Where Pop Culture Meets Academia

For nearly 30 years, the Bleier Center has served as a “think tank” on the art of television.

Most Tuesday afternoons, Syracuse University senior Victoria LaFarge ’25 curls up on the couch with a slice of pizza and watches TV. It’s a ritual she shares with about 40-50 other regulars known as the “Bleier Bunch,” so named for the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture in the Newhouse 3 building.

two people stand at a table and talk — “We’re like family, brought together by the magic of television and pop culture,” says Victoria LaFarge, pictured left.

LaFarge attends “Tuesdays With Bleier,” a weekly series of TV screenings that the center’s founding director, Bob Thompson, has hosted for the past 17 years. Fun and informal, each event is like an episode of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” with trailing commentaries provided by Thompson and his retinue.

“He invites everyone—students, other professors, library workers, janitorial staff,” says LaFarge, a dual major in television, radio and film and English and textual studies. “We’re like family, brought together by the magic of television and pop culture.”

people sit on couches and watch TV — The Bleier Center hosts a drop-in screening series called *Tuesdays With Bleier*. Ryan Maguire ’23 (above) attributes the series’ popularity to the center’s affable founding director, Bob Thompson.

The drop-in series draws on the Bleier Center’s extensive archives—tens of thousands of news reels, documentaries, sitcoms, reality shows, cartoons, commercials, etc. Many are from Thompson’s personal stash of 30,000 hours of videotape.

Everything is presented in its original, unfettered glory, “every television memory you can think of,” LaFarge continues. From the Apollo 11 moon landing to the finale of “M*A*S*H.” From the assassination of President Kennedy to the Beatles’ debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Come for the show, stay for the commercials.

retro merchandise from old television shows sit on a table — “The Bleier Center has an eccentric relic for almost every show or moment that’s graced our television screens,” says Roman Doyle ’24, an LA-based filmmaker.

Free and open to the campus community, Tuesdays With Bleier—and the self-named center—is a “dream come true” for Thompson, the gregarious Trustee Professor of Television, Radio and Film in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. “I try to make our screenings timely and relevant,” says Thompson, adding that the series title is a nod to the book Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom, on whose radio program he has appeared.

Film major Hunter Guillet ’25 says that no two screenings are alike. “My favorite was the first episode of ‘Saturday Night Live,’ which aired 50 years ago. Afterward, we discussed how different it was from the current iteration of the show.”

a Mork and Mindy doll sits on a shelf next to a TV — The Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture is home to such ephemera as this *Mork & Mindy* pull-string doll, which mysteriously stopped working when its star, Robin Williams, died.

When activist poet Nikki Giovanni died last December, Thompson dug up a rare, 1971 conversation between her and James Baldwin on the television show “Soul!” Co-funded by the fledgling Corporation for Public Broadcasting, “Soul!” was then the only nationally televised weekly series produced by and for Black people.

“Giovanni was a rising star; Baldwin, a literary icon,” Thompson recalls. “She didn’t pull any punches, but her respect for him was apparent. The interview is an extraordinary glimpse into Black history and culture.”

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