Angelus News | February 9, 2024 | Vol. 9 No

Greg Erlandson is the former president and
editor-in-chief of Catholic News Service.
shows,” which are anything but.
High culture has been relegated to
public broadcasting, where another
sliver of the population can still find
operas, plays, and serious documentaries.
Yet this audience is a fraction of
the one that watched Margot Fonteyn
and Rudolph Nureyev on a variety
show like “Ed Sullivan,” the same show
that also introduced us to The Beatles.
Sullivan concedes that television has
gotten more diverse. We’ve grown beyond
“The Jeffersons” and “The Cosby
Show,” and that is a good thing. At the
same time, lacking a shared viewing
space, shows featuring this diversity are
less likely to reach very far beyond their
target ethnic audience.
“For just about anyone,” Sullivan
wrote, “there are now more shows on
television that reflect your own life; the
trade-off may be that there is nothing
that reflects our common life, or addresses
our common concerns.”
Perhaps this fragmentation of television
audiences simply reflects our
own fragmentation. Perhaps it reflects
trends in marketing, in which ad agencies
want a specific demographic slice,
and are willing to pay handsomely for
that slice.
There may be one other corrosive
trend at work: that playing to our fears,
our cynicism, and our baser instincts
is more profitable and easier to attract
audiences with short attention spans
and a distrust of almost everything.
Shadowy conspiracies, corrupt higher-ups,
remorseless villains deserving of
a remorseless response (all exemplified
in Prime Video’s hit “Reacher” series)
feed our cynicism.
In fact, our public square, our shared
space, is larded with cynicism. We
have fewer heroes and more villains,
dupes, and lone rangers who, in
Wayne LaPierre’s cynical motto, see
themselves as a good guy with a gun
stopping loads of bad guys with guns.
This may be all that functions as our
“common conversation” today, both
reflecting our fractured and distrustful
culture and feeding it. I can only hope
that we will soon weary of this darkness
and seek to recover a shared digital
space that will speak to our better
angels.
February 9, 2024 • ANGELUS • 27