Like The Andy Griffith Show, the near total absence of black characters on The Beverly Hillbillies made the show’s southernness more viable to its millions of viewers. It taught them that erasing was easier than confronting the weighty problem of white southern racism.
Category Archive: television
Sometimes, you have a dream whose metaphorical meaning is so thuddingly obvious it almost seems too much. The […]
America’s preposterous debate over “civility” in politics has somehow tumbled into Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, of all places. Friday […]
One of the few (very few) pleasures of having cable and paying out an obscene amount of money […]
Finally, we wind down our retrospective of the “anus horribilis” with the rest of the responses to our […]
Scholars in recent years have studied a variety of different media to challenge the ever-present notion of technological […]
We live in an era when the music industry is long since “dead” (slain by Napster, and its […]
Occasionally, when I’m speaking to a class of 100 18-year-olds, I make the mistake of referring to them […]