Television
An organization with similarities to Scientology, called Selfosophy, was a central part of an episode from the second season of Millennium that aired on the Fox network on November 21, 1997, entitled "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense." Selfosophy was created by a science fiction writer who had spent time in an insane asylum. Matt Roush of USA Today wrote that the episode was "written with the density of a Simpsons cartoon. You'll scream till you laugh, or laugh till you scream." Michael Patrick Sullivan writing for Underground Online/UGO wrote: "After a year and a half of doom and gloom stories, one of the most astounding television writers of the nineties, Darin Morgan, is allowed his fractured take on Millennium and Frank and author Jose Chung investigate murders that lead them deeply into the world of a pseudo-religion called Selfosophy (read as Scientology). Bizarre is exactly the word for it as Millennium takes sharp aim at itself and has fun with it."
In 2005, Season 9 of South Park,"Trapped in the Closet" Stan is interviewed by a member of The Church of Scientology. The member tells him that he isn't happy, but the Church can help him for a nominal fee. Later he is given a test on a E meter machine. He scores unusually high, which leads the Members to believe that he is the reincarnation of L. Ron Hubbard. The next day he is confronted by the entire Church of Scientology, including Tom Cruise. Stan tells Cruise that his films are "okay" and that he's not as good as "the guy who played Napoleon Dynamite". Tom locks himself in the closet. He stays there for the entire episode and is later joined by John Travolta, and R. Kelly who speaks in song, as he does in Trapped in the Closet. Meanwhile Stan is commissioned to finish the Writings of Scientology. One of his major changes is that he wanted to make the church free. One of the leaders of the Church reprimanded him for this. He tries to tell the rest of the church about the scam. Each individual member of the church threatens to sue him, including Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and R. Kelly, who have finally come out of the closet.
In 2006, season four of Nip/Tuck, the characters Kimber and Matt join the Church, making them the first Scientologist regular characters on a prime-time TV show. In the latter part of the fourth season, Kimber has a hallucination in which Xenu appears to her. Though the Scientology "tech" and details are portrayed in a simplified way, the show is incorporating the Scientology storyline as a serious subplot, rather than a parody or a one-time jab. In the episode Dawn Budge, Matt moves out of the house after his parents pressure him to leave Scientology. Both characters eventually leave Scientology in the fifth season.
Read more about this topic: Scientology In Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the word television:
“Photographs may be more memorable than moving images because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Television is a stream of underselected images, each of which cancels its predecessor. Each still photograph is a privileged moment, turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)
“So by all means let’s have a television show quick and long, even if the commercial has to be delivered by a man in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck, selling ergot pills. After all the public is entitled to what it wants, isn’t it? The Romans knew that and even they lasted four hundred years after they started to putrefy.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)