It's a vehicle designed to promote the messaging of the current age. It starts out as innocent fun designed to appeal to a wide as audience as possible, but when it strikes a chord across demographics and becomes "more than" just a TV show, the subversion and propaganda kicks in. The writers then begin to push the subversive messaging to the fore, knowing they have the full backing of their sponsoring overlords, and those earlier fans who might not like the latter propaganda will be shouted down and shamed into oblivion by the NPC fans / gatekeepers.
What, in your opinion, are the most obvious subversion/propaganda messages of the show?
I haven't bothered with the 4th season, but from what I recall from the earlier seasons: Race Mixing (the black boy and the red-haired white girl); Strong Masculinity deferring to overly-emotional Femininity (the female characters taking center stage or being the sane voice of reason; the gruff white cop shown to be incomplete in various facets of his being, etc); gradual inclusion of LGBT messaging (one of the kids, from what I can remember, is definitely going to "come out" in future seasons; the lesbian girl who worked in the milkshake / ice-cream parlor).
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