One of the few good things that came out of the ridiculous COVID lockdowns is that it opened my eyes to how incredibly poor television has become.
When I watch TV, I do so to be amused, not taught or preached at. I don’t want to learn a lesson and I don’t want to see more of the same propaganda I can see by watching Big Media. I just want to be entertained.
And, if I’m watching a sitcom, I want to laugh. Period.
Maybe the shows all sucked before the break and I just didn’t notice it. I’m pretty sure, though, that they’ve gotten worse. In fact, many of the shows my wife and I used to enjoy are now completely unwatchable.
It isn’t that we haven’t given them a try. We were as excited as anyone to see our favorite comedies come back from hiatus. After everything that happened last year, we needed some levity and a chance to escape for twenty-two minutes. So, we made some popcorn and hit the “play” button. Very few of the shows lasted more than ten minutes before we deemed them no longer worthy of our time.
The reason? They were all trying to be “woke”.
They weren’t trying to simply entertain. Their goal wasn’t to make us laugh. The shows had all been reworked to be more “socially aware” and they all got sort of preachy. And they were no longer funny.
Every show now tries to teach us a lesson about racial injustice, diversity, inclusiveness and even “masks are good”. If I wanted more of that horseshit, I would just watch the news.
I’m going to press “pause” here and make an observation. I’ve noticed that things like racial injustice, diversity and inclusiveness are often referred to as “bullshit” but everything to do with masks, lockdowns and exaggerated death counts are referred to as “horseshit”. Now that I’ve pointed it out, see if you see the same thing.
Now, back to TV.
There seems to be a racial quota for TV shows.
My wife and I play a game whenever we watch a new TV show. No, not that kind of game. Get your mind out of the gutter. Whenever we watch a new show, we try to guess the next character to be introduced. If we’ve already seen characters that are white, black and Asian, the next one up will either be Hispanic, glibtaq or both.
Shows like Seinfeld, Cheers, Friends, Taxi and Frasier could never be made today. Not because they’re not funny, but because the entire casts were white. These shows were funny because they used easily-recognizable stereotypes to make us laugh.
The characters on those shows were flawed and those flaws were accentuated, not hidden. And everyone knows that you can stereotype people, as long as those people are white. Laugh at the quirks of anyone else and you’re a racist.
If Cliff Clavin were black, would Cheers still be funny? Not today. People wouldn’t see a know-it-all postman who didn’t really know anything. They would see a black person who was being portrayed negatively. And that wouldn’t stand.
Could perennial-loser George Costanza be played by a black man? Nope. Because a white man eating a pastry from the trash is hilarious. But seeing a black man do the same thing would be “perpetuating the negative stereotype that black men can’t be successful.”
These days, we’re only allowed to laugh at white people. But, if you tried to make a TV show with an entirely white cast, you wouldn’t meet your diversity quota and your show would never get aired.
So, we’re left with watered-down comedy that, instead of making us laugh, is feeding us more bullshit (or horseshit) propaganda.
And that’s not funny at all.
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