Two Aspirins and a Comedy: How Television Can Enhance Health and Society

Until I read Metta Spencer's Two Aspirins and a Comedy, I saw television as basically entertaining me, and sometimes informing me. Reading this insightful book shows me how many of my core values and understandings have been formed -- from the tolerance that Howdy Doody implicitly taught to the multiculturalism of I Spy, Northern Exposure and Star Trek.

Metta Spencer brings her skills as a Professor of Sociology, as a long-time peace researcher, and as a psychologist or social psychologist to the question of how we can change our society so that individuals are happier and more fulfilled, and the society is more peaceful and stable. Two Aspirins and a Comedy is not really a study of television and its uses, it is actually a study of our society and how it meets the needs (and fails to meet the needs) of individuals in it. She sees people who are lonely and out-of-sorts reaching out to television stories for human contact and affirmation of their values. But mostly the television stories that are available fill their mind and their imagination with crooks, sociopaths, and unsympathetic characters, and the stories fill their minds with violence and cruelty. Spencer argues for better stories and more sustaining characters as social policy, and takes up a wide range of arguments about why we have the situation that exists. Unlike most non-fiction (and unheard of in professional sociology) this account is wide ranging and consistently serious across a range of fields - philosophy, theology, sociology, the physiology of emotions, and so on. The voice of the author - in turn humorous, sad, empathetic, and intellectually ambitious - comes through the whole account. Try it. Reading Two Aspirins and a Comedy is a unique experience, unlike any other book I know.