American television seems to reflect a value system that is more or less alien to mine. For example, there are always token blacks on American TV, and they're never inner-city blacks - when some racist character (who is invariably a white trailer trash southerner with a twangy accent) confronts a black guy about being a dumb nigger, the guy invariably says something like 'well actually I'm an endocrinologist at John's Hopkins' or something to that effect. Then again, you'll never see main characters that are black in a show designed for a white audience (or at least not in the sci-fi crap that I watch). You quite often see men marry women with children, like in Dexter. I'd really have to be desperate to marry a woman with two children - not only desperate but financially capable of supporting a family of four. If you have that kind of cash, you can probably land yourself an Asian or Latin American university student unless you're hideous, and people on television in America never are hideous, are they? (maybe some of the black ones are - I can't really tell with black people) You never see gays that are total perverts - they're either campy or what the Presbyterian Church likes to think gays are like - nice, well dressed fellows that are cheerful, good neighbors who duck into their bedrooms with their equally charming friends, out of sight, to have man-on-man anal sex. They never portray guys that are into 15-17 year old girls that way, and I'm sure they're far more common than gays. I've been watching Falling Skies - it's exactly like Walking Dead except with aliens instead of zombies.
Travis, I can immediately think of six sci-fi shows that have blacks as main characters. Maybe not THE star, but opening credits at least. And one of them was technically inner-city. The others are a preacher, a short order cook/road crew/hooker/drug dealer, communications officer, med student and unemployed, and a CIA agent. I KNOW YOU HAVE SEEN THESE SHOWS. Think hard.
ReplyDeleteCan you name me five shows that have men marrying women with children? Dexter, sure, is one. The Brady Bunch. Annnnnd that's it. "Quite often"? No.
Men on American television are often hideous. Or at least not all that attractive. Women are never hideous, that's true. But this is common in movies as well as television. Men can be older, funny, reputable - all without being attractive. And Michael C. Hall is not all that attractive (not hideous either though). In my mind at least.
And you never see total perverts on television unless they're the bad guy in a cop or lawyer show. And people do have relationships with minors, but they dress it up in a socially acceptable way so that it's really all okay. Buffy, Pretty Little Liars, True Blood, Vampire Diaries . . . I guess anything to do with vampires really.
You need to watch more tv.