The key topics of TV show “Let them talk”

The article presents the results of the thematic analysis of the TV talk show “Let them talk” (within the season 2017) - the highest rated program of the First Channel. The main goal is to identify the real values promoted by its creators and participants to the public. The relevance of the study is explained by the fact that the federal television in modern Russia reproducts the socially significant patterns of thinking and behavior of citizens in an attempt to unite society on the basis of common values. If the program “Let them talk”, according to its authors’ attitudes, brings to discussion the sensible subjects for “all of the Russians without exception”, there is a reason to discover and comprehend the explicit and implicit subjects using the content analysis and thematic analysis. As a result of our analysis we identified the values’ paradox: though the word “child” was the most mentioned in season 2017 the narrative role attributed to the children in the TV-show in question is to be “Me Guffin” (A. Hitchcock’s terminology). The substance of the above-mentioned paradox is that the child itself is important only as a tool for achieving the goal and at the same time the child is often the reason of conflicts between the show participants. The main results of the study were presented in english as a paper “Let Them Talk as Encyclopedia of Russian Life: Latent Accursed Questions on Russian Television (2017)” for the the Eighth International Scientific and Practical Conference “Modern problems of linguistics and didactics: Interdisciplinary approach in the humanities and social sciences”.