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.

Only if the man didn't marry her. It wasn't that unusual for people to bring weddings forward, or have a suspiciously chubby baby "early" eight months after a wedding.

...and that was a storyline in Call The Midwife.

Nailed it.

@mintlily and Black Earth Rising

maybe I just like Michaela Coel

So you were happy to see gay, black or "othered" characters just as long as they acted just like all the other white, straight "normal" characters and their life experiences didn't actually feature in the plotlines of the shows?

Some people shitting a brick because there are 'so many' gay characters on tv. They don't want their kids to see THAT or think its normal.
Except there aren't 'so many.'
That soap might have a lesbian couple move into the neighbourhood and do a story line. Then another soap might. Or one will turn up as a doc on Casualty. But EVERY OTHER character, all 40, 50, 60 of them are straight.

i don't get why people lose their tiny minds over this kind of thing. If I see a black or asian character in something set in Victorian London, I'm not outraged. It's realistic for a start. And There are dozens of white characters still. That look like me.

@mintlily Killing Eve is very fine acting and entertainment without the agenda you describe.

but surely you’re aware of Killing Eve?

if you’re after funny trash, People Just do Nothing. White Lotus is very good. The Americans gets repetitive towards the end, aS is inevitable with the plot.

I don’t know what year Sideways and Frances Ha! are from.

It's not PC to show more realistic demographics, than everyone who's a 'boss' figure being white and male. gay people have been around FOREVER. Britain has been racial diverse for a very VERY long time.
Just because the mainly wealthy,mainly white, mainly male writers, historian and authority figures didn't represent them, write about them or discuss them doesn't mean they didn't exist.

Some people lost their shit over that Xmas ad - set in Victorian London - that had a diverse cast shown. Not realistic apparently. that ad had a fecking DRAGON in it. But the bigots thought the unrealistic bit was the non-white victorians in the background...

@mintlily The Nuns in Call the midwife are Anglican (COE) not Catholic.

That is not what I said.
Their experiences featured they acted like they acted, they were naturally in a story not forced in, and the writing didn't make every second scene into forced lesson for viewers.
It is noticeable when the issue is foeced into plot, rather than it being naturally in a plot.
Eg, rhinking about it, The modern family gay couple. They were just there, dealing with the shite and the good, not just appearing once in a while giving viewers a lecture. They showed the nice and the bad but with natural flow and without being patronising. It was a good comedy but still included some real bits.
Totally in love with Gloria as well, especially as someone with strong foreign accent the flip over people taking a piss out of her accent was glorious. Real issue as well irl, naturally in there not weirdly forced in.

The fact is that some people have always preferred moralistic dross in terms of their entertainment, and think it is Very Good. Think of some of the Victorian temperance type stories or very simplistic, sentimental religious stories that conceived themselves as being hard hitting.

In terms of popular output, we are in an age with a somewhat similar approach - there is a lot of this crap.

Of course there is still some good output, the Victorians had Dickens among others who produced substantial and popular material. We have things like Succession which was remarkably free of manifestations of the New Puritanism.

I think that television and film however are particularly immersed in this kind of trend because of the way they work financially.

We have things like Succession which was remarkably free of manifestations of the New Puritanism.

I mentioned Succession further back in the thread as an excellent example of a current tv show that has managed to swerve the New Puritinism.

OP, can you elaborate on why you find inclusion amd representation patronising?

Reminds me of a taxi journey I was in the other week. The driver was furious that 'Eda, Edo, Eba, whatever the fellas name is' (Idris Elba) was considered for James Bond. As its 'totally unrealistic'. I asked him sarcastically if he thought so as the 'real james bond is white' and he said 'yes!! The real one is white'.

If this shit wasn't so triggering and soul destroying I would have laughed at this loser with his minute brain power and no teeth.

He's not really wrong, the person James Bond was based on was white.

Part of the issue with this is that the progressive culture around this has become extremely contradictory.

Not in the sense that some productions look to be realistic in their approach while others are doing things like blind casting. It's that there has been a huge push to open up all roles depicting people who might broadly be called white, to anyone. And sometimes sex swapping too, particularly males to females as in Dr Who. Those who aren't crazy about this are labeled bigots, (in this thread for example,) even when you are talking about historical settings or culturally rooted stories.

At the same time, there is more and more demands that roles that might have traditionally been non-white must always be played by members of that actual group. Especially if the stories are historical, or culturally rooted. Older examples where white people played, for example, the King of Siam, are seen as fundamentally problematic, even though often they come out of a stage tradition where race and ethnicity based casting was mostly impossible. This is all pushed as being deeply important, and you're a bigot if you disagree.

And then there is the addiction of deeply weird stuff like the recent "documentary" film about the life of Cleopatra, where is is suggested by the producers that it is very important and empowering to bring forward the true stories of black women, but of course everyone with even a little education in ancient history knows she probably wasn't even mixed race. But pointing that out also makes people bigots.

The fact that it often seems that race-blind casting isn't blind at all, but is actually being used as a hook, doesn't make it easier for people to accept.

People sense that these ideas don't all fit together and there is a double standard, and it pisses them off.

It's possible to prefer race-blind casting, or historically accurate casting, or want culturally rooted stories to reflect that culture, without any of them being wrong, or unreasonable approaches to a particular production.

The person or people who inspired Q in James Bond was possibly not gay. And I'd imagine the person or people M was based on were not female. Do you find that a problem?
James Bond may be based on a real person, but a) the books and films are nonetheless fiction and b) that's at least partially because when the books were conceived, high-level/prestigious jobs were not nearly so available to non-white people as to white ones. In other words, he wasn't white 'just because'; lots of social forces played into that. I think it's rather interesting to look at what they were and what the franchise looks like if you play with that from our (I say this in a qualified way) more progressive modern point of view.

I don't find inclusion/representation patronising. I don't like it when people rewrite history, put words into the mouths of authors who would have had no such views, or have the "good" characters sermonise about the latest woke issue, especially when it is set in an era when people didn't use the kind of ethical vocabulary that we use today.

Yanbu at all Op, I am ND but always found it absolutely absurd even as a child that society is considered so impressionable we can't watch TV shows or view a character that portrays a certain narrative or view on something without adopting those beliefs as our own. TV is not responsible for society's wokeness, I grew up on Only Fools, Inbetweeners, Carry on Films etc and I know what you can and can't say, the world's gone mad.

Don't care about JB's skin but I think Elba is tad too old. Craig was too in the last few. Page, who was also mooted, might fit. At his age he could do few movies and I like his smile. Killer smile

My point wasn't really about representation. It's more about moralistic sermonising from characters in a way that sounds inauthentic, and rewriting works to fit a new agenda.
I like art that has complex morality, where you can't easily work out what is the writer's view and what is the characters'. Where "good" people might have "wrong" opinions and where moral issues are presented in a way that is authentic to the period and context it is set in.

@Chermeup I really agree what you say about Modern family. It somehow managed to be diverse without preaching. Most of the storylines about the gay couple were about their struggles with parenthood that any parent could relate to. Also it showed people who struggled with their own prejudices without being 'bad guys'. Like Jay, a white irish American who found it hard to accept his son was gay, yet his kids struggled to accept his latina much younger wife. The person who found it hardest to fit in was probably Alex, the highly intelligent white middle class kid. There are other examples but I feel it struck the right chord.

OP I think US shows were always a bit more preachy, I remember shows geared at young viewers like 90210 always having a theme like alcoholism etc and each episode would have a narrative. I always found the pro USA narrative in TV and films to be a bit disturbing and a form of propaganda. The blue collar hero and the foreign bad guy. My memory is the British soaps jumped onto whatever bandwagon was popular, always trying to be a little controversial but actually being cliche. I feel British dramas were always more intelligent, totally generalising of course.

American TV has been a lot better than British TV for the last 20 years, probably 25 years now.

I don't really see how what you've said is really relevant to my post.

You say people in the 1950s would not articulate anti racist views in that way? I’m afraid you are incorrect. During the slavery abolitionist movement in this country for example people did just that. They also boycotted sugar (a form of cancellation). People from bygone eras were not as different to us as old time TV period dramas would have us believe.

Time moves on, culture changes - as do artistic values. When the art (or TV) of our time becomes irrelevant we start saying that our art was better, more sophisticated and nuanced. It wasn’t. Great art is hard to come by. In any era.