Core Response (1)

        Hendershot’s “Parks and Recreation: The Cultural Forum” was an interesting extension of Newcomb’s and Hirsch’s argument of the television as forum in the network era. Hendershot’s extension of their assertion that the process of television is more important, ideologically, than the product itself disrupts the earlier assumptions of TV as a wide forum practice that all the public was involved in. There are rare situations of series like Roots captivating all the public, although Game of Thrones seemed to be a reimagining of a whole public television, instead audiences exist in their own curated network picks, existing in echo chambers of media. There is no longer media for all that exists in the forum for audiences to read either in either a dominant, oppositional, or negotiated way as Newcomb and Hirsch argue. There is no longer a confrontation from the wide-released television, now there is the confirmation of self-chosen programs, the echo chambers of network and streaming. Hendershot uses Parks and Recreation as an example of a sitcom for the masses. The uses of the liberal (with conservative work ethic) Leslie Knope and her boss Ron Swanson, the Tea Party-esque anti-government character who works alongside Leslie. Hendershot sees this as working not in the star-studded diverse cast so every viewer can find their favorite character, but instead as a method of showing how “opposing factions can communicate and collaborate” (Hendershot 208). This is an idealistic reading, but I disagree that this is all it emerges from.

            As Todd Gitlin shows, “ideological hegemony is embedded” in amongst other things “setting and character type” (Gitlin 254). Parks and Recreation is borrowing here from an already previously established character type and rapport in Leslie and Knope. If we go back just three years earlier of Parks and Recreations’ debut, we find a similar NBC sitcom carrying this character formula: 30 Rock. Here we have a certified liberal character in Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon, the showrunner of a failed SNL type show who clashes ideologically with her boss, Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy, the ultra-conservative and ideal capitalist network executive. The characters are constantly at odds in how they view the world and politics (the series is actually much more outright in the political issues its willing to tackle), but the sense of communication and collaboration exists here too. Jack is Liz’s mentor, her guiding guru in life, love, and success. Liz grounds Jack, opens him to new viewpoints, but neither are ever totally changed. Episodes don’t provide firm resolutions to ideological disputes (Carrie Fischer guest stars once as an ex-writer for NBC who convinces Liz to go on strike, but is later denounced as a crazy revolutionary). The series does not represent the inner workings of municipal government as aprks and Recreation does, but 30 Rock operates at another central facet of the political atmosphere in America: the media. The show too has a message that is a “decidedly centrist one” extremes of both left and right can coexist, but only a moderate approach can resolve our problems” (Hendershot 211). It is through these character types (that we can see even as far back as All in the Family with Archie and his son-in-law) that this forum is demonstrated at different levels of our society.