The Ringer

Betty Jo learns that it's not whether you win or lose at horseshoes, it's how you throw them as "The Ringer" when the youngest of Kate Bradley's daughters enters the Hooterville Valley's annual horseshoe-throwing tournament in this middling effort that could have been tossed off as a throwaway episode highlighting life at "Petticoat Junction" when it first aired but, thanks to the ravages of time, now looks like Exhibit A in the case proving why this gentle, well-meaning sitcom set in a mythical Rural America would ultimately wind up being replaced by none other than "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."

Scripted by Richard Baer, "The Ringer" is, narratively, little more than a slice of life as Kate's Shady Rest Hotel hosts the tournament, a boon for business even though it's practically a foregone conclusion that it will be won, yet again, by Pixley Fats (Henry Calvin), who, similar to his Minnesota billiards-playing namesake, looks like an even more rotund Jackie Gleason but dresses like the tycoon caricature from the Monopoly board game as he arrives carrying his own custom-made horseshoes in his gloved hand.

Pixley, you see, lives for this annual tournament, but when Betty Jo, the valley's resident tomboy who is better than most of the boys at other sports, proves she can toss a mean horseshoe as well, inevitably winding up in the final against the Big Man from Pixley, that's when Kate, prior to the match, gently takes Betty Jo aside and gently reminds her that poor Pixley, fixated on one thing, doesn't have the love and family and social graces that she has and--could you imagine Kate taking Uncle Joe, or any other man, aside and dropping such a leaden hint to throw the match?

Published nearly nine months before "The Ringer" first aired, Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique" became a feminist manifesto as Friedan illustrated how women, even and especially white, middle-class, college-educated women, remained unhappy and unfulfilled as being merely housewives and mothers while aspiring to achieve what men had achieved. Thus, "The Ringer" only heightens the irony that "Petticoat Junction" was canceled in 1970 to make room for a sitcom that became a runaway critical and commercial success by featuring a liberated single working woman making it in a man's world.

Oh, "Petticoat Junction" would eventually have both Billie Jo and Bobbie Jo flirt with feminism before folding. And, to be sure, many women criticized Friedan's thesis at the time it appeared, and subsequently. In the late 1970s, a woman, right-wing firebrand Phyllis Schlafly, led the charge to defeat ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution (just as "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" was ending its run), which would have guaranteed women's equality. And even after revelations in 2016 that then-presidential candidate Donald Trump felt entitled to grab women by their private parts, that didn't stop well over 24 million women from casting their vote for Trump, who ran against a female Democratic candidate.

Like men, women need not be shoehorned into strictly defined categories, but even when "The Ringer" first aired, it really deserved to have been titled "The Feminine Mistake" even before the season-six episode with that same title eventually aired.

... although this episode woke me out of a sound sleep for two reasons. One, when was the last time you saw an obscure TV show/movie from 56 years ago on late late night TV instead of somebody peddling something you don't need and even sprucing up the set to make it look like it is CNN to add credibility? Well, that is how I ran across this first season 1963 episode of Petticoat Junction.

Betty Jo (Linda Henning), the youngest of innkeeper Kate Bradley's three girls, and the - what was called back in the day - "tomboy" of the family, is the first woman to ever enter the Shady Rest's Annual Horseshoe Tournament. The winner has always been "Pixley Fats", I guess a take on Minnesota Fats the famous billiards player, and remember this was only two years after the movie "The Hustler" back when films had much longer running times.

Well, as Betty Jo gains on the usually suave and together Pixley Fats in the contest, you might think this is going to be an episode about female empowerment, about how women can do anything if they put their mind to it. But then Kate comes to Betty Jo's room one night while the contest is ongoing and talks to her about how sad it is that Pixley Fats has nothing in his life but this horseshoe contest, and then how Betty Jo has many things in her life now, but has "the greatest thing that can happen to a woman" to look forward to - a husband and children. If I wasn't awake BEFORE I was awake NOW.

Petticoat Junction season one is available on DVD, so I'll say watch and find out what happens, but you know I was almost six when this first aired, and our family used to watch this show. So this sexist drivel is buried deep in my subconscious. I'll never know how I ended up in engineering before many women were going into that field, unless it was constantly being told that homely gals like myself have to learn to make their own way in the world. So there's THAT buried deep in my subconscious too. But enough about me.

Petticoat Junction started airing in the fall of 1963. This was only the seventh episode. This was before JFK was assassinated, before the Beatles came to America, years before college kids were burning draft cards, before the Civil Rights era began to bear any real fruit. So the America portrayed here is still very firmly rooted in the culture of 1950s America. So it is interesting to watch because of that.

Also it is great to see Bea Benaderet and Edgar Buchanan looking so well and ambulatory just after the show premiered. Bea Benaderet was diagnosed with cancer in 1967, had to leave the show, and died in the fall of 1968, a couple of years before Petticoat Junction ended its run. Recommended for the time travel aspect of it all.