What can we learn about ourselves from watching TV?

Thoughts of a TV writer/showrunner

From an anthropological perspective, film and TV is one of the greatest tools we have to understand society at a particular point in time.

Take a show like I Dream of Jeannie from the 1960s. It was about a woman with magic powers who lived in a bottle. She was kept there. And how did she address the man of the house? She called him Master.

Wait, what did she call him?

If that show aired today, you’d be like, “Yeah, I'm not really comfortable with the woman calling him master.”

And it’s a good thing that it doesn't hold up. It means society has changed.

What was going on back in the 1960s when that show first aired? Women were metaphorically kept in bottles. Basically, they were allowed to have three careers: nurse, secretary, and teacher. That's about it. But mostly they were supposed to stay home, raise the kids, and have dinner on the table for the man of the house.

Bewitched aired around the same time and had a similar premise. She was a witch and was more far powerful than her husband — so much so that the husband forbade her from using witchcraft.

Excuse me. He what?!

She had to use her magic in secret.

Like I said, it's good that it doesn't hold up.

What about I love Lucy. She always wanted to get into the show, but Ricky forbade her. She had to stay home and clean. Fast forward to the 1980s. There was a hit sitcom called Who's the Boss. The premise of that show was — hang on — the man stays home and cleans, and the woman makes the money.

I'll tell you how it works from my point of view of someone who actually writes this stuff. When you're on a TV show, the first couple of seasons, you're stealing ideas from your life, from your family and you're putting it into the work. Pretty soon you you run out of ideas to steal. So then you start looking out the window for ideas. What's going on out there in the real world? You read a paper and you write about it.

Of course people don't read papers anymore. They scroll. I saw a post about a guy whose identity was stolen and the nightmare he had to go through. Okay, maybe we can do a story where the main character's phone gets stolen. In 20 or 30 years from now, people may watch that and think, “What? That doesn't make any sense. Why doesn't he use the phone installed into his eyeball?”

Or maybe they’ll watch a show where someone is cursing at Siri the way I do. In twenty years the viewers will think, “Well, thanks to assholes like him, AI has enslaved us all.”

Oh well.