A lost remote (it’s got to be around here somewhere!) has trapped me in Direct TV for the last two days, and I noticed…
1. I saw yet another unclever, gratuitous example of those working in the once ascendant, now gutter-level medium of television (Edward R. Murrow would be so disappointed…) thinking that using code for “fuck” is hilarious and appealing. [This recurring topic was discussed again just about a week ago]
The local Fox channel was promoting the syndicated “Family Feud” show, itself now almost continuously obsessed with smutty questions and answers, with the catch phrase, “What the Feud!” Does the letter ‘F’ now automatically suggest “fuck?” Is the implication that “fuck” is intended, buried somewhere or barely implied intrinsically hilarious to the average TV audience? The depressing phenomnon reminds me of when my theater did a special performance of “Moby Dick Rehearsed” for middle-school kids and a lot of them couldn’t stop giggling and making wise-cracks every time an actor mentioned the whale—“Dick,” you know—or said “she blows.”
I also discovered to my disgust that there is a TV game show on the same channel called “Who the Bleep is That?” This is its second season. Network and local TV have just given up: all those fine aspirations for the medium that were being announced in the Fifties and Sixties, in the halcyon days of “Omnibus,” “Hallmark Hall of Fame,” Studio One” and the rest, all of the creative seriousness that produced productions like “Roots,” dead, dead, dead. Today “The Twilight Zone” looks like high art. Now TV really is a “vast wasteland,” littered cookie-cutter procedurals, retread game shows, reality shows and umpteen Dick Wolf low-brow dramas. A wasteland as well, apparently, are the minds of the majority of the American public tuning in. “Heee, heee, they said an f-word…!” Yes…”feud.” Morons.
Speaking of morons, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene seemingly has nothing better to do than publicly attack HBO’s mercifully ending “Curb Your Enthusiasm” comedy series in which “Seinfeld” creator Larry David mocks his George Costanza-like actual personality over and over again. (True, I apparently have nothing better to do than attack Marjorie Taylor Greene, but since the lockdown wiped out most of my ethics business, I have a lot of time on my hands. Put me in Congress.)
The Republican embarrassment wrote on Twitter/ X in a post today, “I watched this week’s episode of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ and it was a glaring reminder of why most Georgians resent Republicans in our state for inviting the nasty commies from California, the Hollywood elites, into our state by dishing out Hollywood tax credits.” David’s show, Greene also said, “made fun of our good new law that stops the Stacey Abrams vote pandering machine and prevents voter fraud.”
As it happens, I watched the same episode, and I was struck by the rank silliness of that plot point. Larry was in Georgia for a vacation and gave water to eager voters standing in line on a hot day, without realizing that he had broken a minor provision of Georgia’s controversial Election Integrity Act, which was signed into law by Gov. Brian Kemp (R) in 2021. It prohibits the distribution of food or water to voters waiting to cast their ballots at polling locations in the Peach Tree State. Larry is arrested, and a group of black activists right out of a Tyler Perry comedy celebrate him as a martyr and a champion of voting rights. Stacey Abrams, who exploited that law to get on her “Republicans are racists” hobby horse and to persuade Major League Baseball to pull its All-Star game out ofAtlanta, is even shown declaring Larry David a hero on local TV.
Well. The show is a comedy, and, “Seinfeld”-like, its satire cuts both ways. Yes, David is a Hollywood progressive, but he is a toxic (but funny!) asshole on his show, and apparently in real life as well. The no-water-and-food provision is nothing more than a strict prohibition on interfering with, gifting or otherwise influencing voters preparing to vote. I think its a bit extreme, but how anyone could call it “racist” (“Jim Crowon steroids” was our President’s description), is beyond me.
Stacey Abrams is and has always been ridiculous: did she know she was spoofing herself with her fictional local evening news appearance on David’s behalf? If she did, I have some new found respect for her. She attached herself to David’s character, an unapologetic curmudgeon who revels in being a mega-jerk, and if you know how the cognitive dissonance scale works, such a connection will sink one or the other.
In the same episode, the AirBnB house Larry and his friends are renting has a black lawn jockey prominently displayed. A black friend persuades Larry to move it, they drop the thing (if you couldn’t see that coming…), and Larry has to replace the lawn ornament before the owners return. He can only find a white lawn jockey, so he puts it in “blackface.” Hilarity ensues. Rep. Greene is triggered.
This is exactly the way the show proceeded in every episode when I quit watching it out of boredom ten years ago.
A vast wasteland indeed.
Ethics Alarms 
That’s a big part of why everyone is moving to internet based entertainment and TV is dying right behind fakenewspapers!
I’m one of the few I know who doesn’t subscribe to a streaming service, marking me as a true Troglodyte/Luddite!
Way back when the first streaming service came to our area I called on some friends and found them watching reruns of The Munsters. Now, I admit there are/were worse shows than The Munsters, but I decided there and then it wasn’t worth my money.
I’d just about kill for some show that actually had a different script.
Thanks for hanging in there with your blog Jack; It’s still the very first thing I check each day.
Water, food, etc. can be handed out to voters in GA if it’s done at least 25 feet away from any voter in line, and 150 feet away from the building. Every polling place I’ve seen has spots that can meet that requirement (though there could be some that don’t, I suppose), & I’ve seen it done. If you want something, you just ask the person next to you to hold your place, and you go get it. Been there, done that.
I’m on record as thinking the food and water provision of the Georgia law are stupid, and I stand by that. I’ve kind of moderated the degree to which I’m annoyed, mostly because I’ve recognized that the reason I was so annoyed was because I felt like it was the newest example of Republicans not being able to stop at a win. America needs electoral reform. You need to limit mail in ballots. You need to standardize practices. You need voter ID. I think it might help if you went to paper ballots. Getting any of that is a win, tacking on some overreach that will end up being a Democrat talking point is dumb.
“Jim Crow on steroids” still left Georgia’s policies more loose than New York’s, which is either a condemnation of New York or the commentators, but everyone seemed very focused on the food and water provision because that was the only comparable that was different and worse.
I always felt the same way about the food and water bit. I can justify and explain the motive behind it and it certainly wasn’t about vote suppression, but it was dumb politics (You ARE the weakest link!)as you say.
To me the obvious answer is to have poll workers go down the line with a refreshments cart like flight attendants. The refreshments can be paid for by anonymous donations if people don’t want to spend tax dollars on them. Alternatively, we can put more effort into reminding people to bring water bottles and snacks for themselves. Am I missing something here?
No, that would be a reasonable response—unless the people hanging out the goodies couldn’t be trusted and verbally added a partisan message to the beverages. It would have to be monitored.
To me the answer would be to speed up the voting process to the point where people aren’t in line long enough that food and water are a concern… I think the longest I’ve ever been at a polling station is twenty minutes.
In my nearly fifty years of voting I have never had to wait in line for more than ten minutes. Having long queues shows an incompetent voting system in need of major overhaul.
Another reason why Democrats love mail-in voting. You can’t give water to people who vote in person, and you can’t watch them to make sure they vote your way. But with mail-in voting, you can deliver whiskey and cash to their homes and not hand it over until you oversee their ballots. Democrats swept yesterday’s special elections, receiving 80%+ of the mail-in votes in all of them.
I haven’t seen that stat, which is ominous. But GOP lost in NY3 about the way I expected: 1) voters should be angry that the party foisted a fraud on them—the party deserved to lose 2) votes who voted for Santos may well feel that he shouldn’t have been expelled, as he was their democratic choice, warts and all, and 3) there was snowstorm yesterday, so in-person voting was restricted, favoring the mail-in ballot addicted Democrats.
I have also seen an analysis after the 2023 elections postulating that Republicans are now doing better in national elections than off year or special elections. Or, perhaps more to the point, the Democratic base is more energized to turn out in these types of special elections than the Republicans.
The upshot of this was that Republicans will continue to fare poorly, as they have been, in special elections, but that it does not portend defeat in the national election cycles.
I think this is most pronounced with the presidential elections, but also for the mid-terms. Republicans did get a majority of the vote in 2022, but it didn’t translate into a sizeable House majority.
So I didn’t have any real expectations for the NY special election, for all the reasons Jack gave plus this as well.
And remember, blanket mail-in voting is against the New York state constitution. Laws are for little people.
The last “series” thing we watched on network TV was seasons 1-6 of “The Blacklist”. James Spader is just flat-out awesome (though Megan Boone’s character was abominable – I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and say it was due to the atrocious writing sent her way). And that kind of dried up for us in S7 and we never finished.
Yeah, unless you’re into “Law & Order” or any of the 20 or 30 regurgitated shows centered around police, fire, or hospital – or you have a penchant for ridiculous game and contest shows – there’s pretty much nothing worth watching on the networks.
We use Sling TV, and it has a Mystery Science Theater 3000 channel. All MST3k, all the time.
Just throwing that out there.
The re-boot with the new cast depressed me. A great example of how difficult it is to duplicate brilliance.
Jack, these shows, such as Family Feud and others, are merely emblematic of today’s much more vulgar and coarser society.
The networks claim they’re just giving people what they think they want and what will increase ratings, but I’m convinced the worst is yet to come. HBO has included on its MAX streaming service a British import titled “Naked Attraction”, a modern version of the dating game that’s shown on broadcast TV in England. And it isn’t just England because other European countries broadcast their own variations of this program. Regarding Naked Attraction, you have to see it to believe it because it’s exactly what the title implies. Since broadcast TV continues to lose viewership, in an effort to recapture ratings, how long before something similar shows up on broadcast TV in America?
If you count Dating Naked, about a decade ago.
I never heard of Dating naked, understandable since I never watched anything on VH1.
Anyway, I looked it up and have to say “Naked Attraction” and its full-frontal nudity along with contestant’s graphic descriptions and opinions of the participant’s various body parts goes far beyond anything seen on Dating Naked.