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

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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=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.[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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