"In 2007, television underwent a great expansion — beyond the major broadcast networks, beyond televisions and into all kinds of genres — just at the moment the economy shrank, and a fantasy emerged. As real people became poorer and lost their jobs, the ones on TV got richer, and their jobs seemed more beside the point. All that space to tell new stories ended up dedicated to a limited set of jobs and an increasingly homogeneous notion of what work even means...
When the economy began to tank in 2007, television was barely equipped to reflect the collapse, in part because the people who make shows were largely immune: They were well-compensated creatures of the entertainment industry, mostly unaffected by a shrinking economy. That disconnection sanitized TV against the complexities of race and class. Many sitcoms now are set in the places their creators know best: soundstages and writers’ rooms.
There is, currently, a diet version of the Huxtable-Conner dichotomy recurring on ABC. It pairs “The Middle,” about getting by in the heartland, with “Black-ish,” which asks whether prosperity dilutes blackness. But the network’s marquee show, “Modern Family,” a masterful machine that makes highly polished sitcommery, has so little to do with most modern families that its claim of modernity often feels like a joke"
No comments:
Post a Comment