Sociological Observation Of Primetime Television

Sociological Observation of Primetime Television

By watching four shows on a variety of networks, making observations in regards to the race of the characters on the show yielded interesting results. Primetime in this observations are shows aired Monday through Thursday evenings between the hours of seven and nine in the evening. This range maintains the shows that tend to have highest reoccurring viewers week by week. I viewed Grey’s Anatomy on ABC, Modern Family on ABC, The Big Bang Theory on CBS, and This is Us on NBC. In observing the television programs, criteria used to select a program were personal opinion on popularity, meaning a program that I had heard of before, time aired, and length of the show. I selected programs with varying

In viewing This is Us, I began to notice that the program continually shifted from present time to the time of the childhood of the main characters. The modern time provides a diverse grouping of people with almost equal numbers of African American and white characters, while the flashbacks moments were made up of almost exclusively white men and women. However, I do not think this is a negative situation; the producers and directors likely planning this on purpose. The flashbacks are set in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s where racism was still extremely prevalent in the United States and races continued to be divided. However, the modern portion of the show involved two middle aged white characters and their adopted African American brother and the intermixing of their families. This demonstrates the idea that modern television seems to be working on being more open and accepting of mixed families and having more than one race per household and the social force of mass media coming into play. In Grey’s Anatomy almost all of the characters in authoritative roles were African American. As medicine tends to be a quite diverse field, this program did not include a variety of races. This can be a tie to the social institution of education, particularly white privileged in education. Middle to high class white families have the greatest access to higher education, such as medical school, resulting in an astonishingly high number of white doctors on the program, Grey’s Anatomy. On the contrary, this program seems to defy some medical stereotypes, such as that many modern doctors are from backgrounds of the Middle East and Asian, two races not represented in the