A German friend of mine, who studied Psychology with me at City College, New York, once asked me seriously if there was any rule on TV that forced sitcom stars to appear aged at some point. I hadn’t noticed it until I saw Lucy and Ricky do it in the leg-jiggling episode; Lucy, in the Hawaii trip and others. Soon I realized that practically everybody else who is somebody in the industry did it.
He asked me why most of them had to play double roles, too. Again, he caught me by surprise. I had never thought about it before, but the fact that in most sitcom comedies at a point in the series, the star (or co-star sometimes) has to play his or her part and another role at the same time.
Jackie Gleason did it (he played Ralph Crandon and himself); Barbara Eden played Genie and her sister, and Elizabeth Montgomery played Samantha and Serena in Bewitched. Fred Gwynne played Herman Monster, his alter ego, and the English counterpart. Don Adams in Get Smart, etc. And so on. They all are good examples of conventional duplication.
There is a myriad of double characters on TV. In Gilligan’s Island several of the castaways had a double. “Yeah, you may call it the Betty Davis Syndrome,” I jokingly answered my friend. And this takes us to double standards, and what better field than...