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Kerry just noted the problems with the "poverty-as-familial-bonding-mechanism narrative"; I've got issues with another recession story line, the Americans-want-to-be-comforted-by-crappy-entertainment-now-that-we're-poor meme. It's in full effect in Alessandra Stanley's piece about CBS's Rules of Engagement, a supremely middling sitcom that, after a long hiatus, begins airing on CBS tonight. In the piece, Stanley contrasts "new economy shows" like 30 Rock, which continue to bomb in the ratings, with successful "Old-economy hits" like Two and a Half Men. She says our preference for the latter "suggests that nowadays network viewers prefer comforting comedy to high-wire satire." (Successful satire The Office does not figure into her formulation.)
My problem with this assertion has to do with that nowadays. 30 Rock has been bombing in the ratings since 2006, when most Americans still thought the value of their house could only go up, up, up. Meanwhile, the admittedly execrable Two and Half Men has been the most popular sitcom in America since 2005. In other words, it's not just nowadays that Americans have preferred the "comforting comedy" of Two and a Half to the "high-wire satire" of 30 Rock—it's most days. So has the recession really pushed Americans to rediscover lame sitcoms? Or has it just given journalists a specious way to explain our bad taste?
Another Times piece, about the resurgent movie business (ticket sales are up 17.5 percent this year—it's not that we aren't consuming more entertainment in this recession, it's that what we're consuming is just as crappy, or just as quality, as always), argues, "Helping feed the surge [in box office] is the mix of movies. [They] have been more audience-friendly in recent months as the studios have tried to adjust after the lackluster sales of more somber and serious films."
In other words, more people are going to the movies because the films are not somber and serious. Well, it's January and February, historically the season for Hollywood's least promising projects—people willing to take in a thoughtful movie couldn't find one at the multiplex. If they could, can the Times really be sure they wouldn't go? Last year's biggest film, The Dark Knight, was hardly light and peppy. Next weekend's Watchmen is expected to do huge business, but given that it deals with an enormous weapon going off in New York City*, "somber and serious" sounds just about right. If it succeeds, I wonder how many articles will suggest we "embraced" it because it "speaks to our troubled times."
*Correction, March 3, 2009: The original version of this post incorrectly described the weapon that goes off in Watchmen as a nuclear bomb.