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.