Television

Boys Will Be Girls—on TV, in Movies, and in a Stylish Condo or Messy Apartment Near You

September 21, 2007
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Boys Will Be Girls—on TV, in Movies, and in a Stylish Condo or Messy Apartment Near You

The tendency of the nation’s schools to suppress boys’ natural ways of seeing and doing things and force them to adopt feminine attitudes and behaviors, brilliantly documented by Christina Hoff-Sommers in her 2001 book The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, is becoming increasingly evident in the culture. Three recent articles document some of the consequences as young men mistreated by our educational system advance into society and try to become men when they simply don’t know how and have been taught to disrespect masculinity and suppress it in themselves. AP, for example, notes that network TV’s new primetime schedule "puts the softer side of men on display": In a number of broadcast ensembles premiering this fall, men are opening up about issues beyond sports, money, power and sexual conquests. They’re expressing their feelings—often to other men—on fatherhood, intimacy and love.

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Unusual Moral Concerns in a Sitcom

September 20, 2007
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Unusual Moral Concerns in a Sitcom

 Back to You is an idea devised in TV programmer’s Heaven: get the star of Frasier and the co-star and only likeable character in Everybody Loves Raymond, mix them together any old way, and voila, a sitcom hit is born. We’ll have to wait and see whether audiences like Back to You, starring Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton as two bickering news anchors in Pittsburgh and created by the same people who made Frasier. As is inevitable with sitcoms today, the premiere episode of Back to You included numerous weary double entendres, but they passed by without doing too much damage because there were some good things going on.

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Fox’s Kitchen Nightmares Reviewed

September 20, 2007
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Fox’s Kitchen Nightmares Reviewed

The new Fox TV reality program Kitchen Nightmares is, like the Fox summer reality series Hell’s Kitchen, an American version of a British program featuring the charismatic and terrifying UK chef Gordon Ramsay. As with Hell’s Kitchen, the new program takes the concept of the UK version and amps everything up to eleven. The spoiled food is uglier, the facilities are in more dismaying disrepair, the kitchens are filthier, and the villains are even more pathologically unfit for their positions. There have been accusations that the producers have faked some of the more florid horrors depicted in the series, and that is a matter for the courts to sort out. From a viewer’s perspective, however, what we see in the program most certainly tells the truth about various aspects of the American character of our time.

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Some Cheese with Your Whine: K-Ville Premiere

September 18, 2007
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Some Cheese with Your Whine: K-Ville Premiere

The new Fox police drama K-Ville premiered last night at 9 EDT. It’s a fairly standard cop show, and the presumed angle of interest is that it’s set in post-Katrina New Orleans. The show indicates that the city is still a mess and that the people there are highly disturbed, some by trauma and some just because many of the good people moved out and have yet to return, while the dregs remained. The premiere episode included a good deal of the usual boohooing we hear about New Orleans, how nobody cares about it, yadayadayada. Of course, like the others in the media who complain about this and claim it’s a product of racism, the show’s producers and characters fail to see the irony in their complaints being aired while we never hear anybody griping about desperate needs in Mississippi and Alabama and in other areas of Louisiana that were hit hard by the storm. Oh, well, consistency is a hobgoblin, isn’t it?

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59th Primetime Emmy Awards

September 17, 2007
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59th Primetime Emmy Awards

The results announced at last night’s Primetime Emmy Awards for what passes as television excellence are available for your perusal here. The Sopranos won for best dramatic series, to no one’s surprise. Fox, which broadcast the ceremony, implemented a tape delay of several seconds in order to avoid any untoward events other than the general idiocy of the thing. AP’s TV writer mocked the decision, as I’m sure others will:

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Emmy Awards—I Don’t Care, But I Don’t Mind If You Do

September 14, 2007
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Emmy Awards—I Don’t Care, But I Don’t Mind If You Do

I never watch award shows these days—haven’t done so for about a half-dozen years—and I’ll be keeping my record intact this Sunday night when some network or other broadcasts the Primetime Emmy Awards for television programming. However, Rebecca Cusey of National Review Online does apparently still follow these things, and her choices for who should win the major awards this time round are interesting and pretty sensible. Read "Red Carpet Ready" here.

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Stossel on Health Care

September 14, 2007
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Stossel on Health Care

John Stossel, co-anchor of the ABC-TV news magazine 20/20, has been producing superb work as a reporter and analyst for ABC News for quite a few years. Tonight at 10 EDT on ABC he takes on the issue of health care in a 20/20 special, "John Stossel: Whose Body Is It Anyway? Sick in America," and his perspective is one most Americans will find very bracing and original. That is because the truth about this issue is seldom reported by the mainstream press. The truth is this: government-run health care is disastrously poor, and private sector health care is by far the best, and is at its best when government keeps its hands off. In anticipation of tonight’s program, Stossel wrote a very good oped for yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, which I highly recommend (both the oped and the newspaper). Herewith an excerpt from Stossel’s oped, to whet your appetite for tonight’s program:

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FCC Authority over Indecency Challenged—but Govt. Agency Is Right for Once

September 11, 2007
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FCC Authority over Indecency Challenged—but Govt. Agency Is Right for Once

When it comes to regulation of communications, usually the FCC and the Congress have it all wrong. They want to regulate speech but let indecency have a free pass. That is the exact opposite of their Constitutional mandate. Here is the truth about the matter. The federal government has no constitutional authority to regulate speech. Period. If somebody wants to say something Congress or the Executive or Judicial branch doesn’t like, that’s just too bad. The states have much broader authority to regulate speech, though even they are not allowed to suppress political speech. But there is one aspect the Congress does have the authority to regulate, and that is indecency. The Supreme Court’s extension of the word "speech" to include nonverbal expression notwithstanding, the Congress definitely does have the authority to regulate the broadcast of indecent materials. This is the one area where Congress can and should step in.

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Spike TV’s “The Kill Point”

August 25, 2007
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Spike TV’s “The Kill Point”

Season 1 of the Spike TV series The Kill Point concludes tonight with a two-hour episode. It’s a fairly engaging series about a bank robbery gone bad that results in deaths and a drawn-out hostage situation (with very strong performances by Donnie Wahlberg and John Leguizamo), though it’s nothing essential, by any means. There is, however, one interesting angle. The robbers/hostage takers are a former platoon of U.S. soldiers back in country after their tours are over. The leader (Leguizamo) is a former sergeant who was court-martialed after he refused to send his men into a particular site in Iraq. After his refusal, the higher-ups sent another platoon, and they were all killed. So instead of being considered a hero for saving his men and warning of disaster, he’s been made the fall guy for their catastrophic mistake.

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Another Try at Genre-Bending

August 24, 2007
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Another Try at Genre-Bending

The mixing of genres can be interesting when it works, but when it doesn’t, it’s usually a disaster. The producers of the forthcoming CBS TV primetime series, Viva Laughlin, based on the BBC series Viva Blackpool, will see if they can avoid the shoals. The series will feature mystery-suspense plots augmented with musical-theater sequences, the network has revealed. USA Today explains:

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“High School Musical 2″ Grabs Record Audience

August 20, 2007
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“High School Musical 2″ Grabs Record Audience

If you need any demonstration of the amazing cultural power of tweeners (young people exiting childhood and entering the early years of adolescence), the popularity of the Disney TV movie High School Musical should provide it. It was watched by millions on television, has sold well in DVD, and has spawned a cottage industry of associated paraphernalia including concert tours and CDs. Last Friday night the sequel, High School Musical 2, kept the tweeners and their undoubtedly reluctant parents enthralled, setting a record for non-network TV viewership:

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TNT’s “The Company” Depicts Security Dilemmas

August 18, 2007
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TNT’s “The Company” Depicts Security Dilemmas

Tomorrow night brings the conclusion of The Company, a three-part, six-hour miniseries on Turner Network Television (TNT). The series, based on a novel by Robert Littell, is produced by Ridley Scott and Tony Scott and tells the story of approximately three decades in the history of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. In so doing, it vividly illustrates the conflicting national security goals that inevitably face all liberal societies. The story is basically sympathetic to the aims of the agency, meaning it approves of the overall U.S. goals in the Cold War, although it is honest about the shortcomings and failures of execution that occurred. The tragic consequences of the Eisenhower administration’s refusal to provide direct support to the Hungarian uprising in 1956 are shown vividly, yet one can assuredly make a strong case, especially on classical liberal grounds, that the president’s decision was the right one.

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"Culture is the expression of the guiding philosophy of the day."—Murray Rothbard
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