James Wolcott takes a look at the complaints over Whither Christmas? and says “Wait a minute“: ” I’ve got news: Even here on the godless, liberal Upper West Side, people wish each other Merry Christmas without staggering three steps backward, thunderstruck and covered with chagrin.”
But there’s another bete noire in the culture war: all the supposed blue-state programming that’s innundating the helpless Red-State-values households. I was inclined to go along with this viewing, thinking of Queer Eye or Desperate Housewives or some other show garnering the most column inches in the press. That is, until I sat down to watch TV Friday.
NBC was showing a made-for-TV movie, Secret Santa, that pitted jaded city newspaper reporter (Jenny Garth) come to a small town to unmask the identity of a Secret Santa. She acts in ways so unbelievably horrible that it’s impossible to imagine even the patient gentle townfolk taking it upon themselves to she her the true meaning of love and Christmas. But they do. It was Capra without the bite, and its PAX-ready moralism is the norm for network television drama today. Providence and Touched by an Angel are off the air, but their influence lives on. And the sitcom has become obsessed with the suburban nuclear family as much as it was obsessed with the New York singleton in the mid-90s. Granted, unlike the dramas the comedies are sometimes not without a jaded edge, but they’re hardly blue-state in tone.
And while we’re on the topic, I’ll mention the NBC promos for Brian Williams. I know why it’s in their interest to market him as the authentic Red Stater, but not only is he from New York state (where as Rather was Texan, Brokaw Midwestern), he’s nothing but a stuffed shirt, in contrast to previous anchors who came up through the ranks as reporters.
UPDATE: I also love this bit from Wolcott:
Isn’t just too-too perfect how a perceived liberal like Kaplan confounds his critics by hiring a conservative as a lead-in into a show hosted by another conservative? … Media liberals almost never surprise anyone by having the balls and spinal conviction to actually do something liberal; no, they always feel obliged to do the cute counterintuitive thing. No one expects Roger Ailes to surprise his critics by hiring Al Franken to host a nightly show on Fox; he earns his plaudits by sticking to his toy guns and hiring Yellin’ Zell Miller for an occasional round of hog callin’.
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