THE ROOTS OF THE COUNTERCULTURE MOVEMENT If you were growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a must-see comedy series with a telling undertow was The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Created by the gifted author and screenwriter Max Shulman who often wrote satirical comedies that addressed societal trends, Dobie Gillis was an important introduction to the so-called counter- culture era of the later 1960s and early 1970s. Not only was it the first major-network series featuring a teenage cast, but it also dealt with the counterculture movement of the 1950s known as the Beat generation or, more simply, the beatniks. The tongue-in-cheek series took place in a small midwestern city and centered around a trio of different characters who would all represent elements of the counterculture movement to follow. Dobie Gillis himself was a white middle-class teenager, somewhat bored with his suburban lifestyle, who was looking for something more meaningful and finding it in teenage girls. In the midst of his many affairs, however, he always seemed in search of something more as each week’s episode would find him sitting in the city park beneath Rodin’s statue of The Thinker. He struck the same hunched- over pose, chin resting on his fist, pondering the meaning of his life. The motif was somewhat ironic, given that Dobie was not a good student in high school and lived more for weekend life. His INTRODUCTION
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