"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 science major at Northwestern University, where he and his friends would work as extras on sets over the weekend to make some spare change (around $44 dollars for a day of hard work).

It was then, however, that Thompson stumbled upon an elective at Northwestern that focused on film. He was immediately hooked.

“Every time I left that course I felt like I had been shot out of a cannon,” Thompson said.

Thompson then applied for a PhD at the University of Chicago, where he took professor Gerald Mast’s film class. That class made Thompson’s decision an easy one when deciding what to pursue for a living.

“That class made me realize I would love to make other people feel as excited about something the same way I was excited about film. My time spent in those classrooms was some of the happiest moments of my early life,” Thompson said.

Turning the study of pop culture from a scarcely common practice to one ubiquitous at most universities was no easy task. Thompson and a handful of other similarly-inspired academics started arguing that pop culture should be studied in the university.

“Because the thought of teaching pop culture was so outrageous at the time, we got a lot of attention for it,” Thompson said.

Thompson’s idea may have sounded outrageous at the time, but he knew almost everything there was to know about pop culture, and his unique blend of past and present insight has made him such a coveted soundbite for the media.

“I know about as much American television as anyone and when something happens, I’m aware of how that fits into a much larger entertainment history,” Thompson said.

Part of the reason Thompson’s intuitions on pop culture are desired by countless outlets is because people actually pay close attention to television nowadays. It was initially so hard to get pop culture study to take off because television used to be a horrendous product and was not considered the high art it is today.

“Television used to be so dumb, it was called the “idiot box”. It was considered what you did when you should have been doing something productive,” Thompson said.

That all changed in the late 80s, when some deeper and more complex shows started to sprout out. But television really took off as the prestige content it is today when HBO released “The Sopranos” in 1999, and other networks followed. Writing and direction became sophisticated, layered, complex. Budgets grew. Stars no longer felt television was beneath them.

This has inspired many potential filmmakers to pursue the industry, leading many of those hopefuls right into Thompson’s office. Thompson though, cautions students to only pursue television and film if it is something they are really passionate about.

“I know this sounds cliche, but the most important thing with any job is to find something that you are called to do, and have a sense of dedication and love for what you do,” Thompson said.

As the study of pop culture evolved though, so did television itself. What used to be three network shows that everybody watched is now hundreds of original series sprawled across various platforms. The sheer volume of content being produced has made it nearly impossible to keep up, and as a result, consumers have fewer shows in common to talk about.

“Even if you just wanted to keep up with the good television it would be difficult, and I try to keep up with as much as I possibly can, but television has become as specialized as literature and poetry,” Thompson said. I kind of miss the way it used to be.”

Thompson is generous with his vast pop culture knowledge, eager to teach not only his students, but also his colleagues. Every Tuesday at lunch in his office, he screens a different movie and orders pizza for anyone to come in and watch.

“It’s like hanging out with Doc Brown of pop culture in that we’re time-travelling back,” fellow professor and screenwriter Keith Giglio said. “He knows the television business so well, inside out. He’s just a delight, a wonderful colleague to have.”

Colleagues love Thompson so much that they wish they could spend more time with him.

“I think Bob is fantastic, and we are so lucky to have him here. I just wish that he wasn’t so busy all the time doing interviews and all that so we could interact with him more,” colleague Tula Goenka said.

But Thompson is so coveted as a commenter because he has lived through television’s entire timeline, from the pitiful quality of the early 80s to the brilliant works of art that have emerged in the mid 2000s and continue today. And now, as streaming services seem to be on the verge of engulfing traditional cable, the future is uncertain, but Thompson will definitely be there to consume it.

“For all we know, our television is going to be sliding down rainbows on the backs of unicorns by 2030.”