Most watched shows in recent years.
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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These are all indicative of a deep rooted sickness in Western society.
Ironically the first is probably the least objectionable, it shows how lack of social safety nets and opportunities pushes people to criminality but doesn't romanticize that life.
The second is straight up glorifying nihilistic misanthropy, it's making an entire generation think social apathy is cool. The third romanticizes one of the worst decades in modern history by portraying the 80s, the decade of Reaganite/Thatcherite neoliberalism, when entire societies were seized by a mass psychosis of selfishness and hyper-consumerism, through rose tinted nostalgia glasses. If someone wants to see what the 80s in America were actually like outside of the privilege bubble of suburbia they should watch John Carpenter's They Live instead.
But honestly these three are certainly not the worst offenders, not by a long shot. Superhero franchises for instance are half fascist ubermensch fantasy half military industrial complex propaganda. And nearly any media set in the future takes place in some kind of dystopia - it's like Western society has become unable to even imagine a better future, or rather we are being conditioned to be incapable of imagining a better world. A healthy society would produce media portraying utopian societies to give people something to aspire to and work towards.
Instead we get it drilled into our heads again and again that things can only get worse from here. Because optimism and hope mobilize people whereas pessimism and doomerism lead to inaction and resignation, which is exactly what the ruling class wants. And if there is anything positive that is imagined about the future in such media then that thing is never the result of the mass mobilization of society toward a common goal but by the merit of individual genius, singular individuals who are superior to everyone else and who single handedly advance society and technology. A typical fascist trope.
And that's what it boils down to. Western society's sickness at its core is that it has a fundamentally fascist world outlook that permeates the entire Zeitgeist and is fed to us from birth, through schooling, advertising, media, politics and the structure of the economy, and which manifests as various seemingly separate pathologies but which are really interconnected and stemming from the same source: supremacism, worship of individualism, capitalist realism...
I think the nostalgia is also in the 2nd tv series as well. The Addams Family was the original series from the 60s.
It's very common for reactionaries to seek to rewind the clock to a "better" time because the present has all these modernization problems. For the boomers, the 60s were better than today. For Gen X, maybe the 80s were better.
Both the 2nd and 3rd tv series are aimed at younger viewers or the young-at-heart: trying to convey the joy of youth.
I can understand 60s nostalgia, even though much is also idealized about that period it was in many ways the last time that there was some real hope for change for the better in the West. The youth wanted a radically different kind of society, there was a strong anti-war movement, decolonization struggles were happening across the world, you could argue things appeared to be on a positive trajectory. Where the 80s and 90s were decades of counter-revolution, the 60s were at least trying to be revolutionary, if in a somewhat naive, idealist way.
I think for boomer liberals, their memory is pretty hazy and the 60s was the end of racism. "We did it guys! Everyone can sit on the same bus seats."
"If you remember the '60s, you weren't there."
Their memory is entirely through rose-tinted glasses lmao. Tho I do think they have more nostalgia for the '50s when they were kids. Things were actually worse then, but Boomers don't know that because they were children.
But the whole point of Wednesday is that she shouldn't be a nihilist that doesn't care. In fact the plot only happens because deep down she cares.
Maybe but that's not what people find cool and seek to emulate. People pick up more on the superficial aesthetic of apathy than on any deeper message the show tries to have.
i'm curious - what do you think about better call saul? /genq
I didn't watch much of that series but it seemed to be considerably darker and more cynical.