Everything I know about elite America I learned from Fresh Prince and West Wing

People use the phrase "TV programming" without a hint of irony.

This is something the right has been complaining about for a long time, the shift of this moral authority from its traditional stewards (usually the churches) to the television writer.

It’s unclear to me how much of the complaint has to do with disliking the results, especially around the acceptance of homosexuality, and how much of it is a complaint about the shift in power itself. As you said, a lot of the moral lessons in sitcoms are fairly benign, as they usually center around the idea that bad actions have consequences but forgiveness and salvation is available if you ask for it. THe core message isn’t that different than what you’d see in some sermons, only the jokes are new.

It doesn’t bode well for society if kids and teenagers are spending more and more time watching YouTube videos and Twitch streamers compared to scripted shows, then.

I got a significant number of my morality lessons from Saved By The Bell and Blossom.

Is there a list of common story lines somewhere? I used to watch sitcoms as a kid, so my memory needs to stretch back a bit, but that seems to sum up almost any episode that I can think of.

I've heard something along the lines of "there are only 6 types of plots and every movie is just a rehash of one of them", but I've never actually found the list.

> Virtually every sitcom episode demonstrates a moral lesson in their A-plot.

Seinfeld may be a major exception to this rule.

> Given the amount of TV most Americans watch, we learn far more "lessons" in any given week or month than we have the opportunity to do so in real life or through friends.

Some of the things learned may not be entirely accurate:

> Copaganda, a portmanteau of cop and propaganda, is the phenomenon in which news media and other social institutions promote celebratory portrayals of police officers with the intent of swaying public opinion for the benefit of police departments and law enforcement.[1] Copaganda has been defined by cultural critics in the United States as "media efforts to flatter police officers and spare them from skeptical coverage,"[2] "pieces of media that are so scarily disconnected from the reality of cops that they end up serving as offbeat recruitment ads,"[3] and "videos, photos, and news clips of police officers dancing, praying, or handing out free food" used to boost public relations.[1]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copaganda

* https://boingboing.net/2020/10/07/what-is-copanganda-and-how...

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udhDawfCLHo

It can also be used for very dubious purposes: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheComplainerIsA...

There is something subtler and more important concealed in sitcoms and dramas. Narrative has its own logic. By that I mean that there are kinds of things that are easy to describe in certain media and difficult or impossible to describe in others. And also that the systematic requirements of storytelling satisfaction act to prioritise certain kinds of understandings of the world.

One simple but ill understood way in which this is true is in the numbers of people interacting within a group or institution. In drama the audience can keep in mind only a set number of major actors - even in a relatively complex political procedural, at most a dozen characters will recur. In reality, the humblest institution may have dozens or hundreds of regularly interacting people who take active part in decision making. So the implicit and unintended myth created by all films and television diminishes the importance of the collective - with its web of loyalties and contrasting intentions - and replaces it with a tiny number of easily tracked isolates. Character motivations always need to be personalised in drama, with 'complex' motivation existing to humanise rather than explicate action.

There are countless other examples of the ways drama systematically distorts our understanding of life and politics. From the disavowal of the motivating force ideology and (even in the United States) religion, to the systematic concealment of poverty.

None of these necessarily require censorship or explicit manipulation. They're not simply expressions of a particular societies blindness to its own flaws. But exemplars of what can easily be transmitted in drama.

This is a great insight. I think it's also worth mentioning that TV is an imperfect representation of our moral reality. TV shows are primarily meant to entertain and keep us watching. Their budgets, production and writing are often slapdash. The shows are absolutely packed with value judgements, though often the creators are not fully in control of the message and the lessons are either contradictory or downright fantastical.

We are the TV people. As I get older I realize more and more that TV raised everybody. I watch us act out the screen dramas in our real lives. I learned professional etiquette from office dramas and sitcoms, and so did everyone else. I re-watched TNG recently and realized it's not a show about aliens on military spaceships, it's a show about people from the late 80's and early 90's aspiring to a better and more inclusive office culture filled with universally competent co-workers who do not harass each other. It is a vision of a world that will never exist.

The author of the article maybe has it all a bit confused. He is not binging on prestige TV to learn more about his upper class peers. His upper class peers learned to be themselves by binging on prestige TV. He had gone right to the source. Jean Baudrillard would agree. Life imitates art imitating art and so on.

I'm going to leave here the one of the best essays I've read on narratives: https://www.moviemaker.com/hollywoods-four-classic-narrative...

My English education as a Swedish kid mostly consisted of watching shows on Cartoon Network. People always think it's a joke when I offer Hanna-Barbera cartoons as the explanation for why I speak English with a North American accent. They just assume I studied in the US or Canada, or grew up there.

Not gonna lie – most things I know I probably learned from watching TV shows, movies, and more recently YouTube videos.

Thanks for this comment. I just realized that I was morally raised by the first 10 seasons of The Simpsons.

> character has bad idea [...] learns their lesson [...] Sitcom writers actually hold a tremendous place of responsibility in American society

Seemingly not widely known, is that sitcom scripts were for years often submitted to the office of the White House Drug Czar, for approval and negotiated revision. IIRC, the carrot was the show counting towards a station's public service broadcast time requirements? So a "90210" script containing drug use for instance, might be revised to reflect a list of requests, intended to present it more clearly as bad idea.

As we now collectively design a censorship regime for more recent social tech, it might be interesting to see insightful non-narrow analysis of past regimes.

with this in mind, do you think there is a concerted effort by corporate media to sway public opinion in ways that might not be ethical?

This is why I miss all of the old Nick at Nite shows from the 50s-70s. They seemed to have a more overt “do the right thing” plot line.

The West Wing is definitely an idealized version of 00’s-era Democrat politics. I think largely because Democrats envision their ideal government and presidency as a bunch of clever, earnest staffers running around outsmarting everyone else.

Conservatives during the 00’s more strongly identified with 24, a universe where politicians and bureaucrats were sometimes virtuous, sometimes corrupt, and sometimes evil, but the hero was Jack Bauer, one of the rough men who stands ready to do violence on our behalf as we sleep soundly in our beds, usually in a very literal sense.

Well, I'm only a couple of seasons in, love it, and am a conservative (although I do fall into all the other categories). Clever dialog, entertaining, etc.

Is this copypasta?

That's definitely a human connection desert.

Do you have a suggested reading list I can look at?

Yeah, being grounded in Cesar war as opposed to contemporary world totally makes sense.

Interesting article, but the way it reads makes me think that she never had a deep understanding of what an X is/was.

That said, although dated, I still recommend Fussel’s book — it’s hilarious if not informative.

I wonder if shows like that—which portray middle-class Americans living in unrealistic material luxury as aimless 20-somethings in NY—give people in other countries unrealistic perceptions of the American standard of living.

> "... Each one of us, of course," the Controller meditatively continued, "goes through life inside a bottle. But if we happen to be Alphas, our bottles are, relatively speaking, enormous."

I think of bottles as being like filter bubbles: once one is aware filter bubbles exist, it's possible to play with moving them around. Once one is aware of the bottle and how the bottling process works, it's possible to attempt to play with it as well.

Compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24141469

Or juxtapose http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...

> "it is clear that none of the moral virtues formed is engendered in us by nature, for no natural property can be altered by habit."

with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23867639

> "When people are born, they all start good, but even though they all start out about the same, you ought to see them after they have had time to become different from one another by picking up habits here and there!"

It is true that when you graduate from a prestigious university, society at large has a superficial notion of your competence/abilities at the outset, but in the long term, i think what you actually do as an individual defines you. There are tons of people who graduated from a great school xyz whose only real accomplishment is graduating from xyz. Do not let labels define what you can do with your life, once you buy into that game, you are mentally boomed for the rest of your life. Einstein certainly never said "oh i work at a patent office, which must mean i can't become a world class physicist", no one (or institution) owns creativity, knowledge, passion or drive, and those are the most important qualities that drive the world.