A Critical Forum on Media and Culture
A Critical Forum on Media and Culture
In addition to presenting viewers with images of urban mayhem, American television now offers a new vision of the city as a bourgeois playground—a bright-lights stage upon which popular fantasies of wealth, power, and distinction can be indulged. Yet, this said, there is still something about this recent celebration of the gentrified city that rankles.
Read moreNo Regrets
by: Tim Gibson / George Mason University
The boundaries of the permissible on network TV have not expanded to match the public’s ill-mood about the war. And the latest proof of this comes in the most unexpected place of all—Fox’s So You Think You Can Dance.
Glimpsing Utopia on Lost
by: Tim Gibson / George Mason University
What I felt in my bones when I watched this particular episode of Lost was a yearning for the collective life of the castaways. Whatever else happens, these people are in it together. When times are bad, they are bad for everyone. When times are good—like when Hurley liberates the
hatch’s food—they’re good for one and all alike.
Everybody Hates Chris and the (Overdue) Return of the Working-Class Sitcom
by: Tim Gibson / George Mason University
On Everybody Hates Chris, class issues are largely explored in Chris’s home life, while the show’s writers
use Chris’s travails at Corleone to foreground questions
of race.
Commercial Media, Media Reform, and an Arlington Church Basement
by: Tim Gibson / George Mason University
The popular critique of media commercialism has deep cultural roots, and you don’t have to be fire-breathing Marxist to be disgusted with the moral consequences.
Studio 60 and the Limits of Self-Critique
by: Tim Gibson / George Mason University
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip promises a “behind the screens” look into the television industry. Here viewers sit ringside in the battle between art and commerce, as a team of actors, writers, and producers work frantically to broadcast ninety minutes of Saturday-Night-Live-style sketch comedy each week.