Woke “Snow White” lost a couple of hundred million dollars for Disney, and you might think that would teach Hollywood a lesson. You might think Hollywood would try to appeal to normal people with non-woke, quality entertainment and collect bushels of cash. Of course, you’d be wrong. One thing we’ve learned over the last couple of decades as conservatives is to reject pure economic determinism. That is, we once held the pure free market notion that everybody operates in their own economic interest at all times, meaning even leftists would pursue conservative customers, but that’s not true. Economic interests are not the only interests they pursue. Sometimes they prioritize pursuing their social interests, i.e., seeking to maximize the number of invitations to Hollywood Hills parties that they get, for example. That’s why they might get it into their head that it is a good idea to produce a remake of “Snow White” where Snow White is not hot, hates Prince Charming, and talks like she’s on SSRIs and watches MSNBC.
Hollywood wants to get paid, of course, but Hollywood also wants to be loved, especially by other people in Hollywood. And that’s why they can leave all the money on the table that would’ve been spent by normal Americans going to the movies like we did 20 years ago. I used to go to the movies at least once a week, and you probably did, too, if you’re that old. Now? The last time I went to a movie was “Mickey 17,” and it was so bad that I walked out. It was boring and stupid, as well as ugly and cruel. I have walked out of maybe three movies in my entire life. Way to achieve, Hollywood! You managed to get me to walk out of the first movie I’ve seen in months.
Like most of you, I’m now watching most of my stuff on streaming. I’ve gotten rid of cable, and I curate what I see, but I find myself starting on some of these shows and getting about three episodes in before chucking it. They make a couple of good episodes, and then what my former editor John Nolte calls “the liberal sucker punch” lands in the third or so. Most of the time, I just abandon them. Occasionally, I’ll stay on but fast-forward through the woke parts. Fast-forwarding is glorious.
Take “The Pitt” on Max. It’s a hospital drama by the guys who made “ER” where the whole season is one-hour slices of a busy day at an urban emergency room. When they’re doing medical stuff, it’s fantastic. It’s as good as it gets. “Hang a bag of Ringer’s with 10 cc’s of morphine and two units of O+ stat! Now back up, I’m going to intubate!” Like most normal people, I’m a sucker for a show that brings me into a world that’s interesting but that I don’t understand and teaches me. Watching the sequence where they prepare to receive mass casualties from a shooting incident is awesome. I don’t know if it’s real, but it seems like it’s real. But, of course, there are a couple sucker punches. I powered through them, but they were so unnecessary. There’s the teen girl whose mean mom won’t let her abort her kid. There’s the transsexual that everyone is careful to use the right pronouns with. Oh, and every jerk, creep, and thug is a straight white male. Ugh.
A few others I hate-watch my way through. The third season of “White Lotus” on Max was a tedious compendium of calculated degeneracy. The message is that affluent white people are bad people. Oddly, the one that comes off best is a Texas church-going lady. Who would’ve thought? It’s just gross; don’t watch it unless you want to take an extra shower. Also, the ending is just plain stupid.
We barely got through the first episode of that dumb zombie show, “The Last of Us,” on Max, and that was the last for us. You would think a zombie show would be about zombies, fighting zombies, and interesting stuff on how you create a new civilization in the ashes of the one destroyed by the zombies, but clearly you are not as smart as the geniuses in Hollywood. No, this zombie show is about a non-binary teenage girl who appears to have fetal alcohol syndrome and who does what teenage girls do in every single bad show, which is ignore instructions and the plan and thereby make the plot about fixing the problems that her selfishness and stupidity caused. Also, there’s a scene at a church where the obnoxious heroine decides to make out with her girlfriend, and the villain is – you guessed it – the white male who objects to a couple of girls playing tonsil hockey in the sanctuary. It’s an agonizing show that was, unbelievably, created by the same Hollywood liberal who made the terrific “Chernobyl” several years ago.
We like “Mob Land” on Paramount+ a lot. Pierce Brosnan, who’s reputed to be one of the nicest guys in show business, plays one hell of a mean crime boss. It’s exactly what you want in a show – exciting and interesting. Creator Guy Ritchie takes you into that world, teaches you how it works, and then focuses on that world instead of the idiotic personal problems of ridiculous characters. Love it.
Ironically, though I’m complaining about Hollywood, one of the best shows on right now is “The Studio” with Seth Rogan on AppleTV. Yes, I know Rogen is very annoying for many reasons, including the fact that he is Canadian, but he acts the hell out of it as a Hollywood studio executive, and he wrote most of it too, brilliantly. This is a super sharp and utterly hilarious show about liberals doing liberal things and looking like idiots. Of course, I’m assuming it’s a satire – could Hollywood think this is a documentary that makes it look good? Well, it greenlights “Sleeping Beauty.”
OK, and now the controversial part of this column. Taylor Sheridan: What do we think of him?
This is the guy who makes shows like “Yellowstone” and “1883,” filled with guns and pseudo-unwokeness while still hinting at wokeness. I’ve talked about “Yellowstone” before – I stopped watching it because the loudmouth daughter character was so annoying and so magical in her ability to avoid the consequences of her stupid actions that I couldn’t take it. “1883” was a very dark take on the frontier, and I thought it was well done (incidentally, Peter Berg’s similar-themed “American Primeval” is pretty good, too).
The current Taylor Sheridan shows are “Landman” and “1923,” another of the “Yellowstone” prequels. Both of them at least play footsie with conservatives – lots of guns, violence defeating evil, and talk that sounds unwoke but never actually challenges any wokeness. Trump tweeted out a viral clip of Billy Bob Thornton in “Landman” talking about how fossil fuels are necessary, but it also included some nonsense about us running out of oil. The show goes right up to the edge of being based and then pulls back. The same with “1923,” except it decides to devote about a third of its running time to this unbelievably boring backstory about an abused Indian girl and blah blah blah blah blah. Enduring it would count as reparations if I hadn’t fast-forwarded every time the Indian girl came on screen.
Part of the fast-forwarding was because it was so sexually and otherwise sadistic. There is a lot of perversion and degeneracy in these shows – that cute girls are constantly naked and/or abused is probably a selling point for a certain demographic. But it’s gross and gratuitous. Also, the sheer relentlessness and volume of the tribulations suffered by some of the characters are hilariously over the top. SPOILER: After a while, we just started laughing: “Oh, there’s another sexual assault! And another. And a shark. And a duel. And a leopard. No, two leopards. What next, frostbite? Yeah, frostbite.” I’m not exaggerating; I’m significantly underplaying the ridiculous plot.
But Taylor Sheridan at least attempts to reach normal people, even if he does appeal to distinctly abnormal ones as well. He’s super-rich now and he’s earned it – he makes shows people want to see. I just wish he made better shows because I want to watch without having to have a death grip on the remote so I can skip the stupid parts. While I despise what Hollywood has become, I love what Hollywood was like. Many of us want to be able to go to the theater again every weekend and be able to see something we’re interested in like we used to. We want to watch shows that don’t turn our stomachs or make us claw out our eyes with boredom.
I want Hollywood to succeed, but after watching its products over the last few years, I’m not sure if Hollywood wants to succeed.