The last time I looked I thought the entertainment industry was dedicated to making money. Excellent idea. As such, you’d think television would produce material that would be attractive to the widest possible audience so as to ensure big viewership. Think again.
This is from a recent article by Elise Ehrhard in mrcTV and relates the programming choices of New York and Hollywood television executives. “Last month, for example, Showtime announced the cancellation of ‘Work in Progress,’ a self-described show about ‘a 45-year-old self-identified fat, queer dyke.’ Remarkably, that description did not entice viewers…Then last week, FX officially cancelled ‘Y: The Last Man’ after only one season. The dystopian show about an apocalypse that kills all biological men, but leaves trannies, had ridiculous lines like, ‘We’ve found plenty of men. None with a Y chromosome.’
Showtime’s nasty ‘Black Monday’ had episodes including a character throwing a drink at a crucifix and yelling, ‘F**k you God!’ and turned the Last Supper into a homoerotic make-out scene.” Enough. You get the drift. In so many senses, Hollywood is playing with itself.
Given we see it’s not about money, then the question is, why? Left wing ideology is an easy answer and a correct one. But it’s not the complete answer. The main reason is they are trying with all their might to impress a group that means the world to them, means more than anybody else in the world: themselves.
The themes and characters in modern television merely make up a big part of the ideas and demographics of the television industry. These characters and scripts portray many of the kind of people who today go into television and the arts in general. Not only are these people clueless about anything outside of New York and Hollywood, they have no idea about anything outside of their immediate social circles.
Case in point, the remake of Sex in the City. We will mercifully ignore some of the rather long in the tooth aesthetic aspects of the show and focus on one character, Miranda. She’s not the cute one, not the promiscuous one, and not the shapely one. The other one.
In the recent sequel she leaves her husband for someone described as “a queer nonbinary podcaster and comedian who works with Carrie Bradshaw.” The clueless part? The character is named Che.
A typical nod to trendy communism amongst the New York and Hollywood set? Uh huh. But it gets even better. Nobody on the show did their research. If they had they would have found out that the commie hero Che they named the character after made a regular sport of killing homosexuals. Yup, old Doc Guevara liked to find gays and shoot them for fun. So the namesake of the character would have gunned down the same character. It would be like naming a character Rabbi Himmler on a show set in a synagogue.
Anybody on that whole set know that? Nope. Why? Because they generally only associate with individuals who are carbon copies of their own prevailing attitudes. Hence why they produce these kind of shows. Pathetic really and not at all profitable in any sense. But then, profit is not the key here. Cultural incest is more like it.