Core Response #1 - Josh Martin

What is so incredibly compelling to me about both Horace Newcomb and Paul Hirsch's "Television as a Cultural Forum" and Heather Hendershot's much later essay on Parks and Recreation as a cultural forum are the ways in which both remain locked into their historical eras, inviting later responses and criticisms within a changing media landscape. Newcomb and Hirsch's essay seems to set forth a brilliant methodology for approaching the contradictions apparent in many texts -- a conceptual approach to media texts that still holds up today. But despite the longevity of that idea, Hendershot's essay serves as such a response to Newcomb and Hirsch's idea of the cultural forum more generally: acknowledging that we are now living in a world "with hundreds of channels on offer... in a niche-viewing environment" (205), Hendershot puts pressure on the broader assertions made by the authors in their notable essay, essentially questioning whether the cultural forum still exists today in any form.

Hendershot's essay works within an unusual structure, often refuting and unpacking the argument that the essay puts forth while still providing the necessary evidence to support its claims. Suggesting initially that the 2010s NBC show "Parks and Recreation offers a liberal-pluralist response to the fragmented post-cultural forum environment," Hendershot later notes that, for all intents and purposes, nobody was watching, thus putting its status as a cultural forum into question (206). Parks and Rec episodes dealing with gay marriage and other social issues were decidedly uncontroversial -- as Hendershot notes, the show was defined by "consistently poor ratings," even if she was indeed correct that the series would find its audience eventually (210). 

Though fundamentally accepting that the Newcomb/Hirsch cultural forum idea does not function in the same way in the contemporary age, even in a program that fits such a model, Hendershot also contends that Parks and Rec mirrors "the essence of [Newcomb and Hirsch]'s conception of television as a cultural forum" (211) and implicitly argues for the necessity of such a concept. Yet Parks and Rec, for all its pleasures as a television program, also feels profoundly dated at a moment of further political fragmentation -- it is a relic of the Obama era, fully unequipped to handle the reality of the post-Trump moment. Rather than fully disproving Hendershot -- or the continued utility of the Newcomb/Hirsch model -- I'm more interested in something she suggests earlier in the essay, which seems to me a different approach within the deployment of the cultural forum idea. Hendershot notes that in the aforementioned "niche" environment, "viewers tend to gravitate to content that matches their preexisting interests," a gravitation that I would argue is supported by the limited audience for Parks and Rec. In this way, I wonder if we've moved from an era of The Cultural Forum to cultural forums, plural. Nobody watched the Olivier Assayas Irma Vep show on HBO Max last summer in the grand scheme of things; for me and fifteen other cinephile losers (I say this affectionately, should any other of my fellow losers read this), that show was an essential jumping point to negotiate questions of cinema, personal relationships with art, politics of business, etc. These cultural forums still address the essential issues, often in ways that mirror the contradictions of Newcomb and Hirsch, but they are not monocultural in the same sense. The paradigm has shifted too far. However, does the plurality of cultural forums negate the importance of the concept? Is the singularity of a given cultural forum what matters? Like the contradictory and unresolvable texts that Newcomb and Hirsch approach, I leave this question unanswered.