Forget 'Gossip Girl' and bed-hopping. The American public, as it showed by electing Obama, is ready again for TV shows that reflect real life.Obama--is there anything he can't do?
Already the signs are there, in the most unexpected and disparate places. "60 Minutes," which for recent years has seemed something of an anachronism, is suddenly a ratings juggernaut. On Fox's "24," Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) finds himself in a less cowboy-worshiping-and-torture-tolerant nation. Over at the CW's "Gossip Girl," the appearance of (in a romantic role no less) gave the show a sudden strange intelligentsia quotient even as Serena (Blake Lively) put down her party girl hat to impress her sober beau. "Mad Men" racked up awards and even a few more viewers for AMC with its ongoing and increasingly ominous portrait of America about to enter the political turmoil of the '60s, while in a week TNT will launch "Leverage," in which Timothy Hutton plays a epiphany-fueled modern-day Robin Hood.
President-elect Barack Obama will no doubt put his imprint on many things in this country, politically and culturally, but the first evidence of change that matters may come on the flat screens that unite this great nation: In a world of sustained post-adolescence, where teenagers swill martinis ("Gossip Girl") and head neurosurgeons live with multiple roommates ("Grey's Anatomy"), suddenly it's hip to be grown up again.
(via Best of the Web)
4 comments:
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Obama--is there anything he can't do?
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Once again: Rock. Big. Nnnnnnnngggghhhhh!!!
:oP
"60 Minutes" -- *GAG* -- I stopped trusting 60 minutes decades ago (ca. 1980) when they did a report about the 1957 Kishtym nuclear accident in Russia. In it, they let Ralph Nader make some idiotic claim of "coverup", as though it had anything to do with responsible handling of nuclear materials (the Russians were dumping random nuclear wastes down a hole in the ground. They collected in one place. Formed a natural "pile" sufficient to create the necessary heat and/or energy to set off a small explosion (probably *chemical*, igniting a methane pocket) which sent a plume of radioactive materials across a small swath of a deserted region of Russia.
It was so well covered up that I'd known about it myself (I was a physics *major* at a Florida university at the time) and had been written up in nuclear/physics journals over 10 years before *I*d found out about it...
And I think it says a lot when you grasp that Mr. Nader is so well-informed -- and his advisers likewise -- that they had never read or heard about the journals in question.
Yeah, them's some scientists you got working for you, ain't they, Mr. Nader??? < --- Assume inadequate level of disgusted sneering applied due to limitation of human facial muscles.
In short, it was a hatchet piece on the nuclear power industry disguised as a news report. The incident had nothing to do with nuclear power generation in the west (the laboratory using the ridiculous disposal techniques was a weapons R&D lab), any more than Chernobyl did a half-decade later (The primitive technology used at Chernobyl has never, ever even been seriously proposed for application in a power generation installation, and the kind of incident that happened is literally impossible using Western designs)
"24" -- what's he on, like, his sixth president? He may save the world, but he doesn't seem to be doing much for the PotUS, is he?
"Mad Men" -- I kinda want to like this show but maaaannnnn, is it dark and dreary. Its view of the early sixties is like a full-employment guarantee for suicide hotlines around the nation. Rather a bit of a contrast with That Thing You Do, which is about exactly the same time era, innit? You can look for the darkness, or you can look for the light. And I know which the creators of Mad Men are looking for.
I gave up on "60 Minutes" when I turned conservative in the late 1970s (thanks Jimmy!). As for "Mad Men," I had the same reaction, especially regarding the "romantic" sub-plots (which all seem doomed). For a hilarious and decidedly non-dark take on 1960s ad execs, read Jerry Della Femina's "From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor," now sadly out of print.
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