My parents enjoy Taylor Sheridan written shows like Landmare (I think it's called) and Yellowstone.
I have a strict rule. If it's modern, it can't be good.
Even just the acting style is not what I like and is just bad compared to 90s and earlier, so even if you had zero modern values, the feel of media sucks now.
But that aside, they were watching Landmare the other night and I heard some woman character on there mention something about pronouns.
Now I've seen some clips from these types of shows, like Landmare. He is against wokeness, so he'll have the main character mock that mindset.
Ok, that's better than a woke show, I'll grant you that.
But you know what's even better than that?
shows like Columbo or Andy Griffith Show. I love that no matter how many episodes of Columbo I watch, I will never run into the risk of hearing the word "pronoun" ever come out of the speakers.
To me, you can't make a truly non-woke show nowadays. Because it would take balls of steel to merely make an apolitical show like Columbo or Andy Griffith show (yes they may have subtle moments, there's a few feminist moments in Andy Griffith show, for instance, but it's balanced out with women looking foolish often as well in their feminist pursuits....it's a relative scale and it's barely a factor)
If you made a show that was exactly like Columbo or Andy Griffith show
you'd have
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Almost entirely white cast
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Women would act like how women were portrayed (and more accurately really are) in the 1960s and 70s. ie; irrational, emotional prone.
They simply would not write women the way a typical Columbo or Andy Griffith show episode would write women.
The short version aka the point of this rant is that I find an anti-woke modern show barely preferable to a woke modern show. They're both presenting you with wokeness, it's just the Taylor Sheridan ones mock wokeness.
I'd rather not see or be reminded of ANY wokeness, and not see any modern type characters, which is why any TV or movie I watch is typically from the 90s or earlier. If you were to make just an apolitical Columbo episode, you'd be blackballed from Hollywood just based on the racial demographics of the cast, background characters, etc and how women are portrayed.
Yeah, Sheridan's shows are only "anti-woke" in the sense that ... they're not "woke". There's still contemporary issues and people in there (Landman just added a trans character for instance) and you won't find anybody there right of Fetterman. But for the most part they keep politics out of the storyline (minus the Tranny) unless it's directly applicable to the plot (EG Trump's increasing drilling and oil production played into some of the plot of Landman this season. Though Trump wasn't directly named just "This President's policies".
It's not high art. All Sheridan's stuff is essentially a soap opera for men and akin to Dynasty or Dallas in the 80s.
Making shows that are completely family friendly akin to those shows in the 70s and before is very much a dead art. All art has to be multi-plotted and faceted for maximum audience appeal. That's why you have the main story on the episode along with one or several sub stories going on that appeal to difference audience groups.
You don't have stars with clout anymore to push their own vehicles. Andy Griffith and its various spin offs were creations of Andy Griffith himself who groomed and maintained an image. Columbo wasn't created by Peter Falk but he loved the character and jumped at the chance to play him and then drove the development of the series. Production studios don't want that now. They want interchangeable (cheap) actors they can plug and play.
But yeah, I lament that we have masses of people that will just consume slop after slop because that's what you do every night.
Yeah, Sheridan's TV stuff is pure pandering. Like throwing chum in the water for boomers, except the chum is laced with woke arsenic. Problem is, everyone has a certain allowance for trash, and for a lot of people that allowance is high enough to watch multiple Taylor Sheridan shows.
His movies are pretty good though. Sicario #1, because he was collaborating with Denis Villeneuve. All time great movie. Hell or High Water and Wind River tying at #2. Sicario 2 at a distant #3 (the most hacky one). You can find traces of the problems of his TV writing in the movies, but they're much, much less significant because he actually tries to write seriously.
I like Landman and Tulsa King but Yellowstone and its derivatives and uh… Lionness? Weren’t my thing.
This reminded me...
The only reason to add a tranny/faggot to the show is to convert another character's viewpoint. Otherwise they serve no purpose. And there isn't one modern show with the balls to have a normal character course-correct the LGHDTV member back to the right path, because that would be considered "conversion therapy".
So what does that mean for the tranny in Landman?
Now I saw a bunch of so-called anti-woke content creators praising Sheridan for "dismantling" the woke ideology, but when they played the clip, there was zero dismantling going on. The character just questioned the pronoun nonsense without really doing much else.
There are only two outcomes possible: the tranny is converted back to being normal (not likely to happen because then Lefties will scream "conversion therapy!") or the daughter comes around to being converted to the tranny's side.
And given that every single other instance where these characters have been introduced into shows (for every case I'm aware of) it always ends up being the second outcome 100% of the time.
Well they've already had the girl play "defend the tranny from her bullies" and become an ally at the end of the season.
It's borderline after-school tv special writing of the "let's learn to get along" type stuff and just toes the line of promoting the ideology vs an opening to have an objective discussion of the facts.
How the show deals with it next season could break the show. I can't recall, offhand, any other gay/lesbian/bi relationship in the series so I don't see why they went straight to tranny in such a way that it could wreck the whole show from its audience. Yeah, it could easily be them trying to normalize it but there's a tiny chance it could end up with her detransitioning.
Yikes. In a best-case-scenario her learning to accept others would be the end of the arc, but if the show is set to go on for multiple seasons then it's not a good look.
As you said, that kind of drastic turnabout might ruin the show, but then again there's no telling what they might do. But every other time that's happened they've usually used that as a wedge to turn-out a character.
In that show This Is Us (I think that's what it's called?) Grace Park's character started off as a married woman with a kid, but after they introduced a dyke into the show, by the end of the show they had Grace Park's character leave her husband to marry the ugly little dyke.
There was some other show with Catherine Bell (I can't recall the name) where in the final season they did the same thing to a character who had been straight the whole series -- I think they also did the same thing to Dana Delaney's character in Desperate Housewives, I think she went from being married to a bloke to hooking up with a dyke.
Maybe Landman might be the rare exception to the rule, but I can't think of any show that introduced such a character in such a context that didn't result in them applying conversion therapy to a heterosexual character.
IIRC since Paramount let Sheridan go his TV contract is up at the end of 2027 which means no more than 1, maybe 2 seasons left of al of these shows. Although there's some doubt that Tulsa King would continue after this season as Stallone will be 80 this year.