May 18th 2012, 16:25:58
This is a good media literacy type of discussion.
There's plenty of truth to what aponic brings up here, and plenty of information about there about it.
However, you need to see the larger trends. Just looking at one television show is meaningless. Think of media as a powerful tool that educates people despite the fact that it's intended primarily to entertain.
I brought up stats with my students that show that they have more hours in front of a TV or a computer screen than they do with any one of their teachers in a year. So the best teacher you remember from high school--imagine how much you learned from that teacher, and imagine the fact that you're often more engaged and spending more time watching TV, playing on the internet, watching movies, etc.
Most of the time, since the messages aren't as consistent, it's not necessarily a big deal, but there are some consistencies that could definitely be part of our psyche at this point.
But back to aponic's point, it's not necessarily that characters like House are low-character. It's that they fit the archetype of any number of types of antiheroes. It's an interesting thing to think about, because you could see these characters as low-character, or in some of these cases, you could see them as more nuanced characters. Past heroes that I study with my classes are far more absolute. Medieval knights are often seen as these almost entirely perfect characters, and their flaws lead to their problems, so there's no nuance there. Modern heroes can be flawed, and are often tortured in some ways by their flaws, but they're still successful, so it's easy to see these as examples of rewarding bad behavior, OR it's easy to look at this as a more nuanced, realistic view of the world. All our heroes can't be Superman.
You hit an area of interest for me, can you tell? :)