I love TV shows, although only about 40% of what I watch is from the last two decades. My top six favorite shows are Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, The Big Bang Theory, Supergirl, Roseanne, and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. There’s a more complete list of shows I like under the “Movies” part of my profile. This is going to be about Roseanne.
I’ll offer a brief summary of the show and highlight some aspects of it but you can also read that wikipedia page.
This show ran from late 1988 until early 1997 and had ten seasons. I don’t think I’ve seen a single episode of the 10th season and I have probably only seen half of the 9th season. I probably have seen 80% of the episodes, an average of 2.5 times and on average about 15 years ago (I watched most of it as it was originally broadcast and watched a lot of re-runs between 2000 and 2010). I recently got a ridiculously good deal on the entire series on DVD and am going to go through it episode-by-episode.
It’s a hilarious 30 minute (with commercials) sitcom about a working-class liberal-progressive white family in what I think is a large town something like an hour away from Chicago (my brief, non-philosophical definition of liberal is someone to the left of Bill Clinton and to the right of Senator Elizabeth Warren; more details are here).
Some of the things that I like about it:
1) It’s progressive economically. There is pro-union stuff and although they get rich from the lottery in the 9th season, they use some of their wealth to help their former co-workers at a factory BUY the factory. There are a few seasons where Dan or Roseanne are small business-owners, but they have practically zero employees and treat them well.
2) It’s anti-racist. Of the very minor characters, about 1/10 are people of color, which kind of sucks, but there’s good anti-racist material. There’s one episode where they address the genocide of American Indians and slavery. Although there’s a small bit that’s pro-prisons, one of the 1-3 episodes that touch on that is also pro-affirmative action. There’s one episode where the Conners confront racism in their family and themselves.
3) It’s anti-homophobic. In an average episode, of the main, recurring and guest characters, about 6-8% are gay (one isn’t identified as gay until towards the end of the series).
4) The recurring character Mark Healy was played by an Irish actor, although he used an American accent because the character is American.
I have placed the Roseanne collection with the other DVDs that I am watching and will be doing reviews of the political issues raised in each episode. I won’t mention those episodes that have nothing political in them.
This blog is mostly about 3 themes- Irish Republicanism, Star Trek, and opposition to bigotry, primarily in America (racism, homophobia, anti-semitism, etc.). It is mostly about Northern Ireland. It will mostly be about these issues in general and past events and will only sometimes touch on current events. Feel free to comment on the earlier posts.
About My Blog
My blog is about history, popular culture, politics and current events from a democratic socialist and Irish republican perspective. The two main topics are Northern Ireland on one hand and fighting anti-Semitism, racism and homophobia on the other. The third topic is supporting the Palestinians, and there are several minor topics. The three main topics overlap quite a bit. I have to admit that it’s not going to help me get a graduate degree, especially because it’s almost always written very casually. But there are some high-quality essays, some posts that come close to being high-quality essays, political reviews of Sci-Fi TV episodes (Star Trek and Babylon 5), and a unique kind of political, progressive poetry you won't find anywhere else. (there are also reviews of episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and reviews of Roseanne)
(my old blog was not showing up in Google search results AT ALL (99% of it wasn't being web-crawled or indexed or whatever) and there was another big problem with it, so this is a mirror of the old one although there will be some occassionnal editing of old posts and there will be new posts. I started this blog 12/16/20; 4/28/21 I am now done with re-doing the internal links on my blog) (the Google problem with my blog (only 1% of this new one is showing up in Google search results) is why I include a URL of my blog when commenting elsewhere, otherwise I would get almost no visitors at all)
(The "Table of Contents" offers brief descriptions of all but the most recent posts)
(I just recently realized that my definition of "disapora" was flawed- I thought it included, for example, Jews in Israel, the West Bank and the Golan Heights, and with the Irish diaspora, the Irish on that island. I'll do some work on that soon (11/21/20 I have edited the relevant paragraph in my post about Zionism))
(If you're really cool and link to my blog from your site/blog, let me know) (if you contact me, use the word "blog" in the subject line so I'll know it's not spam)
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