Check out John Rogers on the fan-mandated second season of Jericho, which he calls “the most genuinely subversive piece of entertainment in the last 8 years.” I’m not sure that’s so, but only because a lot of what the show is saying is now almost conventional pop-culture wisdom. We are in what is often described as the post-post-9/11 era, where U.S. audiences (to say nothing of audiences around the world) are much less anxious to see the post-9/11 narrative of the government protecting us from ill-defined threats. Without getting too much into the politics of it, it’s clear that TV more or less tracks the preferences of its audience, and the themes we’re seeing on Jericho are fairly in-synch with its CBS viewership: pro-military and patriotic but suspicious of government. It’s like the collapse of the Ron Paul campaign has sent the Paulites’ message seeping into the popular-culture mainstream.
Check out John Rogers on the fan-mandated second season of Jericho, which he calls “the most genuinely subversive piece of entertainment in the last 8 years.” I’m not sure that’s so, but only because a lot of what the show is saying is now almost conventional pop-culture wisdom. We are in what is often described as the post-post-9/11 era, where U.S. audiences (to say nothing of audiences around the world) are much less anxious to see the post-9/11 narrative of the government protecting us from ill-defined threats. Without getting too much into the politics of it, it’s clear that TV more or less tracks the preferences of its audience, and the themes we’re seeing on Jericho are fairly in-synch with its CBS viewership: pro-military and patriotic but suspicious of government. It’s like the collapse of the Ron Paul campaign has sent the Paulites’ message seeping into the popular-culture mainstream.