Always Sunny Hot or Cool?

The popular FXX T.V. show its Always Sunny in Philadelphia also known as Always Sunny is going to be examined in this blog as ether a hot or cool type of media. This classification process of "hot or cool" is coming from McLuhan's interpretation of (hot) being high-intensity, low participation and (cool) being low intensity high participation. McLuhan also states cinema as being in the hot category due to the quality of the medium and the dimly lit setting of the cinema, this makes one more focused and engaged in the high quality images and audio produced at the theater with a very minimal amount of participation needed. Television shows such as always sunny are considered cool due to the home setting of the media. This setting provides opportunities for a social gathering like having friends over to watch the show or having a snack and being more engaged in the participation aspect of the medium. These two aspects can become easily blurred by many factors such as the individual watching the show; the viewer could be fully engaged in the show and not so much engaged in talking during it due to the fact that he/she wants to know what’s going on. This, I feel is going to happen more often in a series because of you miss one episode your lost for a good portion of the next or even some later down the road. Another example of this hot or cool media getting blurred is the television shows increasing their picture quality to HD. In some instances high definition television can look almost identical to the cinema quality. In my opinion the newer episodes of always sunny are right up there with cinema quality images but not quite, also I don’t think I would classify this show as hot or cool because when I watch it I’m not in a dimly lit theater with audio that you can feel and images that look real. Then again I am also not constantly talking to people or socializing during this show mainly due to the fact that I mostly watch it on Netflix and there are no commercials. Therefore I would classify this show as both hot and cool with some underlying cool properties due to the commercials cause lets face it no one is going to sit on a couch and not talk during a commercial your going to get up and eat something like everyone who watches T.V. That being said I feel commercials are a real game changer for this hot and cool scale, a game changer that places always sunny more on the cool side of the spectrum while still a little on the hot side due to the hilarious engaging plots of the episodes.   

get rich quick

Get rich quick 

For this post I will be offering my own ideological critique on the show ItsAlways Sunny in Philadelphia. In doing this I will be pointing out the main hegemonic or underlying dominant theme that I feel happens throughout almost every episode.

The Frankfurt School describes ideology as:

…persuading people to support the status quo by propagating a particular set of ideas, the culture industry directly blinds or cements people to the system by crushing their capacity to think critically or independently at all…

I chose to use this description of ideology because in my opinion this idea of blinding people from thinking on their own about the show is extremely prevalent in most episodes. The only difference is the way they do this is not bad or promoting Marxist hierarchical ideas, but instead in my opinion, the writers do a great job in casually convincing the audience that the get rich quick schemes that occur in almost every episode are the best possible option at the time.

Now we all know that most of the things the gang does on the show wont work and we know this from the time the idea was presented to the audience, but the writers present these ideas in such a way that I sometimes find my self thinking “yea why wouldn’t that work?”.

I feel that this is because the writers portray these get rich quick ideas in such a way that it makes the audience feel like this is the only option. Or, in the words of The Frankfurt School they “propagate a particular set of ideas”, as we can see just by watching one episode of its always sunny there are a plethora of dub ideas thrown at the audience as if they are the only options, not to limit our views and trick us into doing some of these stupid things in real life, but to make us laugh and by the end of the show realize how dumb the idea really was.

A perfect example of this can be found in the following video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fP4emqw7O4 about kitten mittens. We all know cat’s barley make noise and when they do its not that loud. In this video charley tries to convince us to buy kitten mittens by portraying the cat as loud and annoying he even shows a clip comparing the cat’s noise to a lion eating a gazelle. It is obvious cats are not that annoying and are no where close to as loud and aggressing as predatory lions, but he shows us this to try to tell us yes they are buy my kitten mittens. This is a great example again of the writers jokingly trying to “crush our ability to think critically” by only offering one set of beliefs. I also find it funny that they own a bar and if they put half the time they do into these insane ideas, into marketing the bar they would make a good bit of money, but there would be no show if that were the case.   

Finally if I were to critique this show I honestly don’t know if I would change anything. The stupidity makes it great and brings attention to how funny the show really is. Without these get rich quick ideas going wrong the show would just be about a group of rich people who own a bar, and that doesn’t sound like it would be that interesting.