Philosophy and New American TV Series

As the title of the essay “Philosophy and New American TV Series”, written by Paola Marrati and Martin Shuster, says, this text focuses on popular American TV series of the 21^st-century saying that all, or almost all, American series are following a new trend: the trend of including philosophical topics (viii). I, however, do hardly disagree on this statement. Modern TV series, be it American series or others, do not deal with philosophical topics on purpose or to say it in other ways, it is not the producers’ main goal. They are more aiming on entertaining the audience by interesting stories, appealing characters and impressive locations. Of course, there is always at least one philosophical topic  covered in a TV series. In the comedy series New Girl it is the question of personal identity as well as in Gilmore Girls. Thinking about all the CSI series there is the topic of morality constantly, but depending on the episodes and the characters one will find a number of philosophical topics as well. In my opinion, the essay is misleading and gives the impression that only the TV series of the 21^st-century are dealing with philosophy and that the individual stories are created around specific moral questions. I say, however, that one can find philosophical topics in any literary piece, movie, video game, songs and TV series. Even in our seminar we are talking about series and video games, and I am sure that we will find philosophical topics in all of them.

Marrati, Paula; Shuster, Martin. MLN. "Philosophy and New American TV Series." The John Hopkins U P, 2013. p. vii-ix. Print.