day. It was my 2 first experience driving in New York City and, although I was trying to play it cool for my passengers, I was looking for some sign that the tempest had passed. And then I saw it—the exit for New Rochelle. I saw that sign and, rightly or wrongly, felt that I was out of the fray. Why New Rochelle indicated the beginning of peaceful times I had no idea at the moment, and I thought about it through much of Connecticut. I was nearly to New London when it finally occurred to me—148 Bonnie Meadow Road, New Rochelle, New York. It was the home of Rob and Laura Petrie from The Dick Van Dyke Show. I had not seen that series in years, but it had been a favorite of mine as a kid, and it had, apparently, left quite an impression. The Dick Van Dyke Show had not been, of course, a documentary about New Rochelle, and the precise location of the Petrie household was, if anything, a footnote. I didn‘t know anything else about New Rochelle, and still don‘t, really, but it fascinated me that I had become convinced, subconsciously, that it represented a sort of sanctuary. That the grit and grandeur of Manhattan had been permanently etched into mind by mass media was not surprising.