Spin City

Spin City was a mainstream sitcom that ran on ABC from 1996-2002. It centered around a fictional mayor of NYC, Randall Winston, (Barry Bostwick) and his deputy mayor, Mike Flaherty (Michael J. Fox). Despite being a comedy in part about politics, the show attempted an amorphous partisanship, the party of the mayor never being revealed. In doing so, it was a gentle satire of politics, and had fun with the idea that city hall is a bit of a zoo, where the most important thing, from the perspective of those in power, is to come-off alright in the press. The show was generally unoffensive to republicans or democrats. Its central joke is that the mayor, Bostwick, is a 6 ft. 4. vacuous idiot with a smiling face, next to the much shorter, and smarter Michael J. Fox character who attempts to get him through the day soundly. Being a show about politics, the series can, in very cursory, safe-for-mainstream ways, address some of the issues in the real world. As Suzanna Danuta Walters pointed out in her article about gay visibility, the character of Carter, a gay, black man, is "a good example of [gay] integration" into a mainstream television show. By not making Carter, "come out" in the course of the show, but instead cleverly announcing him as gay before his arrival in the first episode, it "is able to explore gay identity and life outside the single cataclysmic moment." While the show derived comedy from Carter's gayness, it was handled in a way that generally wasn't mocking, or homophobic, and usually involved the strong-willed Carter, arguing with the equally stubborn Mike. Walters notices that the character of Carter has received little attention, and wonders if it is acceptance, or racism. The portrait of Carter could be simply so innocuous as to slip by even homophobic viewers. In a way, while visibility of minorities in mainstream culture is important, it is a part of the popular cultural encoding that portrays them in such a way as to drain the real world tension of the situation within a show's own boundaries, and thus be largely meaningless outside of itself.