Hogan's Heroes: How Television Turned a Prison Camp Into a Sitcom | TV HISTORY FOR SLEEP
Sleeping Backstage
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For six seasons, one of America’s most popular television comedies took place behind the fences of a German prisoner-of-war camp.
The prisoners ran secret tunnels. The guards were fools. Colonel Klink could never win. And millions of Americans tuned in each week to laugh at a setting that, only twenty years earlier, had been part of a very real war.
Tonight, Sleeping Backstage explores the strange history of Hogan’s Heroes — and the cultural conditions that made a World War II prison-camp sitcom possible in 1965.
We trace the whole story: the original pitch that couldn’t sell, the war films and military comedies that paved the way, the design choices that emptied a POW camp of fear, Klemperer’s rule that Colonel Klink must never win, and Robert Clary’s own lifelong distinction between a stalag and the camps he survived.
And underneath it all is a bigger question.
The show didn’t become harder to watch because Americans discovered something new about the war. The facts were known in 1945. What changed was the frame — the Holocaust moving from the edge of America’s war story toward its center.
Same episodes. A different room around them.
This is Part Two of Television Goes to War, our four-part series on how American television approached war, avoided it, reshaped it, and turned it into entertainment.
Part One, on M*A*S*H and the war television wasn’t allowed to mention, is linked below.
PART 1 Link: M*A*S*H: How Television Talked About a War...
Settle in, turn the lights down, and drift backstage into a television comedy that could only have existed when it did.
#TelevisionHistory #TVHistoryForSleep #SleepingBackstage
1 Comments
Hogan's Heroes: How Television Turned a Prison Camp Into a Sitcom | TV HISTORY FOR SLEEP
Sleeping Backstage
105 views
For six seasons, one of America’s most popular television comedies took place behind the fences of a German prisoner-of-war camp.
The prisoners ran secret tunnels. The guards were fools. Colonel Klink could never win. And millions of Americans tuned in each week to laugh at a setting that, only twenty years earlier, had been part of a very real war.
Tonight, Sleeping Backstage explores the strange history of Hogan’s Heroes — and the cultural conditions that made a World War II prison-camp sitcom possible in 1965.
We trace the whole story: the original pitch that couldn’t sell, the war films and military comedies that paved the way, the design choices that emptied a POW camp of fear, Klemperer’s rule that Colonel Klink must never win, and Robert Clary’s own lifelong distinction between a stalag and the camps he survived.
And underneath it all is a bigger question.
The show didn’t become harder to watch because Americans discovered something new about the war. The facts were known in 1945. What changed was the frame — the Holocaust moving from the edge of America’s war story toward its center.
Same episodes. A different room around them.
This is Part Two of Television Goes to War, our four-part series on how American television approached war, avoided it, reshaped it, and turned it into entertainment.
Part One, on M*A*S*H and the war television wasn’t allowed to mention, is linked below.
PART 1 Link: M*A*S*H: How Television Talked About a War...
Settle in, turn the lights down, and drift backstage into a television comedy that could only have existed when it did.
#TelevisionHistory #TVHistoryForSleep #SleepingBackstage
Some people remember the jokes and the characters with affection. Others find the setting harder to laugh at now. I’d love to hear what you thought when you first saw it—and whether your view has changed.
Thanks for spending the night backstage. 🌙