John / Billybob
I’ve noticed the recent proliferation of TV shows and movies glorifying mixed racial families and non-traditional lifestyles at the expense of all the old fuddy-duddy shows sporting traditional values. That’s a bit disturbing.
I’ve also noticed in recent years that anything goes as long as the participants all feel good about themselves at the end of the program.
Maybe I can get a TV show. I see stupiid people everywhere!
“The general level of waste, fraud and abuse in federal programs is about 7%.”
This I believe was the immediate reason in ‘93 we instantly became riled about Hillarycare. Not so much the program itself although of course we were upset about that as well, but the audacity of the Clintons’ targeting for theft all that money right in front of our faces was our priority anger.
One of my favorite interview was with a crusty old New York City homicide detective and a so called “profiler.” The profiler could not name a single crime that profiling had helped solve, and the old cop said “crimes get solved with legwork and following leads.”
“Notice how the screen writers for TV like a pack of pigeons on a handful of popcorn kernels? One finds brief success. The others hurry to claim a part of it.”
Entertainment types are lazy. You think comic book movies are everywhere because the audience is clamoring for them? No. Not that their audience has dried up, obviously. My feeling is audiences will show up for any variety of pleasing genres, comics included. These movies are simply everywhere right now because the original X-Men made money, then Spider-Man made loads of money. Any time someone finds a way to make money, others will jump on board.
Ever notice how game shows looked before Who Wants to Be a Millionaire showed up? You can still see the classic game show set in shows that pre-existed Millionaire, like Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. For some reason, once Millionaire revived the genre for primetime, every game show had a host with metallic suits, ominously dramatic music, warehouse-like sets with moving lights, etc.
Smae thing with Survivor. Not only did it’s success launch a billion reality game shows, it launched a billion smarmy hosts with open-collared shirts and shell necklaces, a billion shows where one person gets voted off per week, a billion hours of television padded with shots of nature that vaguely enhance our understanding of the plots by metaphor.
Like I said, entertainment types are lazy.
Martin L. Gross has been covering this stuff for years, yet here we still are making the same old mess worse.
Kudos for the reference to Sherlock Holmes. “Monk”, “Psych” and the better characters in the forensic shows owe it all to the original mack-daddy of cluefulness. Well - Poe’s detective in “The Gold Bug” predates, but that was a one-shot.
The genre is indeed jumping the shark now, what with Zen-enlightened detective (”Life”), Algorithm detective (”Numb3rs”), Actual Psychic detective (”The Mentalist”) and Human Polygraph (”Lie To Me”). It’s only a matter of time until we see a guy sip urine samples and report on the contributors’ lifestyles.
Don’t know about you folks but I’m ready for a Western resurgence. Preferably before electricity is rationed.