David Marc

Guest critic David Marc looks at the growing popularity of 1950s TV sitcoms. He thinks the trend reveals a troubling desire for an idealized suburban culture where whiteness and paternal authority ruled.

David Marc is a television critic for The Village Voice and Atlantic magazine, and also a professor at Brandeis. Marc thinks that it is important to analyze television with more depth than is currently done. His new book , "Demographic Vistas: Television in American Culture," plays on the title of a Walt Whitman essay "Democratic Vistas." Marc views television and its demographic analysis as an "ironic" fulfillment of Whitman's call for an American art that focuses on the "average, democratic, and popular."