Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
What is Your Entertainment Wokeness Threshold?
Recently, Right Angles wrote a wonderful post making fun of 9-1-1 Lonestar and how incessantly woke it is. At around that time, I decided to give up on the television show, The Good Place, because it exceeded what I call my “wokeness threshold.” In Right Angles blistering review, she mentioned how insufferably preachy the show is. Most notably, the gay and the transgender firepeople before helping a lady suffering a cardiac arrest decide to bother the lady with their personal lives.
Before helping her, a fireman says “I should tell you I’m gay” (why?), and she recoils a little so the trans one bends down to help and says “And I’m trans.” When the woman is in respiratory distress! Excuse me?
Right Angles she concluded that, “I want to be entertained, not yelled at.” As for myself, economic illiteracy very quickly crosses my woke threshold.
The Good Place is a show about whether or not people get into the Good Place or the Bad Place. The Good Place is pretty much heaven and the Bad place is pretty much hell but your actions and not your faith determines who goes where. Almost every action gives you positive or negative points depending on the consequences and intentions of what you do.
The first two season were great television. It was one of the most innovative stories told as a minute comedy and it was both funny and legitimately thoughtful. Then came the third season and in came the economic illiteracy.
I can suspend my disbelief for magic and superpowers and aliens but once people completely misunderstand economics in a story, I lose interest. I don’t have magic or superpowers… that I would admit to, nor am I alien… you totally can’t prove I’m an alien, but I do interact with the economy everyday and I’ve read Thomas Sowell and Milton Friedman so it’s much harder to suspend my disbelief of something that I am both intimately and academically familiar with.
In this particular case, it has to do with the economic acquisition of two bundles of roses and the morality therein. The economics wasn’t even basic.
<Minor spoiler ahead>
A powerful divine being with intellect far beyond human understanding is reading from a book about whose action is good or evil. This divine being apparently interprets goodness the way a 19 year conformist would after listening to his Marxist Professor.
In 1534, Douglass Wynegarr of Hawkhurst England gave his grandmother roses for her birthday. Picked them himself, walk them over to her, she was happy, boom 100 and 45 points. Now, in 2009, Doug Ewing of Scottsville Maryland also gave his grandmother, a dozen roses. But he lost four points.
Why? Because he ordered roses using a cell phone that was made in a sweatshop. The flowers were grown with toxic pesticides picked by exploited migrant workers delivered from thousands of miles away, which created a massive carbon footprint and his money went to a billionaire racist CEO who sends his female employees pictures of his genitals.
In essence, the economic system that has enabled billions of people to read and to have access to basic literacy and healthcare is to its core corrupt. It would be better to have half of your children die in 1534. The slave trade, serfdom and indentured servitude were all normal in 1534 England. England was actually unusual for just having serfs and not slaves.
The rest of the list of problems show just how ignorant our artistic class is of basic realities. Pesticides can be very problematic and they should be regulated sensibly but they do let us create more food and flowers with a minimum of land and help create enough food to avoid child labor. It is unlikely that Doug Ewing’s cellphone was made in a sweatshop because the labor for constructing cellphone parts is too skilled for slave labor. As for the racist billionaire, I will concede that it is disturbingly easy to believe that an elite billionaire is a sex pervert. However, very few CEOs are racist. They have to deal with many different people of many different colors everyday and high I.Q. people tend not to be racist.
That last comment was a rich-hating cherry on the socialism Sunday and was more about confirming the left’s anti-capitalist bias than it is about concern for the victims of our elite’s sexual depravity.
<End of Minor spoiler/>
Any of us who have ever studied algebra know that if you get something wrong in the beginning, the ending result will be wrong even if you do everything else perfectly. Likewise, if you don’t understand Basic Economics, you misunderstand everything about society and politics.
Some writers and critiques have said that the message of a work doesn’t determine its worth, particularly if it’s meant as entertainment. As the saying in Hollywood goes, “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.” Many great Hollywood writers would agree with Right Angles that movies were for entertaining people preaching at them. I respect the sentiment but almost every story has a moral universe that is a crucial piece of the whole.
For example, the first two seasons of The Good Place encouraged people to be good. The show would not have worked without that moral message. The ethical debates in the show are a bigger part of the show than any of the main characters. This isn’t at all unusual. In, To Kill a Mockingbird, Maycomb county and the zeitgeist of the time was as much a character as Atticus or Scout. Scout and the trial of Tom Robinson were the lens through which the reader could see the moral universe as viewed by Harper Lee.
While it is unusual for philosophy to feature so heavily in a narrative written primarily to entertain, it is far from unheard of. Since the time of the Greeks, people who wanted to express ideas wrote stories instead of philosophy. Humans are moved by stories and not by well-researched arguments. The Greeks were a creative and competitive lot and the writers knew that they wouldn’t be able to keep audiences by lecturing at them. Aristophanes has lots of fart jokes for a reason.
Those jokes were funny. I regret nothing.
The Good Place was always left-learning but its leftism was never a core part of the show’s philosophy. Even though the show’s writing, character development and humor seem as good in the third season as it did in the first, the Wokist message fatally undermines the show because its anticapitalist (and I would argue antiwealth) philosophy corrupts the necessary message of struggling to be good.
We immediately understand that if the protagonist of a story starts to be written poorly, the entire story can cave-in like a building falling after one crucial load bearing structure has been compromised. The same is true if the story’s moral universe collapses in on itself. At least, that is my woke threshold.
What crosses your wokeness threshold? What makes you quit a show after a few seasons of really enjoying it? Do you agree that a bad message can undermine the arête of a work?
Published in General
The moral lesson is that you are responsible for everyone and everything your action benefits, regardless of whether it is something you know about. The CEO’s jerkish behavior is something Doug can’t know. It’s utterly insane. If you help an old lady across the street, and she’s actually a serial killer stalking a victim, do you get punished?
My tolerance for wokeness depends on how disruptive it is to the story.
The worst example in the shows I used to like, was a TV detective series “The Closer” where detectives would stop in the middle of bull pen office and start spouting statistics back and forth to each other on an issue like domestic violence or teenage runaways – whatever issue the case of the week centered on. That was very annoying and made me stop watching the show. People dont do that – LAPD homicide detectives dont do that. Kinda blew that suspension of disbelief for me.
It’s a pagan worldview. Oedipus is punished for killing his father and marrying his mother, even though he did not know who they were.
I gave up on The Good Place after a couple of episodes. It had an interesting premise, but the portrayal of anyone who works for the UN as inherently good was an early tip off to the woke direction the show was headed.
When it comes to economic illiteracy, I had a similar experience when watching the 2016 Star Trek movie. I know the originals always had a progressive message but to make competition the fountainhead of Idris Elba’s generic bad guy, in an election year no less, just seemed like blatant politicking. Shame because of the three Abraham’s Star Trek movies it was otherwise arguably the best one.
Which is odd, because it is an odd numbered Trek film.
My tolerance is very, very low, which is why I don’t watch TV.
While what you say is objectively true about the series, my big takeaway is that the writers unwittingly make the argument that one needs both grace and a savior.
Thus making the Christian view the only path to salvation.
The fact that the actors involved haven’t twigged to this in their outside-the-show interviews renders it even more funny/tragic. See Jameela Jamil shouting her abortion for the proof.
I particularly like the episode where they show that the one guy who got it 94% (?) right while tripping on magic mushrooms still hasn’t earned enough woke points to go to the good place.
If you didn’t watch to the end of the first season, you missed out.
My tolerance is extremely low. My radar for preachiness and messaging is acute. I turned off shows before that was even a thing.
I’ve made a hobby of studying this stuff – especially the willing suspension of disbelief phenomenon. Once we fully grasp and include the willing part, which is often omitted or given short-shrift, it’s easier to understand.
Along those lines, we are willing to suspend disbelief regarding magic, aliens and all kinds of fantastical portrayals because we don’t think the authors, producers and actors are trying to convince or persuade us that these things are real. Whereas, when they depict various economic fantasies as real – and we know better – then we become unwilling to suspend our disbelief. It’s a violation of the agreement.
But pardon, and gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O,! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide on man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth;
For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o’er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history;
Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.
Shakespeare’s treatise on willing suspension of disbelief. We must ask our audience to participate with us. These ignorant and arrogant moral scolds don’t bother asking.
You should have kept watching.
IIRC (I watched season 3 as it aired and haven’t revisited the season), the whole point of that scene and the episodes that followed was that literally no one could live up to the woke standards used to “score” the humans. The “wokeness” scoring paradigm prevented anyone from entering the “Good Place” for hundreds of years. As a result, the “Soul Squad” was tasked with devising a new scoring system.
The woman had it coming. She had a history of making “racist” 9-1-1 calls on her neighbor. That pinata incident was egregious.
It’s like a cop show I saw (forgot which one) where the detectives were standing over a dead teenager. One of the cops remarks, “Any idiot can buy a gun these days.” His partner says, “Yeah, and no one’s doing anything about it.”
That needed a spoiler alert for those who hadn’t finished season 1.
But yes, season 3 was premised on the idea that the people running the Bad Place were manipulating the system so that everyone was being sent there.
@arahant beat me to it. My sentiments exactly.
We’ve already gone back and forth a bit about this. But, I don’t regret watching the entirety of the Good Place. I thorough enjoyed it from beginning to end. Schur is a typical liberal and I can see it in all of his shows (Parks and Rec and Brooklyn 99 had similar issues). But it was never enough for me to stop watching them because the pros (characters, humor in the writing, acting, and definitely story for The Good Place) always outweighed the cons.
I already know I have a much higher tolerance of wokeness or liberalism in shows and movies than the average person here. I’ve never stopped watching something because of its politics. Shows I never cared to watch or shows I gave up on (and I’ve given up on a lot of shows) suffered from so many other problems before the wokeness bothered me. I would have given up on the new Trek universe even without its silly need to parallel our 21st century politics (the movies had dumb stories and I never cared for any of the characters I used to like, I’m not going to even start on the show). And shows whose objective is to be blatantly political, I actively avoid.
A lot of the examples stated above aren’t even shows I would ever watch. Police/medical/firefighter procedural shows drive me bananas.
Yea, I’ll take “stuff cops would never say” for $100 Alex.
Same here. The only show I watched recently is The Last Kingdom on Netflix. It had some extremely minor tidbits of wokiness, but for the most part it was great. Also, hard to make Anglo Saxon England woke. Also, they didn’t do any affirmative action casting, which was a relief.
Personally, I find the actions and statements of the creators more off putting than the content of the work most of the time. I can usually dismiss forced diversity, improbably competent women etc. with little more than a roll of the eyes. It’s the creators patting themselves on the back for it that truly gets on my nerves.
For example: I thought the female Ghostbusters remake was mediocre at worst. It was the studio’s actions – trying to deflect all criticism as misogyny – that really bothered me.
Ditto for Captain Marvel which is much better than Ghostbusters but which is still just another Marvel movie.
The most woke show I tolerated from beginning to end was The Good Wife – which was impressive because I detested Alicia.
I think for me what makes wokeness tolerable is if they allow for at least some attempt at push back that reflects some attempt to understand. I got that in that show from Diane, die hard liberal, Hillary worshipper who goes to work for a conservative law group as a Devil’s Advocate and marries a gun “nut”. Their portrayal of the arguments and the gun nut were enough to have their queen bee gain a certain respect for them.
They still weren’t “right”, but at least they were respectable. And I can live with that amount of wokeness.
I did watch Grey’s Anatomy for a pretty long while (even though I don’t like Shonda), but the trans stuff was escalating and I had had enough.
It depends on my expectations going in and if the stories can overcome the wokeness. I have left off quite a few favorites because of wokeness, so I’m not really all that tolerant of it. I will say I didn’t mind the original 9-1-1. I actually really enjoyed it. There were some great positives to it that I thought were rare in modern television, so I was able to tolerate more because of those positives.
Oh Sony did more than that. They scrubbed a lot of the neutral to good comments and left the trolling comments so that when “the news” report on it, they can say the negative reactions were all coming from racists and misogynists. Oh they also pressured Bill Murray with litigation to be in the movie, that’s why he looked so miserable during the tour.
How often do TV shows make their biases known up front, in the trailer or early episodes? Generally, they do, I think. The more common problem is leftward drift after the first season or two.
In this era of streaming, it’s often possible to skip particular episodes or scenes when they cross the wokeness threshold.
My tolerance is high, but only if the foolish drivel is balanced with entertainment. That’s more common in comedies that don’t linger on idiocy before making the next joke.
The greater problem with comedy is that the Left’s culture corrupts their humor to make it ugly and cruel. But if lefty comics poke fun at life more than the conservatives and heritage they hate, it can be funny.
Serious storytelling is moral play. Play is practice. It’s impossible to tell a story without morality as part of the setting and moral decisions as turning points.
We imagine moral situations for the same reason pilots train with simulators: so that we are better prepared for scenarios we have not yet experienced or haven’t mastered.
Hey, I stayed with *Glee* all the way to the bitter end… (The first season was genius).
My wife is watching the new 911 texas show, or whatever it’s called. I just read a book while she has it on.
The Good Wife, was running on left over 90s wokeness – like “The West Wing”. Also The Good Wife ended in 2016, just as Trump Derangement was becoming an epidemic. As you see in the “The Good Fight” the development of the syndrome. I like alot of these shows that have corrupt politicians from Chicago and New York – Even though they never mention party affiliation – you know that any office holder in these cities are democrats.
“Billions” is another show with a high level of wokeness – but it kinda works in the story lines.
While The Good Place does feature the usual inversionism — the Asian guy is really stupid, while the black guy is super-smart — the woke folk were probably annoyed that the two featured couples were both heterosexual. One of the two should have been homosexual, in recognition of the fact that half the population is gay.
(Got you, didn’t I! It’s not one-tenth of that.)
Another common example of inversionism is when you see an 85-pound actress throwing around 250-pound stuntmen with her magical martial arts moves. (If the high-heel fits, Kristin Kreuk!)
Give me a big tub of popcorn and a large diet cola, and I will proceed to enjoy all of the new “Star Trek” movies. Can’t say I remember much about them, though, other than the black-and-white girl and Benedict Cumberbatch ridiculously miscast as Khan.
Not exactly a typical liberal, if Michael Schur gave us the most positive portrayal of a libertarian on television, in Parks and Recreation.
As I understand it, it wasn’t meant that way. Like Archie Bunker before him, Ron Swanson was supposed to be the villain, and the writers were shocked to learn that a large portion of the audience liked him unironically.
The Daily Wire guys are strangely obsessed with this trope. I keep wanting to yell, “It’s just a movie!” whenever they bring it up.
Depends on the movie doesn’t it? To the extent a fair number of action flicks are just cartoons with real people, I’d agree.