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The Show Must Go Woke!
Some Hollywood producers showed test audiences three episodes of a woke police drama (Show A) featuring “a young POC policewoman who gets dumped by her girlfriend and transfers to a new precinct in a Southern town where she is shocked by the racism, sexism, and abuse of power of her new colleagues as well as their poor relations with the communities they serve.” The drama was being shopped to Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming services.
For contrast, they also showed test audience three episodes of a fake cop show (Show B) about “Two young detectives (two white guys, one Ivy League and the other a good ol’ boy) who are partnered in Vegas where they cultivate informants and recurring girlfriends. Every episode includes a fistfight with chairs and bottles flying, every second episode has a car chase.” It was a put-on based on old “Starsky and Hutch” scripts and loaded with cop show tropes; intended to contrast the old and busted with the new hotness.
Guess which one the test audiences preferred.
Unfortunately for the studio, according to the insider, Show B “tested better with all groups, no matter age, sex or race.”
Well, duh. Real people — not woke NPCs — don’t want to be lectured to, they want to be entertained. The left has taken over all forms of entertainment. Movies, TV, even professional sports, and turned them into platforms for social lecturing. Because the left can only think of these media as vehicles to convey The Message. To paraphrase the Ayatollah Khomeini.
“A Woke regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in woke ideology. There is no humor in woke ideology. There is no fun in woke ideology. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.”
And woke Hollywood properties are at about the same level of popularity as the Islamic Revolutionary Regime in Tehran about now.
The big studios still don’t get it, though. The woke feminist head of Universal Pictures is really keen to do a female-led reboot of the Fast and Furious franchise.
Published in Entertainment
When I see it written that way, I now read it in the Critical Drinker’s voice.
I miss the 80’s.
Then it works as intended.
Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.
— Benjamin Franklin
Universal needs to lose more money.
Remember to give it a little reverb.
Universal tried to reboot their 1930’s Era monsters franchise — the Mummy, the Wolfman, Frankenstein — and lost a sh’load of money.
The guy in charge of that failure is not in charge of the Star Trek franchise.
Hollywood and Washington are the same; you can only fail upwards.
This reminds me of a short-lived cop show called “The Good Guys.” It sadly only ran for one season, but it was great. Colin Hanks played a younger cop and a man of his times. Bradley Whitford played his middle age partner who was like a 1980’s Burt Reynolds who still thought it was the 1980’s. Whitford played his character totally over the top and it was just hilarious. Sigh. Most new shows that I really like get canceled after a season or two.
I never watch any of this stuff, so I’m happy that someone else is telling me what is going on. I entirely missed “Friends” and “Seinfeld” when they were on too. I don’t think I really missed anything.
Well Duh! indeed. Every show today seems to be hectoring me, usually on how wonderful homosexual relations are, or how great are people who think they’re really the sex opposite their reality. Characters that have the characteristics of the “normal” people most of us deal with in daily life are presented as one dimensional, obnoxious, stupid, and/or ignorant. Not entertaining. Especially when “woke” ideology infuses every single show I see.
One of the things the modern studios miss is that they could still deliver their message in an entertaining format. I know I’m going back many, many years, but the television show M*A*S*H had a strong anti-war message, but the entire show was set in a war zone. The show was done with style and panache such that the audience didn’t feel the audience was being preached to.
Oh, I felt preached to. Season by season, M*A*S*H became less funny and more preachy. I have often thought it would be interesting to ask some of the show’s writers if looking at the state of North Korea and South Korea today, do they still think it was only fools and [expletives] who thought we were on a noble mission to save the South from communism.
You lost me with “fake cop show”. What other kind is there?
If you read the linked article, the second show was a decoy made for the purpose of running this test, not a real TV show in production.
It even had inferior production quality to the woke cop drama and still beat it hands down.
M*A*S*H was a very problematic show.
Its lead character was a serial sexual predator.
It portrayed transgenderism as a form of mental illness.
It had a black character named “Spear-Chucker.”
And that was considered liberal in the 1970s.
I miss the 90s.
Vegas is not lacking in LGBTQ plus minus back-back-forward- punch people and POCs. Have a sympathetic drag Queen who is determined to find out who sold fentanyl to his/her best friend. Everyone in the audience would like her because of how horrible fentanyl is.
At the certain risk of dating myself…I miss the 60’s.
I agree about those two shows, but you really shouldn’t miss The Big Bang Theory.
It had an anti-war message, but it was often/usually a simplistic and stupid one, especially if it came from Hawkeye. “If we don’t resist when invaded/attack, there’s no war! Ta-da!”
Look up “Patty Mayo” on YouTube.
And wasn’t Father Mulcahy referred to, at least early on, as “Dago Red?”
Or maybe that was just the movie.
The thing that I liked about Seinfeld was that it was created with the motto of “no hugging, no learning,” and even though Larry David is a lefty, the show was definitely not PC, to the point that episodes are being shelved to this day, as the witch hunters keep finding problematic themes.
That is a very strong recommendation.
Like this one.
https://youtu.be/cpGfyp6MxkM
And this one.
Go woke, go broke.
I watched every Star Trek series prior to the last few years. I have watched the Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise, many, many times.
But the new stuff is simply junk. Go woke, go broke.
Complete first episode can be downloaded here, and watched:
https://www.adrive.com/public/8SVe2u/1×01%20Pilot.avi
Jerry has a Native American girlfriend, but keeps making “offensive” racial faux pas:
I disagree with you in many ways, Gary. But not on this one. Everything after Enterprise is terrible. Except for Lower Decks which is funny. Very unhappy that Enterprise got axed after the 4th season. It was just hitting its stride. It was actually my favorite of the post TOS shows.
Except for the tiny detail… okay, maybe HUGE PROBLEM!… that the Enterprise series was chock-full of stupid retcons.
It was originally supposed to be about the events between the warp discovery by Zefram Cochrane, and the LAUNCHING of the Enterprise. Maybe a little beyond that, but not much. I suspect that would have been significantly better, especially if they weren’t Led Into Temptation for retconning all over the place: dragging in Romulans and Borg and Ferengi and such, just to try and grab “Oh, I remember that!” viewers.
Memberberries, they’re sometimes called.
On the plus side, I’ve heard that some of the studio executives supposedly wanted them to feature a different “boy band” in each episode. THAT would have been even worse.
Oh, and Everybody Knows that DS9 was the best post-TOS show, even if you maybe need to put up with a little TNG to get there.
I bet it’s called I’m Simply Furious . . .