Lowlanders Tiring of Smutty TV

December 5, 2006
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Lowlanders Tiring of Smutty TV

Who would have thought that the merry Dutch, world pioneers of mass-marketed pornography, would eventually tire of all the smut flowing into their neat and tidy homes? Yet it has happened, according to a Reuters/Hollywood Reporter (HR) story: Despite a long tradition of television that pushes the boundaries of the acceptable in the Netherlands, Dutch viewers are being turned off by a wave of controversial programs. Some weeks ago, Rotterdam-based columnist Hugo Borst was watching the daily news on family channel RTL with his 11-year-old…

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What’s Good About Ultimate Fighting

December 5, 2006
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What’s Good About Ultimate Fighting

  I know a couple of fellows, perfectly reputable sorts, who follow "ultimate fighting," the relatively new spectator sport that combines boxing, kicking, and grappling techniques. The impression one gets from the media is that the sport is an outlaw thing, even less rational than boxing and professional wrestling. The increasing appeal of ultimate fighting, however, is based on the fact that it is actually a good deal more sensible than either of these. USA Today has published today an excellent article analyzing the appeal…

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Fox’s 24 to Go Even Darker

December 5, 2006
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Fox’s 24 to Go Even Darker

I’ve mentioned on several occasions the turn toward "darker" programming on network TV this year, and one of the pioneers and models for that approach, the Fox series 24, will become even darker this season. An article in USA Today notes that protagonist Jack Bauer will reach a new low to begin the season: Central character Jack Bauer isn’t dead, but he’s feeling that way going into Season Six (premieres Jan. 14, 8 p.m. ET/PT), said Kiefer Sutherland, who won an Emmy in August for…

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Closer Returns Tonight

December 4, 2006
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Closer Returns Tonight

The TV crime drama The Closer returns tonight with a two-hour movie to kick off its third season (or part two of a divided second season; I’m not sure how the producers and cable channel are categorizing it). The program stars Kyra Sedgwick as a harried, middle-aged, unmarried Southern belle who works as a deputy police chief in Los Angeles and has to adjust to professional and personal problems in the unfamiliar milieu of Lalaland. As I noted earler on the Reform Club blog, The…

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Guest Article: The New Avant-garde: Clean Comedy

December 4, 2006
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Our friend Mike D’Virgilio has posted an interesting article on a cultural trend toward "cleaner" products and has kindly granted us permission to present it to you here. Mike’s article notes something important about the Omniculture: everything happens, and while there is much on what traditionalists would call the extremely bad end of the spectrum, there is also much more than in recent decades on the more wholesome end of things as well. Here’s Mike’s article: I guess if you live long enough you pretty…

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Inspector Mom—Mysteriously Good

December 2, 2006
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Inspector Mom—Mysteriously Good

  Confession time: I make a habit of not watching the Lifetime TV network, which appears to be aimed at left-of-center suburban soccer moms. However, the title of new Lifetime series, Inspector Mom, grabbed my attention, so I took a look at the pilot. And what do you know? It was kind of fun. Danica McKellar (The Wonder Years) plays Maddie Monroe, a—guess what?—soccer mom who’s trying to juggle childraising and a part-time career as a newspaper columnist, known as Inspector Mom. She is in…

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Mr. Capra Goes to Hollywood

December 1, 2006
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Mr. Capra Goes to Hollywood

Turner Classic Movies is showing a five-movie tribute to director Frank Capra tomorrow beginning at 8 pm EST. Capra, whose career spanned the end of the silent era to the early 1960s, was one of the great American film directors. He’s best known for his classic film It’s a Wonderful Life, and he made numerous other fine movies such as Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (another real classic), Meet John Doe, the Oscar-winning It Happened One Night, Dirigible, Lost Horizon, the poignant Lady for a…

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Jerry Garcia on the Omniculture

December 1, 2006
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Our Reform Club colleague Tom Van Dyke sent us this nifty quote from the late Jerry Garcia, of the rock band The Grateful Dead, in which Garcia observes that the real action in changing American society actually happened before the hippie revolution of the mid- to late 1960s, as I argued in my two-part article on the Omniculture a few years ago: "It’s pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old…

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Here Come the Big-Mouth Idiots

November 30, 2006
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There is something rather interesting and revealing in all the recent controversies about celebrities running their mouths and acting like peabrains. You’ve heard about these controversies on the news, of course, such as Mel Gibson’s drunken diatribe against Jews, comedian Michael Richards’s racial slurs in response to being interrupted by a heckler during a disastrous nightclub comedy routine, Danny DeVito’s drunken rant against President Bush on The View yesterday, etc. That’s the Omniculture for you. Everything happens, and everything gets on TV or the Web,…

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Can We Judge Literature?

November 29, 2006
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I stirred up some concerns among PKD fans with my Philip K. Dick article, which was cross-posted at The Reform Club site. Francis Poretto commented thoughtfully there, suggesting that there is no way to discern true greatness in a writer. After stating, "For my money, a great writer is one who inspires me to great emotion," Francis asks, "How shall I judge Dick, or any writer, great, even if permitted to use my criterion?" It’s a fair question, and one that I implicitly answered in…

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Philip K. Dick Canonized

November 28, 2006
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It’s official: Philip K. Dick is a great writer, according to the Library of America. As the Galley Cat at Media Bistro reports: Buried at the tail end of Mark Sarvas’s interview with Jonathan Lethem comes news of one project on the novelist’s plate: "I’m helping preside over the utter and irreversible canonization of one of my (formerly outsider) heroes, Philip K. Dick: I’m writing endnotes for The Library of America, which is doing a volume of four of his novels from the sixties, which…

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Soap Opera to Feature “Transgendering” Character

November 27, 2006
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Soap Opera to Feature “Transgendering” Character

This Thursday, the ABC TV daytime serial drama All My Children will introduce a character who was born male and is being "transformed into a woman" through hormone treatments, surgery, and psychological retraining. This is believed to be the first time an American television show has had such a "transgendering" character. Some programs in the past have had fully "transgendered" characters in the past, but you probably wouldn’t remember them given that nobody watched. The L Word, on the Showtime cable network, has a character…

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Two More Depressing TV Shows Sink

November 27, 2006
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Two More Depressing TV Shows Sink

Two more TV shows representing this season’s trend towared "darker," more depressing TV programs have been placed on "hiatus" by their network. The Nine and Six Degrees are both suspended until later in the season. ABC said that both programs will return later. Programs placed on hiatus, however, often do not return. The Nine has been temporarily replaced by a "special" edition of the magazine show 20/20 for the last day of the November "ratings sweeps" in which advertisers’ rates for TV networks are set.…

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Thanksgiving Day

November 23, 2006
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May you have a blessed Thanksgiving Day, and please take time to consider the great blessings that have been given to this great country, and think about the best ways to preserve and strengthen them.

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Liberals and Statists

November 23, 2006
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Here are some thoughts in our continuing discussion of political nomenclature, in which we have noted the changing nature of what is really conservative, radical, and liberal in the current era, after the end of the Cold War: There are two parties of left and right today: liberals and statists. Liberals see authority as vested in the individual and handed over to the state only as appropriate to maintain both order and liberty. Statists see authority as residing entirely in the state. This is the…

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"Culture is the expression of the guiding philosophy of the day."—Murray Rothbard
"To judge the quality of a cultural product is not to begrudge the preferences of the people who purchase it. It is simply to apply timeless, objective standards in assessing these products."—Ilana Mercer

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