Friday 29 July 2011

Cheers!

Excellent example of how TV operates as a key cultural battleground over social values and beliefs: this episode of smash hit US sitcom Cheers from way back in 1983. Just as the Eastenders clip from slightly later in the same decade seems quite shocking some decades later, so will this. In both cases though, the homophobes are positioned as the antagonists; the serie' central protagonist undergoes a journey: initially antagonistic and homophobic, his hidden liberal instincts finally triumph. As Todorov's narrative model suggests, the new equilibrium leaves us with a changed Sam Malone.

Conservative, right-wing critics of the mass media contend that there is a liberal bias to the mainstream media, an argument long associated with the Tory Party in the UK (and Republicans in the US); Lord Tebbit once famously dubbed the BBC the British Bolshevik Corporation.


There are two more parts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b-BZqapaEY and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4pPV_BClwA.

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