"Pop Culture's Doc Brown"
Walk into Bob Thompson’s spacious and beautifully lit office on the fourth floor of Newhouse 3 and it’s immediately obvious that the man is a television maven. Three flat screen TVs are perfectly plastered on the right wall. Then there are the hundreds, yes hundreds, of books on television, and lastly, “Simpsons”, “CSI” and “Friends” themed trivia games. But Thompson isn’t just a professor, he is a pioneer, one who willed the study of pop culture as an art form to almost every college in America, and by doing so has become one of the most respected voices in the industry. Thompson and his associates estimate he has been interviewed more than 35,000 times, with a single-day record of 86 interviews. In fact, some news outlets have even ordered their reporters to stop interviewing Thompson since everybody else does. Thompson’s path to becoming such a renowned pop culture voice was a road that had very little precedent. In the early 80s, Thompson was an art history and political s...