While Hollywood (a wholly owned subsidary of the American Left) toes the left’s designated political line, they get almost…conservative, sometimes, when the proverbial chips are down:
On some issues, Hollywood can be downright right-wing. From the value of guns in The Walking Dead to the honor of police in countless dramas to the importance of family in most sitcoms, there is a lot more conservatism, broadly understood, on TV than conservatives or liberals ever notice.
And so it is with abortion. With the exception of Maude (an awful left-wing 1970s TV show) and some “edgy” HBO series, there have been no major sitcoms in which a character has had an abortion.
I’d add Neve Campbell’s “Julia Salinger” from Party of Five which, it’s alarming to note, was 22 years ago.
Why? Well, one reason is abortions aren’t funny. There’s no reason to write a storyline in which a character gets pregnant only to decide later not have a baby. That’s not a punch line, it’s a tragedy. Even the very liberal Mindy Kaling, star and producer of The Mindy Project, says the show won’t touch the issue of abortion — and Kaling plays a gynecologist.
And so while politics is downstream of culture, at least some part of the culture business finds it in its interest to remember that most people are, broadly, conservative.
I’d say its less of a conservative bent and more of a ratings thing. As stated above, people don’t find abortions funny. A related question….how come homosexual characters in MSM programing never have sex? I’ve never watched modern family, but read that about the 2 gay guys. They are never banging each other on the show.
The recently ended “Parenthood” had an abortion done by one of the kid’s girlfriends, so not by a regular. And even then the Berkeley based boy was torn up by not having a say in it.
In a related note, I’m going to bet that the minimum wage hike in California is going to take it out of their hide, too–extra wages aren’t exactly princely, if I remember right. Or are they exempt?
Chuck, even Disney is going full PC as far as homosexual characters. Don’t believe me? Check out how Dorothy was awakened by Ruby last night. Or don’t as your tastes prefer. Personally, I left nearly all TV behind years ago and I don’t miss it as I prefer not to swim in cesspools.
“to the honor of police in countless dramas ”
I had to stop watching them. I kept yelling at the screen “SHUT UP! Don’t talk to them without a lawyer. Are you insane?
I’d add Neve Campbell’s “Julia Salinger” from Party of Five which, it’s alarming to note, was 22 years ago.
The Sarah Silverman Project had an episode where the title character used abortion as birth control and played it up for laughs.
South Park has had several episodes where abortion was treated as something “humorous” including one where Cartman was actively encouraging women who didn’t want abortions to get them so he could harvest stem cells from the aborted embryos in order to clone a Shakey’s pizza (yes, that was something they actually did).
I’m pretty sure that Family Guy did something with abortion as well.
Chuck, even Disney is going full PC as far as homosexual characters. Don’t believe me? Check out how Dorothy was awakened by Ruby last night.
I actually dig Once Upon a Time (although they need to wrap up the show before it goes the way of Sleepy Hollow and Grimm) and didn’t mind the Dorothy/Ruby shipping. OUAT (much like Buffy the Vampire Slayer) treats its characters (and by extension its audience) with a certain level of respect knowing that we watch because we care about the characters so by showing their characters as real people (“real” within the context of their fictional universe) they manage to avoid the trap that a lot of shows that insist on being IN YOUR FACE about having a same sex couple or the token gay character have fallen into by making them two dimensional caricatures or even objects of ridicule.
DMA – I have exactly the same problem. “Shut Up, Dummy! I decline to say answer questions without my lawyer and I do not consent to a search! How hard is that to remember?”
Worse, my wife punches my arm for saying “four, five, six, you’re out of bullets.” Who counts shots when the hero is fighting Bad Guys? Me, I guess.
Best scene in Western movies: Silverado, they’re storming the ranch house where the kid is being held hostage, the hero has fired several shots from his single-action Colt during the ride in, he jumps on the porch, looks at the gun, realizes he doesn’t know how many shots are left or how many bad guys are inside the house and it will take forever to swap out cartridges one-at-a-time. So he drops the pistol on the porch and draws his backup gun before kicking the door. I spilled popcorn everywhere when I leapt up in the theater yelling “YES, YES, THAT’S THE WAY YOU DO IT.” My kids were mortified.
Cartman is a semi-satanic character.
In one episode he killed a kid’s parents, made chili out of them and fed it to the kid.
Well, they did make a song, a festival, a cafeteria, and a musical out of the life of Alferd Packer, the original party cannibal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alferd_Packer
Cartman is a semi-satanic character.
Ironically Satan is an actual character on South Park (and generally seen as a pretty nice fellow).
In one episode he killed a kid’s parents, made chili out of them and fed it to the kid.
It’s worse than you think – Scott Tennorman’s father actually turned out to be Cartman’s biological father as well.
I think SouthPark is the outlier of outliers when it comes to pushing the boundaries of socially taboo subjects. They go extremely out of their way to purposefully offend, almost always to great effect (IMO, but I’m pretty much impossible to offend).
Regarding the Big Bang Theory clip referenced in the Breitbart article, I’m reasonably sure “person” was chosen for Raj’s line for the humor of that phrase being said by a non-American geeky scientist, as opposed to “you made a baby”. I don’t think they made this choice with any regard to PP/big abortion’s pushing to not humanize a pre-birth being.
While some aspects of BBT are decidedly liberal (pre-marital sex is the Everest of geeky conquests, and all 7 of the main characters as well as many side characters partake/partook at least once, and Christianity is ridiculed by the portrayal of Sheldon’s mother as a Texas redneck evangelical simpleton), other aspects of the show do celebrate conservative values: The value of family (regardless of difficult relationships like Sheldon and his mother), doing the right thing (and having shame the few times the right thing wasn’t done or the wrong thing was done), and work/career advancement.