Guest Post by The Zman
The news brings word that Hollywood is planning to “reboot” some hit TV series from the olden thymes. Shows like All In The Family, The Jeffersons and Good Times are on the drawing board for new versions. Presumably there is a market for 1970’s nostalgia, although the people old enough to remember those days are getting long in the tooth. If you were an adult in the heyday of these shows, you’re past 60 now. Perhaps the children or grandchildren of these people suddenly have a taste for these old programs.
Or, maybe it is time to retcon the 1970’s.
The idea currently being discussed by Lear and Sony executives would be to have new actors recreate classic episodes of the shows, working from the original scripts, and package them as short, six-episode anthologies. The scripts would be treated similar to plays being mounted in new productions.
“There is some talk about doing some of the original shows, redoing them with today’s stars,” Lear toldVariety. “There is a possibility that we’ll do ‘All in the Family,’ ‘Maude,’ ‘The Jeffersons,’ “Good Times.’”
Discussions about remaking more of Lear’s catalogue come as Sony gears up for the premiere of the new “One Day at a Time,” which re-imagines Lear’s ’80s sitcom about a single mother raising two children. The new series, which premieres on Netflix Jan. 6, focuses on a Latino family with a female Army veteran at its center.
It’s not hard to imagine how this will go. All In The Family will feature a mixed race family, where the patriarch is a transgender white man. Gloria will be a gay male and Meathead will be a gender fluid lesbian, who enjoys lifting weights. The Jeffersons will be the same show, but not funny, because nothing has changed for black people since the ’70’s and that’s not funny. Good Times will have Amy Schumer and Seth Rogan forced to live in a tenement owned by Donald Trump and managed by Richard Spencer.
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The truth is, those descriptions are far too conservative. People who watch a lot of television probably just filter out the endless proselytizing, but that’s pretty much all TV is these days. It is an endless stream of agit-prop. The mere fact that Amy Schumer can get work on television says the people in charge hate their customers. According to the ads, there is a show called Samantha Bee, where a middle-aged prude screeches at a camera for an hour every night. Why would anyone make such a show?
The sudden interest in the 70’s by the crazy liberals who run Hollywood could simply be a bit of cosmic humor. The last great Progressive Awakening started in the early 1960’s and burned itself out by the middle of the 1970’s. Even though Jimmy Carter is remembered as a dreary liberal, he was not a darling of the Left in 1976. By that point it was clear that the Progressives were spent and it was just a question as to when the normal adults would regain control and begin cleaning up the mess left by the Progressive lunatics.
Today, we are at a similar spot. Hillary Clinton was the only person the Left had as an option. Progressives have burned themselves out to the point where it is a movement run by broken down old geezers. Just as TV in the 70’s was full of preachy liberals when the country was increasingly tired of preachy liberals, the current year will be filled with despairing moonbats railing about the current year. Recycling the great liberal hits of the last period of Progressive decline is a logical starting point.
The big difference is the current year has cable, streaming and cord cutting. The Progressive proselytizers in Hollywood cannot rely on a captive audience. For example, the endless ads for the Samantha Bee show suggest no one watches it. Why else run all of those ads? A quick search reveals that her program gets a peak of 700,000 viewers, which would have got it cancelled immediately in the 1970’s, but today’s subsidies from the cable monopolies keep these fringe shows on the air, mostly as vanity projects.
All of this should be viewed as good news for normal people. The fever appears to have broken and we are heading into a period where the normal adults take over from the nutters. The Progs will be left to proselytizing to an increasingly disinterested audience on TV. Unlike the 70’s, where we had to sit through liberal crap on television, we can now watch whatever they call the new Top Gear on Amazon or something on NetFlix. We are, with regards to our video entertainments, spoiled for choice. That’s ultimately the best antidote to Progressive lunacy – choice.
This is sad: “The idea currently being discussed by Lear and Sony executives would be to have new actors recreate classic episodes of the shows, working from the original scripts,”
What this says is that there’s no talent to write new material. I can believe it, seeing all that there is are ‘reality’ shows, that border on stupid.
On Sunday, when it was -20, I was going through the on-line Direct-TV guide. Direct-TV = 250 channels of crap. Anyway there’s this Alaskan show. It was really stupid. It’s about misfits/stupids that want to live in the Alaskan wilderness. They ‘run around’ the forest, chopping down trees, and hauling them with ancient heavy equipment, while trying to avoid killing one another with accidents.
TV is dead.
Why does ANYONE still watch Corpus TV …. I mean .. really ????
It’s free.
“the Samantha Bee show”…never heard of it; but don’t watch much TV. I’m sure it sucks.
I can’t see this working, those shows only had humor and meaning in the context of their times.
The same way “Leave it to Beaver” and “Father knows best” would be meaningless and out of favor today.
(unless maybe “the Beaver” was a child tranny and the father in Father knows best was the part of a bisexual lesbian based marriage, that might work today)
Times have changed.
Well maybe Archie will be fucking Gloria and Edith becomes a lesbian.
This is what we’ll get.
Boycott Hollywood, everyone and everything in it, developed and created there. Don’t forget what they just tried to do to YOU and your FAMILY.
Kill your TV. Do it Now.
You’ll thank me later.
Bad idea. Norman Lear was a good producer at the time, and the writers hit the social issues of the day in just the right way that didn’t offend one side or the other too much. Don’t think they could pull that off again, as the country is MORE divided now than then, IMHO.
IMO shows like “SNL” , “All In The Family”, “The Jeffersons” etc. were the beginning of the liberal war against white men. Archie Bunker was made to look like an ignorant uneducated idiot while George Jefferson spouted the words “Honkie” and “Cracker” every other breath as he degraded white people.
Perhaps Da Joos want to give it another go round since there are still too many non-commies here in the USA!USA!USA!. Bringing back these social engineering icons might push the minnies into card carrying pinko land where they want them.
Can’t have a commie NWO without commies, now can you?
Exactly. This isn’t about Hollywood running out of ideas and rehashing old material for an easy profit…although they’ve certainly done that before many times. This is about turning the screw even tighter in the manufactured “race war” they’re fomenting. The 70’s had some of the most anti-White, bigoted, leftist propaganda TV shows on the air, even when compared to today, many of them pushing themes like White “racism” (All in the Family), race-mixing (The Jeffersons), the “joy” of divorce and broken families (One Day at a Time) and the Po’ black families living in the projects kept down by the so-called corruption of White society (Good Times), just to name a few. Let’s not forget Latino issues and shows like Chico and the Man or the importance of abortion and militant feminism (Maude) either. Norman Lear was without question the source of nearly all the Cultural Marxism woven into TV sitcoms of the 70’s. Actually, I thought he was dead by now. It was these shows that made as drastic a social change in TV programming when compared to something like The Flying Nun in the 60’s as acid rock did for music when compared to The Four Seasons less than a decade earlier. TV was all about social brainwashing in the 70’s, and what better way to program a new generation than to drag out these old Soviet-Coms.
From Earl…
There has been a big question mark over what effect television and the movies was going to have on humanity. I’m sure many people knew the effect was going to be huge, and had a seriously uneasy feeling about it. It looks like we now have the answer.
I think there is actually some decent shows / writing on TV now, although a small percentage.
I like “Lucifer” on Fox: [The series focuses on Lucifer Morningstar, the Devil, “who is bored and unhappy as the Lord of Hell and resigns his throne and abandons his kingdom for the beauty of Los Angeles, where he gets his kicks helping the LAPD punish criminals”.[5] Lucifer runs a nightclub in Los Angeles called “Lux”, with the assistance of his demonic ally Mazikeen or “Maze”. After a minor celebrity whom Lucifer once helped achieve fame is murdered outside his club, Lucifer becomes involved with the LAPD when he takes it upon himself to assist Detective Chloe Decker in finding the one responsible so that he can “punish” him. He becomes fascinated with Decker when she appears to be immune to his powers and charms.] – Wikipedia
The actor Tom Ellis’ Lucifer is a fascinating study in contradictions, brazen and confident one minute, puzzled and insecure about the humans he studies the next. He has family issues, ethical issues, guilt and responsibility issues, and he makes the character compelling.
I also like Gotham, Arrow and Designated Survivor, along with Agents of SHIELD. If Fox would just revive Constantine as a show, it would be even better!
But the key, as always, is the writing. Bringing a complex, difficult character to life is much HARDER than writing a fluffy sitcom that tries to moralize and propagandize. Especially since the moralizing and propagandizing is usually from a liberal viewpoint! You don’t watch Lucifer to hear about how judging the Devil is politically incorrect and how religion is a joke and everyone should be doing drugs and alcohol and constant sex because it doesn’t matter; you watch to see how Lucifer will deal with the guilt of killing Uriel (who was trying to force him back into becoming Hell’s landlord) or how Amanadiel (another angel, not yet fallen) will deal with his own sins on Earth (that have so far turned his once-snowy wings a dribbling brown / black and losing feathers, causing him much grief). You watch to see how Mazikeen, a demon who was Lucifer’s bodyguard, adapts to losing that position and becoming a member of human society (“Look, Linda, it’s my first paycheck as a bounty hunter! Hunting down humans is a JOB, who would have guessed?”). And how she learns how to deal with humans in general (“I’ve noticed something: if you offer a human sex, they SHUT UP!”).
Anyway, re-treading old sitcoms holds no interest for me; except for those above, I watch little TV these days, and recycled ancient shows I rarely watched then won’t lure me in. YMMV, but I suspect these recycles won’t fly for long.