Primetime Propaganda

by Ben Shapiro

  If The Simpsons has debased one element of traditional values more than any other, it is the traditional family structure. Homer is a garrulous goof-off; Bart is a juvenile delinquent. Marge is the long-suffering wife and Lisa the good-natured and idealistically brilliant liberal. Sound familiar? It should. It’s a good deal like All in the Family.

  Unlike All in the Family, however, the father figure cares little or nothing about his wife and children, except on deus ex machina occasions when such care is called for by the storyline. Homer is inconsiderate, insanely stupid, and brutishly loathsome. He is a drunken boor who belches, farts, and knocks around the kiddies. He is the image of the Ugly American so often invoked by the Europeans.

  Following the line of fatherhood on television is a striking study in liberal annexation of the medium. Start with Father Knows Best, where father actually knew best; move on to The Dick Van Dyke Show, where Dick, for all of his goofiness, rules the roost and brings home the bacon. As the decade progresses, father figures—and male figures in general on television—morph into genial fools who maintain titular control (on Bewitched, for example, Samantha, who is obviously more powerful than her husband, leaves him the illusion of power). With the urban television shift, the image of fathers begins changing, slowly becoming even more negative—the 1960s-era youngsters’ image of authority figures translates into the adolescent hallmark of the unlikable but powerful father figure (e.g., Archie on All in the Family). Finally, in the modern era, fathers have become absolutely hapless at best and massively horrible at worst. They are accoutrements to a family, not innate and vital parts of it. It’s no wonder so many Americans now grow up thinking that fathers are superfluous or even detrimental to a happy and functional household.

  One unspoken problem with The Simpsons is that its audience skews young. Sandy Grushow, a Fox executive throughout much of The Simpsons’ tenure, including inception, stated, “The Simpsons was the huge stake in the ground.”100 Groening felt that the youth-centric audiences was one of the key components of the success of the show: “Cartoons are characterized as a kiddie medium and kids are not trusted to delineate between good behavior and bad behavior. I personally think that kids appreciate the fact that they’re not being condescended to.”101

  Of course, this is deeply problematic—kids are generally unable to tell the difference between satire and well-founded criticism. They’re kids, even if liberals prefer to think of them as adults who are just far away. But that’s the point: The Simpsons is a tremendously liberal, tremendously entertaining recruitment tool to cynicism. Which doesn’t mean it isn’t an amazing show. It is. That’s what makes it so effective and so addictive.

  MURPHY BROWN (1988–1998): HUNTING FOR QUAYLE

  The 1992 Bush campaign couldn’t stay away from ill-advised cultural references. If it wasn’t Bush himself getting smacked down by the liberals on The Simpsons, it was Dan Quayle famously having his lunch handed to him by Diane English and the crew at Murphy Brown.

  English got her start in the industry after working as a high school English teacher and a journalist, when she and her husband began writing teleplays for public television. She wrote several television movies, then finally found her big break with Foley Square, a CBS show that was cancelled after fourteen episodes. But that started her on her way. In 1988, CBS picked up Murphy Brown, starring Candice Bergen as a single TV reporter with a drinking problem.

  The show was almost a mirror image of Roseanne. Where Roseanne focused on the downtrodden blue-collar feminist, Murphy Brown focused on the upper-class feminist, the new and modern woman every woman wanted to be: glitzy job, beautiful friends, posh lifestyle.

  The show took on politics, almost invariably from a liberal perspective—in one episode, broadcast at the time of the Clarence Thomas hearings, Brown appeared before a fictional Senate committee and bashed their “grandstanding and shameless self-promotion.” (This wasn’t even close to the most direct television bash at Thomas—that was reserved for Designing Women, an episode of which featured one of the main characters donning a T-shirt reading, HE DID IT and stating, “I don’t give a damn anymore if people think that I’m a feminist or a fruitcake.”102)

  But things got particularly nasty when English decided it was time for Brown to get pregnant out of wedlock. This was no doubt a reaction to the rise of the Moral Majority and the religious right; the Hollywood left responds to conservatism with outrage and dismay, usually combined with an in-your-face display of extreme liberalism.

  Dan Quayle denounced the show on the campaign trail while speaking about the problem of poverty and single motherhood in the African-American community, stating, “It doesn’t help matters when primetime TV has Murphy Brown—a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid, professional woman—mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another ‘lifestyle choice.’ ”103

  English responded in a statement released from Hollywood: “If the Vice-President thinks it’s disgraceful for an unmarried woman to bear a child, and if he believes that a woman cannot adequately raise a child without a father, then he’d better make sure abortion remains safe and legal.” Murphy Brown herself responded on the show: “Glamorize single motherhood? What planet is he on? Look at me, Frank, am I glamorous?”104 Actually, she said even more than that: “I doubt that my status as a single mother has contributed all that much to the breakdown of Western civilization. . . . In a country where millions of children grow up in nontraditional families . . . it’s time for the vice-president to expand his definition, and recognize that whether by choice or circumstance, families come in all shapes and sizes.”105 Brown’s second speech, of course, trumped her first—it’s difficult to say that you’re not glorifying a choice when you then go ahead and glorify it.

  Another character on the show, Corky, was more direct: “I was raised to believe that if you had a child out of wedlock you were bad. Of course, I was also raised to believe a woman’s place was in the home, segregation was good, and presidents never lie.”106 This is absurdly slanderous, implying that all those who oppose single motherhood are sexists, racists, and idiots.

  Quayle’s whole point was that the show was making single motherhood seem a common and acceptable choice (and for the record, Quayle wasn’t suggesting abortion but marriage as the solution for single motherhood). And he was right. But English got the last laugh—the Quayle controversy drove ratings for years, and Candice Bergen thanked Quayle in her Emmy acceptance speech that year.

  She also got the last laugh societally—though the perspective she pushed has caused more tears than laughter. Single motherhood has become an accepted and highly-praised addendum to the definitional family. Since Murphy was a white middle- to upper-class female, let’s look at the statistics with regard to white middle- to upper-class females. From 1980 to 1990, the illegitimacy rate for white women with family incomes over $100,000 was 1.7 percent; by 2007, it had more than doubled to approximately 4 percent. Even more significant, from 1980 to 1990, the illegitimacy rate for all white women was 4 percent; by 2007 it had quadrupled to about 20 percent.107

  Culture isn’t the only factor here, of course, but it’s an important one. The single-motherhood controversy is a perfect example of how Hollywood believes it is reflecting life when it is in fact transforming viewpoints across the country. While single motherhood among upper-class and middle-class white women was a major issue in Hollywood in 1992, it was not a major issue in vast swaths of the country at the time. In retrospect, even Candice Bergen essentially apologized for pooh-poohing Quayle’s comments. “I never have really said much about the whole episode, which was endless,” she said ten years later. “But his speech was a perfectly intelligent speech about fathers not being dispensable and nobody agreed with that more than I did.”108

  That’s not what Bergen said at the time. “On this show,” said Candice Bergen, “we all have fair
ly common political and social concerns and we get to express them. It’s not only a success in terms of quality and ratings, but also [in terms of ] ideology, . . . we always have a point of view even when we don’t have a political message. We get to bash Democrats and Republicans alike. . . .”109 Mostly Republicans.

  SEINFELD (1990–1998): NIHILISM CHIC

  Seinfeld, so often described as a show about nothing, lives up to its name. It is a show without principle, without heart, and without remorse. That’s what makes it funny. It is not, however, a show without politics.

  Larry David, the creator of Seinfeld, is an outspoken liberal. In the mold of Larry Gelbart and Woody Allen and the great Jewish creators of the pre-1970s television explosion, David was a New York kid who grew up in Brooklyn. After attending the University of Maryland and serving in the U.S. Army Reserves during the Vietnam War, David started working as a stand-up comedian, working several low-paying jobs to support himself. He eventually landed a writers’ slot on Saturday Night Live, and the rest was history.

  He often posts his thoughts at Huffington Post—thoughts like “Rove . . . God, I hate that man. . . . The only thing that bothers [conservatives] are fetuses. They love that fetus. The fetus and Jesus. Sounds like a comedy team. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, give a warm welcome to Fetus and Jesus.’ . . . I like how if you criticize the war, you don’t support the troops. You’re the ones sending them over to die, so how is it I don’t support them?”110 This is what passes for intelligent commentary at the Huffington Post.

  Seinfeld came about in 1989, when NBC decided to try to build a show around Jerry Seinfeld, a comedian who had been appearing on Leno and Letterman. The show’s research was awful. Audiences hated the show, hated Seinfeld, hated George, and hated Kramer. But NBC stuck with it anyway, despite initial low ratings and NBC president Brandon Tartikoff’s misgivings (“It’s too New York and it’s too Jewish,” he famously said, in an unintentional homage to the original rejection of Mary Tyler Moore). The result was a show that many consider the finest ever broadcast on network television.

  The show’s milieu was a throwback to the early days of television: It was New York shabby chic. Seinfeld himself epitomized the liberal urban sensibility, wearing ironed blue jeans. It was a far cry from John Goodman in Roseanne.

  The philosophy of the show was purely nihilistic. In order to better reflect that nihilism, Seinfeld’s character actually underwent a transformation in the first season, said Seinfeld writer Peter Mehlman. It happened by accident. “In the episode with the junior mint when Kramer is bugging him to come see this operation on Elaine’s overweight boyfriend, during a run-through,” Mehlman remembered, “Kramer was telling him, ‘Come on, Jerry, come on, we can sit in the observation theater, come on.’ And Jerry totally ad libs . . . ‘All right, let me finish my coffee and we’ll watch ’em slice this fat bastard up.’ . . . The laugh was so thunderous that we said, ‘--- it, we’ll go with it.’ And that one line kind of opened the floodgates to him being . . . not an asshole, just edgy.”

  Mehlman told me that philosophy reflected Larry David’s sensibility. “Seinfeld’s not messaged at all,” said Mehlman. “If it’s anything, Seinfeld is pointedly unmessaged. We’d really look at each other and say, ‘What do I have to tell anybody about the world?’ . . . So we don’t really have anything to say other than to peck at people who do think [they know something].”

  That wasn’t entirely the case, though. Seinfeld’s general liberal messaging came out in its characters, who are all Upper West Side Manhattan Jewish liberals (even George acts far more Jewish than Italian). Take, for example, the season-six episode “The Couch,” which Mehlman wrote. In that episode, Elaine dumps her boyfriend when he reveals that he’s pro-life. “One of Larry’s great, great ideas was having the boyfriend who might be anti-abortion. . . . Are you going to break up with a gorgeous guy because he’s not pro-choice?” That isn’t deep political commentary. But it’s political commentary nonetheless, because we like Elaine, so we take what she says at face value: Only ugly people are pro-life.

  The show clarified its scorn for traditional moral standards in its famous season-four episode “The Contest,” in which the four main characters compete to see who can go the longest without masturbating. The show is replete with euphemisms for masturbation, of course, and it won Larry David an Emmy and a Writers Guild of America Award. TV Guide went so far as to name the episode the best television episode of all time.

  Why in the world would the television industry so celebrate a puerile high school joke extended for thirty minutes? Because shock value is paramount to the Hollywood liberal nihilist. This is the bobo ideology at work—the notion that in order to justify their immense success, Hollywood liberals must freak out the middle-class masses. Larry David and many of his ilk, growing up as they did during the 1960s, are far more rooted in bohemianism, and they still revel in épater les bourgeois. They find their meaning by clinging to the distorted image of themselves as courageous bohemians challenging America’s stodgy, prejudiced middle class. They don’t attack the elite social and political consensus in America, which became largely liberal during the 1960s and 1970s; instead, they feel important because they shock for shock’s sake. They aren’t in the political vanguard—they’re acting out their post-1960s, thirtysomething-type angst at living in a liberal world that for some odd reason isn’t a utopia.

  How does all of that crystallize? In celebrating a show about masturbation.

  At the same time, what makes Seinfeld great is the same thing that makes The Simpsons great—they do bash both sides, though they revel more in bashing conservatives than liberals. A classic example is Mehlman’s episode “The Sponge,” in which Kramer refuses to wear an AIDS ribbon for the AIDS walk and gets “beaten up by gay thugs. And we’re not saying anything about AIDS or support of AIDS or anything like that; we’re saying something about wearing an AIDS ribbon.”

  The show, Mehlman said, was designed to “shine lights on people’s hypocrisies. Like the whole ‘not that there’s anything wrong with it.’ The amazing thing about that episode is that they’re saying ‘not that there’s anything wrong with it’ like five times, and the last time they’re practically in tears, and the show wins a [Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation] award. Obviously they’re saying there’s something terrible about it.”111 This is the oddest thing about today’s comedy world—the funniest material springs from liberals bashing other liberals. But liberals can’t even recognize when other liberals are bashing them.

  The good news for conservatives is that the newfound nihilism of the television cadre means that they sometimes make fun of liberals, too. Still, overall, nihilism tends to reflect liberalism far more than conservatism, simply because conservatism tends to promote lifestyle standards whereas liberalism does not—and it is far easier to point out “hypocrisies” among those who actually have lifestyle standards. While Seinfeld wasn’t a liberal show, then, it was a rip on traditional mores. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

  FRIENDS (1994–2004): AN OBLIQUE “--- YOU TO THE RIGHT WING”

  Marta Kauffman has offices at the Burbank Warner Bros. lot in a bungalow that reads like a who’s who of the Hollywood writers’ set: the same site hosts David E. Kelley, as well as Chris Chulack and others. Kauffman is warm and gregarious, entertainingly honest and open.

  “You know, David Crane and I started out doing musical theater in New York,” she told me. “And the woman who’s our agent today came to see the show during the time, called Personals. It was off-Broadway, and it was about single people looking for love. And she said, ‘Why aren’t you guys doing television?’ And we went, ‘I don’t know.’ ”112 She and Crane moved out to L.A.

  Kauffman got lucky—a pilot she wrote with Crane titled Dream On was picked up. The show was a racy comedy that ran for six seasons on HBO. It was one of the first series on television to use nudity and cursing uncensore
d. It was also decidedly liberal. The show actually changed the complexion of HBO’s subscribers, Barbara Fisher, who ran Universal Television at the time, told me: “Suddenly people were subscribing to them to get Dream On.”113

  Soon afterward, Kauffman got a job developing television for Norman Lear. This made sense—Kauffman is a self-proclaimed liberal, and her shows have strongly political tendencies. She worked on Lear’s short-lived series The Powers That Be, a highly polarizing political show about a good-hearted liberal Senator with an unfortunate penchant for the ladies. But Lear didn’t like her work. “He didn’t like our approach to TV. We wrote a pilot . . . after he read the pilot, and he took my hand and he said, ‘You know, it’s just shallow.’ And he took David’s arm and he said, ‘It’s superficial.’ . . . We [jokingly] called ourselves Shallow and Superficial for ages.”

  This, too, made sense—Lear’s shows always took political issues head on, whereas Kauffman’s shows put politics in the context of character development, tackling such issues obliquely and softly. “They did issue shows,” said Kauffman. “They did it before everybody else did it. . . . We didn’t do issues. We did stories.”

  I asked Kauffman if the difference between her shows and Lear’s shows was a change in the political nature of the times—a broader movement toward acceptance of liberal values—or a change in creative temperament. “In terms of changes in time, God, I hope so,” she said. “But . . . I think it is also a reflection of difference in [national] temperament.”

  Friends came about a couple years after Kauffman began working for Lear; she and Crane wanted to write a show that reflected their lives. And because both Crane and Kauffman sprang from the New York theater scene as well as the Los Angeles television scene, their lives were unswervingly liberal. “It’s about six friends who [embodied] . . . the stuff we dealt with,” she said. The six friends were, of course, Rachel (Jennifer Aniston), Ross (David Schwimmer), Monica (Courteney Cox), Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow), Chandler (Matthew Perry), and Joey (Matt LeBlanc).