Love. It. (And the rebuttals.. we be so analytical..)

A tour de force of common denominators of most of the protagonists (video, Tee Vee or whatever medium) since.. I dunno? pre-Tom Sawyer anyway: in Murican advertainment.
Maybe a iconoclastic sequel to the acerbic *Philip Wylie's Momism ... from Generation of Vipers [1942] ... but a bit late!

tl;dr: Muricans like/demand plots from transitional childrens' books; seek escape from that big-R Responsibility thing via every sophomoric Escape contrivable (Ferris B's long-day-Off?) and like that.
(Surely.. I'm Numbah One!!11ONE has been the longest-running clue, along with Winner-takes-All?) Teen fantasies all.
This is/may be also the root of the current (and also long-running) misogyny, currently not bothering even to be disguised: symbolizing the cheeldrun who need daily nurturing, attention (more of that R- thing.) R is No Fun.

(Have long thought ~this conclusion, but (yet another!) A. O. Scott here documents the evidence ever so more painstakingly than any link-free assertions of the rarity of Murican adults.)
'Course too, while being aware of many of his citations, rarely did I watch any of these, beyond the short time it takes tp get-the-drift. I know why I despised Breaking Bad: not only for its get-rich-quick dope-selling McGuffin, but from that so-easy First murder--when I switched-off--putatively "to save a life" [not his--how noble] but wife's, etc. Ditto the whole bloody-bizness of Tony Soprano (living the boy-escape of Taking what You Want: fuck the looosers, who are inconsequential ordinary humans.)

Anyway I'm biased: does he Make his Case? uh huh uh ... huh huh huh?
(A rebuttal in Salon, below. Nothing is ever (this) simple.)


* Note Wylie's remarkable synchronicity elsewhere:

During World War II, writing The Paradise Crater (1945) resulted in his house arrest by the federal government; in it, he described a post-WWII 1965 Nazi conspiracy to develop and use uranium-237 bombs, months before the first successful atomic test at Alamagordo – the most highly classified secret of the war.