| Why write about television and Generation X? That's pretty easy. The two were made for one another. Would the stereotype of Generation X exist if TV had not been invented? Probably not. Would television exist without Generation X? Yes, but its programming would certainly look different. |
| Some would argue that you could say the same thing about Gen X and movies or music. A snobbish member of Gen X would snort derisively at the idea that television is a medium worthy of study. Film (not movies) is what should be examined, they'd say as they drank their cappuccino and smoked their herbal cigarettes while wearing Exxon coveralls that they paid $50 for at an upscale thrift store. This person is probably a slacker, which is a subset of Generation X. The media began using Generation X and slacker interchangeably after the release of Slacker, Richard Linklater's 1991 film about do-nothing twentysomethings in Austin, Texas. Slackers are the members of Generation X who do not aspire to have careers, who sleep on a couch all day, and who wash their hair only a few times a year. Ethan Hawke's character in the movie Reality Bites was clearly a slacker. The 1996 edition of the Random House Webster's Collegiate Dictionary defined slacker in its new words section as an "educated young person who is antimaterialistic, purposeless, apathetic, and usually works in a dead-end job." In The Official Slacker Handbook, author Sarah Dunn writes, "The slack sensibility is part old-fashioned bohemianism and part fin de sicle exhaustion, placed against the backdrop of a crappy recession and intolerable suburban irony." It's worth noting that Dunn, 25, went on to write for the TV sitcom Murphy Brown. |
| This book is not about slackers; instead it will look at the broad-based Generation X made up of some slackers, some professionals, some bank tellers, some waiters, some students. As for the TV part, let me state right up front: I love television and feel no shame about that. I'm not a couch potato who beaches on the sofa, grabs the remote, and grazes mindlessly through the channels. I only watch shows I know I will enjoy, be it the moral quandaries of |
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