When Did Entertainment Become Politicized?

Don’t Push Your Politics-Just Tell Me A Story!

“Tell me a story!”  It’s a phrase we associate with children, sometimes phrased as a question and sometimes as a demand.  As parents, we may associate it with a child trying to delay bedtime.  We may even have used the strategy ourselves when we were young.  At its heart however is a genuine request, a request to be entertained.  We want a good story though.  If Oscar Wilde was right and “[a] bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company,” then a bad story deprives us of time without providing us with entertainment.  Unfortunately, in the age of streaming services, an age of almost limitless stories, the bad far outweighs the good.

Bruce Springsteen once lamented that there were 57 channels and nothing on.  Today we have vastly increased the number of “channels” but the quality doesn’t seem to have improved.  Certainly, there are rare gems that pop up. Game of Thrones, The Menu, and House of Cards come to mind.  However, if like me, you subscribe to multiple streaming services, it is shocking how little quality programming there is. Much of this is due to: 

• Lazy Writing

• Time 

• Moralizing and Political Agendas

Lazy Writing 

While poorly written shows exist, they are usually easy to weed out.  Websites/apps like IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes allow us to easily see what critics and viewers think and while these groups frequently disagree, if everyone hates a program, chances are that it’s bad.  Lazy writing, however, is more insidious than bad writing, as it relies on low expectations and inattentive viewers. 

Need 20 minutes of material but only have 15?  How about a 5-minute sex scene?  Need 6 to 8 episodes but only the material for 1?  Try exploring the relationships of secondary characters that mean almost nothing to the plot (Dammit, I’m looking at you Perry Mason, Season 2).  The same applies to movies.  The Transformer Movies are perfect examples of prioritizing sex and action over plot, and while it is hard to imagine anyone writing a good story about giant shape-changing robots, Reel Steel did a pretty good job (granted the robots didn’t change shape).  

Time 

Let’s get this one out of the way.  Yes, age plays a factor.  My mother still longs for Doris Day movies and there’s no doubt that my impressions are shaded by what I grew up watching.  The Wrath of Kahn remains the greatest movie ever made (I’ve seen Citizen Kane, it’s not even close).  

More important, though, is the fact that (it hurts to say this) I’m no longer a kid.  I loved Star Wars and Star Trek when I was a kid, but their black-and-white worlds bore me now.  While characters who are completely good or all bad are welcome in some genres (ex. Superhero movies), complex characters vastly improve a story.  Andor, with flawed heroes and villains who have troubled relationships with their mothers and coworkers, may be the best Star Wars show ever.  If nothing else, it is the first one aimed at adults.  Battlestar Galactica (2004 version not the 1970s version) which ran during the early years of the War in Iraq presented a complex situation that defied binary right and wrong answers and as a result, may be one of the best shows ever written (no I’m not exaggerating). 

Not these Cylons:

These Cylons:

But time and experience color our impressions in another way.  I’ve watched so many movies and shows that it’s hard to surprise me anymore.  This is not always an issue.  Good comedies can be predictable and funny while shows with great dialogue need not be surprising.  However, exposure to good writing makes bad writing more obvious and less tolerable.  In some ways, Game of Thrones ruined TV for me.  The possibility that the main characters could die meant actions had consequences.  Contrast this with The Walking Dead in which main characters would regularly wander off and do stupid things and survive (Die Carl! Die!!!  Why won’t you die?!).  

Predictability breeds boredom.  There is some hope that writers are starting to learn this lesson.  The Last of Us and Black Summer demonstrate how good an apocalyptic zombie show can be if its characters behave like normal people and face real consequences when doing stupid things (yes I know zombies aren’t real.  Unlike vampires).

Moralizing and Political Agendas 

Lazy writers and jaded views are not likely to go away any time soon. A bigger issue today is moralizing.  Whether it's politics or social justice it seems that every program has to weigh in on something.  As the purpose of the entertainment industry is to make money, pushing a particular political point of view, as Saturday Night Live did during the Trump years, seems counterproductive.  As Michael Jordan said when asked to endorse a political candidate, “Republicans buy sneakers, too.”  In other words, don’t alienate half your audience.

Representation is less clear-cut.  Certainly, we want television to roughly approximate what society looks like, but this can be taken to extremes.  Why is it necessary to make a white character black (ex. James Bond) or a male character female (ex. The Ghostbusters reboot (sucked)).  Are writers incapable of creating something new?  Atomic Blond did it with Charlize Theron as a female spy.  It is also possible to inject representation into existing franchises creatively as the last Bond movie did by replacing 007 not James Bond and Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse did with Spiderman. Contrast these approaches with this one:

Really?  Is this supposed to be a historical drama?  If so, Netflix gets an “F.”  If not, then try again.  The sad thing is it wouldn’t take much work.  Just change all the names, make it an imaginary world, and copy what happened in history.  Or given how often we’re lectured that there’s not enough African history in schools, the industry could just tell a story from African history.  The Woman King anyone?  

It seems that shows are more focused on representation than writing these days.  It’s gotten to the point where you can play woke bingo in the first 10 minutes of a new show as the writers and producers try to account for all the important “identities.” I don’t know how much of this is laziness on the part of writers and how much of it is actors and producers using their platforms to “make a difference,” but the transparent virtue signaling of racebending should be obvious to everyone.  It is to The Babylon Bee which wrote the following mock review of the Rings of Power:

“A Storytelling Atrocity with Bush-League Production and Acting So Bad, It's Offensive. But There's a Black Dwarf 5/5 Stars.”

I have no doubt that writers are doing their best to provide entertaining stories.  I am less certain of producers whose goals seem focused more on driving viewership and profits than creating good stories.  What’s certain is that until the industry begins prioritizing storytelling, finding entertaining shows will remain a challenge.  It can still be done, but you have to shuck many oysters to find the occasional pearl.  A world of advice to the industry, give me a reason to stay up.  Don’t lecture me. Don’t push your politics on me. Don’t bore me.  Just tell me a story!