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Give your Popular Culture IQ a boost. With each edition we’ll bring you three ideas – discussion points – that revolve around our cultural zeitgeist. It’s an easy way to catch up with the public discourse and just maybe these light-hearted topics can kick off a little first date chatter.
Discussion 1 - What Happened to the Sitcom?
It’s official—this is an era of two polar opposites in television. It’s a time when every show is either Reality TV, or really expensive TV in the form of a Very Serious Action-Drama. A show either has big celebrities, lots of money, and occasional explosions, or else it crams former celebrities and aspiring celebrities into a house together and hopes for some emotional explosions. Will we ever see a return to the glorious sitcoms of old, when we laughed over witticisms and cried over pratfalls?
It used to be that situation comedies such as the Jeffersons, Three’s Company, and the Mary Tyler Moore show dealt with race, dating, sex, divorce, and single parenthood. Even the Brady Bunch was a blended family! But in the nineties, and even more so in this decade, cable television swooped in and took over that niche with the Real World and Project Runway. We still get to see a core group of characters interact, but instead of telling jokes, the jokes are on them—their onscreen temper tantrums, ridiculous flirtations, and shameless backstabbing provide us with countless hours of giggles and gossip.
Meanwhile, network television and HBO are fighting back the only way they know how—with lots and lots of money. Big budget shows such as 24, the Sopranos, and CSI have been all the rage, each show more dazzling and expensive than the last—in fact, the pilot episode of the hit show Lost cost over ten million dollars, the most expensive pilot in ABC history. And it’s working for them—if you look at the shows on any given week on the Billboard top ten, you’ll see Lost, House, Cold Case—and what’s not high priced drama is likely to be Dancing With the Stars or America’s Next Top Model, reality TV with just a bit of celebrity thrown in.
So, in this very didactic era, is there room for a situation comedy that’s a delight to watch, instead of desperate or dramatic? Where are the Friends, the Seinfelds, the Cheers of our time?
Discussion 2 - Where Will Tomorrow’s Concerts Come From?
Have you ever noticed that the most successful concert tours each year are from musical artists who are 50 to 65 years old?! The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young are all old enough to be grandfathers. Even Madonna is about to hit the big 5-0. When this generation of top concert draws retires, who will be left to fill the stadium and outdoor venues? Unless record companies change their formula, the answer is “no one.”
Once upon a time the music business, much like the movie business, operated from a basic premise – stars create fan loyalty. You need rock stars with long careers and multiple hits to build a fan base that stays loyal and keeps buying concert tickets as time goes by. During the 1960s and 1970s, until just about the time MTV hit its prime, this system was in fine form. Labels nurtured artists, helping them mature, find an audience, and grow over the years.
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