The Strange Politics of TV's Alcatraz and Person of Interest

There is only one institution in America with any reach. Only one that really shapes culture. Only one that reflects, and changes it. No, its not churches. Hardly anyone goes to Church any more. Nor is it politics, unaffiliated people are growing and will soon outnumber Republicans. There is only one institution that matters. That is television. True, it does not have the reach it had with only three networks, and no cable tv. But there it is, 17 million people watched the Golden Globes. It is, outside sports and a few other live events, a mostly female-gay ghetto. But it still shapes the attitudes and cultural assumptions of most women. Which brings us to Fox's Alcatraz and CBS's Person of Interest. Both are shows with somewhat strange politics. Alcatraz wants to indict the White male America of the past, for well being White and Male. Not sufficiently multicultural. Meanwhile Person of Interest posits that icky White beta males are the main threat to personal security in NYC, and Black men and women NEVER EVER commit crimes. Why? Because their viewers are nearly all female, and that is what that audience wants.


First, Alcatraz. seen in the trailer below:



Basically, a young White girl with a pixie haircut, and no discernible man in her life, but "hot" (this IS San Francisco, after all), is recruited by a semi-evil cranky old White guy, to work with a "diverse" team of well, a fat Mexican comic book fan and "Professor" and some Indian chick to solve the mystery of why everyone disappeared from Alcatraz. Sub-plots include the wicked, bad White guy who killed her first, less fat Mexican cop partner, who is her ... grandfather! And also the Indian doctor being a time traveler or something, she shows up in a flashback in 1960 in Alcatraz.

The whole thing is laughable, with hard-case WWII vet and Alcatraz con meekly doing what "they" (a voice on a telephone) tells him to do, because well that's what bad, dangerous White guys do. Or guys from 1963 suddenly knowing that they are being watched by video surveillance cameras. Or that time-travelers would use that to ... hire hitmen. Of course!

It is naturally, chick crack. Women love this stuff, the good (puzzles, women love puzzles as any Agatha Christie fan knows), and the bad (basically the semi-lesbian, fat Mexican guy, and the cranky old guy have to chase down evil White male America from 1963 and imprison it). There's a metaphor there, and its very obvious. The shows creators feel the old, straight White male working man's San Francisco is an affront to reality, and want to bring it back to life just to imprison it. Again, chick crack: importance and unraveling the mystery without any responsibility or duty. To country, justice, family, or anything. Or sorting that out. Nope, just easy moral victories over cartoon bad guys. Because everyone knows, that in San Francisco, the most horrible crimes are committed by ... White guys.

Nope, the words of SFPD Captain Michael Biel on the causes of San Francisco's 11 murders in 2011 are:

But police Capt. Michael Biel told the board’s Public Safety Committee the killings are unrelated and do not represent a specific crime wave. Biel said only one of the 11 homicides committed so far this year has been gang-related. Most of the rest, he said, involved social acquaintances and ongoing disputes over money or drugs.

Now, what sort of person kills casual acquaintances in disputes over money and drugs? Oh I know, I know! White guys. Usually icky beta males or lower class blue collar guys. After all, we all know the crime waves WWII vets committed (one of the bad guys in Alcatraz is a WWII vet who stole to feed his family).

Person of Interest, after an interesting start, has followed the path of pandering to the female audience's prejudices. While the pilot played with expectations, the icky beta male White guy being the victim, the "hot" woman being the killer, the main plot, bad corrupt White cops framing innocent Black victims had a noticeable subtext. All the cops were fat, bad looking ethnic White guys, Italians, Irish, and not the handsome good guys.



The most recent episode was the most laughable, embodying Eric Cartman's South Park Dictum that Black people can do no wrong. The character, the person of interest, is a beautiful Dominican woman who is a struggling lawyer, trying to free innocent Black cons wrongfully sent back to prison by their corrupt (again fat and unattractive Italian) parole officer. So the person at Child Protective Services can get a kick-back on falsely claimed kids cared for by the foster parents. The conspirators? A middle aged White couple and ... yes! An Icky White Beta Male. The "twist" is we are supposed to suspect, briefly, a noble Black woman who runs the place. Not the icky White beta male who expresses a romantic interest in the beautiful Dominican woman.

Why that plot point? Because it confirms what most of the White female audience "knows" with religious certainty. ALL Black people are noble and good, and never ever EVER commit crimes, it is racist to think so. The REAL threat is icky White beta males who might even **GASP** ask them out. How awful. Of course they are murderers and corrupt.

How does this willful denial of reality exist? Because most White women have no real contact with actual real, Black male criminals in urban areas. Or noble Hispanics. Those who do, like Alexandra "Asians in the Library" Wallace are not real happy about being second class citizens at best, harassed and threatened at worst. Black ex-cons are not in reality, noble guys trying to "turn their life around" for their son. They are in fact, brutal and dysfunctional and totally without much hope for anything else but aging out of violence. Productive and trustworthy members of society they are not.

This makes the show far different from the 1980's "Equalizer" which was also set in NYC. There, brutal Chinese kidnap or Dominican drug gangs ruled places, or organized crime, or various drug rings. While there were plenty of evil White guys, the beta male White guy was often the one the Equalizer (the incomparable Edward Woodward, sorely missed) protected. Heck even glamor-show "Miami Vice" had no problem in depicting the reality of the drug trade then, mostly Columbian drug lords. But back then, more men watched television, and therefore pandering to female-led PC was not the main concern.



One of the subtexts is that the bad guys are really bad because they are ... racist. "Framing" Black guys for committing the crimes that evil Blue Collar White guys of Ethnic Origin or Beta Male White guys do. I've seen that particular plot point three times on the show this season. That's no accident, undoubtedly the audience responded and it got repeated.

If you don't like PC, you have to destroy TV. Period. Or remake it into a place where shows fear offending .... beta male White guys, and Blue Colar guys of Ethnic Origin.

Either destroy female-led consumerism (by promoting female thrift and value-buying) or start suing the hell out of these production companies and networks for defamation of class. Sue and sue and sue and sue. Sue till the cows come home. And then sue some more. Attrition warfare against an enemy with limited time and money. Force them to abandon the shaping of culture to feed the White female professional viewpoint at its worst not best.

Puzzle stuff? I'm with the female viewers on that one. Its fun! Why not? Character development (but not by icky sex or "shocking" turns to "evil" out of comic books and soap operas) are also a positive development due to women viewers. But lets have an end to the chasing down and imprisonment of the Straight White male past, and icky Beta Male or White Ethnic guy as villain wrongfully framing innocent Black ex-cons. I'd rather watch vampires, witches, and fantasy characters out of "Grimm." Its more believable.
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NBC's Bet on Chelsea Handler: The New Supertrain, or Pink Lady and Jeff?

NBC seems betting big on "Girl in the City" type sitcoms, along with Fox (the New Girl with now newly divorced Zoey Deschanel, sister to Bone's Emily Deschanel, and yes daughter of famous cinematographer and director Caleb Deschanel), and CBS ("Two Broke Girls.") "Are You There, Chelsea?" based on late night talk-show host and comedienne Chelsea Handler's book, "Are You There Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea!" The bet seems weird, akin to the old "glory days" of not just bad, but wretchedly bad NBC programming. The only question is, will the show be more Supertrain (a late 70's NBC show about an atomic powered train, no I'm not making this up either), or Pink Lady and Jeff (a similar era show featuring a stand up comic and two Japanese singers who did not speak a word of English).


The series, starring Laura Prepon as the young Chelsea Handler (Chelsea Handler can't act) with occasional guest spots by Handler as her "super-judgy" older Christian Sister, opens with a bang. Handler's character is convicted of a DUI. That convinces her to … find an apartment within walking distance of her job at a local bar. The plot revolves (as in the book by Handler) drinking, having sex, and passing out.

This version of Handler's life opens with Chelsea in jail on a drunken driving charge, praying to vodka for help. Released, she vows to change her life — not by reducing her drinking, but by moving closer to the bar where she works so she won't have to drive.
That contrivance is enough to set up the show's two main locations: The bar, where she works with her best friend Olivia (Ali Wong), and the new apartment she and the equally wild Olivia share with the naïve, virginal Dee Dee (Lauren Lapkus). And oh, the fun they have making fun of Dee Dee's virginity.
Vulgarity and lack of taste aren't the issues here as much as a deadening single-mindedness. Almost every joke that's not about Chelsea's desire to drink is about her desire to have sex (or, if a red-haired man is involved, not have sex). It's enough to make CBS' Monday lineup look classy by comparison.

Note of course the red-hair stuff. Red hair on women is generally attractive, on men not so much. British actor Damien Lewis ("Life," "Band of Brothers," "Homeland") pretty much mostly plays villains (because of his red hair). It accentuates paleness which the modern female audience finds distasteful in men as much as it is desirable in women. Of course to have the one you must have the other, a fact with which sadly, the modern female audience does not understand.

As another review put it, drunken behavior leading to a DUI and no ambitions beyond working in a bar, drinking, and hooking up would label a male character a failure. But not a female one.

But still, the trainwreck is interesting. First, that NBC thought a show with no laughs would work. Second, that Handler herself would be a desirable model for women (who make up approximately 85% of the sitcom audience) to tune in to watch. Oh all the high-points are hit. Virginity (generally making a woman more, not less desirable, and certainly more desirable than a woman with a high partner count) being mocked … by other women? Check. Glorification of the bar-slut scene? Check. "Super-judgy" older sister (who presumably thinks drinking till one passes out and random sex with strangers is not a wise move) check!

And for aging cougars with a booze problem, this will undoubtedly be a DVR hit, if only they manage to record it in the first place. There's that vodka problem. As amusing as the play on a Judy Blume novel called "Are You There God? Its Me Margaret" the amusement tends to fade after quickly glancing at the book cover and moving on. Handler's first book was titled "My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One Night Stands" which is pretty one note. [Handler is probably best known for "oops accidentally" released sex tape and dating 50 Cent.]

Commenters on the LAT story, since removed called her "leathery" and noted she was probably hot ten years ago.

Chelsea is not presented, professionally, as a version of her original — not an aspiring comedian, writer, TV star or a person with any clear ambition beyond drinking and sleeping around and hanging out in the New Jersey sports bar where she works, and drinks, and picks up men.
…
We are, you may have noticed, or heard, in a TV season characterized by shows driven by strong female characters, though the history of television comedy is hung on a long line of unconventional women. Still, this is not exactly Mary Richards' search for love. "Are You There, Chelsea?" takes the intemperate habits that were long the province of the crazy sidekick and gives them to the lead. The flip side of this emancipation — ewomancipation? — is comedy that seems to celebrate binge drinking and its attendant unintended consequences.

"Chelsea" begins, weakly, with its star in jail for DUI; the main development in the pilot is when she rents a room in an apartment within staggering distance of her job. If these attributes were transferred to a male character, you'd get some hopeless loser, or Charlie Sheen. This is a funny idea of progress, but it is a kind of progress all the same.

The show of course will fail. What is mildly amusing in a little-seen talk show on E! (Chelsea Lately) is not likely to work as a weekly sitcom. First, its not funny. Secondly, leads have to be a calm center, not "zany," even the great and missed Don Adams had a calm center to Maxwell Smart, never going "zany" and acting like he was out on a limb. The zany stuff only works in small doses: Seinfeld's Kramer (Michael Richards), or George Costanza (Jason Alexander). If the jokes come all the time, the audience can't catch its breath, and just surrenders switching the channel. And one-joke shows generally don't last that long. Nor do unlikeable leads (ask Jay Mohr about "Action!")

But more importantly, the female audience does not crave a life of binge drinking and one-night stands. Seinfeld worked because guys wanted to be Jerry (the sane one and one with a modicum of fame and money) and women desired him. Sitcoms with a female lead, have to have an end-state. After all, Handler herself is minor in the Hollywood fairy tale pantheon next to the endless tale of tabloid tangles that Jennifer Aniston (the wronged woman), Brad Pitt (the desirable hunk), and Angelina Jolie (that man-stealing bad girl!) spin every week for their female readers. Don't believe me, just look at them next time you buy groceries.

Chelsea Handler's life in the show, is not very funny. Because it is sad -- a woman wasting her looks and desirability, both limited, on what? Drunken boozy hook-ups that lead nowhere? To no love, no romance, no possibility of kids by a fantastic, great man?

Slate did not much like it either:

It is difficult to situate the fictional Handler in terms of class. Blue-collar isn't quite the word. Rather, her social station is typified by the deep V-neck collar of the t-shirt that clings fondly to her as she waits tables at a New Jersey sports bar. This is not a service-industry gig held in the spirit of a middle-class slacker or a working-class striver, but of a career party chick. We might compare Chelsea’s life as a real alewife of New Jersey with that of her friend and roommate Olivia (Ali Wong) who has gone to college to become a journalist, God help her, and who has designs on an internship in Manhattan. Chelsea, in contrast, is going nowhere, professionally or emotionally. To underscore the latter point, the series offers her a second foil, an innocent soul named Dee Dee, played by Lauren Lapkus, who, with her round eyes and wiggling limbs, reads as a hybrid of Zoe Kazan and Shelley Duvall’s Olive Oyl.

Nevertheless it is interesting to see that NBC actually moved this from pitched script, to shot pilot, to production. Believing that a boozy life as a female "bro" akin to perhaps Snooki (who functions as a laugh point not heroine since people laugh AT HER not WITH HER) will be a success. Because Jersey Shore got lots of publicity. And people like to laugh at Snooki. [They do, and they do because Snooki is a lower middle class Guidette who gets her comeuppance regularly on the show. If nothing else, America is obsessed with status since status as Seinfeld amply demonstrated, determines EVERYTHING: your love life, employment, treatment on the street, everything.]

If nothing else, this show is indicative of how broken NBC really is. How little Comcast has fixed that broken-ness. Chelsea? The only question is: Supertrain? Or Pink Lady and Jeff?
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TV's Bad Boys and Violence

TV is more violent than ever before. Violent deaths, assaults, and other brutality fill the screen. At a time when TV has never been more oriented towards the female viewer? What gives? The answer of course lies in the type of violence. Women viewers in general don't like the masculine violence, seen in movies like "the Wild Bunch" or any realistic combat movie and series (such as HBO's "Band of Brothers.") Women DO like violence that establishes the main male character as dominant and therefore sexy. And it seems that Hollywood is happy to oblige, almost to the point where it has become an exercise in picking middle aged, not particularly sexy character actors and making them hot-damn! sexy symbols on TV. Call it TV producers inside joke.


Cue the Sopranos James Gandolfini. Not exactly a Brad Pitt look-a-like, his characters brutal and violent behavior, including the on-screen murder of a pleading woman (the secret informant girlfriend of his protégé) made him more not less sexy. As did later murders of his protégé, and numerous other characters. Bryan Cranston ("Walter White") of Breaking Bad is not exactly the stuff dreams are made of either. But the characters arc from nebbishy suburban husband to super-bad nascent drug kingpin and killer took him from chump to champ, in sex appeal. You see the same thing with Rescue Me's Dennis Leary, playing a "bad" firefighter who does awful things (like rape his ex-wife onscreen) and becomes even sexier. Showtime's "Dexter" about a "good" serial killer (who only kills other serial killers, sadistically) is par for the course. The whole point is that the characters brutal violence makes him more sexy not less, to the female audience (which is who watches Dexter, mostly). Michael Chicklis in "the Shield" is another such character. Boardwalk Empire's Steve Buscemi who portrays a character that is on-screen violently brutal and murderous, is probably the outer boundary of physical unattractiveness combined with physical dominance to see how "sexy" and physically unattractive a character can be and still play among the female audience.

Quite clearly, producers and writers are well aware of the female audience's desire for brutal and unrestrained violence among "sexy" and "bad" male characters. And they are giving the audience what it wants, full throttle. Sexy bad boys not limited by anything, not conscience, mercy, ties of family, patriotism, anything. Damien Lewis in "Life" played a guy who could be brutal but had definite self-imposed limits when it came to revenge, and a bit of compassion. No doubt those character qualities made the show a failure with the female audience. Playing a variation of the same character (one long and unjustly imprisoned) but with no patriotism, conscience, remorse, or even independence (he is dominated by a stronger, more charismatic jihadi) … the character has gone over like gangbusters.

Why is this? Well like the demand under Prohibition for ever more of the hard stuff, because casual drinking legally was impossible, the demand for "sexiness" in brutal dominance including the ultimate taboo, murder, being violated left and right, is nothing more than a reflection of the lack of sexiness in men around them. If most men were "sexy" then women would not want this hard-stuff.

Ultra-machismo Mexico and Columbia produce telenovela after telenovela that feature hard-working, often "ugly" women who become beautiful, powerful, and successful and snag that Alpha male. Who is the traditional "Fabio" type of character, strong and successful, but not violent. Ugly Betty is well within the range for that type of entertainment, wildly popular throughout Latin America. Men in those countries are plenty violent, women there don't need a fantasy of violence to get their thrills. They can see decapitated bodies, others hung mutilated off bridges, to what the real violence is. Instead their fantasies run towards being rich, famous, powerful, and with a devoted but hot/desirable husband who is "sophisticated" (think Fernando Lamas, not Lorenzo Lamas).

You can see this at work in "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" where gee, give Apes the power of human intellect and speech, and they are "superior" and rule because modern (White) men are just too wimpy to fight back. Yeah, right.

Ordinary White women in sheltered, suburban America, have no idea of what any man is capable of, and tend to judge off superficial posturing. Equal and status-quo feminism in the workplace, in schools, in larger society, leave most women judging wrongly that only a few men are sexy, because they posture overtly as dominant, violent, or both. Hence the hunger for fantasy dominance through ultra-violence. Not impersonal violence showing people blown apart, but personal violence showing the male character is one without any limits and able to dominate other people and make it stick.

If we ever hit sustained, violent hard times (which is likely, to my horror, I am a comfortable middle class American, with much to lose) then obviously the female audience won't demand fantasy violence. They'll have real ones at their doorstep, or more, every day. Even if America degrades, slowly, as the "best option" then things will soon sort themselves out. Women who face being hassled every day by gangs of illegal aliens congregating on street corners for day labor, do not find fantasy violence arousing. Nor do women who live in real fear of being assaulted, robbed, and killed, at home or going to and from work. Nor indeed do women who must deal paying the rent or buying food or buying gasoline to get to work.

The desire for fantasy violence comes from the illusion of control, safety, security, and stability. Seen on First World Problems:

“Exurban growth has led to people I used to think of as hillbillies being socially promoted to mere hicks.”

[Yes elites HATE HATE HATE the "hillbillies."]

Not enough "sexy men" in the cubicle next to you? Too much deferential "niceness" and boring behavior? Not enough dominance and control in the men around you? THAT is a First World problem, soon to go away with the First World itself.

Look for this sexy bad boy killer trend on TV and movies to go away. Soon.
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The Modern View of Marriage

A recent Citibank commercial exhibits the modern view of marriage found in the young, White professional women who are the target of Citbank's rewards program. The commercial features an attractive, athletic woman who says, "My boyfriend and I were going on vacation ... we talked about getting a diamond, ... but with all the points I earned ... I flew us to the rock I really had in mind."





The guy, is never shown in detail, and is a lesser rock climber than the girl (who goes first and stands alone on a towering, dangerous spire). Complete with faux-tribal yodeling and grrrl power! singing, its almost a SWPL parody. One might ask why marriage has become less attractive, to the point that Citibank (which only cares about getting consumers to sign up for its rewards cards program so they can reap fees off it, in the essentials) points out that its target young White female professionals can use the card to go rock climbing instead of getting married?

Let me repeat this. The commercial says flat out that the card allows women to avoid marriage in favor of "exciting" rock-climbing. The "rock I really had in mind."

How has marriage come to this?

It came to this, because in essentials, most White women find their men not very sexy. After all, modern life provides a lot of comfort and security. But the essentials of that security and comfort can only be provided if the men trade-off sexiness for reliability and agreeableness and cooperation. Women don't find happy, smiling men attractive, as any reader of Twilight or its "Teen Paranormal Romance" spawn (that's a genre inside Barnes and Noble Bookstores, no lie they have an entire section devoted to it) would know.

More than a thousand men and women were shown pictures of faces making various expressions and asked to rate them for attractiveness. Some pictures of a neutral face were also included.
The women were least attracted to the smiling happy men and most interested in those whose head was held high with pride. They also found the men who looked ashamed rather attractive, the journal Emotion reports.
Researcher Jessica Tracy said: ‘Pride may signal a man’s competence and ability to provide for a partner and offspring.’

Just as Satoshi Kanazawa's work showing that Black women were the least attractive to men of all races (which earned him a PC defenestration and forced, Gallileo-like apology after a PC inquisition) has not been disproven, just shouted down as not following the dogma of PC, this work and others are sure to generate lots of PC heat.

Is this assumption accurate, i.e. the cooperative, happy, smiling men who are "nice" and mostly equal to most women, are less attractive, than bad, broody guys, and thus account for the decline of marriage (because that is the supply essentially of prospective grooms -- agreeable "nice guys" for the most part)? Probably a lot more study is needed. It might very well not be. But then again, it might.

Does it make sense, or this another History Channel "Ancient Aliens Were At the First Thanksgiving (Hunting Bigfoot)" series?

In my view, there are reasons to suspect something along these lines. Every pundit from John Derbyshire, to Spengler at the Asian Times and Pajamas Media, to Theodore Dalrymple, to Mark Steyn, has remarked upon: plummeting birth rates in the West and places where women have better conditions and status and earnings and independence. Also, decreased marriage rates. Also, vastly increased female preference for "bad" i.e. abusive, violent, and dangerous men. Also, among women, vastly increased display of skin and figures, i.e. "slutty" and ultra-revealing clothing. Also, as Steve Sailer once noted, prevalence of tattoos on young women to indicate an easy attitude towards sex. The Daily Mail has shown series after series of drunken young British women stumbling around in next to nothing looking for sex on the weekend nights.

All of these things are well known. But no pundit has ever said why. The best they can come up with is … well these things just happen as a rule, because well that's what modern life is like. But why is that?

In my view, the reason for the disdain for marriage, the dislike of Western Civilization, the preference for bad boys, and all the rest is the profound dissatisfaction with "Kitchen Bitches," that is equal or mostly equal men who are smiling, agreeable, cooperative, building wealth and security and comfort but providing no sexiness. No danger. No excitement. And no pure, powerful arousal.

Joran Van Der Sloot after all has aroused many women Straight-A, Bible Study Natalee Holloway wound up leaving the disco with hulking, six foot four Van Der Sloot. She was never seen since and Van Der Sloot admitted on TV her murder. Another woman in Peru went with him to his hotel room (and her death). Van Der Sloot apparently used his notoriety to cut a wide swath among women in Asia. As did accused wife killer (yes plural victims) Drew Peterson, a former police officer in Ohio, well into his fifties, with coeds from local colleges.

In the early days of his detention, the Lima papers were full of reports about him reading reams of letters from women who claimed to be in love with him. “I get more letters every day,” he bragged to the downmarket Dutch paper De Telegraaf. “One of them even wanted me to get her pregnant.”

Even a Florida Doctor, a woman in her fifties, was not immune to his spell, spending considerable amounts of money to see him, and hiring attorneys.

What is this? Nothing but market failure. Modern society requires men to be agreeable, smiling, and cooperative. And that coupled with their near equality, makes them sexless. Causing in turn a desperation among women for sexiness no matter what. This is not evil, or a reflection of "evil women." It is simply an adjustment that women need, a set of proper incentives and investment.

Women won't value marriage (to Joe Average) if the trade-off is no sex and excitement. Game, being a PUA, working on sexiness, will all help to some degree fill that market gap, but there are limits. A man can't neglect his job, his other duties, simply to be sexy all day. No group of men spends more on being sexy and dominant (primarily through ultra-thuggery) than Black men in the ghetto. Optimizing for sexy men means minimizing for wealth and security and comfort.

The problem is one of incentives. Women are essentially, among both White working class (illegitimacy around 40%) and the White professional class (illegitimacy around 20%) betting it ALL on a continued long run of prosperity, safety, security, and comfort. Where life is so risk-less and "boring" that rock climbing, and other thrills (named Mr. Sexy Bad Boy) are required just to feel alive. Starving women in the Third World feel no such requirement for adrenaline fixes nor bad boy parades. They'd be happier if their husbands did not patronize prostitutes, drink the family money away in bars, and did some actual work at home and outside.

Women need to know that the comfort, safety, and stability of the West is an illusion. All those disaster movies, the end of the world movies, the zombie movies, and so on have played upon the fears that indeed, the surface stability and safety is just such an illusion. One destined to be shattered. There **IS** a cultural awareness that the West is not all powerful, and can be shattered at any moment. For a long time after WWII, this was centered around the Cold War and nuclear annihilation. Now, bio-terror, or zombies, or aliens, or ancient prophecies, or "climate change" nonsense articulate this fear. Which is the "entertaining" version of the real risk -- social pressures and competition for limited food, water, and other resources in a global oil shock, or global famine, or any other threat (like a failure of the Euro and a global banking shock).

Forget the fantasy of zombies or aliens landing. If gas goes to $10 a gallon, there are roaming packs of inner city marauders, looting the suburbs, a "Kitchen Bitch" with a shotgun who sticks with you looks better than fabulous rock climbing and a bad boy who does not stick around. No matter how moody and thus sexy he is. It is all a question of incentives. Women and Men behave EXACTLY as incentives push them, in the mass. [Individuals can and do vary, but the mass is what we are concerned with. It does society no good to have a few wise women choose security and the nuclear family when most abjure it for risky single motherhood.]

Marriage does not work for women, now, because they assume the stability and power of the West is eternal. Never threatened, always "boring." This is a poor bet, and likely to work out disastrously in fairly short order. Food, oil, and other resources are tight globally, and an external shock (and there is ALWAYS an external shock) in the global system will push everything over. Not aliens invading, or zombie apocalypse, or Mayan prophecies, but a corn harvest failure in Brazil, or a Wheat harvest failure in Russia, the Ukraine, and Australia. The closing of the Persian Gulf to oil shipping for six months or longer. The Euro collapsing. Perhaps all of these, are enough to send the economy into a nose-dive and mobs of hungry people from the urban centers into looting marches on the suburbs. With a paralyzed and inept bureaucracy unable and unwilling to use force to stop it. In other words, the LA Riots writ nationally.

Hipster rock climbing instead of marriage is all well and good, but a woman's "boyfriend" is not going to display the same sacrifice and courage in fighting off intruders as one's husband.
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TV's New Fall Season: Hollywood's Sidebet

The Washington Times has a post up about TV's New Fall Season and how it consists of mean women and weak men. To summarize the story (go ahead, read the whole thing), men are mostly weak and loserish, unless they are hot studs, and women are "sassy" and "empowered" who sleep around a LOT, with the few men who are sexy (dominant, assertive Alpha A-hole men). There is a reason for that. It sells. TV is basically a land of commercials, wrapped around a few minutes of entertainment. Oh, yes, basic cable channels, and HBO/Showtime/Cinemax (commercial free) derive most of their money from cable subscription fees, not ads. And the commercial free channels like HBO get all of their money from subscription fees. But that is changing. Time-Warner cable is now offering a package excluding ESPN that costs around $30-$40 a month, compared to around $73 a month. Continued growth will rely on not a bottomless pit of cable and satellite rights fees passed onto strapped consumers, but ads. Even P&G is prepared for the "hourglass" shaped consumer demographic, lots of really poor people and a few high-earning consumers.

What is wrong with America (and the West) is nothing less or more than its consumer culture, which based almost entirely on the female consumer has pushed bad behavior to the limit, while trying its best to eradicate the best of female actions.


Most women, most of the time, in the West, have been fairly conservative. Yes movements like the Temperance Movement, Prohibition, and the like have catered to the desire to tell other people how to live their lives, something of overwhelming emotional value to upper class White women in America. But most women most of the time were focused on saving money, preparing for household expenses, improving the lives of their children, and wanting a better life for their sons and daughters than they themselves had. This made women in the West a mostly conservative force, wary of great social change, and deeply invested for the most part in their children. Yes there were bad mothers, and bad fathers, but for the most part the nuclear family and very limited consumer spending held back the forces of rapid social decay. This at a time when most women did at least some work outside the house, and for farm wives in particular, labor alongside men in many times and places. In the Depression, women worked even more outside the house, part-time, to keep households together.

Here is what the Washington Times had to say about the new Fall Season:

Unlike their broke, wimpy male counterparts, the women on these shows are mostly strong and self-sufficient, and critics describe them with glowing words such as “assertive,” “edgy” and, heaven help us, “sassy.” However, what these women actually are, generally speaking, are utterly awful human beings. They may be inspired by “Sex and the City’s” Carrie Bradshaw, but they act like Samantha, openly bragging about how badly they treat men. They make the sorts of crude jokes that are rightly decried when men make them on prime-time network TV, yet are celebrated for women as signs of emancipation. “Whitney,” “Are You There Vodka?” and “2 Broke Girls,” for instance, all have one-line zingers where the punch line is “vagina.”

The male characters are largely relegated to being ornaments, comic foils or villains. Those that aren’t wimps or fools are dashing rakes - embodiments, in a way, of the old virgin/whore dichotomy turned upside down. In Fox’s “New Girl,” which premiered Tuesday at 9 p.m., post-“Glee,” star Zooey Deschanel’s character has to find a new apartment because she catches her boyfriend cheating. Similarly, the titular “2 Broke Girls” become roommates only because one catches her “sleeps until 4:00” boyfriend cheating on her, and the other has a father who goes to jail for his Bernie Madoff-like crime.

TV’s women of fall, on the network sitcoms especially, are vain, selfish, shallow and controlling — a generation of “Mean Girls” grown, not surprisingly, into mean women.

You see this stuff because advertisers like it. And they like it because they have done quite a bit of market research showing that their female target audience, younger women, like it too. A lot. The ads on these network shows are in support of the idea that women are empowered, Sex in the City types, who can sleep around, with dashing rake-hell men, bond with lots of "you go girl" female friends, and dismiss the 90% of the male sex that lacks the sexiness required.

CBS's "the Good Wife" has a flavor of it, a glamorous depiction of the sexy betraying bad husband (but one that every woman wants) and an older woman still turning heads. A prime-time soap opera.



There is nothing wrong with consumerism, as long as it is not taken to excess. But the storylines blend seamlessly into the ads, of a society defined by consumption and where the type of consumption determines the type of person the lead (female) characters are: beautiful, glamorous, important, because they are consuming a particular type of man, or for the younger set, hot, sexy, desirable because they have the hottest bad boys and sleep around a lot.

The problem with all of this is that the consumption at some point has to end. No one save the very rich can live a life of consumption without saving. The entire "model for life" promoted by the entertainment wrapping the commercials does not work, for much of anyone outside of say, Mick Jagger, for very long. Sleeping around a lot guarantees sex with Alphas, but not commitment, and a life of single motherhood at best, not the fabulous families envisioned in Sex and the City. Most straight men are not falling over themselves to be the fabulous gay boyfriend of some new girl on the sexual marketplace. Most women who sleep around can get easy sex but little commitment from any worthwhile man. Most women past the age of forty don't turn heads, they make men want them to move, so they can see the hot young thing behind them.

Nothing in America's culture will change until and unless its consumer culture changes. This means ad-supported TV, which influences pretty much every part of society due to its massive reach and its stature of the bread and butter of Hollywood (movies are glamorous, TV production pays the bills). All that is a chicken and egg riddle.

Women in the past were naturally conservative because life revolved around marriage, kids, family, and above all, saving for that life. Savings, and the most prudent, cost efficient consumption meant women were an innate force for conservatism. Seizing the "Commanding Heights" of culture and politics and society: Professional White Collar White women, is not easy given the profound shift to consumption and not saving.

Steve Sailer noted this commercial:



"Suzanne Researched This," about how buying a McMansion is possible by bullying your fat stupid and weak husband. Notice there is nothing about value and saving. Indeed the consumption is all about overcoming the dumb husband, who is not able to see how cool the granite counter-tops are.

In some ways, this culture is the bill due from a near 70 years of uninterrupted peace and security, built through the Cold War duopoly of nuclear weapons and force, the stability from two coalitions desiring to minimize conflict. Allowing consumption to run rampant. The sort of broad social change brought about by television, rising wealth levels, easy contraception, urban anonymity, and highly personally mobile society. All of which seems to be coming to an end.

What is interesting about the CBS show "Person of Interest" is not just how masculine it is, but how it points out that the very technology that allowed anonymous, urban living is now taking it away. Surveillance cameras, massive government and commercial databases, plus of course Facebook, Google, and the rest leave bare most lives to anyone with any determination to pry them open. For any purpose, any time.



Yes there is the obligatory "Good female Black cop" to meet diversity quotas, but she's mostly irrelevant (and shown to be fairly useless, as she does nothing to stop crimes from happening). The producers, JJ Abrams and the brother of Chris Nolan, Jonah Nolan, talked about the approach in London and New York.

Which brings us to the latter show, "Person of Interest." Much is made, fairly directly, of the impact of 9/11 and how the attack made people aware that their lives were not as safe or secure as possible. While there is no footage shown, 9/11 changes the lives of the two male lead characters forever. And the technology used to combat terrorism is inevitably used (in the show, for good) to combat lesser crimes, in fact stopping them before they start. With two completely disconnected from society men, aiming to "be there in time." While flawed in execution, the concept and what the show is about, is so striking.

Inevitably the society of the Good Wife, 2 Broke Girls, and Are You There Vodka, Its Me Chelsea cannot co-exist with that of Person of Interest. Something has to give. And what will give is which ever notion is proven strongest. By ongoing events. TV currently holds that the future is mostly known. More of the same, a big fabulous party thrown for everywoman who can pursue granite countertops, or a fabulous life in the big city, or be sexy well past forty, if she's just fabulous enough. Because security and safety and things like water, power, electricity are all assumed. And that therefore there is a large appetite for shows depicting fabulous consumption in fabulous manners by fabulous women.

The minor side bet, made by some interesting people in Hollywood, is that this is not the case. That society will enter into a prolonged period of shortages, of water, of power, of food, of basic safety, and there is an appetite for shows about broken men finding redemption and meaning (and lawful revenge) by stopping worse things before they start. Basically a whole-hearted endorsement of pre-emption in crime and anything else because … technology gives us the tools to understand and predict behavior much more thoroughly.

Color this the Moneyball of Crime Dramas. The show is not about consumption, or money, sex and power. It is about above all an idea, that imperfect though it may be the way to stop horrible things (and take a moral revenge for 9/11) is to intervene with all the tools used to fight Al Qaeda. Not to put them aside in favor of Hope, Change, and fabulous girlfriends and clothes and men. But to use them, wisely, because there are many, many bad people out there.

That this show was made at all, much less that CBS put it on, is staggering. Yes Hollywood is mostly betting on Sex and the City. But it has made some interesting side bets.



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A New Hollywood Creative Paradigm?

Hollywood is still mostly trapped in its view of itself and society. A stale, 1960's era view of themselves as the good enlightened, struggling against a repressive, McCarthyist people and populace. A group of the true saved enlightened saints, against a dark and evil American people. But recently a glimmering of change is sprouting through Hollywood. Oh don't worry … they still hate America and Americans. But their attitude about themselves is changing. Partly this is due to economics and technology, but partly because of how they see themselves. The change is mostly in the ranks of producer/director/writers, not actors, of course, but it is quite interesting.

The change is that instead of seeing themselves as the new Puritans, "saints" who persevere against a repressive, sexually and politically, "evil White male" regime, the new crowd sees themselves as Batman. Who everyone wants to save them, by extreme violence, while condemning them for doing so if they ever get caught.


Mostly, of course, I'm talking about the Nolan Brothers, and JJ Abrams. The Nolans are famous for the Batman movies, which endorse pre-emption and snooping and all sorts of vigilante violence. Abrams has joined with Jonah Nolan, Christopher's brother, to produce "Person of Interest," perhaps the most unsettling and for what it is, revolutionary conservative show on television.

Nolan's Batman, famously, exists in a world and a city that has failed. Gotham is a pit, decaying into corruption. The cops, save one man, Gordon, are corrupt. Criminals run everything. The few honest District Attorneys are slaughtered, or driven insane, and cannot function. Judges routinely send criminals into a revolving door nuthouse. Nothing works, which is why Batman is needed. He exists because no one else will save Gotham. Leaving it to him, and whatever methods he himself finds appropriate or not. The only lines he follows are ones he draws himself.

You can immediately see the appeal for Hollywood's creative people. All their institutions are failing or have failed. The Studio system that gave them money, a budget, people, and told them what to do are long gone. Have been for nearly forty years. What replaced them, the Agent system, is failing. People are not buying DVDs anymore, nor are Blu-Ray sales fixing the deficit. TV rights are down, foreign sales have been no help with massive piracy, and 3-D is a gimmick whose time has now definitively passed. As Chris Nolan says, film-makers and audiences have spent nearly a century getting ordinary films right, and knowing how to see them. You can't watch 3-D with vision problems (most of the audience), on an Iphone or Ipad, or on ordinary TVs, where people most want to watch movies.

Nothing has worked, and so a few creative people have cast themselves as vigilante heroes. Determined to save the city (Hollywood) from the forces of darkness and violence (foreclosing on the Malibu beach-house) by whatever means required (appeasing the audience with traditional heroes). This earns them disdain from the populace (Hollywood's in-crowd) but they are extra heroic and mavericky.

I'm sarcastic, but that is the process. And more are joining them. Captain America and Thor, no matter what their problems, were straight ahead super-heroic. Therefore, ultra-mavericky when everyone wants to be the hip new happening guy who is the toast of the town and ticks off audiences. Fear, desperation, and a desire to stand out have led the Nolans and others to make movies that appeal to ordinary people with heroics and a distance from the Hollywood mores of "you stupid hicks, your 1950's values stink!"

Person of Interest takes that even further. It is astonishing that a conventional liberal like Abrams is even associated with it (he executive produces). In a key scene, the character Finch explains to the character played by James Caviezel, what he did for the government. Finch, he tells the man he hopes will work with him, developed a software system that would sift through everything. All the phone calls, emails, bank account activity, surveillance videos, supermarket purchases, everything, in daily life, that records activity in a database. And it would look for things, to predict violent acts about to happen.

The public, he says, wanted no more 9/11s. They just did not want to know how it was done. The government having given itself permission to read any e-mail and listen to any phone call, after 9/11, used his program to find out terrorist plots. But he tells the Caviezel character, there was a problem. The program found other things, mundane murder plots not associated with mass casualty terrorism. So he threw those away, but later came back and had the system send him just the social security numbers, of those people who were of interest. They could be the killers, they could be the victims, he could not tell because all he could safely send himself was the social security numbers.

Here there is another failure. The government could, if it wanted to, stop the murders from taking place. As the Finch character tells Reese (Caviezel), while crimes of passion or the heat of the moment cannot be prevented, those plotted over days and weeks and months, often can, because the plotters leave clues that his system can spot. But the government only cares about mass murder terror plots. Because that is the only concern of the public.

Caviezel's character is a former CIA man, presumed dead, who killed a lot of terrorists and enablers after 9/11. He himself, like Batman, decides where he will draw the lines, and what he will or will not do. He does not like killing people, but is good at it. A burnt out and bitter man, he finds redemption in saving people who can be saved but the system lacks the will and ability to save.

The pilot was based on a screenplay developed by Abrams and Nolan, and is pretty revolutionary. The government, far from being an omnipresent fascist state, does the bare minimum to protect a public that wants to pretend it doesn't know what is being done. Again into the gap of failure, by the government AND the people, rush the heroes using new technology and will power, to "be there in time," to stop murders. The pilot tested off the charts, the highest of any drama pilot in 15 years, with "crazy broad appeal you don't usually see," so much so that CBS moved CSI aside for it, and won its timeslot in the premiere with 13 million viewers.

What Hollywood is very cautiously nibbling around the edges of, is that PC and Multiculturalism and restraint and all that, don't work. More 9/11s don't happen because lots of people get killed by drone strikes, combat patrols, and the like aided by outsourced torture, lots of software sweeps of bank accounts, phone calls, emails, travels, airline tickets, and more, plus human intel from forces needing US help/protection/assistance against enemies. Not by a heavy dose of hope and change. More like lots of drone strikes and SEAL missions never publicized, which the public would like to ignore.

Ultimately this is not sustainable, and the lone hero model while very dramatic has its own limitations, as actual policy. Which Hollywood's creative types understand because no one makes a movie by themselves. Indeed the series raises all sorts of questions. Are we willing to tolerate thousands of murders, each year, because we don't want to have intrusive, software-spying? If a couple of guys using the software can save that many, why not the police using it at will?

Naturally, this only around the edges. There is the PC heroic Black female cop. The usual "corrupt White cop ring" though the hot young female prosecutor is corrupt, the schlumpy divorced White guy is the intended victim not the killer. PC still reigns supreme in some areas. No one is asserting a broad-based challenge yet.

But … the whole point of the show is that the good guys use the ever-present surveillance technology (the hero Reese snoops a lot on targets electronically) to stop crimes from happening. In the pilot, they save three lives. They stop murders by not just breaking but obliterating every law, rule, and criminal procedure on the books. They step in because the government will not. The heroic Black female cop is shown as always three steps behind, not knowing who she is pursuing, or even why the hero acts as he does.

Let us put it this way. Not even JJ Abrams believes in Hope and Change and the West Wing anymore. Instead it’s a couple of vigilantes stepping in where the FBI or NYPD will not.
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Gay Star Trek

There are plans for a new Star Trek TV series. Among the tidbits, two gay leads. Is there a problem with this plan? Sure. As William Goldman noted, in Hollywood "nobody knows anything." But ... in Bar Rescue, a reality series on Spike-TV, bar consultant John Taffer knows quite a lot. With demographic profiles, surveys, even aerial photos of nearby bars and identification of what kind of establishments the competitors are. All that for a reality show. The great "Moneyball" revolution has begun, with ordinary bars, restaurants, and every other small business discovering that computers and simple stat programs (often just spreadsheets) can offer meaningful statistical analysis to make their business a success while others fail. How long can this sort of idiocy, ala "Gay Star Trek" go on?

Not long. Because sooner or later one Hollywood studio will gain dominance by adopting a Moneyball approach.


Goldman believed no one knew anything, and that moreover, no one could know anything. This belief pretty much approximates Baseball management before Bill James and the Moneyball revolution proved this wrong. Making "gut calls" on both players and moves (stealing bases, giving up outs to move a runner up into scoring position, going for "good body" guys who can't hit instead of "ugly" guys who can) is no longer supportable. The same way that trading by big firms has moved away from "gut calls" and instinct to program trading, computerized searches for micro-advantages in mis-pricing, so too has sports management. Besides baseball (the Red Sox, Yankees, Rangers, and other teams have adopted all or part of the Moneyball approach), the NFL (particularly the New England Patriots and New Orleans Saints), NHL, have adopted a method of statistical analysis to overturn long-held but erroneous assumptions about proper strategy and player selection.

Only Will Smith and his agent have really applied any rigor to figuring out what movies are successful, and which ones are not, and identifying common elements. Such as a Sci-Fi theme, action, comedy/humor, and so on. Early in his career, Smith and his agent sat down and did such an analysis, and came up with a set of criteria that he has mostly stuck to, in taking roles or declining them. Such a discipline has led Smith to become one of the all time box office champions, in terms of leading men. And it was not really that hard to figure out.

So too with TV. TV breaks down into female-oriented (which is most of it) and the few scripted shows that guys still watch. Star Trek, the original series, was famously just a Western set in space. Creator Gene Roddenberry pitched it as "Wagon Train to the Stars" and it even had regular Western character actors such as DeForrest Kelly as one of the leads. The original series garnered so-so ratings on NBC during its run, upon cancellation running for decades with great ratings. Various film revivals made lots of money, and series attempts even with living room sets (Star Trek Next Generation) or female captains (Voyager) or looming angry Black guy leads (Deep Space Nine) did acceptable ratings. The secret to the original series repeat success in syndication was being just a Western in space. That was it. The whole point. Nerdy White guys watched in droves, imagining they were Captain Kirk. A guy macho, but not too much, whom they could conceivably become. Those nerdy guys first started balking at imagining themselves the patriarch of some living room in space (Next Generation), then as some Looming Angry Black guy (lead Avery Brooks, a fine Shakespearean actor, for some reason played the character of Commander, later Captain Sisko like Othello). The last straws were Captains as inept female middle managers (Voyager) and milquetoast nebbishes (Enterprise). The final Star Trek TV series, Enterprise, was canceled in February 2005.

Who watches Star Trek? Gays? Nope, only 2-4% of the population is gay. What about the revival of BattleStar Galactica, which had prominent gay characters? That show was mostly watched by ... women. And it had fairly miserable ratings, as it went. Witness the swift cancellation of "Caprica" the follow-on show. Much of the TV business either is too stupid (always a possibility) to realize press and media coverage do not equal popularity (Gossip Girl dominates the media, yet barely ekes out a million in viewers). Or producers and such don't care, they won't share in financial success and just want to raise their profile in the industry for their next job.

Nevertheless, a professional management would have on hand:

1. What is the target audience, how much of them can we realistically expect to get, and how much will advertisers pay to be on our show?
2. How much will the show cost, and how expensive will it get over the years?
3. How long will the show realistically run?
4. How much can the studio sell other areas of revenue, DVDs, merchandising, etc.?

A professional management, would know much indeed. It would know the success rate for each type of show, and each type of audience intended. Women are not fond of action-mostly shows, and men don't watch night-time soaps. It would know how much money would be spent, and how much money would be expected in return.

Proposals such as a Gay Star Trek, would be laughed out of the office. Writers and producers would not even pitch them, for fear of looking stupid. This seems like a monumentally stupid idea, therefore it is almost a lock to go into production.

No one knows anything because they are less motivated than a bar consultant to find out about their business. Who their customers are, what they want, and how much money each type generates. It is astonishing that Warners/DC has not copied Marvel's formula for exploiting, what must be admitted is second-class super-heroes. With a rich pantheon of demi-gods and mythological heroes, DC is making ... Deadman the series, on CW. Along with a flop-tastic Green Lantern, and Jonah Hex. With all that money, why hasn't there been a plan to have Christian Bale's Batman, a Superman, a Captain Marvel, a Doctor Fate, a Hawkman, a Green Lantern, a Flash, a Green Arrow, a Wonder Woman, and a Martian Manhunter team-up in a Justice League Movie? Or two?

Why? Because Warners/DC are run by a bunch of idiots. Meanwhile, Disney has largely left Marvel alone, to make decent to good superhero movies. Thor, Captain America, and the second Hulk movie were all acceptable to good comic book movies. Captain America may be the best of its genre. Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury shows up in all of them, along with the Iron Man movies, and fans are excited. Marvel is not doing anything difficult, and the formula is pretty cut and dried. Stick to the comic book origin and basics of the character. Choose an actor over a physique, and strike a long-term deal. Use good actors in all the roles, don't skimp on support. Treat the script with respect, don't camp or joke it up. Deliver meat and potatoes and the fans will show up -- there is a reason these characters have lasted for in some cases more than half a century. Their creators knew what they were doing -- just don't screw it up.

Nope. Instead we'll get a Gay Star Trek. To match the Gay Christ Allegory of Superman Returns. It will fail, miserably. And execs will say, no one watches sci-fi on TV anymore. Let's do another soap opera.


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NBC's Diversity Bet Fails

[Editor's note: work/family issues required a break from blogging. Hence the lengthy hiatus.]

NBC's past season, from Fall 2010 to Spring 2011, was a massive bust. NBC's big bet on diversity failed. Gone, was "Undercovers" (a glamorous Black couple running a high-end catering service are also super-sexy uber-spies). The show failed fairly quickly, and was pulled in November 2010. "Chase" featuring a waify blonde woman all of 120 pounds beating up on hefty evil White guy fugitives, as an uber-US Marshall, in February of 2011. "The Event" with an Obama-like President uncovering an evil White guy conspiracy involving Aliens was canceled in May 2011. So too was "Outsourced," the wacky comedy about the hilarity of firing Americans and moving a call center to India. So too was "Law and Order Los Angeles," with the usual Law and Orderen lineup of evil White guys (is there anything they can't do?) and downtrodden non-White victims (not reminiscent of the Los Angeles I know, where the Azusa 13 Gang was indicted by the US Attorney for hate crimes against Blacks).


Diversity just did not pull in viewers. NBC's big bet came a cropper. The failure was so bad, across the board, that NBC even ... renewed "Chuck" for a fifth and final season (a limited 13 episode run). Likely that move was taken in consideration of a likely NFL lockout. Given that "Chuck" is the only NBC show (and outside Fox's Sunday animated shows, one of the few on network TV that at all) that skews male. NBC tried betting big on "diversity" and hoped that would draw in lots of female viewers. Who in turn are mostly White. The dirty little secret is that while Univison and Telemundo are posting dramatic gains in audiences, their night-time audiences are still tiny. Less even than the CW, itself a baby netlet often drawing fewer than one million viewers for some shows. NBC thought that going all out for "Diversity" would provide an alternative to what other networks were doing. In this they were correct. Where NBC went wrong was in thinking that the mostly White/Female audience was interested in this diversity. By and large, they were not.

Now NBC has resorted to lots of comedies, crummy reality shows, and hoping NFL football comes back in its new 2011 Fall Lineup. The only things original are the "Sliding Doors" type dual-reality show "Awake" (in one reality his wife is dead, in another his son), and "Grimm" (about a police procedural involving ... Grimm Fairytale characters). These may fail. But NBC should be applauded for at least taking the risk. Both are a bit different, offbeat, and not the same old procedural stuff.

[Interestingly enough, both NBC and CBS, during their fireworks broadcasts on the Fourth of July, heavily promoted their upcoming shows, the first time I can recall them doing so. It seems they feel the need to expend more time/money in promotion than in years past.]

CBS only has "Person of Interest" with Jesus (Jim Caviezel from "the Passion") and Michael Emerson (the bad guy from "Lost") about a covert op teamed with a software mogul aiming to stop crimes before it happens. Basically, a variant of the Equalizer, done decades ago, but hey that was a good show. Everything else is either a renewal or tired re-run (Poppy Montgomery from "Without a Trace" has a new show "Unforgettable" about a detective who cannot forget anything). "A Gifted Man" is a weepy-ghost-chick-flick show (so naturally it should do well). I'm shocked Katherine Heigl is not in this one.

ABC has a "Mad Men" clone ("Pan Am") and a Charlie's Angels remake, plus a woman in jeopardy Lifetime Movie Network series ("Missing") with a global twist, and another with a "Lost" in the Amazon style twist ("the River") and a couple of night-time soaps ("Revenge" and "Good Christian Belles") the latter of which was changed from "Good Christian Bitches." Nothing of interest to anyone not gay and possessing a Y chromosome. "Once Upon a Time" has again, the Grimm Fairytales characters inhabiting the modern world, in the town of "Storybrooke" seeming to mix Harry Potter with conspiracy-theory heavy shows like "Lost" or "Fringe."

Fox has the usual assortment of lame comedies, plus the dramas "Terra Nova" (much delayed) about a family moving to the Earth of 80 million years ago to escape Global Warming and pollution, or just the neighbors, or something. Plus mid-season replacements "the Finder" (about an Iraq War vet with a talent for finding things that have gone missing) and "Alcatraz" (another "Lost" clone about criminals from Alcatraz who never age and go on killing sprees, or something.

CW has "Ringer" with Buffy herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar, as a woman on the run from the mob posing as her missing twin sister ... who is herself pursued by unknown enemies. The rest is teen witches, teen vampires, and so on.

FX has picked up for pilot Brian Michael Bendis (who did an excellent turn on Marvel's "Daredevil" years back) based on his own comic book (he retains ownership in other words) "Powers." The series features gritty cops investigating crimes committed against ordinary humans and super-powered people by people with ... powers. Meanwhile ABC is prepping for the following season a number of Marvel properties, including "the Incredible Hulk," "AKA Jessica Jones," and "Cloak and Dagger." [Sadly for ABC/Disney, Marvel's drop-off in superhero quality from their first tier is substantial. "Jessica Jones" and "Cloak and Dagger" are both "diverse" and low-rent superheroes, who while having been around since the 1970s never really caught on. By contrast DC has tons of superheroes, poorly used, with rabid followings.]

As usual, AMC has a violent/provocative show ("Hell on Wheels" about the building of the Transcontinental Railway) and various other basic cable and premium cable outlets have new series they will premiere in dribs and drabs.

But of all of them, NBC has fallen the farthest, and the hardest, from a state of grace. NBC, after all, was the network of such male-oriented shows as "the A-Team," "Miami Vice," "Hunter," "Misfits of Science," along with "Hill Street Blues," "Seinfeld," "St. Elsewhere," "Crime Story," "Private Eye," and even "the Rockford Files." Heck what I would not give for a DVD release of "the New Maverick," (the abortive, one-season western with the great James Garner replaying his Brett Maverick character). While CBS may have had "the Equalizer," and ABC briefly "Max Headroom," NBC remained the place for guys in the 1980's and even into the 1990's. Heck as recently as 2009, NBC aired "Life," one of the most shockingly tough-guy shows ever put on network TV.

As Newton Minnow said in his Vast Wasteland Speech


When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better.

But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials — many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.

While Minnow is often quoted as noting the vast wasteland, the first part of his speech is often forgotten. I have seen over the course of my life TV go from a purveyor, even though flawed, of a mass culture and matching model of traditional masculinity (do the right thing, don't stop trying) to one of total camp, attention-whoring, and paralyzing uniformity. A place where men exist only as female-oriented studs or gays, without even a smidgen of action, adventure, and excitement.

TV, when it is good, is simply unbeatable. Its restrictions on budgets and effects are matched by the advantage of time. A typical movie will have to clock in at around 2 hours, more or less. A TV series, going 22 episodes, even with only 43 minutes devoted to story (less commercials) can still clock in at around 17 hours. That 17 hours allows for a richer story to be told. One with more detailed and developed characters, one with more complex and emotionally arousing storylines. TV at its best helps unify the country and provide (all the more necessary with the collapse of church attendance and religion) a unified morality, and one based on what the people themselves believe, not what elites in Hollywood and NYC believe.

So, it has been good and refreshing to see NBC's diversity line-up fail. Other networks have followed suit. None have launched copies of what has failed at NBC. No laugh-a-minute yuks about outsourcing to India, or super-glamorous super-spy couples who are Black, or Obama-clones fighting off Aliens and corporate White bad guys. Instead, NBC has basically punted, relying on junk reality, a final season of "Chuck," (at least Adam Baldwin will be on TV again in the role of John Casey, he's completely hilarious) and two new series trying something a bit different. Even so that network will have a huge Sunday night hole if the NFL (hopefully) remains on lockout. ABC, CBS, FOX, and CW are merely repeating in new shows what they've always done before. More soaps for ABC, more procedurals for CBS, more big-budget Sci-Fi for FOX, and hunky magic teens for CW.

Eventually, one network will have to take a chance to break from the pack. More of the same fighting over a constantly declining female audience will not cut it. "Diversity" and other tricks, aping "Lost" or pushing a big-budget (soon to be trimmed) Spielberg-driven Dinosaur show won't do it. "Terra Nova" seems set for the success of "the Young Indiana Jones" or "Amazing Stories." Back when Spielberg was not corrupted by a posse of toadies telling him his every brain fart was genius, he made some pretty compelling movies. He's been consistently bad in TV, however, not realizing that TV requires story-telling emotion over a budget always under assault. The network most desperate is obviously ... NBC. So it was good that "Diversity" failed. Nothing gets network attention (and all the networks pay attention) like spectacular failure.

Sooner or later someone at a network will take a gamble on men, and provide a staple of cheap, entertaining, and amusing male-skewing shows. The country will be better off, because traditional male-oriented shows for the most part must embody fairly conservative values. Honor your word, show physical and emotional courage, stand up and fight, protect the weak, punish the wicked. Those are the stories men of all ages are interested in, and are almost completely absent on the TV screen every night. Let's hoping those stories return soon.
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Why Selling New York Is Important

Sometimes reality TV can be simply silly. A diversion of no consequence. History Channel's "Ice Road Truckers" or "Axe Men" fall into that category. Shows of interest mainly to a male audience, that has entertainment value only. No lasting cultural consequence like E! Network's "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" (feeding the princess fantasy by pushing the spoiled brat becomes the girlfriend of a wealth/famous Black athlete). Or "Teen Mom" on MTV, which has normalized (by making famous "stars" out of its participants) and encouraged teen pregnancy. But likely most important of all, is HGTV's "Selling New York." Which shows just how different the uber-rich really are. And how, well shockingly gay and female the spheres they inhabit really are, compared to that of ordinary people. Since the uber-rich shape the culture, through their immense wealth and power, this is important.




"Selling New York" follows (this season) three different real estate brokerages, focused on high-end real estate that only the super-rich can afford. What immediately strikes everyone is how, well gay the men seem. Absent the pater-familias of one agency (the Kleiers) who is apparently not allowed near the clients, focusing on finances, and management, there doesn't seem one normal, straight guy in sight. The women all seem shallow, brittle, immensely uptight and nervous. While the men seem just on the verge of losing it, both sexes coming off as immense phonies constantly afraid they will be found out. Everyone seems profoundly uncomfortable in their own skin (in a Nixon, walking the beach at San Clemente in a three piece suit and dress shoes way).

Everyone is focused on appearances and status-jockeying. No one really makes any real contribution to much of anything, other than salesmanship. All the people, men and women both, are utterly replaceable absent personal relationships with clients, and it is likely they know it, hence the gnawing anxiety.

The only likable client from the first season was the hair dresser making millions (an immigrant) who exuded calm self-confidence and common sense. Though eventually humoring his wife who wanted to build out a shell of an apartment, he figured if you paid millions of dollars, you might as well buy something already done and just move in. Seeing as he had both a business to run and three kids, that attitude made sense. Every other client exuded an attitude that stank, right there on screen. That they were indeed, better than everyone else, and god's own gift to mankind. Arrogance mixed with status-seeking seemed the order of the day.

And this attitude is everywhere in the US and global elites.

The Atlantic has a new article on the global elites. In it, this gem is written:

If you are looking for the date when America’s plutocracy had its coming-out party, you could do worse than choose June 21, 2007. On that day, the private-equity behemoth Blackstone priced the largest initial public offering in the United States since 2002, raising $4 billion and creating a publicly held company worth $31 billion at the time. Stephen Schwarzman, one of the firm’s two co-founders, came away with a personal stake worth almost $8 billion, along with $677 million in cash; the other, Peter Peterson, cashed a check for $1.88 billion and retired.

In the sort of coincidence that delights historians, conspiracy theorists, and book publishers, June 21 also happened to be the day Peterson threw a party—at Manhattan’s Four Seasons restaurant, of course—to launch The Manny, the debut novel of his daughter, Holly, who lightly satirizes the lives and loves of financiers and their wives on the Upper East Side. The best seller fits neatly into the genre of modern “mommy lit”—USA Today advised readers to take it to the beach—but the author told me that she was inspired to write it in part by her belief that “people have no clue about how much money there is in this town.”

Holly Peterson and I spoke several times about how the super-affluence of recent years has changed the meaning of wealth. “There’s so much money on the Upper East Side right now,” she said. “If you look at the original movie Wall Street, it was a phenomenon where there were men in their 30s and 40s making $2 and $3 million a year, and that was disgusting. But then you had the Internet age, and then globalization, and you had people in their 30s, through hedge funds and Goldman Sachs partner jobs, who were making $20, $30, $40 million a year. And there were a lot of them doing it. I think people making $5 million to $10 million definitely don’t think they are making enough money.”

As an example, she described a conversation with a couple at a Manhattan dinner party: “They started saying, ‘If you’re going to buy all this stuff, life starts getting really expensive. If you’re going to do the NetJet thing’”—this is a service offering “fractional aircraft ownership” for those who do not wish to buy outright—“‘and if you’re going to have four houses, and you’re going to run the four houses, it’s like you start spending some money.’”

The clincher, Peterson says, came from the wife: “She turns to me and she goes, ‘You know, the thing about 20’”—by this, she meant $20 million a year—“‘is 20 is only 10 after taxes.’ And everyone at the table is nodding.”
…
The U.S.-based CEO of one of the world’s largest hedge funds told me that his firm’s investment committee often discusses the question of who wins and who loses in today’s economy. In a recent internal debate, he said, one of his senior colleagues had argued that the hollowing-out of the American middle class didn’t really matter. “His point was that if the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad trade,” the CEO recalled.

I heard a similar sentiment from the Taiwanese-born, 30-something CFO of a U.S. Internet company. A gentle, unpretentious man who went from public school to Harvard, he’s nonetheless not terribly sympathetic to the complaints of the American middle class. “We demand a higher paycheck than the rest of the world,” he told me. “So if you’re going to demand 10 times the paycheck, you need to deliver 10 times the value. It sounds harsh, but maybe people in the middle class need to decide to take a pay cut.”

This is indeed the attitude of the global elite. But it is also, very gay, and very female-oriented. With all that money, chasing ever higher status, status seeking itself finds massive inflation. With elites no longer even caring about their nation, or their fellow nationals (indeed contemptuous dismissal of America is the norm), this attitude percolates downward from the new hyper-global hyper-rich hyper-elites.

America does indeed have an aristocracy. Not one of ancient families seeking ancient, feudal rights, but a recent one, no more in many cases than twenty years old, and international in allegiance. More akin to princes of the Catholic Church than anything else. Seeking not just temporal wealth, but spiritual dominion over the globe. Thus telling everyone how to live, what religion to worship, and what the rites are. The arrogance of a foreigner, a man not really American (foreign born) telling Middle Class Americans to take a pay-cut is astonishing. Yet there it is, and the attitude could certainly be replicated by any of the clients or brokers featured in "Selling New York."

What makes this toxic, is that this attitude is often aped, in the White Female College Educated class. The sorts of folks who read the New York Times, or New Yorker, or even (yes) the Atlantic, along with Vanity Fair, in an attempt to find out what the "important people" are thinking, saying, and doing. If Blue collar and lowbrow women are the targets of US Weekly, People, the National Enquirer, and Star Magazine, then the New York Times and New Yorker are aimed squarely at the White College Educated female reader.

You'll see the same dismissive attitude towards America, Americans, and the middle class in all sorts of entertainment aimed squarely at this upscale female demographic. Don't believe me? Watch any of these NBC shows: Chase, the Event, Law and Order Los Angeles, or Special Victims Unit. Cable shows like Nurse Jackie, Californication, Damages, and Mad Men certainly exhibit this same attitude. As does, of course, Fox's Glee, and almost anything on the CW (teen girl only) network. Movies made by and for this demographic, including Green Zone, Towelhead, American Beauty, Michael Clayton, Up in the Air, and Scott Pilgrim vs the World fall into the same attitudes.

Its not that every TV show or movie needs to be a "salt of the earth" worshipping Grapes of Wrath update. Rather, that the arrogant dismissal of all forms of national sentiment, attachment, or even concern for the American middle class is self-evident over and over again. The White middle class suburb is even depicted as hell on earth (for those tragically hip elites making do on only $20 million a year, it must be).

At least part of the solution must be Nationalism and populism, combined, to smash down this attitude. To intimidate, as much as possible, even the thinking of such sentiments. To suppress their spread from the global elites to those who follow them most closely: White college educated women.

Because make no mistake, the key battle for America will be fought in the minds of college educated female White professionals. They are the key, swing vote for victory or defeat in the alliance of the Democrats and Obama. Possession of nearly all of them gives forces aligned against Obama, Democrats, and the global elites at least the possibility of victory. If even a significant portion of college educated, White professional women hold to the attitudes of the global elites, then the global elites win. Get to hollow out America, in pursuit of greater wealth and more important to them, more status. Posturing as the great philanthropists (and anti-White anti-Racists) by discriminating against the "average White guy" as Ace of Ace of Spades noted, the pursuit of status by the Liberal Aristocracy is characterized by ever greater amounts of money chasing status. Hence the Gates Foundation, explicitly excluding White kids from any aid. While Gates pours money into Africa (to demonstrate his nobility). As Ace notes, a great deal of this pours out of the media, which tends to form the opinions particularly of the White female college educated professional, due to their status anxiety and low position of the PC driven caste system.

The media cannot be changed. They will always be hyper-liberal, because they aspire to please the global elite, their prospective employers, patrons, and backers. The media can be intimidated, however, by populist and nationalist anger. Nationalism has to be part of the equation, as well as populism, and enemies of both need to be made explicit examples of. By being given, of course, the full Wikileaks treatment. There are few media figures, whose personal failings, flaws, and family histories can survive unshaken, the unblinking eye of full disclosure and examination. Destroy a few, say a Katie Couric here, to the point where they are no longer welcome at Davos, and the point is made.

Otherwise it will be a "Selling New York" world. Where everyone is frantically nervous, desperate to appease the new global elites. Who rule with a nasty, celebrity-derived touch.
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A Christmas Commercial

A particular Christmas Commercial caught my eye:



The point about the commercial is how little controversy it creates. It is an article of faith that 85% of all Branded Purchases are made by women. Car companies in particular are targeting women. Certainly this ad does. What is the ad targeting? The Kardashian fantasy.


Keeping Up With the Kardshians is a female-targeted reality show featuring the daughters of the late (O.J. Simpson lawyer) Robert Kardashian, as they navigate various Black Athlete celebrity boyfriends/husbands, paparazzi, fame, fabulous parties, and the like. Another princess fantasy, as Virginia Postrel writes about in the Wall Street Journal. Now the Prince Charming is a Black Athlete. Famous. Rich. Powerful. Privileged. [See Michael Vick. A White Athlete who had done what he'd done, would be out of the NFL forever.] And critically, allowed to be masculine in a way that most (Beta) White guys are not.

Its not just this Christmas Commercial either. This Levi's Commercial spoke to the same desire:



Apparently Walt Whitman was a fervent proponent of Levi's Jeans. Who knew? But the point is obvious. The Black guy is presented as the far more desirable choice than the skinny, "kind of gay" White guys, and the kids doing athletic tricks are all Black.

This is not surprising. Show "Joe Average White guy" as a doofus, or icky Beta guy, and there's no place else to go in ads, for a masculine presence. Other than a Black guy. When the commercial is aimed at White women. As nearly all are.

Whatever the reality or myth of Black comparative sexual/romantic masculine advantage (and ahem, "attributes"), there is no question that culturally, Black guys don't have the diffident, nerdy, deferential manner that most White guys adopt as a matter of workplace survival in most workplaces and certainly in the "White Guy hostile" University environment.

Carlton Banks from the Fresh Prince of Bel Air (who did the "White Guy Dance" to Tom Jones "Its Not Unusual"):



Is funny because it is untrue. He's a fantasy character just like Urkel from "Family Matters". The equivalent to Vanilla Ice or Eminem. Characters adopting the extreme cultural characteristics of another race, that usually has oppositional characteristics. I.E. most Blacks are not nerdy, and disapprove of nerdiness (hence the Will Smith bit at the end of the Carlton Dance bringing an end to the Tom Jones-foolery). Or most Whites don't adopt the mannerisms and behavior of Black rappers like Vanilla Ice or Eminem, and consider both kind of jokes.

Indeed the existence of these four characters, Urkel, Carlton Banks, Eminem, and Vanilla Ice, point like arrows to the characteristics around race, at least the way the mostly White female audience of TV consider the characteristics of race (most TV viewers are and have been for some time, White women). Black guys, excluding the comic exceptions, are not nerdy. And White guys, excluding the few (somewhat comic) exceptions, are not uber-macho rappers. Certainly Vanilla Ice is viewed as a comic character, a suburban guy posing as tough rapper.

Clearly, Advertisers are in point of their own making. They have no way to portray, in ways that move emotionally, the target female audience, in association with a product and desirable, high-status, macho White guy. Absent a few celebrity pitchmen and such. The point of the Levi's Commercial is that "the jeans come with a hot boyfriend." Indeed, it is patriotic, and Walt Whitman approves, of your Black Boyfriend! Because Advertisers (and popular entertainment) have mostly pushed the line that Beta White guys are icky, and nerdy (unsexy), that hot boyfriend must be Black if he's not a White Alpha celebrity (see the ads with Ashton Kutcher, very absent Demi Moore). Same with the car commercial. The Lexus comes with the rich, (likely Athlete) and sophisticated (the house is a modernist dream) husband. Right straight out of the Kardashian's reality show.

Ashton Kutcher only sells Nikon cameras. Advertisers seeking that "hot guy with the product" vibe have to go beyond the limited Alpha A-hole celebs.

This has moved the culture in ways unimaginable, before. You'll note that there are no commercials featuring a White guy and "hot Black girlfriend."



The point of the above ad being that the White guy is so clueless he doesn't get that Beyonce is right there in front of him. This being the second attempt to show a clueless White guy and Beyonce, the (now defunct) Circuit City commercial with the clueless White clerk drooling over Beyonce being the first attempt.

Which is not surprising. The commercials are in all cases, aimed at White women. Who tend to find the commercials, portraying White guys as doofuses, amusing and "accurate." Very likely, the very diffident, mild, and unassuming manner that White guys generally adopt in the multicultural workplace, with its White-guy-hostile attitudes, create a repellent effect on their female peers. It doesn't get them hit with sexual or racial harassment lawsuits, or counseling from HR. But it does not win them respect from their female peers as "real men" either.

Advertising (and popular entertainment) is pushing the idea that (Beta) White guys are doofuses, the only appropriate Prince Charmings being outside that group, are either White Alpha A-holes (paging Ashton Kutcher) or Black guys. Don't underestimate the power of advertising, or reality TV (catering to princess fantasies) to move the culture.



Ashton Kutcher's Nikon commercials all hit the same button. Alpha A-hole doing whatever he wants (crudely, but you get the point). The longing look by the chick with the doofus male companion tells it all. Of course the Lexus commercial is more sophisticated, the fantasy of being basically a "cultured Kardashian."



The above Star Trek scene was considered controversial (the first inter-racial kiss on TV) in the 1960's when it aired. The sad thing is, the same pairing would be considered controversial today, which is why it has not been repeated. The pairing of a White guy kissing a Black woman, is just impossible. Black guys object, just as Black women don't like the Black guy and White woman pairing much either. But that's not the reason you don't see White guys smooching up Beyonce.

It is that White women, who form the target of the commercials and reality shows and most of TV, object. If Black women had cultural power, their objections would have killed the Lexus commercial and the Levi's Commercial. Lexus and Levi's don't care. They're selling to White women, and basically no one else. This is why, more than forty years since Kirk kissed Uhura on TV, it is almost impossible to find a White guy and Black woman pairing. While the other way around sells jeans or luxury cars. It is certainly "funny" to mock clueless White guys ("Hey, Beyonce is right THERE dummy!") in female-oriented commercials.

[Interestingly, there are a few commercials featuring a White guy and Asian wife/girlfriend. Almost none of the other way around, Asian Guy and White Wife/girlfriend. It would appear the losers in the way the sexes are depicted inter-racially are Asian Men, and Black Women, most of all. The SWPL blog entry entitled "Asian Women" generated thousands of vituperative comments from Asian men, complaining about the disparity and how they are viewed in the ruthless sexual marketplace. So diversity tends to produce winners and losers. Asian men find the White guy / Asian woman pairing no less disagreeable than Black women find the Black guy / White woman pairing.]

Is it likely that these commercials will generate a mass wave of inter-racial marriage/kids? Nope. Most people marry and have kids within their own race, and this is unlikely to change, being quite stable over time. While there are solid advantages to mating across races (hybrid vigor, disease resistance among some groups, avoiding genetic bottlenecks among some groups, attraction of the "forbidden" and even racial preferences for not being White), the question of who your in-laws will be remains large. Marriage and family is not merely a question of passion and romance. There is the question of a whole host of people who are now related to you, and to whom you have mutual obligations. Mass immigration also tends to suppress marriage across groups. Hispanics after mass immigration, as well as Asians, tend to inter-marry less where there is a large pool of people of the same race (like Southern California). It makes family life easier, juggling in-laws and grandparents and the like. Only among the military (where the civilian/military divide looms larger than that of race, try being deployed for two years in Iraq) is inter-racial coupling anything other than rare. Jewish enthusiasm for out-marriage is probably the anomaly, and likely explained by a desire to avoid considerable genetic bottlenecks (it is not fun to have a kid with Taysachs disease).

It is entirely possible, however, for the natural disdain that White women have for White guys who adopt the typical Beta male posture (diffident, non-aggressive behavior that "keeps heads down" in the multicultural wars) can be accelerated by this advertising and reality blitz. The beneficiaries won't be rappers, or Black athletes, but rather the few men, mostly White, who can create "soft harems" by appealing to their inner Ashton Kutcher. Acting like a self-centered jerk. Which is the whole point of the Kutcher commercials. "Of course he's a jerk ladies, but you still want him, BECAUSE he's a jerk. And his camera!"

Which is a dagger aimed right at the heart of the West. Most women can't marry Reggie Bush. Or even be his girlfriend/mistress on the side. Even Tiger Woods could carry only a few hundred or so. But the rest can be the shared, part time girlfriends of would-be-Kutchers. Instead of generally happy wives/mothers in a relationship like that of their grandmothers at least. One that produces the next generation of people.

The end result is not widespread inter-racial marriage. But a sterile, San Francisco/Portland/Seattle playpen for adults. No children present, save the one designer eugenic baby by IVF at age 41, by a single mother. Beta White guys are already not very popular. It won't take much to make them even less popular.
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