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Your Three-Year-Old Already Knows the Brand Name

Watch a three-year-old in a grocery store. Watch her eyes when you turn into the cereal aisle. Her gaze is not scanning the shelves the way you scan them, evaluating prices and nutritional labels and unit costs. A search is underway. The child already knows what she wants, and she knows it by name, and she knows the name because a screen taught it to her before she could read the word printed on the box. The box appears in her sightline. A finger goes up. The name comes out of her mouth. You have just witnessed the end product of a commercial pedagogy that has been operating in American media for more than fifty years, and the child has no idea it happened to her.

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Reheated Laughter: The Sitcom’s Long Retreat from Risk

Norman Lear did something in 1971 that no network executive would permit today: he put a bigot in a living room chair and dared America to recognize itself. “All in the Family” premiered to confusion, outrage, and then unprecedented ratings, because Lear understood that comedy’s sharpest instrument is discomfort. Archie Bunker worked because he was allowed to be wrong in specific, recognizable, unredacted ways. The audience had to do the moral labor of sorting the joke from the injury. That transaction between screen and viewer, that demand that the audience participate in meaning rather than consume a pre-digested emotional product, defined what the American sitcom could be at its most ambitious. Fifty-five years later, the form has abandoned that ambition with an enthusiasm that borders on institutional policy.

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Scratch My Twitch on Boles.tv

The future now is here and you can watch it live, weekdays, on Boles.tv! Yes, Janna and I have taken the deep leap into the world of live streaming and we’re here to tell you all about it. The most interesting thing about going live each day is the idea that social media is really nothing compared to social broadcasting. You are your own station. You are your own dream stream.

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Never as Sweet as the Memory

As I get older, I notice that things I once loved, and remembered with a philosophic passion, no longer measure up to the memory in reality. With the resurrection of old TV shows in expanded reruns on new cable channels like MeTV, old childhood favorites like “Wonder Woman” and “The Carol Burnett Show” and “The Incredible Hulk” are bitter comparisons to what they used to be in memory.

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Divorcing the Marriage Ref

The Olympic Gold medal for the worst TV series of 2010 goes to Jerry Seinfeld’s horror of a new show, “The Marriage Ref.”  How did such a cruel and nasty show make it out of production and on broadcast television?

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Puncturing Booty Pop

The other night, I was half-watching television and half-listening to the radio when a commercial popped on the TV screen.  I thought someone had changed the channel from TLC’s newest fetish show, Our Little Lives and I was watching a comedy skit for a new product called “Booty Pop.”

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Life Goes On with Chris Burke

Chioma Uzoigwe wrote this article.

Old stereotypes die hard. These four simple words reflect one of the truest aspects of human nature. It is difficult to erase in peoples’ minds characteristics that are socially proven, per se, to be true of a particular group of individuals. It is even more difficult for people to rid themselves of such ideas when they do not belong to the group they stereotype. Public perception changers, however, have the power to reverse common incorrect views. This paper will show that to be a successful public perception changer an individual must overcome adversity to prove himself as exceptional within the stereotyped group to which he belongs. This paper will additionally show that the power of a public perception changer lies even more greatly in his ability to supercede what mainstream society can do. One such public perception changer is Chris Burke, the star of the hit television show “Life Goes On” (1989-1993). In his lifetime, Chris changed the way the world viewed people with disabilities and broke ground as the first successful actor with Down syndrome to appear in a television series.

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