The Dumping Ground

It Depends On Your Definition of "Short"

From the Washington Post Corrections for October 12, 2007:

An article in the Oct. 7 Magazine about roller derby said the television series "American Gladiators" was short-lived. The show ran from 1989 to 1997.

Sure, eight seasons cannot strictly be considered short-lived on television, but perhaps the original author was thinking in terms of social consciousness. American Gladiators' popularity occupies that brief inter-decade period where the cultural norms in our minds, that normally separate one decade from the next, are mixed and blurred beyond simple identification, into a sort of slurry of pop stereotypes. When I look back, and try to place it, American Gladiators clearly falls within the Casio-keyboard, big-haired, cocaine-fueled nineteen-eighties.

And though the facts certainly disagree, I can't help but forgive any writer who'd want to at least imagine that era as "short-lived".

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