It would be hilariously absurd if there weren’t something very sad about Friday’s article on Tracey Owens Patton’s “Ally McBeal” study.

It is indicative of the pseudo-intellectual pablum that passes as serious academic scholarship these days.

Am I the only one who finds it a bit disturbing that our precious tax and tuition dollars are being given to this school so that Dr. Patton can “watch and rewatch every episode of `Ally McBeal’?” And here I thought that watching television was more or less a waste of time. I’m no fan of `Ally McBeal’ (or most of the boring garbage that passes for popular entertainment these days, for that matter).

But I wouldn’t go so far as to characterize the show as “dangerous.”

I always thought that those people who based their ideas of reality off of television characters were brainless morons, but hey, I guess those with advanced degrees in mass communication know better about that, too.

Believe it or not, people will indeed take this stuff seriously.

They’ll send out press releases hoping to “raise awareness” of the hegemonic Eurocentricity inherent in the patriarchal dialectic on television (or some other meaningless babble) and threaten Fox with boycotts or harsher measures until the contents of `Ally McBeal’ are made so bland and milquetoast so as not to offend anyone in the slightest, making pop culture just slightly more dull than it already is.

Meanwhile, out here in reality, the rest of us can just change the channel.

Tom Seymour

Graduate student

Educational leadership and policy studies