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I remember watching some bewitched reruns and they only had a few plots.
- Husband doesn’t want wife to use witchcraft ever
- Husband wants to be the breadwinner and doesn’t want any magical help with his career. By the way his job is in advertising which is useless and stupid so why would he care?
- Wife’s in laws hate husband and make problems for him using magic in some way
- Nosey neighbor keeps seeing strange things but nobody believes her
It’s a comedy so nobody ever thinks to use magic in a way to help society or something, so that’s ok. But it’s very noticeable how mundane the plots are. Also I think there were a few other old shows where the characters were in the advertising business or television business. I bet this was done to pander to the people who were paying for the show.
I think the characters are in those careers commonly because it's what the writers know.
Close but it's because if the husband is an advertiser, then it's REALLY easy to slip product placements in. It was part of the transition from the actors just blatantly looking at the screen and advertising the product to making it more subtle.
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So many of the plots are of the form "housewife disobeys husband" that it's seriously hard to watch.
Watching old media is painful sometimes because of how much inherent misogyny there is.
Like the times the wife has a valid disagreement and the immediate response is for her to "stop being hysterical."
Or you watch even older films and the response is physical abuse.
On The Honeymooners his catchphrase was "one of these days Alice, bang zoom straight to the moon." He was going to hit her so hard she flew to the moon. The height of comedy at the time.
But it's nice to see how much progress we're making as a society
Eh, it doesn't bother me, but it's probably because I grew up with it. I'm quite capable of separating that nonsense from the rest of the show, and not being misogynistic toward others (or so my wife says).
Even some not so old. JAG is a show I loved as a kid. I tried to watch it again a couple of years ago and was shocked at how much misogyny was portrayed in it.