Blue Mountain State may seem like your typical guy humor comedy about college, but there is so much more that lies beyond the laughs.
If you’ve never seen the comedy, it’s a show about a football team and their experiences with being athletes in college. As you would imagine from any division one football team they do whatever they want whenever they want and hook up with gratuitous amounts of women…they’re kings of their school.
But looking past the guy humor, all the alcohol and women is a message on how we all should live our college lives. The message is that we should all have as much fun as we can while we’re here and friendship is more important than hook ups.
This message is a reoccurring them in every episode and is achieved by only focusing on the social aspect of college. Yes, we’re here to learn and get an education so we can be successful. But something we sometimes lose sight of when we’re cramming for test and finishing papers at 3 a.m. is that the social aspect is almost as important as the academic.
Five years from now I won’t be able to tell you what I learned in Math 111, let alone can I tell you what I learned in it last semester. Education helps you learn how to adapt to new situations, become organized, etc., but being social develops us as people.
In college, we become the men and women that we will probably be for the rest of our lives. We develop friendships that will last a life time and memories that we’ll reminisce over years from now.
A way Blue Mountain State tries to portray this is in one episode Thad Castle, captain of the football team, eats badger testicles to show his commitment to his team. That’s something ridiculous and something I would never do for my friends unless I had to, but it’s the shows way of showing friends will do anything for each other.
Sex is something that modern society puts on a pedestal. Shows like Jersey Shore make it seem like you need to have hook ups all the time. Blue Mountain State tackles this in a peculiar way.
The players have random hook ups all the time, and sex is a regular theme in many episodes, but the show never puts focus on any of those female characters. Whenever hook ups happen, the show blows it off as if nothing happened, and it goes back to focusing on the football team.
By doing that it gives off the idea that relationships sexual or non-sexual will come and go, but friends will be there when those relationships fail.
TV shows and movies always have messages that portray how the writer views society. Blue Mountain State chooses to focus on the social aspect of college to get its message through to audiences that we only live this experience once at our age, so we might as well live it up while we can.
