Make TV Great Again
To Bring About A Second Golden Age of Television, We Need To Make Scripted TV Stupid Again
Dear Audience: While this piece begins with an anecdote about movies, it is verymuch about TV. Please bear with me.
I think the modern era of film and television really crystalized for me in the Summer of 2022 when Billy Eichner and Judd Apatow were marketing their new gay rom-com “Bros”. Every media hit and online conversation I saw about the movie in the runup to its release went something like this: “this is the first gay romcom in history, and is therefore an important film”. Nevermind that this wasn’t even true (the excellent “Fire Island” came out first) - I don’t think I ever once saw a single clip from Bros itself as part of the campaign. Just endless clips of Judd or Billy sitting in a directors chair somewhere, nodding furtively and assuring us that this was an important film, and we - the moviegoing public - should see it for this reason alone. The movie was a box office flop - earning only 14 million against it’s 22 million dollar production budget. I’m sure it was pretty funny! But I never saw it. Bros was released at the same time as Top Gun 2, which was a box office smash and marketed itself with nothing more than general “fuck yeah awesome shit incoming baby!!!!” messaging. This isn’t to say that Top Gun 2 wasn’t full of military industrial complex stuff fully designed to convince 18 year olds that their future is worth a downpayment on a Hellcat and getting divorced at 21, but I’m just talking about how the movie positioned itself - and that was a pure, uncut “this shit kicks ass” approach. There was a lot to be learned in this moment, I think.
Liberals and progressives aren’t the only ones who are guilty of the kind of overt-value-signaling sort of marketing we saw with Bros - conservative entertainment employs it just as much, if not more so. Conservative comedy specials make sure you know from the key art that this standup comedian (who’s heyday was always the 90’s) is mad as hell about cancel culture. The slate of incredibly boring and self-satisfied films from Matt Walsh and the Daily Wire like “What is a Woman?” make no mystery of what audience they are targeting. The first “original sitcom on X”, The New Norm, is so mono-maniacally dedicated to touching on every single popular online conservative grievance that it seemingly forgets to make any jokes at all. All of this is a long way of saying that our media, all of it, is getting more and more self-segregating along political lines, and that has bled into every level of how they market themselves. I, a generally pinko lefty type, obviously like when my movies have a message that I can support - but it has never been a requirement. Not to mention that it’s hard to use film and television to influence people politically when you market your work with a big flashing neon sign that says “WE ARE TRYING TO CHANGE YOUR POLITICS!” You have to be more subtle. You have to have a Top Gun 2 approach.