Robert Thompson
Robert Thompson
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I think we have yet to realize how much we are going to miss that. I don't think it's a total coincidence that it's happening at the same time there's an increasingly divisive nature in the country. What the consensus medium of television used to do, and radio before that, was to provide this enormous center that everybody had to go to now and then. ... Now, there is a lack of cultural consensus that even extends to what we consider the body of facts we used to debate.
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How television and the culture are absorbing Katrina is certainly different than how they absorbed Sept. 11. Four years ago, all culture was put on pause. But people have continued to watch comedies and dramas and reality shows throughout, even when things were at their grimmest.
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It's the only television entity of any kind that ever had a generation named after it,
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This came out as the center of the universe for the demographic of young people and it managed to bring together people who would have been very disparate in what radio stations they listened to. But they all came together in this one television hangout.
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For all the enormous social and cultural upheaval and change and revolution which we've all come to know as cliched definitions of the '60s, prime-time television in this country managed to almost completely ignore it,
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Sometimes a performance is best experienced with other people. The real advantage of television - that theater and the movies don't have - is you're allowed to talk through it.
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These are old procedural dramas dolled up for the new century, ... 'CSI' is the new 'Quincy, M.E.' Bruckheimer is good at using old-fashioned television storytelling techniques in the era of 'Lost.'
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Reality has taken a major hit. But it's far from dead, and some form of this stuff is going to be on television for at least the next century, if not longer.
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For most of the '60s, television was trying to hold the dyke. All of these changes and pressures built up throughout the 1960s and finally burst in January of 1971.
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Nobody had that expectation before. Television was something you had absolutely no control over.
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He still has some of the same mystique, but now the mystery has flopped from an asset to a liability. 'Who is the real Michael Jackson?' is not a question people want to ask anymore, when you're accused of something like this.
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rough contrivance to lift from the social conscience a burden that should not be either lifted or lightened in any way.
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I must admit, I am little giddy right now.
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It becomes just another media in which these celebrities work.