It is perfectly feasible theoretically and probable practically that some viewers decode it dominantly and find pleasure in aligning themselves with the capitalist, consumerist, sexist, racist values that are as clearly there in the program as they are in the society that produces and circulates it. In understanding the interplay of forces in this constant struggle between the power-bloc and the people, it is important to avoid essentializing meanings and taking them out of their culturally and historically specific moments of production. The same person can, at different moments, be hegemonically complicit or resistant, as he or she reforms his or her social allegiances. Popular culture is to be found in its practices, not in its texts or their readers, though such practices are often most active in the moments of text-reader interaction. Any space won by the weak is hard won and hard kept, but it is won and it is kept.
Popular culture is produced under conditions of subordination.
But class is not the only axis of domination-subordination, and within classes there are many different formations of the people. While recognizing the close interconnections between class and culture, we must not map them too deterministically one onto the other. The proletarian and the popular are overlapping but not coterminous concepts.