My post on Modern Family’s Big Gay Kiss Episode this morning reminded me of a discussion Jaime Weinman of MacLean’s and I had at his blog yesterday, in a post of his partly inspired by a post of mine on the death of Lone Star. Essentially, he makes the argument that big mainstream broadcast hits still exist and still matter–because small cable shows can’t really start broader national conversations–whereas I argue that, at this point, they’re mostly just bigger niche shows among other niches.
I bet each of us would see this episode as substantiating our position. (And to be honest, the truth right now is probably somewhere the two extremes we were each arguing.) If Mitchell and Cameron has kissed on a Showtime comedy, no one would have linked or blogged about it—partly because of context, but partly because the audiences are just too small. On the other hand, we’ll see how it plays out, but I don’t think that the kiss on Modern Family, one of TV’s most popular sitcoms, will come close to starting a national conversation the way that, say, episodes of All in the Family used to.
Now part of that just has to do with changing mores; a kiss between two men is not quite the deal it was in earlier decades. But it’s also true that even “mainstream hit” TV simply reaches far fewer of us, proportionally, than it used to. Modern Family, a hit in terms of demographics and advertising, averaged just over 9 million viewers last season, or around 3% of the population—not like a show drawing 30 million viewers in a nation of 200 million in the big-three-network era.
None of which is to say that we should want and push for broadcast networks to do better with their shows; we should do it because we want good TV shows, and because pop culture matters a lot in the aggregate. But the historically brief period of mass culture—the mid-20th-century era in which loads of people saw the same thing at the same time—is not going to return no matter how good the series networks make.
Which means that, more and more often, a kiss will be just a kiss.