Good News From TV Land

The news brings word that Hollywood is planning to “reboot” some hit TV series from the olden thymes. Shows like All In The Family, The Jeffersons and Good Times are on the drawing board for new versions. Presumably there is a market for 1970’s nostalgia, although the people old enough to remember those days are getting long in the tooth. If you were an adult in the heyday of these shows, you’re past 60 now. Perhaps the children or grandchildren of these people suddenly have a taste for these old programs.

Or, maybe it is time to retcon the 1970’s.

The idea currently being discussed by Lear and Sony executives would be to have new actors recreate classic episodes of the shows, working from the original scripts, and package them as short, six-episode anthologies. The scripts would be treated similar to plays being mounted in new productions.

“There is some talk about doing some of the original shows, redoing them with today’s stars,” Lear toldVariety. “There is a possibility that we’ll do ‘All in the Family,’ ‘Maude,’ ‘The Jeffersons,’ “Good Times.’”

Discussions about remaking more of Lear’s catalogue come as Sony gears up for the premiere of the new “One Day at a Time,” which re-imagines Lear’s ’80s sitcom about a single mother raising two children. The new series, which premieres on Netflix Jan. 6, focuses on a Latino family with a female Army veteran at its center.

It’s not hard to imagine how this will go. All In The Family will feature a mixed race family, where the patriarch is a transgender white man. Gloria will be a gay male and Meathead will be a gender fluid lesbian, who enjoys lifting weights. The Jeffersons will be the same show, but not funny, because nothing has changed for black people since the ’70’s and that’s not funny. Good Times will have Amy Schumer and Seth Rogan forced to live in a tenement owned by Donald Trump and managed by Richard Spencer.

The truth is, those descriptions are far too conservative. People who watch a lot of television probably just filter out the endless proselytizing, but that’s pretty much all TV is these days. It is an endless stream of agit-prop. The mere fact that Amy Schumer can get work on television says the people in charge hate their customers. According to the ads, there is a show called Samantha Bee, where a middle-aged prude screeches at a camera for an hour every night. Why would anyone make such a show?

The sudden interest in the 70’s by the crazy liberals who run Hollywood could simply be a bit of cosmic humor. The last great Progressive Awakening started in the early 1960’s and burned itself out by the middle of the 1970’s. Even though Jimmy Carter is remembered as a dreary liberal, he was not a darling of the Left in 1976. By that point it was clear that the Progressives were spent and it was just a question as to when the normal adults would regain control and begin cleaning up the mess left by the Progressive lunatics.

Today, we are at a similar spot. Hillary Clinton was the only person the Left had as an option. Progressives have burned themselves out to the point where it is a movement run by broken down old geezers. Just as TV in the 70’s was full of preachy liberals when the country was increasingly tired of preachy liberals, the current year will be filled with despairing moonbats railing about the current year. Recycling the great liberal hits of the last period of Progressive decline is a logical starting point.

The big difference is the current year has cable, streaming and cord cutting. The Progressive proselytizers in Hollywood cannot rely on a captive audience. For example, the endless ads for the Samantha Bee show suggest no one watches it. Why else run all of those ads? A quick search reveals that her program gets a peak of 700,000 viewers, which would have got it cancelled immediately in the 1970’s, but today’s subsidies from the cable monopolies keep these fringe shows on the air, mostly as vanity projects.

All of this should be viewed as good news for normal people. The fever appears to have broken and we are heading into a period where the normal adults take over from the nutters. The Progs will be left to proselytizing to an increasingly disinterested audience on TV. Unlike the 70’s, where we had to sit through liberal crap on television, we can now watch whatever they call the new Top Gear on Amazon or something on NetFlix. We are, with regards to our video entertainments, spoiled for choice. That’s ultimately the best antidote to Progressive lunacy – choice.

94 thoughts on “Good News From TV Land

  1. I bought an OTA antenna and digital dvr this month. I could care less about tv, but my husband watches it. The thing is that he watches mostly old stuff (Law & Order, NYPD Blue, Blue Bloods) and local channels. We pay Directv about $85 a month for that. I’ve tried to get him to use the Roku, but he’s resistant. He just doesn’t understand how badly we get hit for this stuff. We don’t have an HD tv, yet they still want to bill us as if we do. There’s no reason for it.

  2. Norman Lear has never had an original idea for a TV series; both All in the Family and Sanford and Son were based on British TV series and The Jeffersons was basically The Honeymooners in blackface and moved to a nicer part of town. Now he’s trying to plagiarize himself.

  3. Norman Lear modeled Archie Bunker after his own father, but made Archie a white protestant.
    Lear’s father was a criminal who went to prison for the sale of fake bonds in CT.

  4. I wouldn’t mind if Tom Selleck came back as Magnum PI. Magnum PI had no political agenda, it was easy going and fun. You didn’t feel soiled after watching it like most of the cop shows these days.

    • What’s not to like, fast cars, fast action, beautiful woman wearing less clothes, in paradise, and fearless men of virtue.

      • @ Doug – Every point you made is exactly why it will never come back. Liberal-progressives hate all of those things, especially fearless men of virtue.

          • @ SH IV – Oh I think we can see where that remake would be heading. “Tommy” Magnum is woman with major daddy issues and unresolved grief for her dead mother which leads to her current depression and an alcohol problems. She moved into the shabby remains of Robin Master’s estate which is haunted by visions of Higgins now and then. The Ferrari sits unused in the garage, covered in dust because no one today drives a car that only gets 11-mpg. Needless to say when she is sober and not feeling sorry for herself, she drives a second-hand Toyota Prius to the crime scenes.

    • “Blue Bloods” is not bad. It makes occasional nods to immigration romanticism [the main characters are Irish Americans surnamed Reagan] and pc notions of cop-black relations, but not often and always soft-pedalled. The show paints a very positive picture of the NYPD at all levels, even if the season one arc involved a fraternity of dirty cops.

      Selleck plays Frank Reagan, Police Commissioner who came up through the NYPD ranks, and other characters include his two sons who are cops, daughter an ADA, and a few others including Frank’s father, who was himself a former Commissioner a couple of terms earlier. [The cast includes Donnie Wahlberg as one of the sons, Broadway vet Len Cariou as the grandfather].

      Story references back to the old days of the 80s and 90s are measured, but amount to ‘we were fighting a war then’ so shut up liberals.

  5. Culture is downstream from politics: TV shows adapting to Trump era
    http://akinokure.blogspot.com/2016/12/culture-is-downstream-from-politics-tv.html
    The Hollywood Reporter writes about how TV executives are struggling to make their programming relevant in the age of Trump. They don’t know anybody who voted for Trump, and none of their current shows has an even accidental chance of reaching Trump voters. Either they get with the times, or they’re effectively off the air.
    …This is a good example of how pop culture follows changes in the political and economic realms, rather than the other way around.

    • you have the quote backwards 😛 the theory is that culture changes what is considered acceptable politically. but with Trump ascendant that theory is looking shaky.

  6. Speaking of fake news. Rudolph Gialiani was just banned from Twitter, his contract with Fox News promptly cancelled because he confessed to the world he has had personal knowledge of a phedophile ring run out of DC.
    His twitter timeline has gone down the memory hole. Somebody archived it here:

    http://archive.is/IDBh5

    This absolutely mind blowing if true. After I read what Mr. Giuliani posted, I was like, why would a guy like this fabricate a fake story like that? All the cheese would have to fall off your cracker to invent such a tale, and how can you make something like this up anyways. The man has always been an apparently in public a pretty decent soul from everything I’ve seen of him over the years.

      • If he doesn’t die suddenly of Andrew Breitbart syndrome. Or it could be a fake counter psyop operation to create a conspiracy discrediting narrative. Old Rinny Raygun said Trust but verify first.
        If it is true, wager there’s some people involved who will do literally anything to cover their ass.
        That is some truly sick diabolical stuff.

    • I saw that story from a link on Zerohedge. seemed like a prank with the talk of super CGI impersonations. until someone uploads video or pic files, this will just be a rumor.

    • They are stepping on anybody that mentions pizzagate, hard. This is big, so big that it may not break while the people involved are alive, but this has to be huge.

  7. I’m sorry, but I have to disagree with this essay.. We’ve won nothing, just as we won nothing in the 70s. Sure the left got over exposed and had to go underground, but they didn’t stop. They continued to work diligently in universities, charities, the government, and even business. They just got out of the limelight since it was bad press. The mess didn’t get cleaned up, they just shoved all the garbage into the closet and make everything look good, but the termites were still at work chomping on the studs in the walls and the joists in the floor.

    • All manner of shenanigans are possible in an economy detached from the gold standard, and hence the need to produce.

      New freedom to explore every variety imaginable of insanity, devolution, and perversion at no cost appears when you can just run up debt, print money, and put it all on the credit card.

      The credit card has been maxed out for some time now. There will be a reckoning, eventually, and likely within the foreseeable future.

      The mess will get cleaned up then. Our job is just to make sure that the cleaning is done properly.

  8. By that point it was clear that the Progressives were spent and it was just a question as to when the normal adults would regain control and begin cleaning up the mess left by the Progressive lunatics.

    Except they didn’t or at least they didn’t completely. Let’s try to visualize this as the waistband of an old pair of underwear. You get fat and the waistband expands massively, but then you regain sanity and lose the weight. The waste band never truly recovers back to where it was before. It’s already stretched out waiting for the next bout of insanity, and sure enough it will come, and it did. It all creates a cumulative erosion that cannot be repaired.

  9. Remember radio “programs”? Neither do I, except for the occasional “Mystery Theater” or whatever it was, decades ago, with the creaking door at the beginning of the program.

    The idea of TV “programs” is probably just about done, too. Like radio, you will get news, music, banter from the hosts and hostesses, lots of ads, and not much visible structure at all (mind you, radio is incredibly structured and formatted, it just doesn’t sound like it). Perhaps lots of Youtubes and oddball efforts (see “Jackass” or most of “reality TV” for the examples). Episodic programs with a coherent story line will probably disappear. Just as bothering to show up at the time the show is broadcast now seems so archaic, so will the idea of telling a story with a beginning, middle, and end. If you think people’s brains are full of mush now, wait until they have absorbed decades of that kind of media glop.

    • TV looks to be separating into quality and crap with not much in between. the top series are supplanting movies as a long form story telling medium. for examples of crap, re: Lena Durham

  10. The idea of bringing back or retreading seventies era shows arguably is part and parcel of a bigger movement among progressive Hollywood elements to further educate the masses on the finer points of progressive ideology and why it is a good thing for them to support the Democratic Party. Exhibit A: CNN’s so-called “documentary” series “The Sixties,” “The Seventies,” “The Eighties,” and “The Nineties” broadcast during this last year. If you watched any of those shows (I’ve seen all four) it was blatantly obvious that the complex events of entire decades’ histories were boiled down to discussing certain social issues and trends in the US that were then used to show how liberal/progressive movements brought about the wonderful progressive society we have today. Lots of focus on the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the women’s rights and gay rights movements of the seventies, etc., followed by a clear characterization of the eighties as a difficult time because the Republicans were in power and slowed the “pace of change.” Then, a rebirth/renaissance of the progressive movement once their favorite Bill Clinton got into office in the nineties and the geeks in Silicon Valley came into their own. The 1990s of course was the decade when the tech sector began to produce items that were mass consumed by average Americans and thereby changed Americans’ relationship with technology. Put another way, the four episodes praised the development of a society of urban tech-oriented geeks who drive the economy and are very “open and inclusive” of all people regardless of their race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, etc. Bringing back seventies’ era television shows will be a great platform for showing how “bad” things were before cellphones, the Internet and technology-driven society existed.

    • I suppose you are right about this on one level, but my first thought on seeing this news elsewhere was that there was some actual innovation and creative expression going on back then.

      Now admittedly, it was pretty low brow for many people’s tastes, but at least it was new and still consumable, in the sense that it appealed to popular tastes that hadn’t yet devolved to pure mindless animal impulse.

      Everything after then; the “music,” the movies, the television, the “literature;” it all seems like, what’s the word I’m looking for, ah….just crap.

      Except for all the crap, there’s just nothing new under the sun, and the capability for creating anything except new crap seems to have atrophied. Or been extirpated.

      At any rate, even the animal taste tires of crap after a while. And lacking the creative impulse, there’s nothing to do but go back and mine the pre-crap past. This old stuff always works when they redo movies and television. So why not go to the well again?

      But I am old. So what do I know.

  11. “According to the ads, there is a show called Samantha Bee, where a middle-aged prude screeches at a camera for an hour every night.”

    Isn’t that the one called “Full Frontal, and featuring the hostess all garbed in black leather, carrying a whip, and glaring sidelong at the camera with her arms crossed in one of the stills in the advert? Yeah, we get the idea.

  12. There is some great TV available right now. ‘The Crown’ is incredible, episode 9 being amazing. The Crown is anti-propaganda of the first order…’Fargo’, both seasons, great stuff….The Man in the High Castle, excellent… Westworld, outstanding…..

    • Fargo was great. Never watched the others, but I’ll see if I can download them.

      There are some good shows on, but you have to search for them. Most of it is crap though.

    • We liked Fargo and The Americans. Right now we are midway in the second season of Murdoch Mysteries. I like that it’s a period piece and that they liberally sprinkle in historical figures and new inventions of the turn of the 20th century. What I hate is the liberal edges slipped in as though abortion, homosexuality, women’s rights, diversity, and civil rights were common topics in 1899.

      Just cannot get a break.

      • I usually find Murdoch too staid but I enjoyed an episode I saw this week in which the purported villain was a bank robbing, robin hood style “Kissing Bandit”… There was a real murder involving embezzlement from one of the banks, though this was revealed only near the end.

        It’s modern Canadian TV so it’s going to be PC. [Rhyme not originally intended.] Still, I could barely contain my glee at the depiction of old Toronto, with all its red brick buildings, pubs and inns, its wholesome public facilities, white Anglo people, and the Union Jack everywhere. [I could weep for what is now lost.] Even with all the leftist stuff, the show will eventually get memory holed just for its setting.

  13. I have dvd sets of The Honeymooners and Amos and Andy, shows I loved as a child. The Honeymooners was and remains a work of genius: hell, it was done before a live audience! A & A was my introduction to Negroes. Negroes have changed since then and are no longer amusing, although Al Sharpton has a certain Algonquin J Calhoun quality about him. Then there was Our Miss Brooks, a schoolteacher who wasn’t a shrew! Gunsmoke was another great show. Haven’t had tv in many, many years, pretty much lost interest when The Mod Squad appeared. It was all downhill once color tv came in, truth told. Christmas time is here, so it’s time to break out the dvd of Amahl and the Night Visitors, the b&w A Christmas Carol and a relatively recent color movie that I did enjoy, primarily because it was written and narrated by Jean Shepherd, a great radio personality of the 50s and 60s to whom I listened at night as a lad in my dark bedroom illuminated only by the ghostly blue “Magic Eye” of my Grundig radio, still with me 58 years later.

    It’s a crying shame what’s happened to Christmas season entertainment over the past 40 years or so.

    • Oh my gosh. The b&w Christmas Carol.
      After all these years, having watched it on a b&w tv (natch), I still remember that it was hair-raisingly good.

    • Just for kicks I searched for both those programs in the KODI application recommended here recently by another commenter.

      It appears that the all shows for both these programs, and for probably any other TV show you can think of, are available using the app for free.

      I’ve only used it to watch a movie or two, and I can confirm that it works great for those.

    • just program up the content you want for the holidays. all the old stuff plus new things like Elf. be the filter.

  14. I do not watch TV and have not watched TV for the past 30+ years. I do not watch sports or movies, they bore me. I read and troll on the interwebs for entertainment. The entertainment industry went all in with the theories of Theodore Adorno (Frankfort School) in the early 50s, the mission was to make money and “socialize” the rubes. Visual displays effect us on a sub-conscience level, when this stimulus is removed all you are left with is reality.

  15. It was about seventy years between Gutenberg and Luther nailing the theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg. The internet may have sped things up, but I don’t think we can tell how and when this will all play out and what, if any, endpoint there will be. Diversity of information leads to diversity of viewpoints and centralized control of a range of acceptable opinion would seem to be more difficult. But centralized find ways and pretexts for centralization. I’m sure they will find a significant number of people who will accept the lie that it’s for our own good.

    • Who was said “Truth in a time of universal deceit is a revolutionary idea”? We are being carpet bombed with the deceit of cultural marxist propaganda and agitprop. They can’t leave anything not defiled. It must be a concerted strategy to saturate, taint every medium of information, data and entertainment with their filth. It’s so become obnoxious and foul.
      I think in particular TV has enabled them to seem all encompassing, it certainly enabled them to become cunning consummate meddlers in our every affair.
      The truth of it is is probably it is a fraction of a percentage of the population involved in this great deceit. That tells you how powerful controlling the message through the media can be.
      It is still predicated on capturing and monopolizing on the masses ignorance and vulnerabilities.
      A war of hearts and minds, the choice between certain kind of slavery, and freedom.

        • Roger that. You ever see the old grainy photo of Orwell, Hemmingway and what’s the guy who was Orwell’s contemporary who also wrote of distopian future, my minds having a brain cramp, wrote Brave New World, well anyways the three of them are in WWI uniforms, Orwell is holding a small dog in his arms, they are all kitted out with field gear and rifles ready to march. What’s the odds they all end up in that picture in that time and place?

          • Aldous Huxley.

            I’ve never seen that photo. A remarkable conjunction, in retrospect.

            I have shifted several times in my life as to whether 1984 or BNW best captured out future. It now looks like a little from column a, a little from column b.

  16. The interesting thing about cord cutting for me has been how little of just about anything I watch these days. The antenna quality is fantastic, as good or better than satellite, and free. So, I can still watch major sporting events.

    We pay for Sling (which is just Dish Network / AT&T), which at $20/mo and about 20 channels is something resembling a bargain. Even then, our percent-watched is somewhat low…but it beats paying $240/mo to watch the same channels. The thing I like about it isn’t the “live TV”. I couldn’t care less about that. I just like the on-demand nature of it. That, plus $10 for Netflix and $15 for Apple Music (worth every penny if you love music), and I’m good.

    As for the 70’s rehash: they’re out of ideas. Just like the Progs are out of ideas, and the Government Party in general. Nothing new to say to a declining audience that increasingly is tuning them out.

    That’s the problem with these Random Content Generators spewing out banal nonsense 24/7. Eventually people catch onto that. Web media has the same problem.

  17. Revised History Comrades!
    Into the glorious future of cultural marxist social engineering!
    ( It’s feeding time on prime time for SJW’s. The human extinction movement lifting it’s leg to urinate on the dirt people brought to you buy the programming of the cold fire. No culture to be left unsoiled by it’s taint of moral superiority, no rock of tradition and values, no identity of virtue or principles unturned by diversity’s purge of the Western Race of Men. It’s subtle hate is derangement writ large, it’s racist bigotry knows no limits. )

  18. ” gender fluid . . . who enjoys lifting weights ” I thought that defined lesbian.

    ” The mere fact that Amy Schumer can get work on television says the people in charge hate their customers. ”
    How do these people have customers? I watch television and movies for entertainment. Never have understood the artsy crowd talking about the meaning of Ingmar Bergman films, or any other director. I want entertainment, not social commentary, not the meaning of life, not coming of age angst, and certainly not left wing propaganda. When I read or hear about the message in ” whatever ” I cross that off my list of things to see.

  19. The good news is that if they go to Netflix we should have to only put up with a year of this crap at the most. When it comes to their original programing they seem to be very good at cutting their loses (due to the great cost of original programing). Once an All in the Family or Jefferson’s remake get less than one star, and few views/downloads they will move on to greener pastures.

  20. The big thing with television agit-prop is this: pushback against progressivism has been building for years, and the response of “Hollywood” is to double and maybe triple down on progressivism. This will in turn, escalate the pushback against progressivism and back and forth until something breaks.

    • An example would be “Starship Troopers”, a good, old fashioned recruiting movie from the 1940s.

      The only thing it was missing was Bing Crosby, singing in front of some movie screen showing proud rows of bombers and battleships.

    • Pushback can come in two varieties. One, more of a “fading” as I watch less and less content and turn to other pursuits like finding and listening to more music. The other is outright “cutting” the cord as others have mentioned.
      I would cut the cord outright but others in the household have a voice also. Democracy.

  21. i don’t think it’s a 70’s revival kind of thing. There are so many content providers now that every old thing is being reconsidered and remade. This project will never get off the ground though.

    • Sure is a Hollyweird mess. Just like “The Magnificent Seven” now with a black man as the lead character. I like Denzel but a remake of the great movie with that kind of PC change is … beyond the pale. I won’t see it.

  22. What? No plans for “The Rifleman”, or “Branded”?
    Wrong message for the K-12 (+6?) captured audience ?

    • That show would be impossible to remake. For starters The Rifleman was a traditional morality play. Hollywood doesn’t do traditional morality, nor are they capable of writing decent Western scripts without introducing a lot of modern c**p. Really a strong, white male lead who owns a gun, works the land and doesn’t take back talk from his son. Just not possible.

      • The Rifleman would be fertile ground for White Privilege, gun violence, misogyny, repression of minorities, you name the meme, it’s low hanging fruit.
        They would even find a way to fit globull warming, lead bullets as radical white extremist eco terrorism, and Trump as a facist meat eating cruelty to animals cattle baron villain who is destroying the habitat of some special minnow in a mud puddle while committing illegal immigrants to slavery on his ten million acre ranch. Plus transexual pajama mangina boy as moral superior heroine who runs a transexual combination school for special snowflakes for baking gay wedding cakes and pizza’s. As an added bonus episode of glorious revised history, how the West was tamed by islam.

        • As a young lad I learned a sweet little slur from the Rifleman, “PepperGut” the bad guy of the day called a couple of Mexican gunhombres “pepperguts.” I liked it. I never got the opportunity to use it until I enlisted in the Army. I had numerous opportunities at that point and it was taken quite well. I will never forget the Rifleman for furthering my education.

          • Chuck Conner’s man did he have that great squinty eye look. He sure loved his boy something sweet. That was wholesome programming tell you.

      • I read once that all Westerns are morality plays. But you’re right that current Hollywood would never put the traditional morality back on television. What if it became popular? What a nightmare!

        • Think your right about them being fables in the classic sense, they where perfect venues. Look at the spaghetti westerns Eastwood was in. If those weren’t about morality, the nine great virtues and fall from grace what is? How about High Noon with the dashing Gary Cooper, or True Grit, those are masterpieces, some are just epic, a lot of others in their own right. America’s version of Greek tragedy’s.

  23. Not a chance in hell would they remake an episode from the fist couple of seasons of “All in the Family” true to the original script.

    By halfway through the original run the show had lost that edge.

    • Big Problem: Most of the prebuilt plot tension from All in the Family that existed in the ’70’s is now gone.

      Back then it was highly unusual to find a slacker sociology major sponging off a blue-collar redneck by living under his roof and eating his food while schtupping his daughter (although married) yet constantly in his father-in-law’s face about PC BS issues. But today, it’s almost the norm for a hostile millennial to be an ungrateful parasite living in Mom’s basement. I know about this via the situation of a few nephews….

  24. Cable is committing suicide by agit-prop as well. Snide anti-Trump and anti-Republican remarks just sort of pop up with no relation to the plots. I just saw a promo for this season’s Homeland, a show that I’ve liked. The lead character Carrie quits spy work and joins a law firm in NY that specializes in defending Muslims wrongly accused of terrorist activities. They’ve destroyed a good show in the name of their new religion. I will not be watching.

  25. In Hollywood,original ideas are squashed faster than a bug hitting the windshield at 80 mph. They already recycled the 70’s on “That 70’s How”, back in the 90’s. Lather,rinse,repeat,ad nauseum. Yes.thank goodness we now have alternatives. My greatest Christmas wish is to have a Bluray version of “Manos,the Hands of Fate” as done by MST3k’s Joel and the Bots.

  26. Just please don’t bring back 70s fashion. The decade was just one long, bad, look. Personally, don’t think they can pull this off. One thing about the writing in all of those shows. They actually dealt with shit. Virtually none of the dialogs of All in the Family, Jeffersons, Sanford & Son could pass the censors today. Hell, it’s almost impossible to find an uncut version of Blazing Saddles, which I still hold was the last honest “dialog” on race in this country before the kabuki theater took over.

    PS. Took a look at a couple of Samantha Bee clips on Youtube. Dear Lord, who gave that demented Harpy a show?

    • Yeah, leisure suits, platform shoes and sideburns should sty in the past. That period was the worst in terms of fashion. Interestingly though, the auto styling of the 60’s and 70’s was the best. But, if getting cool looking cars means Jew-fros and Jheri curls, I’ll pass.

      I agree that they could not pull off a remake of these shows. In many respects, the shows were dependent on the unique talents of the stars. Sherman Helmsley was the only guy who could pull off the character since he invented it. Modern actors playing Archie would ham it up and make it into a spoof of the original. Then you have the issue of dialogue you mention. No actor would allow himself to be filmed saying “coloreds” or “darkies” on TV. No writer would agree to write those lines.

      Samantha Bee is a puzzler. I did the same thing and came to the conclusion that someone lost a bet. “If I win you have to convince the studio to give that miserable shrew her own show.”

      • Thought for a moment bigger tits might help, but nothing can come that cat caught in a corn sheller voice. Your theory is probably the closest to Occam.

      • The acting these days is overwrought. Compare old and new Hawaii Five O. The old cop drama basically revolved around the story of the crime and tracking down the criminal. The new one has jerky camera actions, character angst, and always has to sandwich in human moments in such as one of the cops interacting and showing compassion to an orphan or some such thing. It’s annoying.

        And let’s not even get into how ugly high definition video is to watch compared to the remastered film used in the original series. Just tell me a story and skip the preachyness. And put it on 35 millimeter film!

        On a final note, I saw “The Jerk” on television the other night. Probably the funniest line in the whole movie is when Steve Martin gets annoyed at the bigots pushing a real estate investment and telling him how he doesn’t have to worry about his investment because it’s going to be priced high so it will keep “n*ggers” out (which is how things work in reality). Indignantly, he exclaims, “What! I’m a n*gger!”.

        Of course, they bleeped out the funniest line in the movie as if uttering a once commonly used word that had no negative connotations is one of the seven deadly sins! (We had a local ghost town which had the official name of N*ggertown.)

        http://www.forgottenoh.com/GhostTowns/franklinco.html

        • “…a once commonly used word that had no negative connotations….”

          No negative connotations? I’m given to understand that the polite term in the USA 100 years ago was “colored”, and that “n*gger” had negative connotations even then. Of course, I was born after “All in the Family” had gone off the air, so this may be one of those “we’ve always been at war with Eurasia” kind of things, but I doubt it.

          • I had a reason to go through some old issues of Jet magazine a while back. Negro was their word of choice. It was used throughout the magazines.

            I don’t believe our current “political correctness” originated with black people.

        • If they had tried they might have been able to voice over “n*ggers” with “n-words.” That would have passed muster.

          I’m noting that more and more words are being euphemized in this manner. Recently I saw a news report where “bitch” was spelled as “b-word.”

          What are we now, a nation of kindergartners? Or just a bunch of d-word f-worders?

    • Most ’70s fashion was crap, true; but I’ll always treasure my memories of the miniskirt!

      (Mission Impossible: Don’t think of Lena Dunham in a miniskirt. That is all.)

    • [i]The mere fact that Amy Schumer can get work on television says the people in charge hate their customers.[/i]

      I once saw about 20 minutes of an Amy Schumer comedy special on cable. I didn’t hate it, but didn’t like it well enough to stay for the entire hour.

      I saw 5 minutes of Samantha the B. when she popped up right after South Park. That was more than enough for me. Mathematical evidence that Sammy is [b]four[/b] times as repellent as Amy.

      I cut the cable back in August of this year.

    • The mere fact that Amy Schumer can get work on television says the people in charge hate their customers.

      I once saw about 20 minutes of an Amy Schumer comedy special on cable. I didn’t hate it, but didn’t like it well enough to stay for the entire hour.

      I saw 5 minutes of Samantha the B. when she popped up right after South Park. That was more than enough for me. Mathematical evidence that Sammy is four times as repellent as Amy.

      I cut the cable back in August of this year.

    • Some of them more natural girls, like Farah Fawcett in spandex and big hair sure where feminine and sexy looking back in the day.

  27. I was one of the first generation of cord cutters, Netflix had just begun streaming and I was mostly watching TV on my laptop in those days. Now I watch Midsomer Murders and anime full time.

    • I still have DTV, but I only watch live sports these days. I really should pull the plug on it as I don’t even watch sports as much as I used to. When I do feel oike watching something, I get it from Amazon most times or down load it from a pirate source.

      • While I am not advocating this, you can share login credentials (with a friend) for online sports.

        • I share my cable connection with my parents, who live on the other side of my back fence. Yeah, it’s probably illegal, but sharing the cable with two households is the only way I can justify the cost. I would not be paying $92 a month for cable and internet for just one home and really the only reason I have cable (instead of internet only) is so that my dad can watch soccer. Otherwise, the cable channels I mostly watch are the over-the-air channels anyway.

      • Are there any sports worth watching anymore? It seems leftism has spread like a virus to all of entertainment. Not a day goes by I don’t mark another ‘used to be’ favorite actor off my list because of their newfound desire to express their politics in an overt fashion. It turns me off and will not fund our country’s demise. I cut the cord once I found my money was funding Comcast and all its channels to beat me over the head with (MSNBC or some other Al Gore production). I never looked back. Roku with Netflix, Amazon, Hulu (not sure I care for it myself), Plex Media Server, and a single indoor OTA for all local HD channels. Bought my own cable modem, cost me $59 for the month of internet. I get pleasure out of seeing the look on the DirectTV guy at SamsClub when he approaches and asks what cable provider I have in an attempt to undercut it, and I tell him I don’t have it. Sad Panda comes to mind. Once I helped the family find content, it didn’t matter where it originated as long as it was easily accessible. They’ve learned to adapt and I don’t worry as much about the kids getting indoctrinated by today’s Bert and Ernie or latest oversexed christian hating effeminate programming. Stop feeding the beast, it’s easier than you think.

    • My wife and I have found how remarkably insignificant TV is once we totally cut the cord and had time to acclimate and focus our impulses and desires to other endeavors and activities.
      I don’t no for sure what it is, but looking back TV is like heroin, but instead of a monkey on your back, it’s a monkey on the mind, it’s addictive you can’t see the forest for the trees, it’s like being hypnotized and a spell of entrancement in one. When visiting, and a TV is on, I find I can’t even focus on it, it’s like this alien contraption spewing out unintelligible nonesuch. And to have to pay for being programmed and bombarded by incessant demand for consumption, to part you from your hard earned bucks, I feel like I was this complete retard and idiot all that time.
      It’s like a cold fire, people stare into it, but instead of being entranced by the primal glow of heat and light, an alluring connection to ghosts of ancestors and spirituality, it disconnects one from reality. Some never find their way back I suppose.

      • I find I watch less TV than before I cut the cord, but not that much less. I only watch things I want to see now, I never watch just for the sake of watching. It’s also changed my viewing habits, I prefer binge watching. I can’t do the one episode per week thing anymore. I also can’t handle TV without pause and rewind, if I’m watching regular TV at somebody else’s house the lack of pause and reverse drive me nuts.

        • I know what your saying. We still have a TV set, the neighbors up and down the ridge we all trade back and forth on movie dvd’s and tapes. One lady dropped off 6 milk crates of movie and documentary tapes, left a note to take what we want, put in anything we had we wanted to share, and drop the crates off to somebody further down the mountain. Some awesome flicks too, John Wayne westerns to The Matrix.
          Somehow watching a movie is very different than network TV programming. Maybe because like you said and there’s no commercials.

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