Why ‘Gilligan’s Island’ and ‘The X-Files’ Hold the Key to America’s Global Reach

Paul A. Cantor is a strange creature: a conservative professor of English at the University of Virginia who specializes in Shakespeare, loves pop culture and is flat-out funny (he once referred to Mel Gibson’s “Hamlet” as “Lethal Bodkin”). In his new book, Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization, Cantor examines four of his favorite television shows–“Gilligan’s Island,” “Star Trek,” “The Simpsons” and “The X-Files”–and explores how they speak to America’s understanding of its place in the world. Cantor is a proponent of a thoughtful conservatism that should be interesting to liberals and instructive for conservatives, for he has the courage to say out loud that not everything on television is dross and that some of it is not only entertaining but significant as well. Los Angeles Times