Here, then, is the critic’s eye turned towards something which would ordinarily be ignored, with revealing results:
“Family Feud” would seem the most straightforward family show on television.…And yet, in fact, it isn’t the familial bond that wins the prize on “Family Feud,” but the family’s successful self-erasure. Each of Dawson’s questions is a test of sameness, its answers based on tallies of “one hundred people surveyed,” well ahead of time, by the show’s producers. A “correct” reply is therefore not the smartest, but the least inventive answer, matching an alleged “consensus” expertly defined and validated by the show itself. Thus the irresistible appeal of “Family Feud” is also the attraction of TV, which tells us endlessly what “we” believe, thereby using our supposed group sentiments to reconfirm its own authority1.…For all its seeming family pride, then, each group that plays on “Family Feud” does not come on to manifest its own discrete identity, but rather struggles to get rid of it. Miller, Boxed In (54)
This is why we talk of TV as being “mind-numbing”; why, after watching it, you can feel sapped or empty, or, like the narrator in Fight Club, even violent. By addressing “Family Feud” critically, Miller reveals the “truth” of it (there’s that word again). And he reveals his own perspective, namely, that television’s depression of our individual identities in the name of commercial success is a dangerous practice deserving of resistance. If we’re all unflinchingly in agreement, then the conditions for democracy have not been met; we have to be willing to assert our differences meaningfully if we’re to be effective citizens:
We retain the rhetoric of liberal democracy, but in concrete terms this supposed democracy gets enacted as the commodity culture, in which freedom of choice really means Wendy’s versus Burger King. Berman, Dark Ages America (73)
The first – and arguably most important – step towards resisting this phenomena is to bring it out from the shadows; that is the critic’s role.
- Emphasis mine. ↩
