Series · CBS · 1954
Pass it on
Lassie
63Watch it awake.
It began before this decade and was still Sunday. The dog is the courage. The farm is the point.
The review
It began in 1954 and was still, in this decade, a Sunday a child could count on. A boy and a dog live on a farm. Someone is trapped or lost or foolish, and the dog does the thing the adults cannot do from where they are standing: she goes and gets them. The farm work matters. A mother matters. The peril is sized to a child's courage and then finished, rather than lingered over.
I put it on without a speech. The limit is simplicity. The dog always arrives, and a child should hear, from you, that real help can fail and you still go. The show will not say that. You can. What the show does say is that a loyal creature and a watching adult are how a small person survives a large field. That is a better Sunday than most of the things that replaced it.
Journal
Keep Lassie in the record.
No house has filed a sentence for this yet.
Live Historic number 63. Yours can differ.
The glance
Piety is the thin one.
Can conscience actually stop someone, or is reverence only in the shot so it can be mocked?
This phone is set for a grown person, just me. Change the ages.
Consider this
The Waltons
78 instead of 63
The Waltons is still a family show, and it scores 78 instead of 63. What you gain is industry: The father runs a lumber mill, and the mill is how the mountain family eats.
The eight
- 6Industry
A farm is work, and the trouble usually starts because somebody was doing a job.
- 8Household
A boy, a mother, and the people of the farm are the household the dog is running back to.
- 4Piety
The show treats a child's peril as serious, which is a reverence for the small.
- 7Courage
The dog crosses whatever is in the way. The courage is physical and it has a reason.
- 5Republic
A rural community is the public. Neighbors come when the barking starts.
- 6Temperance
Peril is real and then over. The show does not dwell on a hurt animal for the thrill.
- 6Truth
The danger is what it looks like: a well, a river, a fire. No ironic secret.
- 8Stewardship
A child inherits a picture of loyalty that costs something, on a farm that needs the child.
Where to watch
Finding the page.
Live Historic · Lassie · 63IMDb
