Sunday, October 3, 2010

All in the Family and George Lopez

All in the Family and George Lopez shine a light on important issues, involving prejudice, bigotry, and other serious social events. However there are significant differences on how the two shows bring these issues to the forefront.

All in the Family uses the character Archie Bunker as a mouthpiece to represent the countries more perverse opinions and attitudes towards minorities. The audience is meant to relate to the son-in-law when he admonishes Archie. Often times, this strategy backfires because the audience relates to Archie as an "anti-hero" or "lovable bigot" (link on this at the bottom). The George Lopez show aims to showcase the same issues but has the advantage of realizing social issues from within the minority group. This allows the audience to relate to George Lopez, preventing them from seeing the oppressed class as "the other" but instead more like themselves. So even though the desire is still to use a character driven comedy to encourage the audience to change their opinion is the same in both, The George Lopez show approaches it in a fresh and effective manner.



http://www.thestar.com/article/108423

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