Very few people reading this will remember a sitcom that aired about 15 years ago called Married People. The show was about 3 married couples who lived on separate stories of a Manhattan residence: the upper middle aged black couple who owned the building, a pair of yuppies, and a "just starting out" naive couple.
Anyhow, I was watching this show one night and that evening's plot revolved around a visit from the young white woman's parents. The father wasn't at all happy about his little girl living in the big city around people of, um, darker skin tones. His state of residence? Ohio, pop culture's go-to state when it comes to portraying conservatism, backwardness, and provincialism--the place anyone with taste, talent, or ambition can't wait to get away from. What made this particular plot point on Married People so galling was that it came on the heels of an astonishing number of racial incidents in New York City, none of which needless to say were touched off by Ohioans. If the writers of the show had wanted to deal with bigotry, certainly a fit topic to cover, why import your racists from Ohio when they're found everywhere, even in blue state paradises like Manhattan?
If you haven't already guessed, I live in Ohio (Columbus to be exact) and I tend to notice these slights--have even thought it might be a good topic for a dissertation in cultural studies of whatever of those disciplines you can get a degree in for watching TV. Last night, we saw one of the more egregious examples of Ohio-bashing I can recall--characterizations so unbelievably out of touch with reality that if I hadn't seen it myself, I would assumed it was some sort of conservative parody of what liberal Hollywood "really thinks" about the Midwest. And it came from Aaron Sorkin and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which NBC and Sorkin's dwindling cult would have you believe represents the last best chance for intelligent television. If this is high culture, give me Howie Mandel and chicks with briefcases.
Here's what the episode dealt with, or at least the part of the episode that concerns me here: Tom, one of the show's young writers, was preparing to host his visiting parents, take them on a tour of the historic Studio 60. At one point, Tom is asked if his parents are alive. "Well, they live in Columbus, Ohio, so...barely," Tom says. A few minutes later we see the parents, and they have the general demeanor of an uptight farm couple that might have been painted by Grant Wood, and not residents of a city of 700,000-plus people. The mom says they feel like "real Hollywood bigshots," and when they meet one of the stars of the show (played by D. L. Hughley), she awkwardly attempts to bond with this Negro by announcing that her husband has a crush on Halle Berry--Hughley's character being the first black person she's ever met, apparently (Halle Berry is from Ohio too, for what it's worth).
It gets worse. The father seems distracted as Tom gives his tour, and we learn why later--he's in a frivolous line of work while his brother is fighting in Afghanistan. Eh, OK. But Tom also finds out that his folks have never heard of Abbott & Costello or the "Who's On First" routine, which is just not possible for someone who isn't Amish, although Sorkin clearly believes pop culture stopped in Ohio around the time "Down by the Old Mill Stream" was a hit. The dad also mocks Tom's reference to the Art Deco theater by saying he didn't know he was an interior decorator now. Still, there's a rapproachment of sorts, and Tom presents his peace offering--a recording of "Who's On First", on vinyl because Dad is too set in his ways to shift over to CDs (this was maybe a commentary on resistance to technological change generally and not a slam on Ohio, but still, senior citizen Ohioans like my parents have been buying CDs for a good long time).
Tom's parents are simply not realistic characters in the year 2006, no matter what state they're from. But making them residents of Columbus--the 15th largest city in America, not only a state capital but a leader in banking and insurance, home to several colleges including Ohio State, featuring the largest gay community in the Midwest outside of Chicago--was just a lazy bit of stereotyping, a sign that Sorkin is utterly ignorant of life in the United States outside his elitist coastal bubble. I hate to come across like a "my city right or wrong" booster (a type that really is still depressingly common here), but the portrayal of Tom's folks was condescending and insanely inaccurate in equal measures. Sorkin doesn't know the first thing about Columbus or anywhere east of Las Vegas and West of the Hudson River--Chicago might as well be Fargo might as well be a farm town in southern Indiana. And he wonders why people have deserted this program, which initially got promising ratings, with the speed of lemmings on crack.
There were other ridiculous elements in last night's episode too--bimbos so broadly drawn that they couldn't grasp the concept of what a "writer" was; Matthew Perry, accompanying Hughley to a comedy club in what may be the first scene he's ever appeared in with a black guy after 10 years on Friends; and Eli Wallach as an elderly veteran of both World War II and the blacklist. Sorkin really is pompous enough to believe that both the actual and the fictional Studio 60 are the inheritors of the moral righteousness of the anti-McCarthyite forces. But even in the '50s, bad TV got bounced for other than political reasons. And if Studio 60 is history by January as I think it will be, this episode and the mindset that brought it to life will be a big part of the reason why.
