May 21, 2025 09:37 PM
(This post was last modified: May 21, 2025 09:40 PM by Magical Realist.)
"There was a time, not that long ago, when most of America was watching the same thing. Thursday nights meant The Cosby Show or Cheers (R.I.P. Norm). Friday nights were for Full House and Family Matters. And somewhere between the late 1980s and early 1990s, a very particular genre of television emerged—shows where an interloping character, often strange or “other,” arrived to disrupt the status quo of an otherwise ordinary family or suburban household.
Harry and the Hendersons gave us a Bigfoot who lived in the basement. ALF was a wisecracking alien hiding in plain sight. Small Wonder introduced Vicki, a robot child in a pinafore dress. Mork & Mindy, Out of This World, Perfect Strangers—they all centered on the intrusion of an unfamiliar presence into a familiar world. These weren’t just sitcom gimmicks; they were cultural metaphors. And, in hindsight, they tell us something deeper about who we were—and what we might be losing now.
These shows offered more than just entertainment. They offered collective imagination. They asked audiences, many of them children, to empathize with the outsider. To see the world through the eyes of the strange, the misunderstood, the not-quite-human. And in doing so, they subtly modeled something profound: what it means to live alongside difference.
The families in these shows were rarely perfect, but they made space—sometimes reluctantly—for the interloper. They learned to adapt, to accommodate, to change their routines, and to expand their understanding of what family could mean. The message was often implicit, but clear: even the strangest beings deserve to belong.
It was empathy by way of sitcom.
And it worked because we were all watching.
Today, those shared cultural moments are harder to come by. The proliferation of streaming platforms and content silos has created an infinite scroll of niche narratives. We don’t sit down at the same time on the same night to watch the same show anymore. Instead, algorithms feed us what we’re most likely to enjoy—what reflects us back to ourselves.
On the surface, this hyper-personalization feels like a gift. More representation. More specificity. More choice.
But choice isn’t the same as connection.
And when our media diets are composed entirely of what we already know and like, we lose the friction—the productive tension—of encountering the unfamiliar. The stranger in the living room never arrives, because we’ve curated them out of view.
This isn’t just about nostalgia. It’s about what shared media once offered us: a kind of emotional commons. A place where difference was introduced through entertainment, and where empathy could be practiced in the safety of story.
Empathy requires proximity. Not just physical, but narrative. We have to be willing to spend time in the story of someone else, especially someone who isn’t like us. Shows like ALF and Harry and the Hendersons weren’t perfect. Many were problematic by today’s standards. But they built a cultural muscle that helped audiences stretch their sense of self, if only by a few degrees.
Today, as we fracture into smaller and smaller echo chambers of taste and belief, that muscle is atrophying. And in its place, we’re seeing an increase in cultural polarization, tribalism, and disconnection.
If we never meet the stranger—on our screens or in our lives—we’re far less likely to understand them.
There’s a growing body of research supporting the idea that exposure to diverse narratives—especially those that centered marginalized or “outsider” perspectives—correlated with higher empathy scores and lower levels of implicit bias. Conversely, over-personalization and echo chamber content consumption has been linked to increased affective polarization and reduced perspective-taking.
This doesn’t mean we need to go back to a three-network world. But it does raise the question: what are we losing when we’re no longer looking in the same direction?
Our shared cultural references have become fewer and more fleeting. And while we’ve gained diversity in voices and stories (a tremendous and overdue gift), we’ve also lost the connective tissue that once tied us together. The strange visitor, the disruptive outsider, the Bigfoot in the basement—they weren’t just characters. They were catalysts for empathy. They reminded us that home doesn’t have to mean homogeneity.
So what do we do in a world without them?
As leaders, creators, and storytellers, perhaps we need to be intentional about bringing the unfamiliar back into the frame. We need to champion narratives that challenge our assumptions and stretch our capacity for understanding. And we need to fight for shared spaces—not just digital platforms, but emotional terrain—where audiences can imagine themselves alongside someone profoundly different from who they are.
Because the stranger in the living room was never really about the alien, the robot, or the Bigfoot.
It was about us.
And if we stop making room for the stranger, we may one day find there’s no room left for anyone at all.
Take good care,
Michael Ventura
https://michaelventura.substack.com/p/i-...dium=email
Harry and the Hendersons gave us a Bigfoot who lived in the basement. ALF was a wisecracking alien hiding in plain sight. Small Wonder introduced Vicki, a robot child in a pinafore dress. Mork & Mindy, Out of This World, Perfect Strangers—they all centered on the intrusion of an unfamiliar presence into a familiar world. These weren’t just sitcom gimmicks; they were cultural metaphors. And, in hindsight, they tell us something deeper about who we were—and what we might be losing now.
These shows offered more than just entertainment. They offered collective imagination. They asked audiences, many of them children, to empathize with the outsider. To see the world through the eyes of the strange, the misunderstood, the not-quite-human. And in doing so, they subtly modeled something profound: what it means to live alongside difference.
The families in these shows were rarely perfect, but they made space—sometimes reluctantly—for the interloper. They learned to adapt, to accommodate, to change their routines, and to expand their understanding of what family could mean. The message was often implicit, but clear: even the strangest beings deserve to belong.
It was empathy by way of sitcom.
And it worked because we were all watching.
Today, those shared cultural moments are harder to come by. The proliferation of streaming platforms and content silos has created an infinite scroll of niche narratives. We don’t sit down at the same time on the same night to watch the same show anymore. Instead, algorithms feed us what we’re most likely to enjoy—what reflects us back to ourselves.
On the surface, this hyper-personalization feels like a gift. More representation. More specificity. More choice.
But choice isn’t the same as connection.
And when our media diets are composed entirely of what we already know and like, we lose the friction—the productive tension—of encountering the unfamiliar. The stranger in the living room never arrives, because we’ve curated them out of view.
This isn’t just about nostalgia. It’s about what shared media once offered us: a kind of emotional commons. A place where difference was introduced through entertainment, and where empathy could be practiced in the safety of story.
Empathy requires proximity. Not just physical, but narrative. We have to be willing to spend time in the story of someone else, especially someone who isn’t like us. Shows like ALF and Harry and the Hendersons weren’t perfect. Many were problematic by today’s standards. But they built a cultural muscle that helped audiences stretch their sense of self, if only by a few degrees.
Today, as we fracture into smaller and smaller echo chambers of taste and belief, that muscle is atrophying. And in its place, we’re seeing an increase in cultural polarization, tribalism, and disconnection.
If we never meet the stranger—on our screens or in our lives—we’re far less likely to understand them.
There’s a growing body of research supporting the idea that exposure to diverse narratives—especially those that centered marginalized or “outsider” perspectives—correlated with higher empathy scores and lower levels of implicit bias. Conversely, over-personalization and echo chamber content consumption has been linked to increased affective polarization and reduced perspective-taking.
This doesn’t mean we need to go back to a three-network world. But it does raise the question: what are we losing when we’re no longer looking in the same direction?
Our shared cultural references have become fewer and more fleeting. And while we’ve gained diversity in voices and stories (a tremendous and overdue gift), we’ve also lost the connective tissue that once tied us together. The strange visitor, the disruptive outsider, the Bigfoot in the basement—they weren’t just characters. They were catalysts for empathy. They reminded us that home doesn’t have to mean homogeneity.
So what do we do in a world without them?
As leaders, creators, and storytellers, perhaps we need to be intentional about bringing the unfamiliar back into the frame. We need to champion narratives that challenge our assumptions and stretch our capacity for understanding. And we need to fight for shared spaces—not just digital platforms, but emotional terrain—where audiences can imagine themselves alongside someone profoundly different from who they are.
Because the stranger in the living room was never really about the alien, the robot, or the Bigfoot.
It was about us.
And if we stop making room for the stranger, we may one day find there’s no room left for anyone at all.
Take good care,
Michael Ventura
https://michaelventura.substack.com/p/i-...dium=email
