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 loved the first series of New Amsterdam, I thought it was brilliant. But the next couple of series, there just seemed to be a lecture every week on a 'woke' topic.

Surely not?

You think people who were leaning towards being non-hostile to refugees might change their thinking because an episode of Silent Witness is poorly done?

Surely nobody is that stupid.

I think this is a very good point. Many shows seem to revolve around identity as the main dilemma (I think this is because it makes it very easy to have inclusive casting as it makes the variation in the cast central to the dilemma). So that makes shows seem like they are all very similar as a similar part of your mental processing is being worked. So eventually you get a bit bored of it (or I do, maybe others do not). Also, identity is not the only interesting dilemma in the world. There are other themes that are universal and still interesting to explore.

I have been thinking the same thoughts. Some of the actors now cast in historical roles ruin it for me because frankly, it is unrealistic and too distracting to the plot for me.

Tbh some of this is just because there is so much to choose from with streaming. Television has always had really crap dramas which people forget about. What's lauded as ground breaking often gets forgotten five years later

I see what you mean OP. By all means TV, tackle difficult subjects. Give us characters, nuance, weave these tales into the story as a natural progression, make something really good.

Or, you know, just charge on in with all the toe curling cringe of when the local theatre group used to come to your school like "Yo guys, I'm Gaz, and we're here to show you our play about why doing drugs is not cool yeah?"

And they'd do their play, probably thinking they were really going to challenge the kids and make them think; when in reality it was performed so clunky and written so badly it just came off as a big cringey lecture in the end.

Good historical drama should show a different world view and, in doing so,should allow us to acknowledge the contingency of our own world view. Mad men, which I am rewatching with my gen z dd, did this very well.

We also watched Big Love, which showed a really disturbing world view, but made you emotionally complicit with the characters. So maybe early 2000s tv was more complex?

Same with picture books for small children. Thumb through loads at the library as it's all 'issues' and no bloody storytelling.

This

You think all people from bygone eras were anti- abortion? Anti equality? I don’t think so.

The show love thy neighbor. Being made today vs when it was, it would be banned in today's times.

disneyfied anyway. The little mermaid - no name as far as I remember - died of a broken heart and became foam on the waves. Gotta love Hans Christian Anderson.
Proper fairy tales have all been sanitised and have lost the morals that were the point of them in the first place.

Yes, it can be pretty hard to take.

There seem to be periods where film and television don't seem to have much commitment to telling real stories, they become very formulaic, or kind of a formal declaration of certain moral stances. It can be hard to pin down because of course stories have always had reflected ideas about things like ethics, but these deeply puritan moments are very bad for stories.

Call the Midwife has a lot of issues with this in later seasons. Like they had to brush over the realities of what the different people are likely to have actually thought. Another I find unwatchable now is Father Brown. I could buy him as a very live and let live kind of priest, most are really since their job puts them in contact with a lot of the worst moments people have. But he doesn't actually seem to believe anything that is actually Catholic, and what's more, you get the sense that the show is embarrassed by it.

Yes, I agree with you, there's a way to do it seamlessly, but a lot of things I've seen have it just shoehorned in.

Yeah I seem to remember when I read the original sad story, thinking the moral of it was that you shouldn't try to venture out of your place in life.

What were the agendas of these shows? Star Trek had the 1st interracial kiss but what were the other shows promoting? Not being goady just genuinely wondering as have just got into watching clips of I ♡ Lucy on YouTube

Yes, this^^. OP isn’t wrong, and many of the responses are unwittingly demonstrating that, too. Anyone who works in media/scriptwriting/TV/the cultural sector knows that “issues” are in, and that the current fashion is for identity politics and moralising inserted into all sorts of cultural arenas. (And historical realism is out, in favour of creatively interpreting the past so that it serves modern political ideas.) This isn’t always the case (it wasn’t the case in the early 2000s, for example, when historical realism and moral ambiguity were fashionable in dramas). Look at how Shakespeare adaptations have changed over the last twenty years. In 2005 the fashion was for historical accuracy and uncovering original performance conditions, and attempting to produce something as close as possible to the original staging of the plays. Today, the current fashion is for reinterpreting the plays to reflect modern sensibilities, DEI and identity politics, gender and race-blind casting, etc.

These different styles go in and out of fashion, but it’s certainly true that didactic and political modes of cultural production are currently dominant. Partly that’s the media industries trying to appeal to a younger crowd, and also starting to be dominated at the creative end by young millennials/older Gen Z, who are very into this. The result, though, is right now pretty clumsy. I find there’s a lack of historical awareness in this, such that the moralising is very surface and often simplistic. It’s a bit tiresome to be lectured at about an Issue in dramatic form when you can remember the same Issue being done far better on the last go round (in the 90s, say, or the 60s. Not that I was alive for the 60s, but I’ve seen a fair old amount of 60s TV over the years).

Maybe I’ve just reached the age when you get irritated that the Yoof seem to think that everyone over the age of 30 has no idea about Issues, and needs to be told, very patronisingly and in dumbed-down narrative plots, that Backstreet Abortions Are Bad, or that Gay People Exist (I’m gay by the way, and I can probably do without yet another episode of a TV drama misrepresenting lesbian and gay history just because it fits into a current fashionable narrative).

But I’d put good money on things switching back in ten years or so. It’s just that art may be a bit crap until then 😂 (you could hardly pride me from my TV in my twenties, yet now I barely switch it on. It would be nice if it was good again in time for my retirement in twenty years please 🤣)

Have you considered that they aren’t agendas but relative topics in our modern culture? Abortion, anti racism and LGBT rights are very much at the forefront of issues in the western world. I get that you might want to escape all that but there are plenty of programs with no reference to any of those topics for you to watch. It seems like you probably don’t support those issues not being taboo anymore.

I just have to throw in, you don’t get points for always having a “classic novel” in your hand. Stop being so pretentious and go read 50 shades, better still, go watch it. There’s no agenda other than to possibly make you do a love honey shop after a few glasses of wine.

*prise me from my tv! Not pride me 😂 I definitely don’t want to be prided 😉

All media is propaganda, and the posters criticising you are its footsoldiers.

I’m afraid that 50 Shades glorifies problematic abusive relationships and toxic masculinity, not good at all, didn’t you get the memo? 😆

Those topics have been issues of the modern day for sixty years or more, but it’s only intermittently fashionable to shoehorn them into TV dramas in a moralising way, is what OP is getting at. We just happen to be in a period when identity politics in particular is obsessing the culture and the people making the culture. But there are also political topics that don’t make it into TV, and that’s telling too. Where are the dramas and TV documentaries with minor plotlines about climate crisis, class, poverty, homelessness or geopolitics, for example? Not much in evidence. Perhaps in ten years’ time, what are considered important issues of the day will be completely different.

I am interested to know what you mean by “historical accuracy” or “historical realism” and wonder if those past representations of history are any more authentic than contemporary works. Probably not. How do you know they are accurate? Remember that even novels written at the time are performances and themselves served an agenda so the idea of authenticity or truth within any artistic representation is rather nebulous.

Agree. History is a representation, not fact. It's called hisstory

Pocahontas, Tintin in Congo, Little House on the Prairie… totally apolitical. Definitely not plugging colonialism or the dominance of white men. Nope, pure entertainment.

"Is dumbing down decolonisation?"
I rekon there's probably a thesis in that.
Maybe it's because we once again live in an age of moral certainty, so works that are subtle or ambiguous are ousted and replaced with works that have a simple, moral clarity.

On the other hand, us viewers can be a bit dim. When Todd Hayes made [Safe ] in 1995 he had to add a scene showing the guru's luxurious mansion alongside other cult members' one-room hovels because viewers kept assuming the guru in the film was Hayes' mouthpiece. I think because the guru is only ever seen through the eyes of the main character Carol, who is mesmerised and uncritical.
So maybe script writers are right to assume we need things spelled out for us?