Anything that makes you feel like you’re doing something smart, but you’re still pretty comfortable or unchallenged doing it, that’s midcult. Time magazine is midcult, as is Game of Thrones. Portlandia is midcult; Downton Abbey is midcult. So is NPR and orchestras playing Led Zeppelin and The Old Man and the Sea and nature shows narrated by David Attenborough. Macdonald describes a midcult success as something that “has been praised by critics who should know better, and has been popular not so much with the masses as with the educated classes.”
He sounds like a snob with a stick up his butt.
