Since The Truman Show premiered 25 years ago, the premise—about a man unaware his entire life has been a reality TV program—has gone from thought experiment to reality.

Jury Duty, which recently debuted on Amazon Freevee, is the latest example. The docu-style show follows a group of jurors through a civil trial. The process looks and feels real, but everything, from the judge to the jurors to the case itself, is fictional with the exception of one “juror,” a likable 29-year-old contractor from San Diego named Ronald.

What I find most interesting about Jury Duty is how it positions itself. It wants us to know that it means well. Yes, Ronald doesn’t know he’s being duped, but everyone behind the scenes is looking out for him—rooting for him, even, by setting him up for a hero’s journey. “We never wanted to do a show where we were punching down and Ronald was the butt of the joke,” co-creator and executive producer Lee Eisenberg told AP. “I think that the show has a warmth and an optimism and feels winning, while still being hilarious and weird and surprising.”

In this way, Jury Duty comes off like the kinder, gentler cousin of The Rehearsal, comedian Nathan Fielder’s experiment in human behavior, which came out last year. Fielder, who is working with HBO money, goes to extreme lengths through elaborate sets and hijinks to help participants “rehearse” major moments in their life to family, friends, acquaintances that don’t know they’re part of it. But the “Fielder Method” does not coat itself in niceties. Instead, the show’s genius is the constant state of unease and downright discomfort it projects on the audience. The result makes all of us feel culpable in the culture of media surveillance and voyeurism that this kind of TV format has normalized.

We’ve been wading into these uncomfortable waters all the way back to the forerunner of contemporary reality TV shows. Starting in the late 1940s, the pioneer of them all, Candid Camera, used early hidden-camera techniques to capture unguarded moments of ordinary people for mass entertainment.

Candid Camera creator Allen Funt saw himself as a “student of human nature.” Born in Brooklyn in 1914, he attended Cornell University where he briefly was a research assistant to the influential social psychologist Kurt Lewin. After graduation, he worked as an adman until he joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps, where he brought his fascination for human behavior to radio. But it was while he was recording GI life that he encountered an issue: The soldiers he interviewed tensed up when he started his recorder and only let their guard down when he stopped it. What, he wondered, would happen if they didn’t know they were being captured on tape?

Candid Camera was his answer. Starting as Candid Microphone on the ABC Radio Network in 1947, it moved to ABC Television a year later. Using recordings—first audio captured by hidden microphones, and later video by hidden cameras—the show sought to catch unsuspecting people “in the act of being themselves.”

From the start, Funt wanted to create the most realistic situation possible: “[A] good conceptual idea is only the start,” he would later write in an article for Psychology Today. “You have to make lots of adjustments to create viewer believability and really involve the subject. You need the right setting, one in which the whole scenario will fit and make sense to the audience even when it doesn’t to the actor.”

The setups were endless: Buster Keaton played a klutz at a lunch counter. Jayne Mansfield a damsel in distress on the way to the airport. Over several appearances, Muhammad Ali offered a range of performances, from pretending to be a messenger delivering packages to appearing on a schoolyard to surprise kids. The show revealed the gag at the end of each stunt, with its famous catchline: “Smile, You’re on Candid Camera.”

Audiences were enraptured, but critics called foul on the deceptive nature of the show. After all, when you broke it down, Funt was putting unsuspecting “marks” on national TV for entertainment. In Real People and the Rise of Reality Television, historian Michael McKenna writes that over the years Candid Camera was charged with being everything from “invasive,” “misrepresentative,” “exploitative,” to “cruel.”

Fred Nadis, a scholar of Candid Camera, writes that these accusations may have hit home for Funt, and even inspired him to create Pictures of People, a show where he traveled the country, asking people who knew they were being recorded to speak candidly about their lives and experiences. But if you’ve never heard of Pictures of People, there’s a reason. The 1963 program only lasted a year.  

Audiences didn’t want transparency, they wanted Candid Camera. Solid ratings mixed with cheap production value unlocked a formula for success that’s continued to be replicated and advanced to this day.

By the time The Truman Show debuted in 1998 (six years after a 1992 play by Mark Dunn called Frank’s Life, also about a man unaware his life is a reality TV program), the spectacle of the O.J. Simpson murder trial had already kicked off the era of reality TV as we know it.

The Truman Show attempted to pump the breaks, asking us to consider if the future of televised “reality” was worth the human cost involved. At an early stage in production, director Peter Weir even tried to make this point more explicit by having cameras pointed at audiences in movie theaters to make their reactions become part of the film. Was this what we really wanted?

Roger Ebert praised Weir in his review of The Truman Show, observing that “the underlying ideas made the movie more than just entertainment” and the film brought “into focus the new values that technology is forcing on humanity.”

But while The Truman Show became a critical and commercial success, there was no putting the genie back in the bottle. Audiences might have seen the mirror being reflected back on them, but they didn’t care. Candid Camera continued to run in various iterations until 2014, when it was surpassed by bolder offerings in the format from Punk’d to The Joe Schmo Show. More advanced technology and methods of surveillance continue to pave the way for the age we’re readily entering today where everything from iPhones to Amazon Ring doorbells enable us to turn nonconsenting strangers into viral content.

It’s what stopped me from watching The Rehearsal at first. Yes, at least the people involved in the show knew what they were signing up, but it was hard not to see them as civilians all the same. Who signed off on this? Did they get any media training? The Rehearsal takes these questions and runs with them. It all comes to a head in the episode “Pretend Daddy,” where Remy, one of the child actors cast to play Fielder’s son, gets confused and starts to think Fielder is his actual dad and tells him he loves him. Remy’s mother explains that his real father is absent from his life, and Fielder attempts to explain that they’re just acting, but Remy just doesn’t understand. It’s a deeply uncomfortable episode, and Fielder holds the lens unblinkingly as it unfolds. He implicates not just himself but us watching along at home, viewing this footage that’s ostensibly billed as entertainment.

Jury Duty gives the audience an easier pass. Since the show came out, Ronald himself has said in interviews that the experience is one that he’ll never forget.

Even so, it’s hard not to see him like one of the “marks” on Candid Camera. Because Ronald never opted in. This was a path that he was unknowingly put on, so that we on the other end of the camera could enjoy watching him navigate this fantasia.

The actor James Marsden, who plays an exaggerated version of himself on Jury Duty, has spoken about how he only wanted to do the show if it supported Ronald. “I needed to make sure it was more than just getting a laugh out of it.” But it’s hard not to read the discomfort in his comments when he addresses the ethical questions around the show. As he said himself at one point, “We’re kind of playing god a little bit in this.”

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I’m an audiovisual translator, which means that I—and others like me—help you understand the languages spoken on screen: You just click that little speech bubble icon in the bottom-right corner of your preferred streaming service, select the subtitles or the dub, and away you go. These scripts are all written by someone like myself, sitting quietly at a computer and spending day after day trying to figure out, “What are they actually saying here?”

I decided to become an audiovisual translator because it allows me to combine cinema and French culture, my two favorite things. But there is also something about the anonymity of the work that appeals to me, which is the name of the game for our craft. As Bruce Goldstein, director of repertory programming at New York’s Film Forum, put it in The Art of Subtitling, “Good subtitles are designed to be inconspicuous, almost invisible.”

Of course, it’s impossible to be truly invisible. Translating film and TV always involves some form of compromise. But we do our best, carefully dissecting what is being said in the source language, then reassembling it in the target language so that you have the same viewing experience as a native speaker, and may even forget you’re watching a “foreign” film. Whether working (as I do) from French into English, from Spanish into German, or Japanese into Swedish, the process is always the same: We pay close attention not only to the meaning of the words, but to the actors’ emotions, the cadence of their speech, their body language, the themes and narrative structure of the script, the historical period, and the social context. Together, these cues provide a host of tiny hints, all of which add extra layers of meaning and must be accounted for in the translation. Translating all these layers is a bit like solving a Rubik’s Cube—it’s easy to do one side, but what about all of the others?

Say I’m dubbing a ghost story set in a bourgeois Parisian household in the year 1850. The French grandmother stands in a doorway and whispers, “A tout de suite, mon petit.” How would you dub that into English? I might try, “See you in a minute, my darling,” but that doesn’t sound stuffy enough for the 19th-century bourgeoisie. It needs to be more uptight, more formal. So what about, “See you in a moment?” The issue there is the cinematographer has lit the scene so the actor casts a sinister shadow into the room. She’s not just standing there, she’s lurking, and if I were a grandmother trying to lurk in a doorway, I wouldn’t say, “See you in a moment.” However, I might say “See you soon.” That could work—especially when you consider the spooky quality about the alliterative s’s and the ghostly “ooh” in “soon.” “See you soon, my darling” perfectly fits the atmosphere of the scene. Except this introduces a new dilemma: “my darling” doesn’t sync with the actor’s lip movements. Her mouth is closed for the “p” in “petit,” whereas the “d” in “darling” would require it to be open. In dubbing, the end of a sentence is one of the most important parts to get right: If the last word is poorly lip-synced, it sticks out like a sore thumb and risks distracting the viewer. In an ideal world, I’d find a new term of endearment that syncs with “mon petit.” “My petal,” perhaps, though it is not nearly as good as “darling”—it makes the grandmother sound too affectionate. But in this case, a compromise is necessary. At the end of the day, a loose translation is less distracting than bad lip sync.

At times, I also must compromise when it comes to personal taste. For example, I might be subtitling a rapper renowned for Eminem-style punchlines, like: “C’est le retour de la légende de Jimmy, même si j’peux craquer à tout moment comme Djibril.” With these lyrics, they’re making a tasteless joke, comparing themselves to Djibril Cissé, a French footballer who has broken both of his legs. I don’t find broken legs especially funny, nor is it a joke that I would ever make myself. Still, this sick humor is a key element of their controversial persona, and the English-speaking audience deserves to understand what they’re saying so they can make up their own minds. A translator must never censor the source material: I must put my own opinion to one side and render the translation as faithfully as possible. It’s a challenging task, but also an instructive one.

In this case, since most Americans are unlikely to have heard of Cissé, I start by “translating” his name into that of another famous sportsman, a popular figure that an American audience would recognize by name. In order for the punchline to work, I need someone who would have suffered some kind of terrible injury. A fairly gruesome Googling session suggests the late basketball player Kobe Bryant, who died in a helicopter crash. Now I need to reverse-engineer the scenario. At first, the rapper pretends to be arrogant (légende), then undercuts themself by admitting they’re scared of failure (craquer… comme Djibril). After looking for an arrogant-sounding phrase that rhymes with “Bryant”—eventually settling on “rap giant”—I must find a way to describe Bryant’s accident that also acts as a metaphor for failure. This produces the solution: “It’s the return of the rap giant, even if I might crash any minute like Kobe Bryant.” The offensive punchline leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but because it leaves the same bad taste as the original French, it feels like a faithful translation.

My job is always easier when I’m working on a story that I really care about. If I’m hooked by the plot and can empathize with the characters, then I can produce a deeper, more intuitive translation because in that moment, I am that character. When my wife gets home from work and asks how my day went, my first impulse is not to tell her about myself, but about the imaginary colleagues on my computer screen. I spend my days listening, empathizing, and listening some more, until eventually I lose myself in whatever I’m translating, and become invisible. When the process is flowing well, it’s both relaxing and satisfying, like being in a meditative state in which I’m channeling the emotion of every scene. There have even been a few times over the years, when I’ve been working on something especially good, that I was so immersed in the story that translating a single line of dialogue left me breathless or moved to tears. It can be quite jarring to reach the end of the working day and suddenly have to emerge from this fictional world, to open my mouth and speak my mind again, to remember who I am.

This line of work is not really suited for those with big egos. Most of my colleagues—the actual, real-life ones—are modest, sincere, and soft spoken. And even though these qualities are the very things that make us good at our job, I do wish that we could sing our own praises a little louder, and bring some more attention to our invisible craft.

Especially because these days, though there are more films and TV from around the world than ever before, in many countries (such as the UK, where I live, or Spain, where my colleagues assure me the situation is even tougher), rates are falling and deadlines are getting tighter. This has inevitable repercussions on quality, not to mention our livelihoods. It can be hard to publicize our achievements because we usually sign non-disclosure agreements, and more often than not, filmmakers regard us as an afterthought, something to be rushed through at the distribution stage. Thankfully, many of the best filmmakers realize how important the translation stage is and are closely involved in the subtitling and dubbing process. They also pay fairly, so that we can take our time getting it just right.

It’s possible for subtitles and dubs to be so seamless that they feel invisible without pushing audiovisual translators ourselves out of sight. I’m proud of what I do, and I want the world to know how much care and consideration I, and thousands like me, put into our work. That being said, there is still a certain satisfaction in being the hidden conduit between cultures, the solitary name that appears in a film’s credits after everyone has left the cinema. It is precisely our invisibility that allows a family watching Netflix in Chicago to empathize with a bourgeois grandmother in Paris or an edgy rapper in Caen. Translation is about helping people to understand each other, and it feels good to be able to do that on a daily basis.

So the next time you click on that intriguing Polish dystopian thriller, or the latest award-winning Italian gangster series, spare the briefest of thoughts for all the people behind that little icon in the bottom-right corner. Then please, forget all about us.

The post Hello (<em>Bonjour</em>) From Your Friendly TV Translator appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’ve held telly as the pinnacle of all possible evening activities for a good few years now. When I’m glued to the screen, slumped out on an oversized cushion because my housemates have bagged the sofa, I never worry I should be somewhere else; I don’t question whether I ought instead to be broadening my mind.

Without a doubt, my best TV-watching experiences took place in 2017, when I was 22, in the English county of Cornwall, in the port town of Newlyn. I was staying at the cottage of a couple named Denise and Lofty, whom I’d never met before but had offered me up their spare room when I moved to Newlyn to research the Cornish fishing industry for my book, Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Town.

My first night at Denise and Lofty’s place, I was pretty nervous. I’d spent all day on the train, traveling up from London to Penzance, the first to the very last stop on the line. They picked me up from the station and, as we drove along the coast toward Newlyn, I could make out the last few day fishing boats heading back into the harbor, their lights casting galaxies across the darkening water. Neither Denise and Lofty nor I knew quite what to say to one another as we sat in their lounge, plates of buttery baked potatoes balanced on our laps.

But when they turned the TV on, the mood in the room shifted instantly: we relaxed into ourselves, conversation becoming easier because there was no longer a gaping silence any of us had to fill. Lofty asked if I liked the soap Coronation Street. I said I hadn’t seen it before. “Well, you’re going to get to know it pretty well living here, my love!” he winked, and the two of them burst into coarse, gravely laughter, the product of many years diligently spent chain-smoking.

I came to love our evening TV routine. As the light faded, I would appear at the front door, exhausted and smelling strongly of fish, after days spent working on deck of a crabbing vessel or ring netter, which catches pilchards. With the television on and the three of us curled up on the sofas, Denise would tell us stories of the demanding tourists she’d served at the fishmongers where she works, which is a two-minute walk from the ship’s chandlers where Lofty works. (I am often told that “For every one man at sea, that’s five jobs on the land.”)

I believe that the freest exchanges take place when you are not facing one another but rather when your eyes are on something else. It is in that moment that language becomes untethered. Each word is given the space to open outward and drift. For me, this can happen on walks, on benches, in cars with your feet up on the dashboard, while staring out at the sea, and, and my personal favorite, in front of the TV.

British anthropologist Daniel Miller has suggested home is “the place where most of what matters in people’s lives takes place” and “the site of their relationships and their loneliness: the site of their broadest encounter with the world through television and the Internet.” And so, the way we use TV says a lot about us, and our relationships. On that sofa, every wall decorated with paintings of the sea and each surface with a toy fishing boat, listening as the winds picked up and the waves crashed against the harbor wall, we would talk about our lives more honestly than I was used to back home in London. By the time I left, I would consider them a second family.

From Denise and Lofty’s cottage, I then headed down Newlyn’s North Pier to board a deep-sea trawler that would take me away from the Cornish coast for eight days with four other fishermen I barely knew. The Filadelfia (PZ – Penzance – 542) was a 79-foot beam trawler, skippered by a barrel-bellied fisherman called Don. She was built in 1969, the same year man felt the Moon beneath his feet for the first time. Like Apollo 11, the Filadelfia was a voyager, transporting man away from familiar landscapes into the unknown, protecting her crew from the mysterious waters existing just outside her thick, steel, yellow-painted shell.

While out at sea, I learned that a fishermen’s trawler is much more than their place of work. It is where they eat, sleep, dream, smoke, watch telly, and wait to go home. Each vessel becomes a figure to whom they feel deeply connected for the rest of their life.

Every three hours, Don hauled the nets that were dragging along the ocean floor up and we would get to work gutting whatever fish are brought up—mostly lemon sole, dover sole, turbot, bream, monk fish and rays. The crew gave me my own knife, smaller than theirs, with yellow tape twisted around the handle, and patiently taught me how to disembowel each species of fish. Once the haul was over, the men either retired to the cabin down below where we all slept together, or headed over to the galley to smoke and watch TV.

All trawlers have TVs in their galleys. These stay on day and night, providing an unending background burble. On our first night, while the crew polished off my last few chips (you eat like a king at sea: huge, comforting school-dinner meals of beef, steak, sausages, chips, and mashed potatoes), we sat close together, twisting round to face the TV so we could shout answers at The Chase (Don and the crew’s favorite gameshow) and jeer at contestants when they got obvious things wrong.

Peter Collett, a behavior psychologist, suggests that television “buttresses social relationships in the sense that it gives people something to discuss.” The Chase suddenly became the most important thing; we would reference past contestants like old friends, particular episodes where we would, as a team, have beaten “the chaser.” Our TV-watching ritual held us together, especially as the week drew on and we became more tired and homesick. It was a way of feeling connected without having to speak, and a comfort that simultaneously reminded us of home.

My favorite evening of TV-watching on the Filadelfia occurs on our final night at sea. For dinner, we’d feasted on a spectacular roast cooked by Don, the meager size of the galley’s oven and lack of surfaces in no way limiting his culinary ambitions. From the oven, Tetris-like, he produced a steaming tray of golden roasted potatoes, swede mash, Yorkshire puddings, an overflowing pot of cauliflower and broccoli cheese, honey-roasted parsnips set to a perfect crisp, and tender strips of beef.

While we sat nursing our bloated bellies, we found ourselves confronted with Johnny Depp’s eyeliner-smudged and darkly tanned face swinging the wheel of the Black Pearl. There will probably never be a more appropriate environment for watching Pirates of the Caribbean than shoulder-to-shoulder with four fishermen as you drive through the running sea in a wet night. The crew guffawed and slapped the table as the pirates ran rings around the Royal Navy officers.

And when Elizabeth Swann joined the buccaneers, exchanging her corset for a pair of men’s trousers and a sword, I could not help but glance down sheepishly at my fish-stained tracksuit and think of my yellow-stripped knife hanging up on the deck. We watched the film right through, snug from the winds and rains drawing around the boat, the heat from the oven fogging up the galley windows, thinking of the homes we would be returning to the next day.

Truth be told, just before I came to Newlyn, I had stopped seeing the point of television. I was at university and trying to work out what shape my life would take. I’d felt anxious then that everything I consumed should be an additive: something that would help me become a great writer or a great thinker. TV-watching, I worried, had no obvious use to me.

But during my time living with Denise and Lofty, I learnt that the best conversations are not the big ones you are trained to reach for in university, with all those long words with which to explain the world away. The best ones are the small chats that occur during the adverts between TV shows or as the credits roll for Coronation Street. These are the conversations that make you laugh, that don’t have to carry much weight, and that, because they can be silly and forgettable, help to solidify friendships and relationships.

TV-watching enables a particular kind of vulnerability: to sit close to one another and just be present together, without performing, without needing to assert our identities. It is also a portal through to past times. Watching TV allows me to be close to Denise and Lofty again, to be on a rusty trawler in the middle of a raging sea, to remember all those extraordinary things that happened to me in the fishing town of Newlyn.

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Another senator wants to raise taxes on everyone under the age of 67. He, of course, is 68. Yet a third stands up to demand, “We’ve got to get the government out of government!” The Pottsylvanian spies decide their weapon is unnecessary: Congress is already ignorant, corrupt, and feckless.

Hahahahaha. Oh, Washington.

That joke was a wheeze half a century ago, a cornball classic that demonstrates the essential charm of the Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends, the cartoon show that originally aired between 1959 and 1964 about a moose and a squirrel navigating Cold War politics.

High-flyin’ duo: Giant balloons of Rocky and Bullwinkle soar over Broadway in Manhattan during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, Nov. 28, 1996. Photo by Doug Kanter/Associated Press.

I’ve been wistful about the show of late, as I’m sure many of my generation are. Last month, we lost the great June Foray, the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel and many others. Her passing gave me pause to reflect on how important the show was during my formative years and how far-reaching its influence is on satire today. Bullwinkle was, like so many of the really good cartoons, technically before my time (I was born the year it ended). My sister and I caught it in syndication as part of our regular weekend cartoon lineup of Looney Tunes, Jonny Quest, and The Jetsons, from elementary through high school.

It wasn’t that Bullwinkle the character was especially compelling. He was an affable doofus with a loyal heart, if limited brainpower. Rocky was the more intelligent straight man: a less hostile Abbott to Bullwinkle’s more secure Costello. They were earnest do-gooders who took every obviously shady setup at face value. Their enemies were far cleverer, better resourced, and infinitely more cunning, but Rocky and Bullwinkle always prevailed. Always. For absolutely no good reason. It was a sendup of every Horatio Alger, Tom Swift, plucky-American-hero-wins-against-all-odds story ever made.

What we didn’t know in the ’70s, when we were watching, was that this was pretty subversive stuff for a children’s program made at the height of the Cold War. Watching this dumb moose and his rodent pal continually prevail against well-funded human saboteurs gave me pause to consider, even as a kid, that perhaps it is a silly idea to believe that just because we’re the good guys we should always expect to win.

The animation was stiff but sweet, the puns plentiful and painful. The show poked fun at radio, television, and movie tropes, and took playful aim at Cold War spycraft. Part of the fun was that Bullwinkle wasn’t a regular cartoon, but an animated half-hour variety show. And variety shows used to be so much of a thing that I am stunned there is no niche cable network devoted to them today.

Every episode of the Bullwinkle show featured two cliffhanger segments in the adventures of Bullwinkle J. Moose and Rocket J. Squirrel, pitted against master spies Boris and Natasha, all narrated breathlessly by erstwhile radio star William Conrad. Between each serial installment were stand-alone features, including Peabody’s Improbable History, wherein Mr. Peabody, a genius dog, and his pet boy, Sherman, travel through time to make terrible puns; Fractured Fairy Tales, updated twists on Grimm Brothers classics; Dudley Do-Right, a parody of silent melodramas starring a cleft-chinned Canadian Mountie; and Aesop & Son, modernized versions of Aesop’s fables as told by Charlie Ruggles, star of silent and classic films. Other features included Bullwinkle’s Corner, an over-enunciated poetry reading, and Mr. Know-It-All, in which Bullwinkle tries and fails to teach us something.

Tom Lehrer’s topical, bitingly satirical songs exemplified a dark vein of humor that ran through the Eisenhower-Kennedy era. Image courtesy of Lawrence/Flickr.

The variety show format enabled three things. First, its gloss of adult sophistication completely undercut by silliness was incredibly attractive to me and my sister. Secondly, it got us to delight in the work of a revolving cast of top-notch, old school voice actors who’d grown up in radio and knew how to sell a line. June Foray, for example, is the common thread that weaves together the everyman fast-talkers of Warner Bros. films (she voiced Granny and Witch Hazel for Looney Tunes), the pop culture and political satire of Stan Freberg, and the Cold War kiddie fare of Bullwinkle (as Rocky, Nell Fenwick, Natasha, and more).

Fractured Fairy Tales were narrated by veteran actor Edward Everett Horton, a Warner Bros. stable favorite, and featured Daws Butler (Elroy Jetson), a Stan Freberg comedy show veteran, along with Paul Frees and June Foray. Before giving voice to Dudley Do-Right’s nemesis Snidely Whiplash, Hans Conried was better known as Captain Hook in Disney’s Peter Pan, as well as for his years’ long yeoman’s work on radio mystery shows, I Love Lucy, and Burns and Allen.

Finally, the show’s format and depth of talent connected my sister and me to a world of comedy that was well before our time, but helped us navigate what came afterwards. Apart from Sesame Street and The Electric Company (whose cast was a gift to future Broadway lovers) the cartoon landscape during the 1970s was bleak. I don’t know what happened during the Summer of Love to cause formerly respectable shops like Hanna-Barbera to go from Jonny Quest to Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels, but it can’t have been pretty. In those grim years when cable was not yet available to the common man and one had to physically get up to change the channel (or make one’s sister do it), we relied on three networks, a local PBS affiliate, and a couple of random UHF stations for our home entertainment. By setting the contemporary junk fare right up against reruns of infinitely better material, regular television gave my sister and me a great education in quality satire, voice recognition, and genius parody.

There was also the added benefit of our mother’s healthy collection of comedy albums—Stan Freberg, Tom Lehrer, Nichols & May, and vintage Woody Allen—all of which are of the same era as Bullwinkle and feature some of the same performers. My parents and these comedians belong to the so-called “Silent” Generation—that cohort born between 1925 and 1945—too young to be the Greatest and too old to be Boomers. Born during times of economic insecurity, this group came of age during the McCarthy Era and is marked, understandably, by a desire not to rock the boat too much. While they weren’t as culturally radical as the Boomers of the ’60s, the artists and cultural provocateurs of the Silent Generation loved to take a whack at the Eisenhower status quo, not to mention psychoanalysis and the Bomb.

The late June Foray, shown on the job on Nov. 2, 1967, gave voice to Rocky the Flying Squirrel, babies, birds, cackling witches, and many other animated characters. Photo by George Brich/Associated Press.

Because we loved these old records and shows, my sister and I ended up singing along with Tom Lehrer about German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun (about whom we knew nothing), did the Vatican Rag and the Masochism Tango (ditto).

And so, through Bullwinkle, we were granted access to nearly a century’s worth of comedy and satire, three generations of backhanded patriotism tempered with gentle skepticism going back to vaudeville, a sort of atavistic psychic tool chest for navigating strange and scary times.

Bullwinkle was there when PBS pre-empted all programming to air the Watergate hearings in the summer I was eight, my last before sleepaway camp. At P.S. 19, we were still having bomb drills and the Cold War was still very much on, as was a hot war in Vietnam, but there was no recognition of these facts in the Archies or Hong Kong Fooey.

Bullwinkle’s playful critique lives on today in Spongebob and The Simpsons, shows whose creators openly acknowledge their debts. (Spongebob’s Squidward’s voice is Ned Sparks; Plankton is Walter Brennan. All the male Simpsons have Bullwinkle & Rocky’s middle initial “J.”) These shows are a loving critique of the ways that American ideals and American reality are often out of whack.

The post How Bullwinkle Helped Us Laugh Off Nuclear Annihilation appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The discussion, before a full house at a Smithsonian/Zócalo “What It Means to Be American” event at the Landmark Theaters in Los Angeles, explored both the opportunities and the obstacles in trying to bridge seemingly vast cultural divides via TV.

Bowman, an Emmy award-winning writer and creator of Martin, described his experience in 1995 as “the white head writer of a black show” called The Show. “I wanted to explore racial issues in an integrated show,” he said. “It was the best reviewed show I ever wrote, and it was canceled after four episodes.” At a subsequent focus group, he recalled, a white respondent and a black respondent bonded over their dislike of the show and wound up hugging. Small comfort, Bowman said. “I had brought black and white together in their hatred of my show.”

The trick, said Dan O’Shannon, former executive producer of Modern Family, is to find a way to create relatability without “condescension and preachiness.” When the show first aired, in 2009, much of television “was divisive, about making fun of the other side.” In crafting the story line for Cam and Mitch, the gay couple on the show, the writers intentionally avoided physical intimacy in the first season, O’Shannon said. “We wanted to have Americans embrace them as empathetic human beings first and as a gay couple second.”

Jennie Snyder Urman, Jane the Virgin showrunner, concurred, saying it’s important to understand every character, “from the most evil villain to the family unit at home.” Empathy, she said, is “the catchphrase in the writer’s room,” with scripts given a painstaking review from every character’s point of view.

Portraying characters honestly, even when it’s unflattering, is essential, said, Gloria Calderón Kellett, co-showrunner and executive producer of Netflix’s One Day at a Time. When the teenage daughter on that show came out as gay, her father refused to dance with her during the traditional father-daughter dance at her quinceañera.

Why portray the father in that light? Bowman asked.

“We wanted to let the audience know that she was going to be supported and be okay, but maybe not everyone was going to have that perfect, warm response to it,” Calderón Kellett said. “It wasn’t just hurray, she’s gay! We wanted to represent the totality of that experience.”

All of the writers on the panel—as in much of television itself—Bowman observed, had worked on shows revolving around families struggling with the deepest social and cultural questions of the day. “In TV history, the family is always the crucible of social issues,” Bowman said. “It’s where we talk, it’s where we tolerate.”

The holy grail of placing family at the heart of television’s efforts to sort through social divisions is the 1970s Norman Lear sitcom All in the Family, Bowman said. That ground-breaking show succeeded in provoking thought and conversation among non-like-minded people. But, said O’Shannon, at that time there were just a few networks competing for viewers’ attention, and even if they offended some viewers, others would tune in “to see what this car wreck was about.” Now, he said, with much greater competition, no one wants to offend because they can’t take the risk of “losing a single viewer.”

What then, is the way forward, asked Bowman, citing as an example of the vastness of the divide one recent survey that found that the favorite television show among liberals was Modern Family, and among conservatives Duck Dynasty. He specifically wondered whether in this moment where audiences place a premium on authenticity, his whiteness would be an obstacle. He posed the question to Urman, who is white and whose protagonists are Latino.

Urman said that initially she did question whether she should embark on the show, but then, she said, she realized that, “I spent all of my career writing men. I’m a lot closer to Jane,” the show’s heroine, who she described as “type A with a very complicated relationship with her mother.”

The key, Urman said, is “being open, listening and making sure that your family is so specific that they are not caricatures. We all want the same thing: We want happiness, we want love, we want to be respected.”

One of the big challenges, the panelists agreed, is in fairly portraying “red” characters—those with conservative values—without relying on the buffoonery of an Archie Bunker, for example.

Jay, the grandfather on Modern Family presents one such opportunity, said O’Shannon. “Jay spent his whole life following rules. Everything he was taught was okay is bad, he’s the bad guy now,” O’Shannon said. “I don’t know if you forgive him for some of the things he does, but you understand him.”

During the question-and-answer session, one audience member asked whether the writers worried that when they presented their characters’ flaws they were disrespecting them, suggesting that viewers might extrapolate negative stereotypes about them.

“It’s humanity and we’re flawed,” Calderón Kellett responded. “We do things that are good and we do things that are bad and that’s the totality of being human.”

Urman agreed. “Our characters mess up all day every day,” she said. “If we just made these characters that are perfect, then they have no relatability.”

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