What I Learned About American Culture By Binging On ‘Gunsmoke’ And ‘House Of Cards’ Both 'Gunsmoke' And 'House Of Cards' encapsulate an American ethos, but one humanely and the other in a brutal, disturbing way.By Alfred Siewers
June 22, 2017 As a university English professor, I am always on the lookout for laboratory experiments to conduct to rival my science and math colleagues. So recently I engaged in a binge-watching experiment across a few days, to analyze two jarringly different TV narratives of American virtue: The fifth season of “House of Cards” (2017), and a string of episodes from the ninth season of “Gunsmoke” (1964). The comparison revealed something of how the stories we Americans tell about ourselves and America changed across half a century.
“Gunsmoke” on CBS claims to be the world’s longest-running prime-time TV drama series with the same star and setting, from 1955 to 1975. One TV critic memorialized its Western mythology as “the Iliad and the Odyssey” of America. In its first years a top-rated show, it kept a solid loyal following. John Wayne, who had once long before been anointed by the real Wyatt Earp, gave his blessing to its opening. Its star James Arness was a decorated World War II hero.
“House of Cards” on Netflix superseded an older British send-up of parliamentary democracy to become in its own right a mythic American TV story for the 2010s, focused on an imperial presidency and decadent American leadership class. They, in the words of one character, lack any “North Star” of ideals, values, or even ideology. One of its stars, Kevin Spacey, did become a real-life hero of the old White House Correspondents Dinner during President Obama’s administration.
Both Sets of Leads Are Childless, Yet DifferentOn “House of Cards” this season, Spacey’s President Francis Underwood puts out a cigarette in an American flag as he prepares to resign in the wake of scandals involving murders and electoral manipulations that make Watergate look like a vaudeville skit, not to mention sexual relations that would make Arness’ Matt Dillon in “Gunsmoke” blush. The current-day political drama ends with the murderous first spouse Claire Underwood (Robin Wright) becoming president while exclaiming in an Evita-like pose: “Now it’s my turn.”
That turn of events would be unthinkable in a “Gunsmoke” universe, where traditional gender roles are well-prescribed, despite Amanda Blake’s admirable strong female lead, Miss Kitty, whose ambiguous relation with Matt is matched by her ambiguous business at the Long Branch.
This leads us to one of few commonalities between the two series: A lack of focus on intergenerational community values, or what the Iroquois called “the seventh generation” ethos, in postwar American pop culture. There is zero concern at the terminus of the sexual revolution in “House of Cards” about children and family. They are strongly implicit in “Gunsmoke,” yet the main characters remain single and, like the Underwoods, childless.
Different Views of Virtue’s Restraint<..snip..>
http://thefederalist.com/2017/06/22/what-i-learned-about-american-culture-by-binging-on-gunsmoke-and-house-of-cards/
