Hunted: Recreational Killing
First author: MolloyYear: 2011
Abstract
This is the exchange that takes place between two characters, Maggie O’Connell and Joel Fleischman, at the beginning of an episode entitled ‘A Hunting We Will Go’, from series 3 of the highly successful 1990s television comedy drama Northern Exposure. Maggie has returned from a hunting trip with a ‘ten point buck’ strapped to the back of her station wagon and is challenged by the town doctor, Joel, a New Yorker who has been sent to the small isolated Alaskan town of Cicely to fulfil a four-year placement obligation.1 Joel’s struggle to fit-in with the lifestyle, customs and traditions of the townspeople forms the main premise of the series, and ‘A Hunting We Will Go’ follows his experiences as he attempts to understand the motivation to hunt. The programme explores some of the established positions within the hunting debate, but in fulfilling the generic conventions of a closed structure and reinstated equilibrium demanded by a comedy drama series narrative, it has to arrive at a negotiated position by the end of the episode. The programme was targeted at an audience who, based on demographic profiles, would have been unlikely to support hunting, and the episode steers a course through the various arguments that continue to inform current debates. Attitudinal surveys on hunting during the 1990s indicated that ‘there is no such thing as a general public.Details
Language: EnglishCountry of affiliation: United Kingdom
Published in: Popular Media and Animals
Publication type: Book chapter
Source: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230306240_7
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