I'm very, very excited about seeing The Simpsons movie tonight. There was an interesting discussion on the AV Club site about how influential The Simpsons has been, and whether a TV show can truly be influential.
My question to you is, what would you consider the most 5 influential (in terms of broadly influencing society) pieces of pop culture in our conscious lifetimes.
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Mulkowsky -- There's no way The Simpsons movie is going to be as good as the upcoming Bourne movie next weekend. That is going to be AWESOME.
Top 5 pop culture phenomenons off the top of my head -- Star Wars, Harry Potter, The Sopranos, Thriller and American Idol.
No. 1: MTV. The pop-culture world can easily be divided into pre-MTV and post-MTV. MTV is lame today, but at the time it changed the way we think of film editing and music and commercials across the spectrum, plus all but invented the reality tv genre.
No. 2: Oprah. Dethroned Donahue, revolutionized the television afternoon talkshow (Rosie and Ellen and Ricki Lake clearly owe a lot to her), introduced the celebrity magazine brand extension, and made more money than J.K. Rowling in the process, while perhaps even being responsible for selling more books: a nod from Oprah would spring unknowns onto to the best-seller list; an Oprah-approved diet would become the latest fad. Also responsible for Dr. Phil, and some minor production work in film and Broadway.
No. 3: Star Wars. For better or worse, completely revolutionized movies, toys, movie marketing, and the business of movies. Jaws had a bit to do with the shift of Hollywood from lots of small pictures to the blockbuster, but Star Wars made it clear that this was the business model. Plus, obviously, the first integrated use of special effects.
No. 4: The Simpsons. 400+ episodes, t-shirts, catchphrases, neologisms, South Park, Family Guy, and other adult animation, Scrubs, Arrested Development, 30 Rock, My Name Is Earl, How I Met Your Mother -- it seems most 21st century tv comedy (and much of today's ironic sensibility) owes a lot to the Simpsons, which will outlast two Bushes, and perhaps two Clintons.
No. 5: Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? The successful import of this British game show was not only a flash-in-the-pan national phenomenon in 1999-2001 (even briefly affecting men's fashion as men imitated Regis's dark-shirt/monochrome tie), brought game shows back to American tv, and also paved the way for even bigger British imports Survivor and American Idol, thus making it the grandfather of the reality gameshow and talent competition, making it indirectly responsible for many pop stars of today.
Honorable Mention: The All New Mickey Mouse Club. We're going by influence here. Harry Potter is obviously much bigger, a multi-billion dollar seller in both books and movies, and the only blockbuster book in recent memory. But it has yet to affect the larger culture, and probably won't. Spider-Man is also bigger, but the superhero movie trend was inevitable anyway once CGI became cheap, and it can't be said to be especially influential. Mickey Mouse Club, on the other hand, launched the careers of Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Justin Timberlake (any one of whom has been bigger than all the American Idol stars combined) not to mention Keri Russell and Ryan Gosling -- and imagine how it might be higher on the list if Jessica Simpson and Matt Damon hadn't flunked their auditions.
OK, I've been thinking about it a bit, and here's my list.
1) Star Wars - Dramatically changed the movie business and focused movies and pop (and general) culture on 11 year old boys. Merchandising, opening weekend grosses, sequels? All spawn of George Lucas. (Jaws didn't hurt either.)
2) NASCAR - The South has risen again. The core electoral support for the GOP comes from Southern whites, and NASCAR and country music have provided the backbone of the cultural identity for this group.
3) MTV - Changed the music business probably as much as anything between The Beatles and the Internet. A significant influence in shortening American youth attention spans and expectations of visual entertainment. Also, a pipeline for rapidly sharing cultural trends from LA/NYC/Miami to the rest of America, particularly hip hop culture.
4) Cosby Show - We're hardly a color blind society now, but I would argue that the road from MLK to Barack Obama runs through Bill Cosby. The most popular show in America was about an upper middle class black doctor and his family. That's big.
5) The Daily Show (Jon Stewart edition) - The under 25 (or so) generation strongly tilts towards the Democrats, and I'd say that after W, Jon Stewart gets the biggest share of the credit for that.
Maybe 10 years from now, other cultural events will be proven to be more influential, but that would be my list for now.
I agree with many of the choices and think especially that Oprah, American Idol and Star Wars hit the nail on the head about shifting the role of television and movies in our everyday lives, for they began to influence other and aspects of modern life (e.g., the publishing, music and toy industry, respectively).
The one entry missing, IMO, is "Seinfeld". That show, more than any other, revived network television, demonstrating its power and mocking its limitations at once. (Can you say, "not that there's anything wrong with that?")
I can't give anywhere near that much weight to Jon Stewart. He doesn't even get a quarter of Leno's audience, and it's wildly derivative of (if superior to) Saturday Night Live, aside from the fact that it wasn't even his show to begin with. Under-25s always skew left and skew pro-minority party, so it's not a big surprise that they're running a few points ahead of general societal disapproval of Bush, and it's far from clear that that will even be enough to get Hillary elected if the Republicans are savvy enough to nominate Rudy. So Stewart doesn't even make my top ten.
Fifteen years ago, I would've agreed about The Cosby Show, but, other than a revival of mediocre family sitcoms, it turned out not to have much influence beyond its own viewership (which was huger than American Idol ever was). It didn't launch any careers, and Oprah and Michael Jordan (and perhaps even Tiger Woods and box office hero Will Smith) have at least as much to do with American comfort with African-Americans as Cosby. Every time the Cosby Show tried to launch a message (e.g., the seven grandparents who were famous jazz musicians, as The Simpsons joked), it went nowhere. Obama didn't need Cosby to succeed, and neither did Oprah, so it gives Cosby too much credit for the success of all African-Americans.
I disagree with Seinfeld, too. Big in NY, and a brief phenomenon as America anticipated the final episode, but one can't give it credit for influence beyond making Friends and Curb Your Enthusiasm possible, and that's not enough for top five.
NASCAR makes my top twenty or thirty if we're going to call it pop culture, but I don't see much influence outside of increasing the sphere of NASCAR fans. There's one breakout B-list face (Jeff Gordon) and two relatively successful Hollywood movies, but all of NASCAR is still smaller than the Michael Jordan phenomenon, and Jordan's not Top-5. NASCAR probably even ranks behind Tiger Woods.
Fun discussion. It would be interesting to look back 10 years from now and see what we think. (I'll put in a reminder in my Palm Pilot to do that.) :)
Societal influence is hard to assess. On the one hand, something in the culture must already exist that is receptive to the "innovation", so it is difficult to say whether further development is due to the innovator or would have happened eventually regardless.
The Cosby Show illustrates that dilemma. Yes, the US was much more accepting of blacks in positions of mainstream power and influence by the late 1980's, but the idea had been radical in 1984, the show wouldn't have succeeded. But, racial attitudes dramatically shifted in the 1980's (this poll shows that the number of Americans saying that interracial dating was completely OK rose from 13% to 37% from 1987 to 1992 - http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?PageID=754), and I think that the Cosby Show was as responsible for this as any other cultural factor.
I love the Simpsons and Seinfeld, and I respect what Oprah has built. But I don't think that any of them have had a significant influence on American life beyond other pop culture and a few catch phrases.
Re: Jon Stewart, I think that Ted is wrong re: the tendency of the young to always vote with the Dems. In the Reagan era, this group swung slightly more strongly towards the GOP than the country as a whole. There was an interesting study in the NYT about a year ago (I found much of the same data here http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?PageID=750)
showing that to a significant extent, people's lifelong political affiliations are formed by the relative popular of the political parties during their young adulthood. So, people who were about 20 during the Kennedy years are more likely to be Dems their whole lives, as with those who were about 20 during Watergate, while those who were about 20 during the Reagan era are more likely to vote GOP. Thanks to W with an assist from Stewart, today's young people will probably be voting majority Democratic for the rest of their lives.
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