Everybody Hates Chris and the (Overdue) Return of the Working-Class Sitcom

NOTE: I originally published this commentary on Flow TV: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture, an online journal published out of the Department of TV-Radio-Film at the University of Texas, Austin (www.flowtv.org). My thanks to the editors of this journal--graduate students, mostly--for inviting me to be a columnist over the past year.

One of the best things I’ve seen on television recently was shot from the perspective of a garbage can. This particular shot comes in the middle of the pilot episode of Everybody Hates Chris, a semi-autobiographical sitcom that chronicles the middle-school experiences of comedian Chris Rock in early 1980s Brooklyn.

In the pilot, we learn the basic premises of EHC. It is 1982. The Rock family has just moved out of the projects and into their new home—a two-level apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Young Chris is excited about the move and the adolescent adventures that await him now that he’s turned thirteen. His excitement vanishes, however, when his mother informs him that he’ll be taking two buses everyday to become the only black student at Corleone Middle School—all the way out in white working-class Brooklyn Beach.

In this way, two social spaces generate most of the show’s comic energy. Class issues are largely explored in Chris’s home life, while the show’s writers use Chris’s travails at Corleone to foreground questions of race.

This brings us to the garbage can. Early in the show, we learn that Julius Rock, Chris’s father, works two jobs and counts every penny. Julius, it turns out, has a particular talent for knowing the cost of everything. When Chris goes to sleep, Julius tells him, “unplug that clock, boy. You can’t tell time while you sleep. That’s two cents an hour.” When the kids knock over a glass at breakfast, Julius says, “that’s 49 cent of spilled milk dripping all over my table. Somebody better drink that!” And when someone tosses a chicken leg into the garbage, we see Julius peer over the rim, grab it, and exclaim, with a pained look on his face, “that’s a dollar nine cent in the trash!”

To be sure, as a former early 1980s middle-schooler myself, I enjoy the retro references to Atari, velour shirts, and Prince’s Purple Rain. But what I like most about EHC is how it foregrounds the experience of class inequality. Unlike other blue-collar comedies (e.g., According to Jim, Still Standing and King of Queens) which signify their characters’ working-class status via lifestyle choices (i.e., wearing Harley shirts, drinking beer, listening to Aerosmith, etc.), EHC generates much of its comedy directly from the class-based experience of struggling paycheck to paycheck and never having enough to pay the bills.

And so, in one episode, we see Julius buying the family’s appliances from Risky, the neighborhood fence, because the department store is simply out of reach. In another, Julius and Rochelle (Chris’s mother) agree to give up their luxuries (his lottery tickets and her chocolate turtles) in order to pay the gas bill. Things go haywire, however, when Rochelle (now reduced to getting her sugar fix from pancake syrup) catches Julius sneaking out to play the Pick 5.

And during one dinner, when Chris finally gets up the courage to ask for an allowance, Julius delivers a lecture familiar to every working-class kid. “Allowance? I allow you to sleep at night. I allow you to eat them potatoes. I allow you to use my lights…Why should I give you an allowance, when I already pay for everything you do?!”

What makes this focus on class all the more remarkable is that it comes to us in the form of a so-called “black sitcom.” As Timothy Havens notes in his study of the global television trade, international buyers looking to pick up American sitcoms strongly prefer “universal” to “ethnic” comedies (their words, not Havens’). As Havens quickly makes clear, however, the term “universal” is essentially code for white, middle-class, family-focused shows of the Home Improvement variety.

Thus, in the international TV marketplace, a white, middle-class experience becomes universalized as something that will appeal to “everyone.” Steeped in this discourse of whiteness, distributors reflexively brand as “too ethnic” any shows that deviate from this norm, including especially sitcoms that, as Havens writes, “incorporate such features as African American dialect, hip-hop culture…racial politics, and working-class…settings.”[1]

Given the important role played by international sales in the profitability of American television programs, this hostile distribution environment makes it less likely that shows with African-American casts will be produced in the first place.

The breakthrough success of The Cosby Show in the 1980s, of course, pointed a way out of this particular cultural and commercial box.

As Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis note, Cosby struck an implicit bargain with white audiences in the Reagan era. In exchange for white viewers inviting the Huxtables into their homes, the show’s producers would banish explicit references to the politics of race and keep the narratives focused on “universal” family themes. You’ve seen the show. Theo gets a “D” in math and receives a stern lecture from Cliff. Cliff’s attempt to cook dinner for the family ends in disaster. A slumber party for Rudy gets hilariously out of hand.

But, equally importantly, because white audiences have historically associated poverty with “blackness” and coded middle-class status as “white,” The Cosby Show placed these family-friendly stories in a context dripping with wealth and class privilege. In the end, this complex interpenetration of class and race in the dominant cultural imaginary allowed many white viewers (who might otherwise have been reluctant to watch a “black sitcom”) to read the Huxtables—an upscale African-American family focused on the peccadilloes of everyday life—as “white” and therefore “just like us.”[2]

The commercial fortunes of The Cosby Show have thus left an ambiguous legacy. Its path-breaking success has undoubtedly provided subsequent producers of African-American sitcoms with rhetorical ammunition to take into the pitch room (“Cosby made $600 million in its first year of syndication!”).[3] In an industry built on the endless repetition of past success, this is no small contribution.

Yet the middle-class, family-focused formula for African-American sitcoms—the model that signifies “universality” to international distributors and buyers—has also proven to be an ideological straight-jacket. To get on the air, in short, class must be dismissed. Thus, shows like The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, The Bernie Mac Show, and My Wife and Kids reproduce the upscale Cosby formula in exacting detail. Even programs like Girlfriends—shows that jettison family-focused themes for a more hip and youthful sensibility—nonetheless take great pains to place characters into high-end, even lavish, settings.

This raises the question of how EHC got on the air in the first place. Undoubtedly, the star power of Chris Rock, the show’s co-creator and narrator, played a central role. This said, I would love to know more about exactly how artists like Chris Rock draw upon their accumulation of symbolic capital—including their professional prestige, their network of connections, and their track record of commercial success—in order to overcome the ideological limitations of the industry’s commercial “common sense”

Indeed, perhaps this is a question that future political-economic work in television studies could productively explore. If we knew more about the conditions in which such accumulations of symbolic and social capital can be strategically applied to open new ideological spaces in the industry, we could create cultural policies that encourage this process.

In the meantime, I’m rooting for the future success of EHC. Admittedly, I’ve only seen the first season DVDs, so disappointments may be waiting. Still, for placing the struggles of working families at the center of its narratives, and for presenting the working-class experience as more than a matter of consumer choices, EHC has earned a valued place in my Netflix queue.

Image Citation:

1. Cast photo -- http://www.magneticmediafed.com/?cat=43

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[1] Timothy Havens, “‘It’s Still a White World Out There’: The Interplay of Culture and Economics in International Television Trade,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol. 19, no. 4 (December 2002): 387.

[2] Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis, Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992).

[3] The $600 million revenue figure came from http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/contributor/1809120796/bio.

Commercial Media, Media Reform, and an Arlington Church Basement

NOTE: I originally published this commentary on Flow TV: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture, an online journal published out of the Department of TV-Radio-Film at the University of Texas, Austin. My thanks to the editors of this journal--graduate students, mostly--for inviting me to be a columnist over the past year.

The recent successes of the media reform movement have been, in a word, stunning. To be sure, most of the victories have been on defense. Reformers fought off Michael Powell’s drive to annihilate media ownership restrictions in 2003, and big telecomm’s more recent attack on net neutrality—once viewed as irreversible—has been handed a series of improbable defeats. [i]

These are both big wins. So it would seem that the public’s disgust with media commercialism and their distrust of industry motives is both wider and deeper than many expected. Okay, I’ll admit it. I was surprised (if pleasantly so).

But perhaps I shouldn’t have been. The popular critique of media commercialism has deep cultural roots, and at the heart of this criticism is a rejection of the basic amorality of financial capital. In this critique, it is not merely—or even primarily—economic inequality or even labor exploitation that offends. It is rather the suspicion that, in market societies, every value, every principle, ultimately becomes subordinated to the cold calculus of profit.

This holds as true in the media system as it does anywhere else. If advertisers want to promote alcohol to teens, corporate media is there to help. If junk food firms want to sponsor Dora the Explorer, Nickelodeon is happy to oblige. If it’s a choice between covering climate change or filling the newscast with plugola, well, that’s no choice at all. Plug away! You don’t have to be fire-breathing radical to be disgusted with the moral consequences of media commercialism.

This last point became clear to me earlier this month as I was delivering a lecture in an Arlington church basement. How did I end up in this unlikely place? The usual way: during “drop off” at my son’s preschool, I let it slip to some of the other parents that I was a media studies professor at the local university. One thing quickly led to another, and before I knew it, I had agreed to give a lecture on “media, children, and violence” for the preschool’s parent association. My spouse then added fuel to the fire by publicizing the lecture at the Congregational church our family attends.

Initially grumpy about this intrusion on my winter break, I slowly warmed to the task. Like many Flow readers, I am sure, I teach my department’s required course in “mass communication” theory, and once during each semester we discuss the research and policy debates over media violence. The meat of the lecture would thus be pretty straightforward. These parents would essentially want to know if letting Johnny and Jane watch Justice League would inspire them to knock the other kids about the playground and land them in successive time-outs. Although this may not be the most interesting question to ask about media violence, the behavioral research on this question is nonetheless crystal clear (the answer is “yes, a little more likely”). [ii] Get out the media professor boilerplate.

At the same time, however, it began to dawn on me that I was being presented with an intriguing opportunity for, bluntly, political subversion. For I quickly realized that one of the questions parents would have would be “why all the violence, anyway?” This is a natural question, especially given the consistent finding that children’s programs contain more acts of violence per half hour than prime time shows. [iii] What could possibly motivate producers of children’s narratives to do such a thing?

The current political environment offers two major answers to this question. One argument—call it the cultural conservative argument—holds “the liberal Hollywood elite” accountable and articulates parents’ concerns about violence to a caricature of an amoral, partner-swapping, traditional-values-hating subculture of actors and writers. Another argument—call it the Big Media argument—holds families themselves responsible. If kids (and, secretly, parents) did not like violence, the industry simply wouldn’t provide it. So it’s our fault. From commercial media’s perspective, of course, both arguments have the signal virtue of giving corporate producers and distributors a moral free pass.

So here was my chance to present an argument on media violence that held commercial producers and global media firms culpable. And to a group of Arlington church-goers, no less! Luckily, the late George Gerbner once articulated just such an argument as part of his Cultural Environment Movement. Flow readers undoubtedly know it well: violence sells well across cultural and linguistic boundaries. Violence has a visceral quality that breaks through the clutter and grabs channel-surfing audiences just long enough to deliver them to advertisers. The insertion of violence into a children’s program pumps inexpensive drama into narratives that otherwise follow the most mind-numbing formulae.

Still, to be honest, I was pretty nervous about delivering Gerbner’s argument. Often, the gut instinct on these matters—as I’ve seen in class a thousand times—is to blame the parent. (Or, if you’re a parent, those “other” parents out there). If you don’t like children’s television, don’t let your kid watch it.

What I found, however, was just the opposite. These parents seemed to connect with the commercial explanations for the level of violence on children’s shows. It made sense to them. It made them angry. During Q&A, many parents expressed their desire for a media environment that did not relentlessly undermine their attempts to teach values like compassion and nonviolence.

One parent even said what I’d been secretly feeling for a long time: “why shouldn’t I be able to sit my kids in front of TV for a half hour while I do the dishes?” It seemed absurd to her that programming meant for children should require the co-presence of a vigilant parent, always at the ready to explain why his or her child shouldn’t take to heart television’s toxic lessons about aggression and violence.

Perhaps most tellingly, as I was wrapping up, I projected the now-iconic image of the “branded baby” on the screen and mentioned that I would be happy to come back and talk about children and advertising. More than one parent said they were more concerned about advertising and marketing than about aggression and violence.

All in all, this experience has led me to think more carefully about the rhetoric of the progressive-left media reform movement. The movement does, I think, a fine job of delivering what you might call the “public sphere” critique of commercial media. And rightly so. The criminal failure of the current system to provide an open forum form democratic debate and dialogue indeed deserves our ruthless criticism.

At the same time, progressive media educators and reformers have been less comfortable, it seems to me at least, with engaging in a moral critique of commercial media. Perhaps it comes from a reasonable fear of strange political bedfellows. It's not often, in short, that you see liberal progressives and cultural conservatives on the same side of an issue.

This said, I do think it is immoral to advertise junk food to kids. I do think it is wrong for media firms to accept alcohol ads on programs they specifically create with teens in mind. I indeed have a moral objection to children’s programs that divide the world in the “good” and “evil” and then celebrate aggression as the only effective way to protect “us” from “them.” (sound familiar, anyone?)

These are values that many people share. And if some folks have yet to make the connection between the commercial structures of the industry and these objectionable marketing and programming practices, the ideological ground for cultivating these sorts of connections is, in my view, fertile.

After all, the suspicion that an all-consuming pursuit of property and wealth is fundamentally amoral and dehumanizing can be found in more places than radical political theory. It is a suspicion also voiced with no small amount of power in the Christian gospels themselves. In fact, many of Jesus’ parables often dramatize the spiritual costs of putting material wealth ahead of our obligation to serve one another. In one particularly blunt example, a rich man, having spent his life ignoring a beggar’s pleas for food and shelter, is sent upon his death to an eternity of torment. In another, Jesus ends by making the point clear: you cannot serve two masters. You must choose between God and Money.

This is a point upon which limited, short-term, pragmatic coalitions can be built. Consider conservative evangelicals, example. As Andrea Press and Elizabeth Cole found in Speaking of Abortion, many evangelicals indeed accuse commercial media of undermining their conservative beliefs with regard to faith, family, gender, and sexuality. [iv]

Yet, interestingly, the authors report that evangelicals also object to television’s soulless materialism, its relentless commercialism, and its celebration of accumulation as an end in itself. And it is this contradiction in the wider conservative movement—this uneasy tension between the Chamber of Commerce’s religious devotion to markets and wealth and the working-class evangelical’s devotion to, well, Jesus—that merits some serious probing by progressives.

There is reason to be optimistic on this front. Indeed, one of most important features of the contemporary media reform movement is its refreshing lack of traditional lefty isolationism and orthodoxy. Free Press once allied with the NRA, for goodness sake.

In this spirit, if left-progressives speak openly about their own moral objections to the commercial media environment, and if they work to connect these concerns to the economic structures that generate this environment, they will be doing more than venting their spleens. They will be widening the constituency for media reform.

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[i] Robert McChesney, The Problem of the Media (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004).

[ii] See especially C. Anderson, et al., “The Influence of Media Violence on Youth,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest, vol. 4, no. 3 (December 2003): 81-109.

[iii] B. Wilson, et al., “Violence in Children’s Television Programming: Assessing the Risks,” Journal of Communication, vol. 51, no. 1 (March 2002): 5-35.

[iv] Andrea Press & Elizabeth Cole, Speaking of Abortion: Television and Authority in the Lives of Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

Studio 60 and the Limits of Self-Critique

NOTE: I originally published this commentary on Flow TV: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture, an online journal published out of the Department of TV-Radio-Film at the University of Texas, Austin. My thanks to the editors of this journal--graduate students, mostly--for inviting me to be a columnist over the past year.

Recently, I was surprised to realize that I was looking forward to the premiere of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. There were plenty of reasons to give this one a pass, after all. For one, NBC relentless hyped Studio 60 as “quality television,” heaping praise on series creator and West Wing veteran Aaron Sorkin’s “intelligent” writing and the “amazing” cast full of TV veterans like Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford. Since my tastes admittedly run to the broad and trashy, such talk of “TV worth watching” usually sets my teeth on edge.

At the same time, I was intrigued. If the conceit of The West Wing was that it brought viewers backstage into the corridors of executive power, Studio 60 promised a “behind the screens” look into the television industry. Here viewers would sit ringside in the battle between art and commerce, as a team of actors, writers, and producers work frantically to broadcast ninety minutes of Saturday-Night-Live-style sketch comedy each week.

And as a media professor fascinated with the political economy of American television, this show-about-a-show seemed particularly interesting. How far would Sorkin go in portraying the raison d’être of commercial television: delivering affluent audiences to advertisers in a mood to buy? Sorkin has clout, I thought. Let’s see how he uses it.

At the center of the Studio 60 universe are Matt Albie, the fictional show’s head writer, and executive producer Danny Tripp. In the pilot, we learn that Matt and Danny worked on the show four years ago, but were cast out of the fold when Matt’s satirical sketches were viewed as “too unpatriotic” in the immediate 9.11 aftermath by network brass. When the show’s current producer melts down in the middle of a live broadcast and delivers a Network-style tirade against American television, the network’s new president, Jordan McDeere, convinces Chairman Jack Rudolf to bring Matt and Danny back to run the show. Rounding out the characters are the cast members of the fictional Studio 60, including especially Harriet Hayes, a conservative Christian and the most talented comedienne on the cast. Her off-again, on-again romance with Matt—an agnostic Jewish secularist—provides the show with the contractually obligated amount of romantic spark.

So far, two main tensions animate the drama. The first, and least interesting, is show’s treatment of America’s culture wars. The fictional Studio 60, it turns out, is constantly besieged by conservative Christian organizations threatening the show’s advertisers with consumer boycotts. In fact, not only did such fundamentalist outrage prompt the earlier sacking of Matt and Danny, but the meltdown of the show’s former producer was provoked in large part by last-minute orders from the network brass to cut a sketch called “Crazy Christians.”

In usual Sorkin fashion, however, the show’s narratives labor to demonstrate that the secular/religious divide in America is not as stark as it appears. Harriet may promote her Christmas CD on Pat Robertson’s “700 Club,” but she defends the show’s right to air “Crazy Christians.” Simon Stiles, another Studio 60 cast member, initially plans to ridicule a small Missouri town for canceling its high school production of “The Crucible” but then changes his mind, convinced by Hayes that while the hypocrisy of Christian leaders is fair game, the school boards of small-town America are not. And of course there was the laugh-out-loud moment when, after fighting off yet another network threat to cancel “Crazy Christians,” the cast joins hands in Christian prayer, proving, in true “after school special” fashion, that you can’t tell a book by its cover.

Leaving aside the obvious point that, in corporate America, this would never, ever happen, the prayer scene illustrates a more fundamental problem with Sorkin’s political statements: there always seems to be, with Sorkin, a mushy, reasonable middle-ground that smart people can find if they sincerely try. Any notion of incommersurable ideological systems and basic conflicts of interest is out of bounds.

More interesting is the show’s treatment of the battle between art and commerce in Hollywood. Most often, the protagonists in this battle are represented by NBS Chairman Jack Rudolf, and the network’s idealistic president, Jordan McDeere.

McDeere, we learn quickly, is all about “quality.” She’s there to class up the joint. She knows, for example, the difference between Commedia dell’arte and Restoration comedy (hint: one is Italian and one is English). What’s more, she has a spine. In one scene, she defies Rudolf by “passing” on an exquisitely degrading reality show (“Search and Destroy”—best described as Temptation Island meets the Drudge Report). When summoned before Wilson White, NBS’s major shareholder, to explain herself, she delivers the following speech with a straight face:

It’s patently disgusting. It appeals to the very worst in our nature, and whoever airs it will play a measurable role in subverting our national culture. It doesn’t belong on anyone’s air—certainly not ours, at a time when we’re trying to re-brand the network as a place for high-end viewers. I swear to God, sir, the better our shows are, the more money we’ll make.

In the end, of course, the grandfatherly über-capitalist approves McDeere’s decision to pass on the show. And so it goes in Studio 60-land: good people (McDeere) encourage creatives to take risks and defend the right of viewers (well, maybe just “high-end” viewers) to access quality programming. Bad people (Rudolf) think only of money and dragging down standards for a short-term ratings win. But good news! The good people always win! In Sorkin’s alternative universe at least, art has kept commerce at bay.

Ultimately, however, Studio 60 pulls some major punches, revealing, I think, the boundary of the permissible on network television—especially when it comes to portraying its own inner political-economic workings.

All the easy targets are appropriately caricatured: the flame-spitting pressure groups that impose their views on others, the Armani-clad executives who dumb down television for short-term commercial gain, the standards and practices geek who frets excessively about offending Jerry Falwell and the FCC.

But thus far (and to be fair, we’re not even halfway through the first season) the truly big game—including the fictional network’s advertisers and Wall Street shareholders—have eluded Sorkin’s rhetorical arrows. I’m still waiting to witness a standoff between McDeere’s idealism and a boardroom of advertisers unhappy with the anti-consumption or anti-corporate “environment” provided by her programming.

This said, the biggest sacred cow left untouched by Sorkin’s Studio 60 has to be the concept of consumer sovereignty. For Sorkin, as much as for the propagandists of the NAB, the consumer is king. If the viewers want degrading reality shows, the networks will deliver them. If the viewers can be educated or inspired to expect “quality,” the networks will deliver that instead.

And so the debate ranges from those who wish to win ratings with schlock and those who wish to cultivate “better” public taste (and, in the end, better ratings) by exposing viewers to quality programming. That, ultimately, ratings are transparent expressions of the cultural and political desires of “the people” is questioned by no one.

Just the opposite in fact. In one recent episode, the cast and crew of the fictional show were feeling the pressure to keep at least 90 percent of the previous week’s audience. This would allow the saintly McDeere to argue that the show is reaching “the people” despite the protests from conservative groups. At the end of the show, when the predictably high ratings come in, McDeere hugs Matt and Danny and exults, in the kind of voice one usually reserves for announcing, say, the birth of a child: “we built by 9 percent over last week, including a point and a half in the demo!”

As critical media scholars, we know the notion of consumer sovereignty is, as the Brits say, pure tosh. Eileen Meehan’s newest offering, Why TV is Not Our Fault, is the best in a long line of books that assault the notion that ratings transparently express the tastes of the public and force programmers to respond to our needs. At best, ratings register the choices that a sample of the consuming class make from a menu of alternatives already approved by advertisers and corporate owners. We can all name programs that were doing well in the ratings, but not with advertisers, and we all know what happened next.

Perhaps, as I write this, Sorkin is penning an episode that deconstructs Nielsen ratings and the tacit boundaries set by advertising and corporate ownership. But somehow I doubt it. This is what Raymond Williams meant by economic structures setting limits and exerting pressures. It’s much easier, and much less risky, to plumb the culture wars than to explore and critique the economic foundations of the industry that employs you.

In the end, I like Studio 60. I like the steadicam shots, the busy, chaotic set, and the rapid-fire witty banter. I like that the show takes television seriously as a cultural and political forum.

But there’s something ultimately unsettling about the show, and I think I put my finger on it. As Shawn and Trevor Parry-Giles have argued, for all its surface liberalism, Sorkin’s West Wing ultimately reassured Americans that the country was in the hands of talented and dedicated people. And now Studio 60 labors to offer us the same reassurance about the television industry. For every Jack Rudolf, there is a Jordan, a Danny, and a Matt. Your television, dear viewer, is in good hands. Would that it were true.