{"id":224,"date":"2026-06-21T19:40:32","date_gmt":"2026-06-21T19:40:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/ted-mandell\/?page_id=224"},"modified":"2026-06-21T19:40:32","modified_gmt":"2026-06-21T19:40:32","slug":"you-are-what-you-watch","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/ted-mandell\/you-are-what-you-watch\/","title":{"rendered":"You Are What You Watch"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Indianapolis Star 10\/16\/05<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Growing up in the seventies, I\u2019d say my teenage personality was as much a mix of my mother and father as it was a conglomeration of Arthur Fonzarelli and Johnny Fever, part Vinnie Barbarino, part Hawkeye Pierce.

I still scratch my head a lot. A lot like Chuck Barris.

Maybe I watched too much television. Or maybe I learned too much from television.
But there\u2019s no denying television is a part of me. So are motion pictures. Thanks to seventeen viewings of The Bad News Bears as a teen, I can\u2019t watch my son\u2019s little league game without hearing Bizet\u2019s Carmen.

Thanks to a 30-year addiction to Saturday Night Live, I still belch out those tired SNL water cooler one liners on occasion, I must say.

You do too.

Your language. Your wardrobe. Your swagger. How much of it do you owe to television and movies?

Probably enough to launch a line of catch phrase T-shirts or new look blue jeans.

Check your closet.

It\u2019s how we talk. It\u2019s what we wear. It fills the minds of our children. It funds our economy. From movies to television, entertainment to information, we are what we watch.

So what are we watching this fall?

The Nielsens tell us 50 million viewers nationwide caught an episode of CSI last week. From week-to-week, it\u2019s TV dramas and cable news talk. Not one comedy in the top ten Broadcast TV shows, not one laugh in the top ten Cable TV shows.

Are we serious, or just sick?

It\u2019s 30 years later and Vinnie Barbarino is now Vincent the barbarian, deranged and dangerous, wanted for a series of sex crimes. Didn\u2019t I just see Arthur Fonzarelli being interrogated on Law and Order: Criminal Intent?

In my youth, Ralph Edwards hosted This Is Your Life.\u201d Tonight on CBS, it\u2019s This Is Your Death. From early prime time to late local news, that\u2019s what we\u2019re watching this fall.

Scared yet? You should be. That\u2019s who we are. We watch serial killers on NBC at nine. We watch them executed on the local news at eleven.

The death row execution vigil by your local TV news. You\u2019ve seen it.

They camp outside the barbed wire of the state penitentiary. They stand in the darkness, carefully recounting the hideous crime committed. They dust off the fifteen year old footage of the grisly murders, flash interviews with sobbing siblings, countdown the final minutes before the lethal injection.

But if you want to see the actual execution (and don\u2019t we all), you\u2019ll have to turn to prime time TV for that. Maybe Cold Case this week. Or Law and Order: SVU. Or perhaps on Fox\u2019s Prison Break or CBS\u2019 Criminal Minds, two unwanted new additions to the fall menu of screaming, angry television.

Just can\u2019t get enough of psychotic, mentally ill perpetrators duct taping the mouths of rope-bound victims? These are the stars of primetime today.

Hope you\u2019re entertained, because you\u2019re certainly influenced.

Renowned media analyst Dr. George Gerbner spent decades researching the effects of television violence on viewers. \u201cOur analysis has found that exposure to violence-laden television cultivates an exaggerated sense of insecurity and mistrust, and anxiety about the mean world seen on television,\u201d said Dr. Gerbner in the early \u201890s.
That was the nineties, before the term \u201ccrime scene investigation\u201d was a household phrase.

Gerbner called it the \u201cMean World Syndrome\u201d. In our mean world, those who watch significant amounts of television perceive the world in ways consistent with what they see on TV. They\u2019re more anxious and fearful. They\u2019re more likely to believe their neighborhoods are unsafe. They overestimate their risk of being victimized by crime. They assume the crime rate is on the rise, even when it\u2019s not.

They buy tickets to see Flightplan. Fifty-million dollars worth in two weeks. Makes sense that the nation\u2019s number one film is about the fear and paranoia of your six-year old child vanishing on an airplane.

Sound silly? My son Riley came home from pre-school the other day with a form for Dad to sign. A release allowing Riley to be videotaped during his class Halloween party. I doubt this was about royalties for national distribution of the DVD.

No, it was about the Mean World Syndrome.

Hey Ramona Room Parent, lighten up. Junior\u2019s home room party tape isn\u2019t going to end up in the sweaty palms of a crazed pedophile. Want to do something positive not paranoid? Change the station and change the Nielsens. Turn off CSI and turn on a sitcom.

Laugh a little.

Ted Mandell teaches in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. <\/em>

Copyright 2004 Ted Mandell<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Indianapolis Star 10\/16\/05 Growing up in the seventies, I\u2019d say my teenage personality was as much a mix of my mother and father as it was a conglomeration of Arthur Fonzarelli and Johnny Fever, part Vinnie Barbarino, part Hawkeye Pierce. I still scratch my head a lot. A lot like Chuck Barris. Maybe I watched … Continue reading You Are What You Watch<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4375,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-224","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/ted-mandell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/ted-mandell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/ted-mandell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/ted-mandell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4375"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/ted-mandell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/ted-mandell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":225,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/ted-mandell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/224\/revisions\/225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/ted-mandell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}