David on Tv...

Date: 11/29/10 Time: 12:00 Influence: 420

Other info: This came to me while watching Dexter...

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I urge you to think back to an earlier time when shows like "Leave It To Beaver" and "I Love Lucy" reigned. It was a time of black and white in more than one way. On both of those shows, the characters are only occasionally challenged morally. Even when it did occur the choices were obvious. Simple Wrong/Right thinking was the only thing that occurred in many American households and popular culture reflected that.

Now return to 2010. In television today, there is no perfect family. There is no "Cosby family". There is no "leave it to beaver". There are also many characters that are operate in a moral gray area. In an area that, though against some of our moral intuitions such as law or christian morality, makes us like them and want to watch them regularly.

As far back as the 90's, the "perfect family" on television began to change from the nuclear family, two parents of opposite sexes and 1.5 children (a la "leave it to beaver" or "all in the family"), to a far less traditional one. Beginning with shows like "Full House" and progressing to modern day television such as "two and a half men", the concept of "family" on television has developed to include nontraditional one parent households and even "odd couples" of two or more men. This "perfect family" concept can even be expanded to shows where "family" doesn't include a child. In shows like "House", "Big Bang Theory", and "How I Met Your Mother" for example, a group of characters interact to such an extent that traditional separations between "work life" and "personal life" as well as "friends" and "family" begin to be blurred. Indeed, the characters on the aforementioned shows tend to act more like groups of siblings than mere friends or coworkers.

This recent inclusion of these nontraditional groups into the American concept of family shows the ever loosening nature of the definition of family. Now, family is no longer defined by blood. It can now be defined by a shared living/working situation. Really any identical set of circumstances can create a group of people that become as intertwined as family.

Though people may think of this as a positive effect, this also may have a negative reflection of society. Due to the now ambiguous and arbitrary nature of "family" in American television (and to an extent, American life), there is now less of an emphasis on actual blood ties. In the three fore mentioned shows, the main characters (with no blood ties) are very deeply interconnected to each other, yet have deteriorating or even non existent ties to actual blood. The case could be made that this de-emphasis of actual blood family in American television shows the decreasing importance of things that we have little control over (like who our family is) and a greater emphasis on things we CAN control (such as associations with friends, roommates, coworkers, etc).

Lets change gears and instead of considering family in television, lets analyze more deeply and think of today's favorite television characters. There's the benevolent serial killer Dexter Morgan (showtime's "Dexter). A forensic scientist for the Miami PD and a father who kills serial killers in their free time in an effort to channel his "dark passenger" into a positive force. Years ago, there's no chance you'd find a serial killer being shown in a positive light. But nowadays, Dexter is one of the most commonly watched series on television and Dexter Morgan is one of Americas favorite characters on television.

And there isn't just Dexter, there's countless others. Showtime and HBO have a tendency to really promote these morally ambiguous characters in an effort to stimulate viewership (very successfully). But these characters aren't limited to premium channels like this. Look to NPH as Barney Stinson on CBS's "How I Met Your Mother". Perfectly portrayed by the talented thespian, Barney is, mildly put, a narcissistic, manipulative, opportunistic, insensitive womanizer. Though he does on occasion show a soft side for the career oriented, self alienating news anchor Robin Scherbatsky, almost every line spoken by him is either Barney praising himself, objectifying women, or scheming to preform risky and daring actions in an effort to pursue women. And yet, because he is incredibly funny and helps to create interesting situations, America loves him.

So what does that say about how Americas developed since "leave it to beaver"? Are we all accepting of murderous womanizers from dysfunctional families? Or maybe its the nuanced good about those characters, the simple humanity of people we often look at in a negative light. Even though Dexter Morgan is a murderer, he still has coworkers, still has friends, still has family. He has a job that contributes good to the community, and a son (and two stepkids) that are experiencing childhood. He still has a life that means something, apart from the fact that he's a serial killer. Sure, he goes out to stalk and kill people, but he also goes to his stepson's soccer games and stepdaughters dance recital. Sure, Barney conquers countless women through deceit, disrespects them immediately after the affair, and subsequently brags about it in the bar with his buddies before repeating the process, but he also has a corporate job for a bank, still has a mother which he visits on a regular basis, still has humanity. In short, he's still a person, and quite a likeable one at that.

Maybe this is the direction american moral thought is moving in. We no longer believe in the "perfect family" or even the "perfect person". While drug dealers were previously portrayed strictly in a negative light years ago, now shows like Showtimes "Weeds" are challenging that notion. We're advancing from simple claims such as "murder is wrong" and "womanizers are bad people" to simply "it depends".

Think about how big of a jump that is. That's moving from black and white, yes and no, on and off, to large areas of grey moral thinking. Its installing a dimmer switch onto our judgment of human morality. Its exponentially increasing the significance of ethical considerations.

Welcome to Intalksicated

My name is Sarah. My friends and I have a lot of things in common. Some of them include a penchant for mind-altering substances, staying up all night talking about the universe, blasting music that makes our eyes roll back into our heads with joy, drinking until the sun comes up, speeding down the freeway for hours all hyped up on energy drinks, wandering through the forest in a late-night daze, thinking about life and death and everything in between. Oh, and drugs, we have a penchant for drugs. If you didn't catch that.

Our youth is our time to experiment with our world: sex, drugs, alcohol, etc. are a part of this. But this is not the place for me to justify our behavior. This is the place for me to establish this blog as a collective of thoughts, revelations, stories, epiphanies, anecdotes, feelings, and connections made by myself and my close friends. This idea germinated between my good friend David and I as we discussed the advantages of being smart and having smart friends. We decided it would be a great idea if we all had a place to record our ideas, whether they be formed under the influence or not, for everyone to share. I'm excited to see where this project will take us. In the words of Kayla Hallee, "Rock on!" (she was skydiving, she can't be held accountable for her dated jargon).

:D