scourse" (262), which according to Vande Berg, Wenner, and Gronbeck (243) comes down to showing how television "texts" treat "our social experience."
What this critical perspective comes down to is that Cheers's portrayal of beer drinking both reflects and functions as an example of real-life social forms. Now it is a commonplace of popular culture that a Boston bar named Bull and Finch is the real-life model for Sam Malone's bar named Cheers. But Hundley's larger point is that the ceremonies, attitudes, personalities, and behavior of the characters in the show are presented as a proxy for real-life beer drinking as social modality. She argues that "the naturalization of beer on television stereotypes reality's concept of masculinity," where masculinity is associated with a range of socially and politically retrograde behavior and belief systems on one hand, and with a mainly "white, male, working class perspective" on the other (Hundley 268). Hundley describes the Cheers beer-drinking ensemble as a "boys club," perforce exclusionary in its structure and perforce comprising men, though the working-class waitress Carla (unlike the better-educated and variably aloof Rebecca, Diane, or Lillith) is "more accepted" (268) on account of her working-class identity.
Hundley cites three "strategies" of naturalization, or as it were acculturation of viewers to the notion that beer drinking is a desirable social norm: humorous treatment of excessive beer consumption, the friendship or camaraderie associated with group beer drinking, and the pattern of portrayal of detoxification (more exactly absence of toxicity) for beer versus the toxicity of nonbeer alcohol consumption. She refers to episodes that have as "one seriously important function" the "naturalization of beer drinking, regardless of one's health" (Hundley 265), not least in the context of comedic portrayals of beer drinkers. On the show, those who drink beer, even to excess, almost...