Many of the so-called elite think of television as a low form of art. It's not very intelligent, and people who watch a lot of television are supposedly idiots. I strongly disagree here.
I will preface these remarks by saying that I am only speaking of American TV as I don't really know about anybody else, but I imagine that it would apply to other countries almost as well.
One thing that can be learned from American television is history. You can learn a tremendous amount about American life from the 1950s on and from the mid 1960s on in full color.
I would hasten to add that this only holds when a program is set in the present. Any show set in the past is essentially worthless in this regard whether it is early Happy Days, early Waltons, Hogan's Heroes, Lavern&Shirley, or what have you. Most emphatically included in this list is M*A*S*H.
You learn nothing about the Korean War here, except for the fact that it started in 1950 and ended in 1953. You learn nothing about those years from this show. Absolutely zero. Even in the first season Hawkeye and Trapper did not even look like the 1950s.
There were a million anachronisms on this show. Probably the worst was a second season episode called "George." If I didn't know the back story, I would have thought this episode was filmed in the current century rather than the 1970s. In this episode, we are led to believe that in the US Army circa 1951, the only officer who was against gays being in the Army was a jingoist religious hypocrite. Yeah, most Col.'s like Blake were sympathetic, and most Army doctors felt like Alda, I mean Hawkeye. Note Mulcahy's behavior in this episode as well. Very bizarre. I don't see how he was in the episode at all, or how this even got on the air?:crazy: Any thoughts?