Caryl Flinn and Dana Polan's "The Patty Duke Show and the American Sixties"

Caryl Flinn is Professor Emerita in the Department of Film, TV, and Media at the University of Michigan. She has written, taught, and lectured extensively on film music, film sound, German cinema, kitsch and camp, musicals, and American independent cinema--areas covered in her six books and numerous articles. Dana Polan is Martin Scorsese Professor of Cinema Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. He is the author of eleven books in film and media studies. He was named a Chevalier by the French government for his contributions to cross-cultural exchange. He is a former President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, The Patty Duke Show and the American Sixties: Hot Dogs and Crêpes Suzette, and shared the following:

Our volume is a study of the classic sitcom The Patty Duke Show (1963-1966). Page 99 discusses its 1990s reunion TV movie, The Patty Duke Show: Still Rockin’ in Brooklyn Heights. Our comments on this page note how several aspects harken back to the original show and hint at our larger arguments in considering the role of studio versus real locations for interiors, the efforts of the telefilm to invoke the energy that defined the original series, the appeal to original and subsequent viewers, and the concern to not deal too heavily with the theme of twinning but weave it periodically into the narrative. On this last point, one of our central arguments is that the original series was about much more than gimmicky twinning and instead followed two “identical twin cousins” to observe diverse ways youth were growing up in the fraught social world of the American 1960s.

It would be hard for any one page to convey a real sense of what our overall volume is about. This stems in part from the number of angles and approaches we use to examine The Patty Duke Show including its production history (as well as tie-ins to the show), the life of its star and co-stars, close readings of episodes across the series’ three-year run, a wider review of 1960s sitcoms that challenges standard conceptions of them as “silly” or formulaic, a look at various comic traditions around themes of twinning and doubling, the afterlives of the show in numerous spin-offs and parodies, and so on. The discussion on page 99 deals primarily with one of these categories: the afterlife of the original series.

Learn more about The Patty Duke Show and the American Sixties at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue