Watching TV shows from the 90s/00s... is this where Main Character Syndrome comes from?

[Anonymous]

I recently finished watching the West Wing and am currently watching ER (inspired from watching the Pitt). Both shows, I saw some episodes of when they aired but I was a teenager/college student at the time and not really sitting around watching a ton of TV.

One thing I noticed in both shows is how often the main characters do things that are absolutely insane to do in public or in front of other people. On the West Wing, various characters frequently just insult people to their face for not being smart enough or not working at the White House. A non-main character will be like "how are you" and the staffers (or sometimes the President himself) will go on these long diatribes about all the important stuff they are doing, as though that is a normal or appropriate way to respond to polite conversation. In an early episode of ER, one doctor's wife shows up to tell him she passed the bar. She literally interrupts him while he is in the middle of treating the patient, and then they hug and jump around to celebrate, bumping into this patient who is in real pain. It's played for laughs, sort of, but the show is a drama so all I could think was how insanely unprofessional and self-centered this is.

You don't see behavior like this on contemporary shows. It makes me wonder if people who grew up watching shows like this got the false impression that this kind of behavior was normal and that's why some people are just bizarrely self absorbed or treat other people as bit players in their own dramas? The West Wing, in particular, is reminding me so much of many people I've met in DC and it's like "oooooh, they think they are Josh Liman."

[Anonymous]

No, I don't believe that middle-class and above educated professionals got their behavior patterns from t.v.

People get behavior patterns from family, school, extracurriculars and work.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No, I don't believe that middle-class and above educated professionals got their behavior patterns from t.v.

People get behavior patterns from family, school, extracurriculars and work.

People watched a lot more TV in the 80s and 90s though, especially in the evening. It's become tacky for educated people to spend their evenings watching broadcast television but it was pretty standard back then. And kids especially watched a lot of TV. My kid watches TV occasionally, maybe once or twice a week, and it's almost always kids programming with kids behaving well, even though she's in upper elementary (her choice, I've tried to get her interested in stuff like Great British Bake-off or other family-friendly programming for adults, but she mostly prefers to watch shows about kids). At her age, I was consuming at least 2 hours of TV a day, usually some after school (Saved by the Bell or cartoons, MTV when I was a little older) plus another hour after dinner (lots of sitcoms, shows like Family Ties, sometimes more adult programming like Seinfeld or Friends depending on if my parents were okay with it or not, they usually were).

I definitely think a lot of my ideas about how people behave came from TV. Especially because most people on TV lived in cities, and I grew up in a small town where the sorts of lives people lived were pretty narrowly defined (teacher, doctor, lawyer, nurse, construction, small business owner, and that's pretty much it) and almost everyone I knew was a middle class family living in a SFH home. So I got a lot of ideas about what it was like to be a single professional, or live in an apartment, or have roommates, or have an office job working for a big company, from TV. A lot of wrong ideas, but I know plenty of my peers who grew up in small towns or suburbs and then moved to cities for college or post-grad were the same because we've laughed about it before.

[Anonymous]

I think kids got a lot more “adult” ideas from watching shows with their parents back then. From kindergarten age I was watching stuff like Frasier religiously that wouldn’t let my 5th grader watch now! My mom was super strict about movies but she wasn’t about to tell my dad to turn off his favorite shows and the house was too small for me to not hear it.

[Anonymous]

No, OP. Although your post is ironic because you clearly believe you've stumbled on to some kind of insight.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No, OP. Although your post is ironic because you clearly believe you've stumbled on to some kind of insight.

I think it is an insight. People really do behave differently on TV now than they did a generation ago, and it's not a leap to think this impacts behavior.

I have long thought that the reason Gen X is so sardonic and sarcastic in their humor, and most millennials more earnest and not sarcastic, is because of the TV/movies we consumed as kids. I grew up kind of between those generations and my older siblings/friends use sarcasm a lot more and are somewhat caustic in their humor, whereas my younger sibling and people I know born after about 1985 are not like that. It feels like a sharp divide to me and that's the only explanation I've come up with as to why.