"Well we're movin' on up, to the East Side, to a deluxe apartment in the sky" - The Jeffersons theme
The Jeffersons: The Complete First Season DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
Of the thousands of shows that seem to have been spun off of All in the Family, The Jeffersons was the most successful and the longest running. On January 11, 1975 in episode 102 of All in the Family entitled "The Jeffersons Move Up," George Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley), whose dry cleaning business was becoming more and more successful, was able to move wife Louise (Isabel Sanford) and son Lionel (Mike Evans) out of Archie Bunker's working class Queens neighborhood and into a luxury high-rise apartment on Manhattan's East Side. The Jeffersons moved up to their own series one week later.
In the new building, Louise befriends Tom and Helen Willis (Franklin Cover and Roxie Roker), but George rejects the interracial couple. He derides Helen for selling out and marrying a Caucasian. Complicating matters is the fact that Lionel is now dating Helen and Tom's daughter, Jenny (Berlinda Tolbert). George wants his son to be happy, but has problems accepting the daughter of a "zebra" family. Next door neighbor Harry Bentley (Paul Benedict), an Englishman who works as a translator at the U.N., also drops by on occasion, much to George's chagrin. Louise, in addition to listening to her husband criticize her newfound friends, must also put up with her mother-in-law's insults. Now that the family lives in Manhattan, Mother Jefferson (Zara Cully) is free to drop by the apartment at a moment's notice.
The first season of The Jeffersons holds up surprisingly well. A few of the episodes are stuck with fairly routine stock sitcom plots, but even when the situations are too familiar, the writing usually contains several laugh out loud bits of dialogue. Sure, much of it is insult humor, but at this point in the series, it still seems fresh and funny.
Many of the episodes in this season deal with class consciousness and the Jeffersons learning to cope with their new wealth. In the first episode, a maid in the building assumes that Louise is a domestic, too. Louise eventually clarifies things and vows to remain friends with the woman. George is horrified by this, and decides that the family needs to hire a maid of their own in order to secure their status. Louise, who remembers the time not long ago when she herself had a job as a maid in order to help the family through its lean years, at first refuses to hire anyone. She fears that she will not know how to treat a maid, especially since her own bad experiences are so fresh in her mind.
The theme is also carried through in episodes that examine Louise's boredom when faced with her new life of leisure and Lionel temporarily abandoning college to live the life of a rich playboy. Self assured George is also affected by their "movin' up" - he discovers that he is insecure about his slave ancestors.
One of the funniest episodes also involves George and the side effects of his wealth. In "Rich Man's Disease," George is diagnosed with an ulcer. When Louise decides that the road to better health requires her to shelter George from any stress, the episode veers into a hysterical take on French farce, complete with door slamming and misunderstandings. This episode is also a treat because it allows Sanford to cut loose in a way that the other episodes do not.
Roker is also a standout in many of these episodes. Her Helen is a perfect foil for George, and the actress brings much dignity and charm to the role.
Fans of wisecracking maid Florence Johnston (Marla Gibbs) may be disappointed to know that she does not appear all that often in the first season. In the opening episode, Florence applies to be the Jeffersons' maid, but ultimately is not hired. She shows up in subsequent episodes only when the Jeffersons have parties, and her personality is much different than what it would eventually become.
The thirteen episodes that make up the first season are divided onto two discs. As usual with Columbia/TriStar TV DVD releases, the set's biggest flaw is that there are no chapter stops in the episodes.
