There are more TV sets in the U.S. than toilets. TV is the most popular appliance in the history of the world. David Thorburn, professor of literature and director of the MIT Communications Forum, has taught an MIT course in American television since 1976. TV, he says, mirrors society. It sustains an ongoing dialogue about family, gender, religion, and race, telling the stories that define our values and assumptions.
TV is a forum that dramatizes and facilitates cultural change.
But if they watch hundreds of hours of situation comedy over a course of years, they may come to accept changed gender roles and new ideas about the structure of families. Loving Lucy Think of I Love Lucy. The show embodies the patriarchal values of the late 1940s, but it also covertly discloses women's impatience with mere domesticity. The man is the head of the household. Lucy is the wife and mother.