The Education of Max Bickford

The Education of Max Bickford - TV.com

Dreyfuss stars as Max Bickford, a college professor facing a turning point in his life after being passed over for what he feels is a long-overdue...

Dreyfuss stars as Max Bickford, a college professor facing a turning point in his life after being passed over for what he feels is a long-overdue promotion.

Notes

Taking a much-needed inventory of his life, Max looks around and sees that he has been working forever, and for what? A widower surrounded by women at an all-female institution, struggling to parent a headstrong 18-year-old daughter and an overly wise 13-year-old son, with a best friend named Steve who has just returned from sabbatical as the newly transgendered Erica, Max realizes that he's an old-fashioned man in a modern world and that something has to change. But he'll be damned if it's him.
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Popmatters
More importantly, Bickford's criticism of his female students accompanies a strangely skewed representation of what contemporary students are like. All Chadwick students appearing in the pilot are rude, silly, or dishonest rich brats who demand high grades they didn't earn, download term papers from the internet, and suck up to professors for letters of recommendation. Bickford tells them all off, with sarcasm so biting that it borders on verbal abuse. He observes that students "care about saving the whales and they don't want their mascara tested on some cute little bunny, but they don't seem to care about social justice and the fact of human suffering." This distinction, funny as it may be in Dreyfuss's delivery, ignores the fact that most student protests in recent years, including WTO demonstrations in Seattle and DC, have been built on coalitions between environmentalist, social activist, and identity-based groups. But of course, the main irony of his ranting about students' apathy is that a realistic representation of contemporary student activism might never make it to this show just as it did not make it to the network news programs.

Bickford repeatedly promises to teach students "a way to approach the world with a critical eye." In order to offer something similar for viewers, The Education of Max Bickford would have to include issues current on college campuses, for example, economic globalization, and more recently, anti-war demonstrations and hate crimes against Arab American students. But given that producers may be mindful of CBS's older, more conservative viewer demographics, Bickford is in danger of becoming a sweet family drama, like Prestwich and Yorkin's Judging Amy, about a single mother who is also a family court judge, or worse, like Touched by an Angel, the saccharine sermon that had Bickford's time slot last year. In its first episode, Bickford huffs and puffs about "critical perspectives" and history as a "larger context," but does not show what a critical perspective on major historical and contemporary events would look like.

Conference call:

Call for Papers: America Studies American Studies: The Education of Max Bickford

Deadline: December 14, 2001

I plan on proposing a panel on the CBS television program The Education of Max Bickford for the American Studies Association conference in Houston, November 14-17, 2002. Papers may address any aspect of the series, though I have listed a few "issues" to think about. One may place the phrase "Hollywood representation of" at the beginning of all but the last two of the following.

9. Max Bickford as Hollywood version of popular journalistic representations of Culture Wars;


Send abstracts to
http://cfp.english.upenn.edu/archive/2001-10/0148.html