Picture an America where friendly, funky, Cub-fan-fanatic Chicago is the only inhabited spot between New York City and Twin Peaks. Imagine that this mythical U.S. has become so awash in racial sensitivity and tolerance that even drug dealers practice affirmative action, yet, strangely enough, intergalactic aliens are a far more visible minority group than Hispanics. In this youth-obsessed culture, where children of all races automatically come equipped with loving families, the stork must have supplanted traditional biology, for there are virtually no pregnant women.
Other oddities abound. How can the economy remain prosperous when half the work force lazes around luncheonettes and broadcast studios swapping dirty- word-free double entendres, while the other half consists of overworked and underappreciated cops? And why are all these people so hazy about their history? Is it not peculiar that no one ever refers to an event that predates Elvis' appearing on Ed Sullivan?
If such through-the-looking-glass images of an alternative America seem eerily familiar, the reason is probably that they are an impressionistic synopsis of a recent week's worth of prime-time TV watching on all four broadcast networks. Why would anyone voluntarily subject himself to nearly 50 hours of sex-and-sass sitcoms, puerile police procedurals and yuppie yammering about the meaning of life? Call it a census of sorts, a time-slot-by-time-slot canvass of the nation's nightly fantasy life, a solitary journey up the lazy river of the collective consciousness armed only with VCR and fast-forward button. The goal was to view television through the eyes of an outsider and to pretend to encounter the Huxtables, Roseanne and, yes, even the Simpsons for the first time. Alas, the results were depressing, not only in the obvious vast-wasteland sense but also more seriously as a reminder of the insidious ways in which prime-time TV distorts America's sense of itself.
Make no mistake, not even the most credulous couch potato believes that, say, 16-year-old Doogie Howser, M.D., is for real. But the easy affluence that is the birthright of Doogie's family might seem representative enough, especially when on the following ABC show (The Marshall Chronicles) the TV father was dressed in a tuxedo for an evening of Manhattan night life. Despite the pseudo-lower-middle- class realism of Roseanne and Married with Children, the implicit message in much of prime time remains almost effortless economic entitlement. For while most of the nation resides in what bicoastal types call "the great flyover," TV characters are never rooted in Toledo or Omaha; instead, most spring to life magically equipped with sprawling houses and apartments in glamorous cities like New York and Los Angeles.