Like Bobby Ewing Returning From The Dead...

"Television As You've Never Read Before" is back! I started this blog alomost six months ago to not only share my thoughts on the world of television and how it affects culture and society, but also provides a good writing forum for me. For my first returning blog, I will discuss where how my interests in media began:

My interest began in media during my first semester in college through a course called "Social Aspects of the Media." For the first time in my college career I was mesmerized. Not only was my professor refreshing, expressive and opinionated (in a good way)  but, she also treated her class as a forum, where anything media was open for discussion. Most of the class consisted of articles, studies, declassified documents and journal reviews. The handouts would explain the plight of each miniority group and how they were represented in the media (usually negitively viewed in the media or not covered at all). Some of these explosive examples include a review of everything the FCC deems either an obscenity, indecency and profanity on TV, the image of white and black masculinity on television and a press release featuring statistics of violence on popular TV shows. During the next few semesters, a few other classes would clench it for me. I was exposed to discussions and articles about various marginalized groups across society and how their efforts affected media in a social movement class and watched incendiary documentaries on McCarthyism, Vietnam and the New Right movement of the Reagan years in a news and documentary class. These years in college yielded some of my best and most investigative research papers.

Besides writing sitcoms, this became my second interest. And I fantasize of the day I can thoughtfully meld these two worlds into a sitcom that would give classics such as "All in the Family" and "M*A*S*H" a run for its money in ratings and acclaim. However, right now it might be a pipe dream to have a successful sitcom about media issues, at least on the network frontier. Criticism in media is often geared towards the corporate trail that many parent companies of networks like Disney, Viacom, News Corporation etc. blaze. This idea is indeed a work in progress!