A quick New Year’s kudos to NPR for bringing more depth to our discussions of modern pop culture. Their new series In Character explores how authors develop indelible characters and, more significantly, how those characters reflect our broader cultural values. While the series is appearing on “All Things Considered,” NPR is also maintaining a companion blog with plenty of supplementary material and space for audience interaction.

While students of cultural studies might feel that the series is only scratching the surface at best or being outrageously reductive at worst, I think it’s always worthwhile when a mainstream media outlet (yeah, I’m calling NPR mainstream) attempts to engage its audience in a conversation about the social and historical context of what is usually relegated as “entertainment.”

Besides plot, characters are the major way in which readers and viewers process the stories around them. But it’s easy for most people to judge a character simply on whether they relate to him or her — or, if the character is from a completely different walk of life, whether the actor was able to represent the character realistically.

So to get us thinking about the psychological motivations behind our attractions to certain characters is a great starting point to some advanced cultural criticism. Elizabeth Blair, in her introduction to the series, suggests in her conversations with various writers and actors that even the characters who are seemingly most different from us might reflect our own individual and collective desires:

These fully conceived characters often do the things we couldn’t, wouldn’t or shouldn’t. The superhero flies. The wisecracker says things we think about saying, but don’t. The villain does the unthinkable.

And when we get to know them, we learn something about ourselves.

With this perspective in mind, the first full installment in the series focuses on “Mudbone,” the alter ego that comedian Richard Pryor created to say more than he could say himself.