Series · Prime Video · 1951

I Love Lucy

A marriage that survives the scheme. The scheme is that a woman's hunger is a joke.

Lucy wants to be seen, Ricky wants the act contained, and the laugh is that neither gets the week they planned. Under the laugh is a marriage that resets instead of leaving. That reset is the part worth keeping. The part to argue with is the idea that a wife's ambition can only arrive as a disaster.

Watch it as play. If a child asks why Lucy isn't allowed on the show, answer the question. Don't let the laugh answer it.

The eight

Industry
4/10
Ricky works the club. Lucy works at getting into the club.
Household
7/10
The marriage is the fact that does not break. The neighbors are in and out of the kitchen.
Piety
3/10
No piety. The apartment is the world.
Courage
5/10
She risks looking like a fool every week. He risks the public eye he already has.
Republic
4/10
A building, a friendship, a job. Small civic life.
Temperance
6/10
The excess is a costume and a plan, not a cruelty.
Truth
6/10
The plots are absurd and labeled absurd by the ending.
Stewardship
6/10
It lasted. People still know the beat.

Live historicallyOne episode. Then let someone in the house do the thing they are actually good at, on purpose.

Series · Prime Video · 2010

America: The Story of Us

A wide overview. Useful as a map, too smooth to be the map's last word.

A house that does not know the order of things, settlement, revolution, the river, the war, the factory, the highway, cannot tell a true story about the present. This series gives the order in a voice that wants you to feel inspired. Take the order. Go to a better book for the chapter that the inspiration sands down.

The eight

Industry
6/10
Canals, railroads, factories. Making is in the story.
Household
4/10
Families are examples more than characters.
Piety
3/10
Providence is offstage. The tone is documentary uplift.
Courage
5/10
Wars and crossings are included.
Republic
6/10
The country is the subject, which television usually will not sit with.
Temperance
6/10
Broad, not lurid.
Truth
5/10
True in outline, proud in narration, thin on the argument.
Stewardship
6/10
It exists to hand a sequence down. The sequence is worth having.

Live historicallyPick one chapter and read twenty pages of a real history after the episode.