Cheers and Social Roles

Hundley's close reading of the final season of Cheers focuses on the show's portrayal of beer drinking as a social--and socializing--exercise. This portrayal, says Hundley, constitutes the "dominant reading encoded in the text's [= show's] narrative [= dramatic] structures" (Hundley 263). That is, the consumption of beer is the "common ideological frame" (262) for the pattern of ideas emerging in the program and is the dominant, or naturalizing, mechanism and standard by which the meanings made by the program emerge.

Clarity about the critical context of Hundley's discussion of Cheers is central to an understanding of her characterization of the program's portrayal of beer drinking as a naturalizing agent. Hundley begins from the standpoint of structural analysis, which Vande Berg, Wenner, and Gronbeck say (379) "focu

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race, and class are definitely underscored in the Cheers narratives" (Hundley 268). This would explain, for example, why the characters of Lilith, Diane, and Rebecca, who are all both female and educated white-collar workers, remain relative outsiders to the "antics of the male patrons and employees" (268). As detailed as Hundley's analysis of Cheers is, and as trenchant as it seems, it also presents certain difficulties. In making beer drinking the common ideological frame, i.e., the dominant cultural attribute of the show and standard by which the whole of the show is properly judged, Hundley selects a set of attributes of Cheers specifically and progamatically associated with presumed consequences, mainly to viewers aged 18 to 34, of a mise-en-scène and character-conceptualization set that encourage acculturation to unproblematic alcohol consumption. That consequence may be real enough for many people, though in 1993, when the last first-run episode of Cheers was aired, published reports cited the statistical decline of alcohol consumption in the U.S. ("Cheers" 14). Therefore let us grant that winking and nodding at unrealistically high levels of alcohol consumption constitutes a species of social irresponsibility on the part
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Sam Malone, Diane Lillith, United Prolonged, Heather Hundley, Diane Rebecca, Zhang Casswell, Wenner Gronbeck, Cheers Hundley's, Cheers Hundley, Vladimir Estragon, beer drinking, naturalization beer, portrayal beer drinking, alcohol consumption, portrayal beer, beer consumption, hundley's analysis, vande berg, naturalization beer drinking, beer drinkers, role models, male bonding, wenner bruce gronbeck, boston houghton mifflin, houghton mifflin 1998,
Approximate Word count = 2416
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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