Five TV show questions I'm desperately seeking answers to

Cafe Society
1

Okay, I believe in beginning 2003 with a fresh start (and, if all goes well, a fresh job, but I’ll save that for later). No better place to start than finally resolving a number of questions that are still bugging me to this day.

#1: Why has there never, ever been even the slightest criticism of Beavis and Butthead as a show?
“Oh no, not THIS again!” Yes, this again. I will keep asking this until I get a satisfactory answer. It’s driving me nuts like you wouldn’t believe.

I’ve given up trying to understand this show’s appeal (filed it with all the other shows I don’t understand the appeal of). What I want to know is why it’s universally loved. No one who’s not some wrongheaded defender of public morality has had even the faintest whisper of criticism of this show. The overwhelming consensus is that it rocks and is the best friggin’ cartoon ever. No one’s ever challenged this. Ever. Just right now I saw a new thread on GameFAQs devoted to heaping on further praise.

I have a problem with this because it seriously challenges one of the fundamental rules of existence I’ve held for nearly my entire life, i.e., there’s always more than one side, and nothing is universally liked or disliked. When John F Kennedy was assassinated, many Americans praised the killer. Mumia Abu-Jamal, himself a murderer, has garnered some of the fiercest defenders I’ve ever seen any criminal get. And I don’t even have to explain Elian Gonzales, Osama Bin Laden, Princess Diana, etc.

No one dislikes Beavis and Butthead. Everyone believes that the music videos “lampooned” got exactly what they deserved. Everyone thinks that jokes about masturbation and dumb stunts are the coolest things ever. Everyone wants to quote the hapless pair. No one thinks theres anything the least bit wrong or unusual about “huh-huh-huh-huh”. Everyone thinks that simply quoting from the show constitutes a defense. No one believes that some kid somewhere may have actually been inspired to do a dangerous stunt because of what they saw on B&B.

No one finds it annoying. No one finds it pointless. No one thinks the main characters don’t deserve to be main characters. No one thinks it’s anything but the coolest thing ever.

A weird show becoming incredibly popular, I don’t mind. ANY show receiving absolute total 100% accolades, it disturbes me to the very core of my being. I want an explanation, dammit.

#2: What’s with the damn Richard Hatch mystique?
Specifically, why is seemingly everyone treating him like some diabolical ultra-genius master manipulator with godlike powers, whereas he was simply someone who combined a good strategy and luck to defeat relatively weak opposition?

Lemme give the man props…yes, he had a good strategy, by far the best of everyone on that island. And he always looked like he was serious about winning this thing, something that was definitely lacking in many of the other competitors. But Pagong had more than sufficient chances to oust him or any of his allies, so his plan was hardly bulletproof. Of course, since no one saw an alliance coming, he eventually whittled down the Pagong side to the point where he was safe. No master manipulation here, just a rookie mistake he benefitted from.

And he got lucky, dammit. He was able to oust Jenna only because Sean (who looked completely clueless from beginning to end) not only knocked her out of the immunity challenge, but voted for her for no clear reason. Keep in mind that Kelly was something of a wildcard at this point; if anyone in the core alliance goes and Jenna stays, it’s anyone’s ballgame. Later, Richard and Sue were tied 2-2 in the voting, with Kelly voting for Richard; had she stuck with that vote, the result would’ve been another tie, and Richard, having more past votes, is out. Let’s also not forget Kelly deciding to take Richard to the final…who was dead in the water at that point and probably the only person of the remaining four he could’ve beaten.

Note too that everyone in later Survivors who played it like Richard did has gotten destroyed (nb. especially John in the most recent one). Don’t give me that “imitated but not duplicated” nonsense…the strategy simply doesn’t work anymore. (Brian, I might add, made it to the final two mainly because he won three straight immunity challenges, and even then it came down to the final vote.)

Richard Hatch won not only because he had the right gameplan, but because he was in the right place in the right time and things went right for him. That doesn’t take anything away from his accomplishment…but it doesn’t make him a supreme master of anything either.

#3: Is “it’s still better than most of what else is on prime time TV” really enough justification for keeping The Simpsons on the air?
This strikes me as a really, really low bar. Also, let’s not forget that the lack of quality programming on the air has as much to do with some incredibly ill-advised cancellations as anything else. I say don’t use the other guy’s ineptitude to justify your own…if the show’s run its course, pull the plug.

4: Dan Quayle vs. Murphy Brown…like, what the hell?
I actually followed this from start to finish, and it still mystifies me.

Okay, granted that the show was still pretty pouplar at the time, and polticians have been trying to score cheap political points by ripping television for like, oh, an eternity. That this would become a spectacle was predictable.

But a full-blown media circus? Major newspapers publishing ferocious editorials about this? My local paper getting in on the action for weeks? POLLS asking which side was right? (All this over, I might add, a fictional character.)

Given the Bush I administration’s rampant cluelessness on women’s issues, and Quayle being, well, Quayle, and the silliness of the subject (a sitcom about a strong-willed hellraising single mother reporter is still a sitcom, complete with, well, FICTIONAL CHARACTERS), this sounded exactly like one of those “controversial” blowups that’d die out and be completely forgotten within a week. It ended up going on for week after week, even inspiring actual debates about single mothers in society.

Geez, I only wish The PJs got this kind of press…

5: Xena: Warrior Princess and lesbianism…like, what the hell?
Yes, I know it was popular with lesbians. That’s because it had a strong, capable, complex female heroine, something of a rarity even now. What I want to know is where were all the lesbian overtones that some of you insisted were there. I’ve seen nearly every episode, and if there was any hint at this (other than the one “Special Report” episode that made a joke of it), I’m unaware of it.

It’s clear that Xena and Gabrielle love each other a lot. This is because they depend on each other and do just about everything together. But there were no sexual connotations to any of this, let alone sexual tension. Don’t forget that Gabrielle was happily married at one point, so she couldn’t possibly have been a 6-on-the-scale, and Xena would’ve never been so cruel as to force herself on anyone. And yes, it is possible for two nonlesbian women to kiss without going any further.

Let’s not forget that this was a spinoff of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys…hardly a vehicle for women seeking women.

2

Well, there are plenty of people who dislike Beavis and Butthead and, while I’m not one of them, I suspect they’ll be coming out of the woodworks to announce their disklike here.

Just out of curiousity, how old are you? If you weren’t in the right agegroup when the Beavis and Butthead phenomenon (and yes, it was a phenonmenon) hit America then you probably just don’t “get it.”

To me, it was the absolute epitome of myself and my friends, both in what we did and what we wished we could do. They had no parents, no jobs, and they rarely went to school. They spent most of their days sitting around making fun of people on TV and if you’ve ever been in a room with more than one teenage boy then you know that that’s spot on.

I know there was that incident with Beavis saying “fire” but you absolutely cannot convince me that Beavis made anybody burn their house down. And IF that kid did indeed burn his house down because of Beavis then he obviously had problems that ran deeper than MTV and he should have been under strict and constant professional or parental supervision. In either case you cannot blame a cartoon character.

Beavis and Butthead will always be near and dear to my heart. It’s been, what, almost 6 years now since it went of the air and my friends and I still quote it and talk about it. It completely captured the spirit of teenage boys in America. Youthful innoncence, ignorance, and just plain stupidity all rolled into one.

3

Simple. This all happened for the same reasons Trent Lott suffered a shit storm while Robert Byrd did not: Quayle was a conservative Republican and 99% of the media is comprised of liberal/Democrats. They put up a fuss about it because they were trying to make Quayle look bad. Quayle allegedly is an idiot because he mis-spoke a few times and didn’t know how to spell potato. And it’s better to have a lying, adulterating, traitor in the White House, according to most forms of the American mass media.

4

There was plenty of criticism of it, especially in the first season. MTV did get sued by the mother of a boy who had burned down their trailer after watching B&B. As a result, there were some episodes of B&B that only aired once or twice, because their “plot” (I use the word loosely) centered around Beavis uttering his “Fire! Fire! Fire!” chant at a critical point in the story.

Of course, Mike Judge worked his way around the settlement agreement, by letting Beavis chant things that rhymed with fire, such as tire, or liar. There was also a music video that the boys watched one time, that consisted of nothing but slow motion footage of a stuntman on fire from head to toe running the length of an LA city block trying to catch a bus as it pulls away from the stop. That pretty much sent Beavis into a near orgasmic catatonia, until Butthead smacked him out of it. For all out blatancy though, nothing tops the episode where B&B fly a kite in a storm because they saw a PBS documentary on Ben Franklin.

Another first season episodes to be pulled and never aired again is the one where the boys work up a plan to sell their blood for cash (of course, they go to the local Red Cross Donation center, who usually only pays in cookies and juice). The trailer trash nurse who’s drawing their blood gets into a heated arguement with her boyfriend, and ignores the boys for a long time. When she gets back to them, she finds that instead of the usual pint they’ve both got about 2-3 gallons in their donation bags. She sends them home with the donation bags with instructions to drain the blood back in.

Then there was the first season episode where the boys are going around the neighborhood trying to sell chocolate for a school fund raiser. They meet with their typical lack of success, until the last house, where an elderly woman looking to be in her mid 80s promises to buy all their candy and she invites them into her home. We soon find out the old bat’s real motives, as her house is laid out in the very best BDSM dungeon style, and she takes her houserobe off to reveal a dominatrix outfit underneath. The episode ends there, but it’s pretty clear that B&B have a lot of painful torture in store. That one brought a slew of complaints, and it too got yanked.

So you’d rather see them cancel a show that’s by your own admission better than everything else, thereby lowering the total average quality of TV in general? Vonnegut would be proud. :slight_smile:

No, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys was a vehicle for men seeking men. Or were you not aware of the gay male community claming Herc and Iolaus for their own in a similar fashion to the lesbians claiming Xena and Gabby? :slight_smile:

5

HEAR HEAR! The same goes for the movies Natural Born Killers and Basketball Diaries, every first person shooter video game, heavy metal music, and pen & paper Role Playing Games.

6

What the hell? Those people defended him, not because they thought cop killing was a jolly good time, but because they thought he was innocent. I don’t know enough about the case to form an opinion one way or the other, but your statement is hardly a fair assessment of his defenders.

Now, I would like to know where you get the idea that Beavis and Butthead was universally loved. Were you paying attention at all during the 1990s? People hated that show with a passion. Why doesn’t it garner any outrage or hatred now? Because it was cancelled five years ago! Sheesh.

That’s a pretty bold statement. Are you saying that little old ladies and Fundamentalist Christian Republicans count this among their favorite shows of all time?

7

My thoughts exactly. I forgot to say anything about this in my post but I was certainly thinking it. A whole hell of alot of people hated Beavis and Butthead. I would suspect that the reason you hear so much good stuff about it now is that only the die hard fans are still talking about it. The people that hated Beavis and Butthead are now focusing on South Park or Jackass.

Also, people hated Ozzy Osborne in the 80’s but you’d hardly know it by watching TV nowadays. He has a sitcom and does magazine covers and Barbara Walters interviews now while the people that hated him so viciously back then are wasting their time hating Eminem now.

8

Well, I didn’t care for it, but it wasn’t because of some sense of outrage. I just didn’t think the show was all that funny. Then again, I’m not particularly enchanted by music videos generally.

You use the word “everyone” an awful lot, I notice.

I though his approach to the final challenge (where the last three have to stand with their hands on a pole) was perfectly logical under the circumstances. I don’t know anyone who thinks he’s a genius, though.

I wasn’t aware Fox needed a “justification” for any of its decisions, except to its own shareholders. Simpsons has its weak moments, but its funny moments can be extraordinary. I’ll watch it as long as I find it entertaining, though I haven’t seen it regularly in recent months because it plays opposite Enterprise. The “it’s still better than most of what else is on” argument is a common response to people who begin to criticize Simpsons excessivley and unfairly. It’s the verbal equivalent of a shrug, and comparable to saying “I understand you don’t like it, but I’m not going to waste my time trying to change your mind.”

Of your five mysteries, this is the only one that’s actually interesting because it has serious and relevant political overtones. The question is: how much (if any) responsibility does Hollywood have for their product? Murphy Brown was kind of a tricky thing to criticize, since the “single mother” was a successful professional with resources and maturity, but a general criticism of Hollywood was worth making.

The writers started to throw in veiled lesbian references, probably because they thought it was funny. The early Wonder Woman comics had her frequently exclaiming “Suffering Sappho!”

The 1960s Batman television series, as well as many successful cartoon films and shows, do well because there is a subtext (be it social, political or sexual) that adults can chuckle at while the kids watch the colourful characters running around. In some sense, it can be considered a cynical marketing ploy, since adults won’t just casually dismiss your product as a “kid’s show”, but actually sit around in coffee shops and discuss the deeper meaning.

Is Beavis and Butthead even on anymore? If not, then four of your five mysteries involve shows that are no longer in production; some for years.

9

There was a definite lesbian subtext to the show, and the cast and crew got a big laugh out of dropping hints. Of course it wasn’t out and out obvious because hints are more attractive.

Right offhand I can think of several episodes where they hinted- “A Day in the Life” was the start of it where Gabby is asked by a lovestruck guy whether Xena will ever get married and she replies, “No, she likes what I do for her too much”- is interrupted by Xena throwing a fish at her and corrects herself- “She likes what she’s doing too much.”

There was also the reincarnation one where Lawless played a reincarnated Joxer, O’Conner was Gabby, and Raimi was Xena reincarnated. Once they figured out who was who Gabby and Xena began kissing- not something close friends do, and that goes for all the other kisses they shared. You just don’t see close friends on TV shows liplocking like that.

I haven’t seen many of the episodes from the later seasons, but one I do remember had them wanting to go to a poetry reading of Sappho, but missing it because of other adventures- and at the end Xena gives Gabby a poem written by Sappho as a gift. Sappho, if you didn’t know, wrote beautiful poetry to women whom she loved and had relationships with on the isle of Lesbos.

I don’t know what “6-on-the-scale” is but Gabrielle being married (for one day, no less) doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not she and Xena were ever an item. And it doesn’t matter what Xena was a spinoff of- it established itself as being quite different from Hercules right off- the first episodes were rather dark in dealing with Xena’s angst about her past.

I don’t know what else to say- if you can’t see it, you can’t see it.
shrug

10

Here is an exhuastive analysis of Xenia’s lesbian subtext on an episode by episode basis

http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/4580/frame.html

11

Pulling the plug isn’t an artistic decision, it’s (usually) a business decision. As long as the show draws high ratings, and associated revenues from broadcasters and advertisers, it will continue to air.

12

Cite?
Sorry for the hijack, but that is bunk.

13

Yeah, everyone knows that it’s 100%. O’Reily is actually a closed Liberal who only plays a blowhard Republican on TV as part of a Democratic plot to make the GOP look like loudmouthed assholes.

14

Aww I missed all the best episodes :frowning: The one with the magic scroll was really hillarious, AND had three naked Gabbies running around (chasing joxer?) There was another episode with Xena and Gabby taking a bath together that had very very lesbian subtexts. (If you slow down that part you can see what looks like duct tape over Gabby’s boobs).

2c

15

Why has there never, ever been even the slightest criticism of Beavis and Butthead as a show?

People liked Beavis and Butthead?

This must be a generational thing. Admittedly, I never watched the show, but the only context in which I ever heard it mentioned was as an example of how incredibly stupid T.V. can be. OTOH, I’m at least in the generation of the show’s creator, because Mike Judge’s wife was in my high school class.

Is “it’s still better than most of what else is on prime time TV” really enough justification for keeping The Simpsons on the air?

As others have said, T.V. shows are kept on the air because they are making money, or because the network believes that they have the possibility of making more money. They are cancelled if they stop making money. Artistic quality has nothing to do with it.

Dan Quayle vs. Murphy Brown…like, what the hell?

This wasn’t about Murphy Brown, it was about Dan Quayle. The media created a portrait of him as an idiot (just yesterday, someone made a Quayle joke about the spelling of “potato” to me), and when he made the Murphy Brown comment, they ran with it, just as they ran with every Quayle comment that could be perceived as stupid. They did a similar thing with Gerald Ford and clumsiness. The subsequent debate was not about a fictional character, it was about a real issue – whether single women should bear children.

What’s with the damn Richard Hatch mystique?

Well he was a poor substitute for Michael Douglas in The Streets of San Francisco, but I loved him in Battlestar Galactica. Wha…? :wink:

16

Are you kidding?!

Beavis & Butthead was cited in debate in the freakin’ U.S. Congress as an example of the moral decay of kids!!

I forget if it was the House or Senate.

17

I suspect DKW is merely uncomfortable at finding himself on the same side as these people on any issue at all, and is looking for company among folks whose stereotypes he doesn’t despise.

[sub]I’m really disappointed in this thread. From the title, I thought I was going to get a bunch of trivia questions such as, “Which shirt pocket did Barney Fyfe keep his bullet in?” None of the OP’s questions engaged my interest at all.[/sub]

18

Have no fear, Kayla, I’ve created a thread designed for this sort of thing! http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=153346

Of course, my OP sucks and I think it’s lagging…so get in here and help me, man!! :slight_smile: