Portlandia , or as it’s known around my place, “Stuff White People Like: The TV Show ” aired its season finale on March 9, having successfully bested Mad Men as the show whose impact on the cultural discourse furthest outstrips its ratings. The kind of people who pen magazine articles defining the culture’s official watercooler topics spring directly from the educated, anxiously hip urban middle class that Portlandia captures so perfectly, giving it a massive edge in this contest. Beyond just being an entertaining black hole of self-referential humor, however, Portlandia signals an important shift in the zeitgeist. By replacing once-fashionable hipster-bashing with warm-hearted humor about hipsters, for hipsters, Portlandia suggests that finally, a decade after it became cool, hipster-bashing is square yet again. It’s once more hip to be hip, so long as you have a sense of humor about it. To be clear, Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, the creators and lead actors of Portlandia ,...
