Highlights Archives
Wisconsin on TV
For those not from Wisconsin, the state may seem less like a real place than an image on television — Al's Diner, Shotz Brewery, a courthouse in Rome, Eric Forman's basement. Wisconsin has been the setting for a number of television programs over the years and, with the start of the new fall TV season, we look back on fictional "Wisconsin" in all its stereotypical glory.
Although the soap opera Young and the Restless was the first program set in Wisconsin, Happy Days and its spin-off Laverne and Shirley are perhaps the most iconic Wisconsin-based shows. Another show, The Flying Nun (1967-1970), while not set in Wisconsin, was actually based on a book by Wisconsin writer Tere Rios Versace called The Fifteenth Pelican. Happy Days brought the idealized values associated with 1950s middle-class America to television viewers when it debuted as a series in 1973 and centered on the misadventures of a Milwaukee family, the Cunninghams — hardware-store owning dad Howard, stay-at-home mom Marion, clean-cut son Richie, and tag-along younger sister Joanie. True to the depicted era and place, Marion and Howard both played on a bowling team, the Leopard Lodge League. Bowling was a favorite pastime of Wisconsinites in the late 1950s and 1960s, and one that has been associated with Milwaukee in the popular imagination for decades. The United States Bowling Congress (formerly American Bowling Congress), the sport's governing body, is actually based in the Milwaukee area and has been since 1908. For a show that appealed to viewers based on popular perceptions of the period and place, bowling made the perfect choice.
Happy Days spin-off Laverne and Shirley, also set in Milwaukee, drew on the one stereotype for which Milwaukee is particularly famous — beer. A progressive TV show that focused on the lives of two independent women, roommates Laverne De Fazio and Shirley Feeney worked on the bottling line at the fictional Shotz Brewery to make ends meet. The fictional factory's name was not all that different from Milwaukee's own Schlitz, the "beer that made Milwaukee famous." With limited education and income, the portrayal of two working-class women employed by the brewing industry furthered the stereotypes of Milwaukee as a blue-collar industrial town.
After Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley ended in the early 1980s, Wisconsin did not appear on television again until the 1990s. The show Step by Step, debuting in 1991, centered on the merger of two families in a Port Washington home after the impetuous marriage of Frank and Carol while vacationing in Jamaica. The following year, Picket Fences introduced the fictional Wisconsin town of Rome. That '70s Show, set in another fictional Wisconsin town, the Green Bay suburb of Point Place, is perhaps the most notable Wisconsin-based show since Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley. Among the particularly Wisconsin-like touches to the show, was the chest freezer in the basement, a common occupant of many Wisconsin basements and, of course, the beer drinking.
While no programs this fall appear to be set in Wisconsin, it can't be too long before a real or imagined Wisconsin community appears on television again.
:: Posted September 22, 2006
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