The Return of Doris Day?

It often happens that in having a major hit an artist, and perhaps especially an actor, sees their image redefined, narrowed and often turned into something quite silly. So did it happen with Doris Day after Pillow Talk--that 1959 romantic comedy one of the top hits of the year, and indeed enough of a sensation that Hollywood cast Ms. Day in reworkings of the theme (Lover Come Back once again throwing her together with a lying and scheming Rock Hudson), all as one saw the echo of the movie in still other romantic comedies she probably would not have been doing were it not for that film's success (like That Touch of Mink). In the process it seems that audiences forgot everything else she had ever done in a very successful career as an actress playing believable grown-up women (for instance, in the prior year's Teacher's Pet) to picture her always as a somewhat implausible type--an attractive woman leading a glamorous life in the glamorous Big City (indeed, New York) in which she is going on plenty of dates but gives the impression of, living like this into middle age, having no "romantic" history to speak of with all its baggage, and never even quite having learned about, as they used to say, "the birds and the bees," for no reason we are given to understand; of, in very different circumstances from Steve Carrell's character in that film, being a forty year-old virgin, without even the hint of an explanation. This seemed silly from the start. (Indeed, that first movie for Doris-Day-as-we-have-known-her-ever-since made it something of an in-joke, as is clear when one sees her interaction with the "ladies' man" Hudson played in a manner that was often yet another in-joke for the Hollywood crowd, or the quips of her housekeeper Thelma Ritter about the life she is leading.) And it only looked sillier as time went on, especially given how very different a place 1970 was from 1960 pop culturally, and one might add, Doris Day by that point closer to fifty than forty (with, symbolic of it all, her actually declining the role of a certain Mrs. Robinson in that era-making hit, The Graduate).

One would think that what was already so much laughed about then would be that much less plausible in any current production. However, seeing the romantic comedies on Hallmark after the shifting of its content in the direction that has since defined the brand, it would appear that the Doris Day-type heroine is very much alive and well--an attractive woman leading a glamorous, socially active life who in middle age seems weirdly without any "past." Thus the married women, the single mothers, the single-but-dating woman who may be coming out of a bad relationship or getting over a break-up were out, as instead actresses often older than Ms. Day was in Pillow Talk seemed just as unburdened by any romantic history, any past, and the worldliness going along with it, all as what Hallmark does is matched by the ever-growing number of other channels and streaming services offering similar fare (like a certain, self-styled, Great American Channel).

Compounding the surprise, so far as I can tell this has drawn nearly no remark. Certainly the prestige TV-loving "cool people" on the review pages do sneer at Hallmark, for many things. For a time one heard endlessly about their lack of regard for a certain old, old wooden ship that was used in the Civil War. They also mock at the highly formulaic, repetitive, nature of the plots. But not this, perhaps reflecting the post-#MeToo turn to a sex-negative "New Puritanism," but perhaps also reflecting the limited extent to which they pay attention to those Hallmark-type offerings, and certainly the extent to which they would be able to draw a parallel between the heroines they see on these channels now and the characters that Doris Day played way back when. (After all, how many of those in the relevant age groups would even remember Ms. Day's comedies in this day and age in which the young simply don't watch old movies?) At the same time those who do pay attention likely find it part of the appeal, the thought of a woman leading a full, active life and not having any such baggage at (implicitly, given the age of the actresses we see) forty or up attractive to an audience that itself is substantially middle-aged and all too aware of its own baggage; and so too a cultural space free from the contemporary wallowing in sex, the more in as deliberately un-sexy sex, especially from anything like the traditionally mainstream vantage point, is the only kind considered fit for television these days.