The Mary Tyler Moore Show and the Golden Girls -- both were great television. Mary Tyler Moore, Valerie harper, Ed Asner, Gavin McLeod... all gone, and relatively recently before Betty White . With the Golden Girls one had also Bea Arthur, Rue McLanahan, and Estelle Getty. And let;s not forget the superb Dick Van Dyke Show. I got to see Dick Van Dyke dance up a storm in Mary Poppins Returns, so maybe he is immortal. Well... he remains.
I'm not saying that there was some Golden Age of Television that we have lost. It's still there, and mercifully the studios produce boxes of the TV shows. The legacy remains.
... As for Sidney Poitier, I see him as the first black male to compel white people to see dignity in black men, at least when it is so blatant. Poitier couldn't sing and dance, so that took away one pair of stereotypes. He chose his roles well. On the previous page was Desmond Tutu, eminently capable of putting the lie to the idea that blacks were 'lessers' in South Africa under Apartheid. In that he was a troublemaker that the racist authorities could pin nothing upon. He too exuded dignity under a political order that offered none to blacks.
I'm not saying that there was some Golden Age of Television that we have lost. It's still there, and mercifully the studios produce boxes of the TV shows. The legacy remains.
... As for Sidney Poitier, I see him as the first black male to compel white people to see dignity in black men, at least when it is so blatant. Poitier couldn't sing and dance, so that took away one pair of stereotypes. He chose his roles well. On the previous page was Desmond Tutu, eminently capable of putting the lie to the idea that blacks were 'lessers' in South Africa under Apartheid. In that he was a troublemaker that the racist authorities could pin nothing upon. He too exuded dignity under a political order that offered none to blacks.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.