HEGEMONY AND MANAGED CRITIQUE IN PRIME-TIME TELEVISION: A Critical Reading of "Mork and Mindy.".

The article analyzes the television series"Mork & Mindy" in an effort to unravel the various dialectical moments of cultural hegemony. Hegemony, as defined by Raymond Williams, " is not only the articulate upper level of ideology nor are its forms of control only those ordinarily seen as manipulation or indoctrination. It is a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living: our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world. It is a lived system of meanings and values--constitutive and constituting--which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming." The reasons for using the television series in unraveling the dialectical moments of hegemony were, first, it provides an excellent text for illustrating the possibility of linking the study of hegemony to the study of the construction and reproduction of meanings through the acquisition of language and interpretative procedures of a language community, second, the series appears to manifest characteristics of both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic cultural forms. The television series tells the story of an alien being (Mork) who visits Earth from a more advanced civilization. He was sent to study the Earth and its culture as punishment for persisting in humorous acts.