Social Netflix Originals are pretty cookie cutter these days...

I'm just getting ready to finish up that new Netflix series Dead to Me with Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini. I actually really enjoyed the show and thought it was good, but there cookie cutter approach to television kind of makes me roll my eyes. Its seems like everything has to have the following now days.


Strong female lead (Head of household, can beat up men etc...)

LGBT supporting character(s)

Usually some sort of snarky comment about the republican party

White villain

Heroic or moral character is a person of color

Christianity is mocked while other religions are respected

There's nothing at all wrong with the things above, but all of these points seem to be playing on repeat when it comes to Netflix and Hollywood right now, and a lot of it is a little unrealistic.

I'm not a conservative or a Christian and none of this offends me as a good writing can always shine through. It's just that Hollywood seems to be pushing a painfully obvious left wing agenda.


LOL you noticed?

every single show on amazon prime and Netflix promotes aggressive feminism.

Guess which group of people write all the scripts for those shows.
Same people who run Hollywood , who pump out the same stuff .
 
That Good Omen show or whatever that is being advertised on Amazon all the time right now is an example imo of being too heavy handed with the political message.

There's a clip in the trailer where a female character (complete with the steampunk short haircut and shit) goes "I reject your traditional sex roles" or some shit and stomps on a random male characters foot.

Like.... come on... that sounds like a high school freshman wrote that...
 
LOL you noticed?

every single show on amazon prime and Netflix promotes aggressive feminism.

Guess which group of people write all the scripts for those shows.
Same people who run Hollywood , who pump out the same stuff .

Old white guys?
 
I don't think that makes any sense. When they make a show like Sons of Anarchy, that doesn't mean that corporations are advancing pro-biker gang politics. Or that Breaking Bad means that they're advancing pro-meth politics. There are women and gay people watching tv and movies, just like there are bikers and drug users, making shows that appeal to the potential audience doesn't mean that there's a pro-them agenda.

I really don't see the connection between a variety of programming and the alluded agendas unless it's being applied to literally every show theme that shows up in more than one program. Otherwise, it seems extremely selective.
Fucking lol, Sons of Anarchy and Breaking Bad were not made for biker gangs and meth dealers.
Honestly, that seems an impossible criteria. The Indian kid is written to represent his race because he both embodies and subverts stereotypes of Indians? Then there will never be an Indian character that is acceptable to you. Someone is representing their race when they embody stereotypes. Then if they subvert those stereotypes, they're still representing their race. The writers will never be able to write a character that neither embodies nor subverts stereotypes. Because any character that doesn't embody the stereotypes is de facto subverting them
Except I actually quite like the Indian kid in Mean Girls, in fact he is one of my favorite token Indians. But he is still a token Indian nonetheless. In a cast full of Indians it is less likely that being Indian will be boiled down to being good at math and eating spicy food.
But your statement wasn't when they are more likely to be cast. Your statement was that you prefer to see these types of roles presented in casts that are largely homogeneous. That you would prefer the Arabic Christina priest in a largely Arabic cast and NOT in a largely white cast. Which I think is simply reduction in the range of presentations available to Arabic actors.
No that is not what I said, or at least not what I meant. I do not prefer those kinds of roles in ethnically homogeneous casts, its just that in my experience they are more likely to be written in an ethnically homogeneous cast because the characters have to be distinguished from each other on some basis other than ethnicity so such casts are more likely to explore the different kinds of people within an ethnicity and the relationship between them. That is my impression at least.
Again, what you said is that you prefer them in largely casts of the same ethnicity. I asked for that clarification so that I wouldn't misrepresent your preferences. But to this point specifically, I don't think that's the case. Most of the arguments around this particular subject is that the characters being presented violated the stereotypes.

No one has complained about women being presented as homemakers and mothers. Or black characters being presented as poor or criminals. Those are the not the subversions that trigger these conversations.

Women physically dominating men, people in mixed relationships, gratuitous positioning of minorities/gays in positions of authority over non-minorities/straights, etc. That's the complaint.
But that's not my argument. And in fact @Gregolian produced a good example of a black character in a diverse cast being boiled down to a stereotype, a criminal, and I would say that's also an example of what I am talking about though to be fair I have not watched House.
 
But that's not my argument. And in fact @Gregolian produced a good example of a black character in a diverse cast being boiled down to a stereotype, a criminal, and I would say that's also an example of what I am talking about though to be fair I have not watched House.


The clip I referenced. It comes up semi as a running joke throughout the series too that Foreman is this supposedly brilliant character but only got hired cause he was a juvenile delinquent.

You want a token character that gets stereotyped by OTHER characters on the show and sets out to prove the stereotypes wrong only to end up being a stereotype:


"Your family's black Token, there's bound to be a bass guitar someplace in your family's basement"

THEN, Token claims to not know how to play and then he bangs out a bassline.... South Park is great at highlighting this shit.
 
@Kafir-kun, what exactly is the thesis here?
That certain shows are appealing to a kind of pop liberalism that emphasizes a certain conception of diversity. This is done with a cluster of tropes that have emerged such as "strong" female characters, flamboyant LGBTQ characters, an ethnically diverse cast, and some shallow bigoted character that is repudiated by any of the aforementioned good, "diverse" characters as well as some wink and nod to some topical political, social, or cultural issue. Merely checking these boxes isn't in and of itself bad, as I have said more than once Mean Girls ticks off most of them but is pretty good. But that came out like a decade before the current trend and really feels like a passion project by Tina Fey. Some of these more recent shows seem to be trying to cash in on woke identity politics and so aren't always very good.

Obviously pop liberal politics aren't the only thing pushed by media, there are certain tropes and series that appeal to right wing sensibilities. Something like 24 seems to unapologetically push the mainstream, official view on the War on Terror. Its also not uncommon to see cops on TV violate a citizens' right only to be vindicated in the end because the citizen was actually a dangerous criminal so see, gotta give cops some leeway in dealing with criminal scum and can't get too hung up on so called constitutional rights now. That appeals to law and order conservatives and is honestly one of the most infuriating tropes I see in media, much more so than some token black or gay character.
 
I'm just getting ready to finish up that new Netflix series Dead to Me with Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini. I actually really enjoyed the show and thought it was good, but there cookie cutter approach to television kind of makes me roll my eyes. Its seems like everything has to have the following now days.


Strong female lead (Head of household, can beat up men etc...)

LGBT supporting character(s)

Usually some sort of snarky comment about the republican party

White villain

Heroic or moral character is a person of color

Christianity is mocked while other religions are respected

There's nothing at all wrong with the things above, but all of these points seem to be playing on repeat when it comes to Netflix and Hollywood right now, and a lot of it is a little unrealistic.

I'm not a conservative or a Christian and none of this offends me as a good writing can always shine through. It's just that Hollywood seems to be pushing a painfully obvious left wing agenda.
I just watched 'I am mother.' Was going pretty good for a pro female flick, up until the white girl main characters "brother" was born and he was black.. And the AI and girl talked about how perfect he was. So it was a movie with two white female stars, a white sounding robot, and the main girls little brother who might be the only male on the planet.. A perfect baby who is black.

Still would give a B+, But it totally took me out of the moment.
 
As far as the thread goes,
@HereticBD @Kafir-kun etc are correct about the quality of the source material being important when it comes to the obvious message.

Some of my all time favorite movies are about empowered women. Alien, Aliens, Fifth Element, Terminator 2, Jackie Brown, etc. The difference between those and *some* of the popular new age stuff, is that, imo of course, those movies were actually good, and had a credible plot to support what was happening. These pretenders are too obvious.
Yeah this kind of woke identity politics is just the latest trend that hack writers can safely exploit for now but it doesn't mean that having female leads or a diverse cast is bad. That kind of media can be done well and I would bet a few of these woke shows are probably not half bad.
 
Fucking lol, Sons of Anarchy and Breaking Bad were not made for biker gangs and meth dealers.
So? If television shows are about agendas then it's about normalizing a behavior through the medium of TV. Those shows aren't made for biker gangs and meth dealers - they're made to push that behavior on the rest of us by normalizing it...right?

Or are the messages in those shows somehow less propaganda than others? Because I've never had a gay relationship or joined a biker gang, yet I've seen tv shows about both things. One can't be an agenda while the other is simply entertainment. That's way too arbitrary to be defensible.

Except I actually quite like the Indian kid in Mean Girls, in fact he is one of my favorite token Indians. But he is still a token Indian nonetheless. In a cast full of Indians it is less likely that being Indian will be boiled down to being good at math and eating spicy food.
But that isn't what you said - you said he is "written to embody his race in some capacity" as if there is something wrong with the Indian kid being acceptable as an Indian kid.

. As for tokenism - I wholly reject that argument. When I walk into a legal conference, I'm often the only black lawyer in the room. My wife is often the only Indian in her profession. Outside of select few professions, minorities are often a very minor presence in many spaces. My dad was frequently the only black doctor. Eminem was the only white kid in his rap group (D12).

Just one or a few of an outsider in a group is not "tokenism". It's the reality as more and more people cross barriers into spaces they previously weren't welcome.

No that is not what I said, or at least not what I meant. I do not prefer those kinds of roles in ethnically homogeneous casts, its just that in my experience they are more likely to be written in an ethnically homogeneous cast because the characters have to be distinguished from each other on some basis other than ethnicity so such casts are more likely to explore the different kinds of people within an ethnicity and the relationship between them. That is my impression at least.
And my point is that writing them into ethnically homogeneous casts simply reinforces the stereotypical perception of those groups and contradicts reality.

Using the black doctor since it's more common than the Arabic priest: The truth is that there are black doctors and they make up 4% of the physician population. They are often operating in very non-homogeneous neighborhoods. Casting them in heterogeneous spaces where they are the only one of their ethnicity in that space is much closer to their reality than casting them in some space where they're primarily interacting with others of their own ethnicity. That wouldn't make sense - a black doctor makes a doctor's income and is going to largely know other doctors, live in neighborhoods that align with his income, etc. And those spaces are primarily non-black.

Writing the black doctor into a largely black cast is less true than writing him into a largely white cast. The same for any minority cast into a non-stereotypical position and even for some of the stereotypical ones.

But that's not my argument. And in fact @Gregolian produced a good example of a black character in a diverse cast being boiled down to a stereotype, a criminal, and I would say that's also an example of what I am talking about though to be fair I have not watched House.

And my point was that no one complains about black character being cast as a criminal. No one is starting threads or writing op-eds about Hollywood's agenda when they cast a Muslim as a terrorist or a black person as a criminal or a woman as choosing her home life over worklife.

They make a comment if they were to cast the Muslim as President or the black person as en engineering genius. And they only make those comments when the Muslim or the Black person shows up in mainstream viewing. No one gives a shit about the black doctor on BET because they don't watch that anyway. But you put him next to a mainstream actor on a mainstream channel where he/she cannot be ignore then they complain.

Relegating minority actors (including sexuality) to homogeneous casts is far worse than tokenism. Tokenism at least reflects reality.
 
That certain shows are appealing to a kind of pop liberalism that emphasizes a certain conception of diversity. This is done with a cluster of tropes that have emerged such as "strong" female characters, flamboyant LGBTQ characters, an ethnically diverse cast, and some shallow bigoted character that is repudiated by any of the aforementioned good, "diverse" characters as well as some wink and nod to some topical political, social, or cultural issue. Merely checking these boxes isn't in and of itself bad, as I have said more than once Mean Girls ticks off most of them but is pretty good. But that came out like a decade before the current trend and really feels like a passion project by Tina Fey. Some of these more recent shows seem to be trying to cash in on woke identity politics and so aren't always very good.

Obviously pop liberal politics aren't the only thing pushed by media, there are certain tropes and series that appeal to right wing sensibilities. Something like 24 seems to unapologetically push the mainstream, official view on the War on Terror. Its also not uncommon to see cops on TV violate a citizens' right only to be vindicated in the end because the citizen was actually a dangerous criminal so see, gotta give cops some leeway in dealing with criminal scum and can't get too hung up on so called constitutional rights now. That appeals to law and order conservatives and is honestly one of the most infuriating tropes I see in media, much more so than some token black or gay character.

So some shows are bad, and some bad shows have tropes that line up with what's identified with what are pejoratively called "SJW"s. OK. I agree with that. I don't see it as particularly interesting, though.

Yeah this kind of woke identity politics is just the latest trend that hack writers can safely exploit for now but it doesn't mean that having female leads or a diverse cast is bad. That kind of media can be done well and I would bet a few of these woke shows are probably not half bad.

You know what the easiest market for hack writers to break, right? Christian fiction.
 
So some shows are bad, and some bad shows have tropes that line up with what's identified with what are pejoratively called "SJW"s. OK. I agree with that. I don't see it as particularly interesting, though.
Then this thread isn't for you.
You know what the easiest market for hack writers to break, right? Christian fiction.
True but Netflix isn't really releasing a lot of Christian fiction as far as I know.
 
That Good Omen show or whatever that is being advertised on Amazon all the time right now is an example imo of being too heavy handed with the political message.

There's a clip in the trailer where a female character (complete with the steampunk short haircut and shit) goes "I reject your traditional sex roles" or some shit and stomps on a random male characters foot.

Like.... come on... that sounds like a high school freshman wrote that...

I remember seeing some show on Netflix, and I'm pretty sure it was that Dear White People or whatever, and a black character was like "What's up, negro? You on fleek?" or something like that. I was just thinking "I wonder if the guy who wrote this was in his 40s or his 50s...."

Most of Netflix' originals, though. It's not about the messaging to me, it's about how bland the shit often is. When you make the Punisher tame? Sheeeeit. I could handle him slitting throats and putting a grenade in a pimp's mouth when I was 10, and now I'm an adult and they neuter the shit for a subscription service?!

I never watched season 2.
 
Then this thread isn't for you.

What I'm saying is that I don't think that that's a matter of controversy. The controversy might be based on people talking past each other with no one holding (or at least being willing to express) views that anyone really disagrees with.

True but Netflix isn't really releasing a lot of Christian fiction as far as I know.

Don't know, as there's way more stuff than I can watch. But I took it to be a broader point about the culture.
 
Not just Netflix. Hollywood.

What are they trying to do?

I don't know.

My guess is that they are unwitting useful idiots, stirring a political culture war, so the American populace doesn't fight a economic and anti-war, political war.

So screenwriters and producers all throughout Hollywood are dictated a specific, coordinated agenda to only produce content that will piss off straight white males? Any idea who the shot-callers are?
 
Netflix originals are largely atrocious

It still has decent horror and action movie selections tho
 
I am not "fuckin" defensive, I am just not going to defend a position I didn't articulate. I'm not dumb, I know Netflix is trying to play to its perception of the market. That doesn't change anything that I said though. Obviously I don't force myself to watch anything that I don't like but the point is as a consumer I am not a fan of it and I wish the industry would innovate a bit more instead of pandering with topical culture war garbage.

As I alluded to earlier this is why I try to go out of my way to experiment with foreign media every so often, because its divorced from our political context and therefore is less likely to have the same kind of political pandering.

Hollywood, like all art, is just a reflection of the society we live in, and I'm not sure how much Hollywood is actively "pandering topical culture war garbage", or if the complaints are simply part and parcel of getting older and desiring a return to the things that we grew up with. I'm sure your parents had the same reservations about cutting edge movies/Hollywood you were watching as a kid, just as their parents did before them. Resistance to change is nothing new, and as the old saying goes 'everyone is born a liberal and dies a conservative'.
 
Hollywood, like all art, is just a reflection of the society we live in, and I'm not sure how much Hollywood is actively "pandering topical culture war garbage", or if the complaints are simply part and parcel of getting older and desiring a return to the things that we grew up with. I'm sure your parents had the same reservations about cutting edge movies/Hollywood you were watching as a kid, just as their parents did before them. Resistance to change is nothing new, and as the old saying goes 'everyone is born a liberal and dies a conservative'.
Dude I am not that old, I am pretty much in the target demo that these "woke" shows and movies are supposed to be targeted and yet even I roll my eyes at them.
 
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