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Comment by sctb | Hacker News Reader

If the show was Seinfeld then it brings up an interesting point: the context of the show is that all of the characters are socially pathological. They are bad people who treat others poorly—that's the whole show. It would be fascinating if today's viewers might see it as an endorsement of those behaviours!

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> the context of the show is that all of the characters are socially pathological

I have no idea of the context: I just watched this episode and I found it shocking enough to not bother trying more episodes.

> It would be fascinating if today's viewers might see it as an endorsement of those behaviours!

When watching, I didn't have enough context to say if it was an endorsement or not, but the body shaming and gay shaming were synchronized with a laugh track, so it's not just that it was considered to be ok for main characters to engage in such behaviors, it was intended as humor

I don't find that funny, but shocking and sad.

I've found this a really interesting (and sudden) change. It has been commented on a fair bit in popular media, the most recent I saw was in "No Hard Feelings" where the younger generation get angry at Jennifer Lawrence for gay shaming (in this instance, as a 40-year-old my first thought was that she made a reasonable comeback given how she herself was just treated, but as far as the 19-year-olds were concerned she had crossed a line!)

Whether you can enjoy 90's (or earlier) content really depends if you can view it in the context that produced it; if you go all "death of the author" it's just going to seem cringe.

> really depends if you can view it in the context that produced it; if you go all "death of the author" it's just going to seem cringe.

I don't wish death to anyone. I try to separate the author from the art, so there are many things I can enjoy: I'm listening to Bing Crosby's White Christmas. He may have been a bad person [1], but the song is nice. If he was singing hate stuff on a happy melody, I wouldn't enjoy it.

This TV series making fun of bad things is something else.

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/mbqqeb/isnt-it-funny-that-bi...

Seinfeld is one of the greatest shows of all time. You’d seriously be depriving yourself by not watching it.

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