by Ben Shapiro
Nonetheless, Sex and the City has dramatically changed American perceptions of female sexuality—and as with all of the other comedies, it did so with witty writing and likable characters. But is that perception of female sexuality more or less accurate than it was before we had women openly chatting about testicle size on national television?
FAMILY GUY (1998–2001, 2004–PRESENT): HATE MAIL TO RED-STATE AMERICA
Family Guy, the highly successful animated Fox comedy helmed by Seth MacFarlane, takes no prisoners when it comes to politics. Episodes of the show have depicted God as an old man having sex with a prostitute, a Nazi wearing a McCain/Palin 2008 pin, a mentally retarded character based on Sarah Palin’s son Trig, a mock musical about Terri Schiavo (sample lyrics: “the most expensive plant you’ll ever see . . . her mashed potato brains”), and frequent bestiality and pedophilia, as well as depictions of Jews bordering on the anti-Semitic. And that’s the mild stuff. The show’s satire is often hysterically funny (who else makes random references to “Shipoopi” from The Music Man?), but the show has never found a conservative sacred cow it wasn’t willing to skewer—or a liberal sacred cow it was willing to skewer.
The show’s liberalism springs from the mind of creator MacFarlane, who is as of this writing the world’s highest-paid television writer (he signed a contract for $100 million). MacFarlane grew up in Connecticut, where his parents sent him to a series of boarding schools. His favorite show growing up was All in the Family. (That love can be seen in Family Guy’s opening credits, with Peter and Lois singing together at the family piano à la Archie and Edith; similarly, MacFarlane labels American Dad! “a current-day All in the Family that is more political than Family Guy.”) After working as an animator in Los Angeles, he finally got Family Guy on the air. Now, MacFarlane presides over the largest block of programming since the days of Norman Lear and Aaron Spelling, Family Guy being accompanied on the air by The Cleveland Show and American Dad!127
MacFarlane is a down-the-line liberal—and a supremely militant liberal at that, at least in his public rhetoric. He has compared Arizona’s immigration policy to Nazi Germany.128 He is supremely intolerant of anybody who doesn’t believe in same-sex marriage: “Why is it that Johnny Spaghetti Stain in ----- Georgia can knock a woman up, legally be married to her, and then beat the shit out of her, but these two intelligent, sophisticated writers who have been together for twenty years can’t get married? . . . I have arguments with people where I get red in the face, screaming at the top of my lungs.”
MacFarlane rejects any right-wing mail he receives that criticizes the show. “That’s like getting hate mail from Hitler,” he told the Advocate, referring to Parents Television Council. “They’re literally terrible human beings. . . . They can suck my dick as far as I’m concerned.”129
MacFarlane says he does have limits—“It’s a case-by-case thing. . . . There have been jokes pitched that seemed too mean to specific people”130—but he has yet to demonstrate them, except when it comes to gay rights. On the issue of homosexuality, MacFarlane seeks input from a gay censor at the network’s broadcast standards department, “making sure that we’re handling it in the right way.”131 The network broadcast standards officers, as we’ll discuss later, have stopped protecting the public from objectionable material and now focus on protecting minority interest groups; MacFarlane’s preapproval by a gay censor represents yet another in a long line of moves by Hollywood to appease particular liberal activist groups.
TWO AND A HALF MEN (2003–PRESENT): CONSERVATIVE LIBERALISM
In 2008, entertainment website Gawker.com labeled Two and a Half Men one of the most conservative shows on television.132 The website didn’t give a reason. It simply put that contention out there, assuming that because Two and a Half Men isn’t openly liberal, it must be conservative.
Of course, the show isn’t conservative. It features boatloads of sex and drug jokes, masturbation, threesomes—the works. But because the show doesn’t feature a regular openly gay character, episodes revolving around abortion, or pregnancy out of wedlock, it’s considered a right-wing show.
Chuck Lorre, the creator of the show as well as its sister hit The Big Bang Theory, has spent his career building well-crafted moneymaking hits like Roseanne, Dharma & Greg, Grace Under Fire. Like many in the television industry, he grew up Jewish in New York (his real name is Charles Levine), a member of the lower-middle class. He went to college at SUNY Potsdam, where he “majored in rock & roll and pot and minored in LSD.” A decade later, he broke into the television business with Carsey and Werner.
As that résumé should suggest, Lorre leans heavily to the left on politics. He critiques network censors: “You can show maggots crawling out of a bullet hole, but God forbid we should talk about human sexuality!”133 He tacks a text-heavy placard at the end of every episode of The Big Bang Theory, and they’re often political. His most inflammatory placard, which appeared on the screen for two seconds but was preserved for posterity at his website, ripped Fox News by implication:
Control of the media equals control of the populace. I am endowed like a stallion. And also why a state run television news channel is so very dangerous. I am endowed like a stallion. Now there are those who would argue this has already happened and that a certain cable news channel is actually a covert extension of our government. I am endowed like a stallion. The fact that the channel is run by a high-ranking party official, an anchor person from the channel became a White House spokesman, and another top-ranking party official became an on-air news commentator is often used to make this argument. I am endowed like a stallion. Of course, this fact would be entirely inconsequential if the oft-repeated falsehoods they attempt to imbed into the Zeitgeist were simply amusing, or at worst, inane. I am endowed like a stallion. But, unfortunately, that is not the case. I am endowed like a stallion. The heavy repetition of lies and smears for political gain are by no means inconsequential. I am endowed like a stallion. Which is why each and every one of us must use whatever resources we have at our disposal to disseminate the actual truth.134
Lorre has no problem using the resource of his shows to disseminate the truth as he sees it. And his methodology is an effective exposé of how Hollywood promulgates messages—they stack their politics between sex jokes and hope to distract us long enough to shovel their ideology down our throats.
30 ROCK (2006–PRESENT): LIBERAL HOLLYWOOD LOOKS IN THE MIRROR
If the history of comedy on television shows anything, it is that seriousness is no fun. Thank God, then, for 30 Rock, which makes fun of both sides of the political spectrum. Sure, it’s a liberal show. But it’s a show that doesn’t take its own liberalism too seriously.
Tina Fey, the creator of 30 Rock, started her career at Saturday Night Live. As a member of SNL’s Weekend Update team, she admitted, “I think a lot of young people don’t just watch comedy shows to stay informed. They also want to be guided on how they’re supposed to feel. I guess that’s what we do, to some extent. We have a liberal bias, obviously, and that’s very much the tone of Update.”135 That same liberalism obviously played a role in Fey’s dead-on impersonation of Sarah Palin during the 2008 election campaign (she said during that cycle, “If she wins, I’m done. I can’t do that for four years. And by ‘I’m done,’ I mean I’m leaving Earth”).136
She brought that liberalism to 30 Rock, which was supposed to be a parody of SNL. Her character, Liz Lemon, is a thinly veiled parody of herself, a liberal do-gooder trying to head up a show full of crazy people. Her boss, Jack Donaghy, is a conservative executive (creators in Hollywood tend to see executives as conservative, no matter what the executives’ actual political streak). But strangely, Lemon’s brand of liberal politics doesn’t trump Donaghy’s conservatism. In fact, Lemon’s politics is often depicted as pie-in-the-sky, while Jack’s conservatism is often portrayed as common sense.
In one of the show’s more hilarious episodes, “Rosemary
’s Baby,” Liz decides to stick it to the Man by following Rosemary Howard (Carrie Fisher), a ’60s-era comedy writer, out the door after Jack nixes some of Howard’s skits. Lemon soon realizes that she’s signed on with a loon, and goes back to Jack to beg for her job. In a parallel plotline, Jack has to deal with star Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) and his bad decision making. When Tracy attends therapy, Jack role-plays Tracy’s entire family, channeling characters from Good Times to do so—and Tracy is cured. It’s a hysterically funny bit, taking on stereotypes and showing them to be ridiculous even as we laugh.
Lately, though, Fey has become even more strident in her anti–right wing rhetoric. Upon accepting the 2009 Mark Twain Prize for comedy, she exclaimed, “For most women, the success of conservative women is good for all of us. Unless you believe in evolution. You know, actually, I take it back. The whole thing’s a disaster.”137 Fey’s rhetoric here isn’t funny, let alone balanced.
Unsurprisingly, the show has slid to the left in the past few seasons. Most recently and most egregiously, the season-five episode “Brooklyn Without Limits” featured Stephen Austin (John Slattery) playing a nutty candidate who is obviously of the Tea Party persuasion. “I don’t believe in parties, and I don’t get invited to them,” says Austin. What does Austin believe in? An American renaissance. “Renaissance means rebirth,” Austin explains. “I want to usher in the rebirth of this country, that’s why the theme of all my campaign commercials is: I’m a Baby.” Austin continues: “The government shouldn’t interfere in anything. What happens inside a man’s own rain poncho at a minor league baseball game is his own business.” In Fey’s world, all Tea Partiers are nutty sexual perverts who don’t understand basic concepts of government or constitutionalism. Fey’s scorn is palpable with regard to Americans who want smaller government and believe that President Obama has led us astray from founding principles.
It’s not that this is biased, though it is. It’s that it’s utterly unfunny unless you happen to think Barack Obama is Jesus. No wonder 30 Rock’s viewership continues to decline along with its humor standards. The show used to demonstrate that nonpartisan political comedy could be done right by liberals. All it took was a commitment to self-effacing humor and the humility to write funny instead of merely targeting political enemies. Sadly, it looks as though Tina Fey has moved beyond nonpartisanship and is now doing what so many of her colleagues do: targeting those on the other side of the aisle with as much acidity as humanly possible.
LEFTIST LAUGHTER
The history of leftism in television comedy is a history of American liberalism, preserved for all time in film. It is a history of major figures biasing their programming to satisfy their consciences, which had been tarred by the stain and stigma of monetary success. It is a history of motivated people consciously and unconsciously infusing their values into America’s entertainment, shocking the bourgeois in order to normalize ever more radical moral systems.
It is a history of class conflict. Following the leftist perspective on blue-collar workers from Your Show of Shows through 30 Rock shows Hollywood liberals’ reactivity to the middle and lower classes’ political persuasions—when blue-collar workers vote Reagan and Nixon, Hollywood despises them and focuses instead on upper-class elites; when blue-collar workers vote Carter, Hollywood loves them and paints them as ignorant heroes.
It’s a history of sexual conflict. Tracing the leftist perspective on homosexuality, fatherhood, and feminism shows the total allegiance in the television community to the anti-traditional-family-structure agenda. Their ability to infuse programming with their bohemian mentality accelerated with the shift toward urban programming in the early 1970s, but it had been latent long before that. Now, it’s out in the open, and over the course of decades, it has shaped our perspective on who should have children, who should get married, and the very nature of sexual relationships.
It’s a history of generational conflict. When conservatism dominates the older generation, the older generation is portrayed as villainous, as on All in the Family. When conservatism dominates the younger generation, the younger generation is depicted as foolishly rebellious and in need of life lessons, as on Family Ties. Eventually, when liberalism exhausted itself in the failures of the Great Society, Hollywood settled on liberal nihilism, lashing out occasionally, like a rattlesnake, at any upswing in strong conservatism among Americans at large.
Most of all, the history of television comedy is a history of laughter. Liberalism has dominated the world of television comedy for decades. Virtually every major comedy has been messaged in leftist fashion—and when it’s done right, it’s tremendously effective at changing hearts and minds. Far more than we do in dramas, we identify with the characters in comedies because we wish we had friends that funny, that witty. We spend time with comedy characters because we like them.
And that enables them to propagandize without our even knowing that we’re watching propaganda in the first place.
Making The Right Cry
How Television Drama Glorifies Liberalism
If laughter can edulcorate liberal politics to the point where we no longer even taste them, drama can serve to sear liberal politics into our consciousness. While laughter attacks, drama converts, pulling our heartstrings, manipulating our emotions. If the philosophy of the political comedian is to make innocuous that which seemed offensive, the philosophy of the political dramatist is to make offensive that which seemed innocuous. Comedies are anti-morality crusades; dramas are morality tales. The question in drama is always which morality is being promoted.
The beauty of using drama as a political vehicle lies in the set-up: by stacking the characters and facts on one side or another, creators can drive audiences’ emotions. Think about The Godfather, for example. In that brilliant drama, the main character is a murderer and a bootlegger; his father is an extortionist and a murderer as well; his oldest brother is an adulterer and a violent hothead. We like all of them, because Mario Puzo, Francis Ford Coppola, and Robert Towne weight the situation to their benefit: Michael Corleone becomes a murderer only because his father is unjustly threatened and his wife is murdered—and he only murders corrupt cops and drug dealers; Don Corleone extorts a pedophile; Sonny cheats on his wife but defends his sister from her abusive husband. The ease with which brilliant dramatists can twist and turn our morality is truly astonishing.
As in comedy, the most successful dramatic television creators comprise a small group of committed liberals. We will meet them over and over again. Their talent is undeniable, but their politics pervades their work, which is one of the reasons the industry worships them so.
And as in comedy, the long tradition of infusing politics into drama started from the beginning. Whereas many comedy writers came from vaudeville and radio, many drama writers came from the 1930s and 1940s theater scene, a milieu dominated by socialist thinkers like Clifford Odets and the Russian-influenced artists of the Stanislavski school. The dramatic television creators brought those sensibilities to their work, infusing social messages wherever they could. As with comedy, pushing the envelope quickly led to further pushing the envelope.
That evolution is evident in all of the major dramatic television templates: the cop show, the medical show, the legal show, and the soap opera (both daytime and primetime). Over time, cop shows moved from the outright worshipfulness of Dragnet to the cynicism of The Wire. Medical shows shifted their focus from doctors working to heal others within a functional medical system in shows like Dr. Kildare and Ben Casey to doctors struggling with the injustices of society in St. Elsewhere and even ER. Legal shows changed from the aspirational Defenders to the dark and gritty view of lawyers in Damages. Soap operas started as simple interpersonal dramas and shifted to encompass controversial storylines.
The liberal leanings of particular dramas do not in any way diminish the brilliance of the dramatists. One of the most challenging tasks for any artist is infusing beauty
and feeling with meaning. Certainly no one can blame the creators for infusing their ideologies into their dramas—that’s what creators do. Still, we must open our eyes to what we’re watching. Drama tells us what is moral and what isn’t. It ponders deeper questions than comedy, and invariably skews the storyline in order to reach conclusions the creators want us to reach. As viewers, we must be aware of how our emotions are manipulated so that we can embrace Hollywood’s pecular brand of liberalism.
PLAYHOUSE 90 (1956–1961): WHEN MAINSTREAM LIBERALISM WAS RIGHTEOUS
Without question, Playhouse 90 was one of the finest television programs ever produced. A series of ninety-minute made-for-television movies, the show ran from 1956 to 1960 on CBS and broadcast the combined talents of the world’s best writers and directors. Those who contributed to the show included Abby Mann (Judgment at Nuremberg), William Gibson (The Miracle Worker), Horton Foote (To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies), and Frank Gilroy (The Subject Was Roses). John Frankenheimer directed the vast majority of the episodes, though Franklin Schaffner, Sidney Lumet, George Roy Hill, and Arthur Hiller, among others, also directed episodes. As for the stars—well, let’s just say that there wasn’t a star in the pantheon who didn’t once appear on the show.
These were heady days for television—days when dramatists were given relatively free rein to pursue their art. That freedom was partially due to the fact that television had not yet entered all American homes; only the rich could afford them, and the rich preferred deep and abiding entertainment. The artists took advantage with alacrity.
