Vivek Ramaswamy tweeted:
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture… A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers. A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.
Ramaswamy is not the first major political figure to attack sitcoms. Some will remember when Dan Quayle did something similar. In a 1992 speech, Quayle laid out a conservative response to progressive TV trends:
Ultimately, however, marriage is a moral issue that requires cultural consensus and the use of social sanctions. Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong. Failing to support children one has fathered is wrong and we must be unequivocal about this.
It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice. I know it’s not fashionable to talk about moral values, but we need to do it. Even though our cultural leaders in Hollywood, network TV, and the national newspapers routinely jeer at them, I think most of us in this room know that some things are good and other things are wrong. And now, it’s time to make the discussion public.
Quayle cited high rates of single motherhood and divorce. Spurred on by the controversy, Morgan et al.1 looked at whether TV viewership was related to less traditional outlooks about family conceptions. They concluded that indeed, there was some evidence that television may cultivate less traditional sex-role conceptions for women. Heavy viewers were more likely to be marginally more accepting of such situations.
That last paragraphs are an excerpt from my forthcoming book about situation comedies and culture. I deal with this question a lot: are TV, and sitcoms specifically, forming and shaping our culture? Not surprisingly, I think that the question is more complex than what Mr. Ramaswamy puts forward.
First, I note the irony that if Ramaswamy’s hero, Trump, were a sitcom character, he would not be Urkel. He’d be the alpha kid stealing your homework. Trump Meets World would not be about diligence and studiousness.
A second point is that it’s not hard to locate sitcom heroes who have admirable scholastic and professional qualities. Moving backward through time, the Big Bang Theory cast are all science geniuses (and they manage to get relationships with attractive women). The cute guy on Friends is a paleontologist. The 80s’ top show (Cosby) has a doctor married to a lawyer, constantly harping on the need for higher education. The 1970s antihero, Archie Bunker, faces off with a university grad student (son-in-law Mike). Even in silly ways: I Dream of Jeannie’s stars are astronauts.
I’m not suggesting that sitcoms are or should be about valorizing the path to engineering degrees; of course they’re not. But the blame-TV arguments are almost always cherry picked.
A third and final point is that actual studies on the effects of sitcom viewing can be contradictory or counterintuitive. They show some relationships that might make sense (like the one mentioned above that heavy viewers are more accepting of non-traditional family situations) but they are usually not strong in terms of effect size. Early studies found that sitcoms could have some pro-social effects about family beliefs. Some studies found that sitcom viewers were less sexist. They could open people up (a little) about gay relationships (Will and Grace). Sitcoms have been shown to increase awareness of condoms (that was Friends). Bill Cosby himself was a major advocate of using TV for educational purposes and studied it in his doctoral program.
Sitcoms, seen from a wider angle, are an important tool to help us describe and understand cultural change. At some points, sitcoms are moving discussions forward about social arrangements. Oftentimes, though, what we see in sitcoms is lagging cultural change that has already happened. When Screech is already out of the barn, closing the door behind him might not do much.
Sitcoms are not “accurate.” Some groups are over-represented and others under-shown. Certain kinds of families get shown less than what you would see in reality. Same with occupations. TV has traditionally had some issues with science, where many portrayals can hinge on science “run amok” or “mad” science tropes. But what would Ramaswamy say to his friend Elon about Star Trek, which seems to have inspired just about every engineer I know?
Especially now, sitcoms may be one of our gentlest media products, when compared to, for example, the causticity of social media. Let’s leave Urkel out of it.
Morgan, M., Leggett, S., & Shanahan, J. (1999). Television and family values: Was Dan Quayle right?. Mass Communication and Society, 2(1-2), 47-63