[Brett Martin, author of the book “Difficult Men”, about the producers behind the current era in TV] notes that there was something explicitly political at work in the early days of what he calls television\u2019s \u201cThird Golden Age.\u201d Americans \u201con the losing side\u201d of the 2000 election, Martin writes, \u201cwere left groping to come to terms with the Beast lurking in their own body politic.\u201d As it happened, \u201cthat side happened to track very closely with the viewerships of networks like AMC, FX, and HBO: coastal, liberal, educated, \u2018blue state.\u2019 And what the Third Golden Age brought them was a humanized red state. .\u2009\u2009.\u2009\u2009. This was the ascendant Right being presented to the disempowered Left\u2014as if to reassure it that those in charge were still recognizably human.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of course, the \u201crecognizably human\u201d people who dared vote for George W. Bush were all sociopathic or psychopathic crooks: Tony Soprano, Walter White (note the name) of Breaking Bad, the polygamous Mormon Bill Henrickson on Big Love, and others. They were the characters at the center, and they were indeed fully human.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Less human, but no less emblematic? \u00a0“Peter Griffin”.<\/p>\n
No, seriously.<\/p>\n
Anyway, J-Po finds the part that’d been nagging at me:<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the depiction of the worlds in which they live that is so striking, even more so in the series that have come along since the body politic\u2019s shift to the left, beginning in 2006. The canvas on which these characters are brought to three-dimensional life isn\u2019t a \u201chumanized red state\u201d at all, but rather the red state of liberal horror fantasy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The whole thing is worth a read.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve never been much of a TV watcher. \u00a0 I’ve gone through some major parts of my life with no TV at all, and many more not really watching any. But over the last eight months or so, via the miracle of Netflix, I’ve caught up on some of the shows everyone says “you just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-n-e"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42507"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42507\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42528,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42507\/revisions\/42528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}