Although you're often described as a dark satirist of American culture, your work is essentially a nostalgia fest. Like Pop Art, it drips with sentiment about things it pretends to ridicule.

When I was a kid, I took "The Brady Bunch" and "The Partridge Family" very seriously. It was a world to me in the same way that the Greek myths would have been had I read them. You know, Marcia is Athena and Mr. Brady is Zeus.

It's true that "The Brady Bunch" creates its own imaginative universe, somewhat like fiction or any art form. You cannot say that about today's reality shows.

I agree, "The Brady Bunch" can seem utopian compared to "American Idol" or "The Bachelor" or "Swapping Grandma" or "America's Bravest Hottie Midgets."

What is the connection between television and the arc of our lives?

I don't think it is a coincidence that we got into Iraq in the wake of Monica Lewinsky and O. J. and the round-the-clock television coverage of them. There has got to be a causal connection between the kind of small-bite thinking that we started to accept around the time of Monica and our incredible gullibility vis-à-vis Iraq.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 2:34 PM  |