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.

There was the horror of the recent Persuasion, with Anne Elliott swigging wine from the bottle and talking about her 'ex'. shudders

Exactly - most of England was white . I mentioned previously in a post that I was talking about outside London.

I am an immigrant, DH is brown immigrant, I am often surprised when I hear moaning about areas of UK being mainly white, because... Of course they are. It doesn't mean they are bad. We lived in few. I sometimes wondered if people want equal diversity everywhere and how the heck wojld that work? Move people around based on quotas? We actually joked about how it could go.
"Hey, sorry, we know you want to live in Manchester, but we actually need 1 arab in a village by Morecombe, so... Yeah. Enjoy!"
UK is the "white area". Nothing bad on having majority of indeginous population?

But we are steering away from preachy TV.
I don't know how others but we always enjoyed The good doctor. Nkce light thing to watch. Season for in the post covid episodes was just abysmal. Good examples of what we are talking here about issue being preached and then dropped. Just randomly in there. If they really wanted to ahow racism against patients, why drop it? It's actual serious issue but we saw report being given and.... That's it. It would be great if they carried it over a bit in background fgs. Nah. Make 20 min dance about racism, and then drop it. Pregnant man was also bit odd episode. Guns, with shot kids, but at least that carried via different characters. And so on.
Then it went better again, I think it may have something to do with losing quite cast numbers.

Annika on BBC 1 is very, very good. But not all the characters are white, OP. And one is gay, so you’d probably hate it.
normal people should like it though. The type who don’t think a character with brown skin and a Scots accent is an ‘agenda’ and in fact night just be be a non- white Scot.

Why can't Britain make TV that has mass appeal all around the world like Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, etc? Those shows are full of British actors too.

Why can't Britain make TV that has mass appeal all around the world like Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, etc?

Did Doctor Who just whizz right by you, then? Or Sherlock, Black Mirror, Shetland, Catastrophe, The Thick of It, etc.

U have manged to articulate how I'm feeling so much better than how I could

You do understand that Succession is a satire full of people so hateful and awful because they are painfully ‘antiwoke’, don’t you? One of the primary themes is the characters wrestling with their desire for power v their fear that they are creating an anti-democratic, decisive, racist media landscape. It’s about as woke as it gets.

So things actually happening in the States are preachy? The Good Doctor is based in the States, those issues you mentioned have been brought up for years on other medical drama shows and based off of actual experiences.

It is HOW they are brought up

Sent too early.
The good doctpr always had bits in but in season 4 they just suddenly quikly decided to do 2 per episode for about 4 or 5 episodes with nothing coming out of them except people rguing and shutting others down. No continuance like with other issues. It was just like issue speed dating. Totally different to other episodes. The last few episodes then went back to normal where the stories actually flowed again.

None of those shows are popular to the extent that GOT and WD were.

Most British TV shows are unimaginative, unambitious and cheap looking compared to America's cream of the crop.

None of those shows are popular to the extent that GOT and WD were.

GOT and WD were bywords for creative bankruptcy in their later seasons. A bit of production polish doesn't equate to quality.

Because British TV doesn’t have the budgets US TV does. It’s simple
economics - TV content is there to sell advertising space / streaming subscriptions. The bigger the audience, the more money for the commission. US audiences are much bigger.

Economics, by the way, is also the reason for a more representative cast in tv & advertising. They are there to appeal to the people the advertisers want to attract - the young, disposable income, cool crowd who live in cities. Frankly, they don’t give a flying fuck about all the moany old bigots - you aren’t the target audience. Sorry if that makes you feel isolated or ignored or minimised, but it’s the truth. ‘Woke’ (ie not being a bigot) sells. This isn’t universal, of course - there will be pockets of America where they won’t bother marketing or selling certain shows - but in general, the younger generation is what advertisers are after, and they believe in a fairer, more equal society for all.

There is also a massive brain drain of UK talent to the US because they pay much better.

There's nothing stopping British TV producers making shows that appeal to a wider international audience the same way American TV does. The problem is they'd rather play it safe and put out the same old shit they've always put out.

😳

That would be the commissioners you mean, not the producers. Have you any idea how difficult it is to get a TV show commissioned? Especially the expensive dramas and comedies. Advertising budgets have been slashed, which in turn means slashed programme budgets. There just isn’t the money to make lots of dramas and comedies like there is in America.

Don’t forget, we only get the good stuff from America - there is plenty of utter shit, as well. But scale wise, British TV tends to punch way above its weight.

‘Why can't Britain make TV that has mass appeal all around the world like Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, etc? Those shows are full of British actors too.’

they do. But there are plenty of people who hate both those programmes anyway. Violent, full of rape scenes - GOT particularly

Downton Abbey was huge. The Americans especially went nuts for it. Broadchurch did so well the Americans made their own version...see also The Office and Shameless. The US Mare Of Easton was heavily 'influenced' by Happy Valley.
I think you're just watching the wrong things. Have you see Detectorists? It's one of the most beautiful pieces of television ever made.
Recently, Slow Horses is incredible.
Popular doesn't necessarily equal quality. Game Of Thrones is just Lord Of The Rings with tits.

@Bingbangbongbash You've missed my point about Succession. I know what it's about. I disagree that it is woke, at least in the context that I would use the word or understand it. It is very clever and doesn't at all patronise the viewer. The characters are fully fleshed out and as awful as they are, they have their moments of likeability and pathos. It is also extremely, darkly funny.

It's the exact opposite of say Call the Midwife or Discovery - the former has crude stereotypes instead of characters and the latter actually kept veering the plot off course to do the 21st century version of a talk about Jesus. It's jarring and doesn't make for good entertainment.

I suspect we differ on the current definition of woke, mainly.

I like to think of that adaptation as "Jane Austen for 21st-Century Dummies". True sacrilege.

I think Gilmore Girls did a really good job of "showing not telling" in terms of politics. The two main characters were evidently more left-leaning, and the show addressed issues like breaking away from upper class conservative society, but through the very personal lens of their lives, with no sermonising. This theme was delivered with tonnes of nuance - e.g. Rory finishing the series with an upper class conservative boyfriend, and him being a "good" character rather than inherently worse than her more arty, left-wing ex-boyfriend. It showed that politics and class don't condition whether or not you are inherently a good or bad person.

Lane, also, is a great example of this. Her mother would be outright demonised in a TV show today - Christian, ultra-Conservative, narrow-minded, super strict. But the trajectory of the show was not, as it would be now, for Lane to disown her mother and renounce everything to do with this way of life. It shows her carving her own, more liberal path while still massively respecting her mother and preserving many of her values of her upbringing in her a adult life (e.g. getting married before having sex). This less black and white approach to personal values is much more like real life.

It was fine for Lorelai to spout opinions that many viewers would consider "wrong" (e.g. some internalised misogyny, "fatphobic" comments etc), because it was all part of her rounded persona, and this made her very convincing as a character. A character who only ever says the "right" thing is synthetic, unrelatable and shallow.

Superstore is a US comedy on Netflix, really silly most of the time and never preaches or shows an agenda. However when you step back from it you realise it gave a deeper insight into real life of working class US and the inequities they face every day. I don't know how but it gets the balance right and the cast is very diverse but doesn't feel like that's the point its making, working class US is diverse so no tokenism necessary. I would recommend it OP

I watched Superstore actually - sadly the last seasons got pretty moralistic... :(