To not be able to stand film and TV nowadays because it always has an agenda?

[mintlily]

I've noticed that I can only bear to watch TV shows and films produced until roughly 2008.

It feels like everything nowadays has some kind of moral or political agenda. The writers are either trying to show off how enlightened they are, or condition you to accept their certain neo-Marxist world view. Virtually ALL dramas have an LGBT, feminist or anti-racist agenda, delivered with 0 subtlety or nuance. And the way it is done is so patronising and disrespectful to historical writers and figures - as if we 21st century people are the moral arbiters of history, and must overlay our more enlightened worldview on their bigoted work, which was surely produced in ignorance. It's also patronising to the intelligence of viewers, as if we need everything censored for our innocent eyes and can't make our own moral judgements. There is something puritanical and unartistic about it, like the Victorians censoring art to not corrupt the masses.

For example:

The new Little Mermaid deleting the line "men don't like women who blabber" from Ursula's songs. Ursula is a villain. We can cope with her being sexist, for goodness sake - we know that we're supposed to think she's wrong. The writer didn't need to fret that children would internalise the worldview of the villain.

Anne of Green Gables and her gay best friend. Why? This is not the genre to deal with LGBT issues. The author had no interest in this subject (as far as I'm aware).

Call the Midwife and it's pro-abortion stance. As if CATHOLIC MIDWIVES IN THE 1970s would have been pro-abortion?!

It's nothing to do with your actual views on these subjects. I just find that TV and film lacks the nuance and intelligence that it used to and I actually can't bear to watch any of it anymore, as it just feels so soulless.

I think Brooklyn 99 started out brilliantly but I was annoyed when they made Rosa bisexual. I like it when women are allowed to be not uber feminine and also straight!

Yeah I know what you mean.
but equally it didn’t feel like a complete 180 for them to suddenly introduce Rosa as bisexual - not like the shit show they made of Keely and her relationship with Jack in Ted lasso. That was literally just a lesbian relationship written for and by men

I get that you like that but why it annoy you that she wasn't? Very few bisexuals are on tv shows. Did it take away from her character and personality?

I don't object to sex scenes so much (within reason & excluding any abuse) as sex is a natural part of relationships. I have more of an issue with gratuitous violence (I appreciate there may be some overlap).

a show like Brooklyn 99 did diversity excellently. Two Latina characters, black characters, white characters, different ages, but again, each character was beautifully written and when it covered tricky topics, it did it sensitively and in reference to the previous character development

Totally agree! Unless you actually consciously think about it, the diversity would not hit you like with other series/movies. That's just natural flow, 5* well done series with great character developments. There are quite a few like that, but more and more us and uk production is, as pp said, patronising and "punch you in your face with it". Which imho is just doing no one any favours, especially to those they claim to support with it.

Are you new here? There's one of these threads every other week.

The story leaves it up in the air. She is still alive, so we don't know what her ultimate fate will be.

The point being that even though the children in the story all knew Aslan personally in their youth, they did not mean they'd all remember him or maintain that same relationship with him as adults. For Susan, other things got in the way, mainly it seemed a desire to seem grown up and fit in.

Which seems a pretty common, realistic scenario to me. Lots of people lose touch with what's important as they grow older.

The whole point of her not being killed with the other children is that it is entirely possible that as she grows older, she will mature and grow out of that, and come back to Narnia a different way.

The objection to this element of the story seems very similar to me to the complaint of the OP. Lewis has tried to show that things aren't always easy or straightforward, that there can be bumps in the road, and maybe even make a point about free will. He's also set it up so that making some mistakes or getting a little loss isn't the end of the story for her. But there is of course the possibility that she won't get back to Narnia.

I don't see how having it all wrapped up in a neat ending with no questions or ambiguities would make it more true.

Yeah, it was a very believable scenario. It's common for people to have friends mainly of a similar race and class even now, and many people still live in neighbourhoods where one group is dominant, certainly in NYC. You could do the same kind of show where they were mostly black or Asian or whatever and it would still work.

I don't think it is the subject matter but the unsubtle way it is presented. We are being treated like children.

you can pretty much guarantee that in almost any crime drama it is always the white middle class man what did it.

Too much of the agenda is in your face nowadays. They'd do better to concentrate on making a captivating story first, and then slipping in some agenda stuff so people don't notice it so much.

1. It’s interesting that that’s how it seems to you, because every furniture ad doesn’t have a mixed heritage couple, as a quick Google shows (below).

So, your perception is not reality. Where do you get your data from when you categorically state that the racial mix on TV is not representative of the UK. Did you do a survey? What channels and programmes did it cover? Do you watch every show and every ad on TV, or is your perception skewed by what you watch and your own biases (we all have biases).

https://equinox-tv.co.uk/project/sofa-store/
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LXhEMdmBSbo
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T_51CzomE2I
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6mgXwfz1-ew
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6mgXwfz1-ew

2. There is no central clique of furniture advertisers who get together to decide on the precise racial mix in their combined advertising output. So, even if there were a mixed heritage couple in every TV ad, it would be the result of a series of decisions by individual brands,

So, Oak Furnitureland have decided to have a mixed heritage family in their latest TV ad.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ8FALPEpP8&list=PL0T73dtKaPHfzoyqAZIru4wIY8DwD9bIj&index=1&pp=iAQB

But their previous campaign featured a white couple and two white sales staff. Are we supposed to aggregate the number of ethnicities over time, or by advert, or what? There is, after all, a long history of huge under-representation of people of colour in TV and advertising.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QYgry04ZXpc

3. If you have “no issue with it”, why are we having this conversation?

Doctor Who had a series where it seemed like each episode had been storyboarded as "X is bad", and they'd just swap in littering/racism/giant retail conglomerates. They're all perfectly good ideas for episodes, but they were so heavy handed.

Re the advertising, I'm guessing it's because one black parent, one white parent, and obviously mixed race children covers three different skin colours all in one go. I agree it isn't that representative of all areas though — around me there are a lot more Asian (both east and south) and Jewish families than black ones.

I would guess that prime time has ads with many minority groups featuring - watch in the afternoon and it's not the case imv.

I don't see what's wrong with that. It's just using the language of the present day. There is nothing to be gained from trying to emulate the language of the past because you could never be 100% accurate. So much language is lost to time. It's like when I see films set in the 80s now I think "nobody spoke like that" Much better for younger writers to write "in their own tongue" as it were.

I totally agree, OP. It's not the political views themselves that are the problem, it's the way they are presented. It feels like the viewer is being scolded or schooled in right-think, rather than being left to form their own opinions. And it seems that a lot of (particularly younger) viewers want to be shielded from views they disagree with, and find it hard to deal with ambiguous characters with complex motives. It's so childish! Doctor Who (the Jodie Whittaker series) was the worst for this.

The Catholic Church's teaching on abortion couldn't be clearer! So she is a hypocrite sorry.

I'm still working my way through the thread and wanted to comment on this one. I agree that talking like modern people can be done well and usefully. It really depends how it's done. I don't think it's about the slang that is used, it's more about whether you are modernising how people back then would have thought, and whether that changes the meaning of the story. Sometimes, keeping things the way they were back in "the olde days" actually distracts from what the story is trying to do, because the story is not about that specific thing.

You can be pro choice or you can be pro abortion but you can't be both.
I don't know why people cling to their Catholicism.

Ooops pro choice or Catholic I meant.

Interestingly there was actually an article in the Telegraph about this today. Not sure if all can read it because of the paywall https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/0/todays-television-dramas-are-betraying-20th-century-history/

I think it articulated what I'm trying to say quite well here:
"In the recent BBC One drama Ten Pound Poms, Annie and Terry Roberts, two new migrants from Britain to Australia, have been invited to a barbecue. Their host is an unreconstructed Antipodean called Dean, whose opinions on his country’s indigenous people would make John Tyndall blush. Annie, perhaps emboldened by the beer, stands up to him. “They’re just people,” she says. “And they were here long before you were.”

Quite right, and hopefully the viewers at home would be cheering Annie on. Except that this scene just didn’t ring true.
Ten Pound Poms is set in the 1950s but Annie’s reaction felt oddly 21st century. Of course, many in that generation found racism abhorrent, but few would have articulated their horror in such a way. This is becoming more and more of a problem with period dramas about the 20th century. As we move further from the time in which they are set, so there will be fewer who can offer authentic insight into the way we were. "

Well she's no longer with us @Valeriekat so it's a moot point. I didn't say she was a "good" catholic!

Hmm.

Lucky the Daily Telegraph doesn't have "an agenda".

She sounds a bit like my late MIL, we were watching a Kevin Costner film when the girls were in their teens and he, KC, was getting very very close to a woman in the back of a limo going round Washington DC at night, MIL piped up Oh Mummy, lets watch something else, the girls were making frantic Press record gestures, predated V boxes etc. No Way Out was the film, not many films have made me gasp at the end.

I think that many women who are midwives are pragmatists. They're on the pointy end of shit. It's her God who will judge her - and it sounds like she was unto her ownself, true.