Just when you think you’ve reached the heart of darkness of this brave new world—crazed sex and drug addict Hunter Biden may get off scot free, his crooked lying father will remain president, the Department of Justice will continue to be run by the corrupt Merrick Garland who claims objections to Biden’s perfidy are much ado about nothing, and Congress will spend us into bankruptcy gradually and then suddenly—just then comes a sliver of light: the “entertainment” industry is shut down by an actors’ strike. Oh, Nellie, get down on your knees and thank Providence.
Now the children—and, yes, their parents too—will not be able to watch new episodes of . . . well, let us look at a few of the programs.
- Euphoria: According to HBO, the show follows a group of students as they “navigate love and friendships in a world of drugs, sex, trauma, and social media.” Euphoria is the second most-watched show behind Game of Thrones. Is Euphoria family friendly? Depends on whose family . . . the Bidens perhaps, and the closely related Addams family, but probably not yours.
National Review said this about the show: “It plumbs the depths of Zoomer depravity. Euphoria feels more like the work of a slightly desperate middle-aged writer doing his best to cram as many outlandishly lurid events into each episode as he possibly can with an eye toward totally f***ing freaking out parents, who after all are the ones who pay for the HBO subscriptions.”
Another outlet complained about “far too much nudity, sex, and violence in Euphoria season 2.” And not just sex, unrelentingly explicit sex.
Now that season 3 has been delayed, I guess people will have to start reading Dickens.
- The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian show about a society where women are treated as property of the state, and fertile women are turned into sex slaves. Season 4 set a Hulu record—the premiere was the most-watched Hulu original ever. Hillary Clinton thinks America might be turning into The Handmaid’s Tale, and the New Republic says the original novel “lays bare the horrors of collusion with the patriarchy.”
With season 6 delayed, families may be able to find better things to do than wait a little longer for their latest warning about the patriarchy.
- A Knight of The Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight is a new “prequel” to Game of Thrones, a show which achieved fame in part due to its “sexplanations”—sex scenes purely for the purpose of distracting from boring exposition.
- Abbott Elementary is a mockumentary about teachers in a Philadelphia public school. According to National Review, “Abbott Elementary promotes the collapse of American education and, by laughing at the problems, hides the self-serving and recently exposed political interests of teachers’ unions. Abbott Elementary teaches hegemony.”
- The Last of Us is a post-apocalyptic show about a pandemic that causes humans to turn into zombies. Ben Shapiro called the show a “Brokeback Zombie Farm” about “two gay dudes who meet and have a relationship in which one grows strawberries for the other, and then they die by not being killed by zombies.”
Must we feel sorry for the writers and actors of such programs? Why? We don’t feel sorry for pornographers or drug pushers. Why should we feel sorry for writers who create stories about gay dudes or a world of drugs, sex, and trauma?
What would happen if we had no television—no television at all?
Once upon a time—long, long ago, in a land inhabited by a different kind of people—there was no television. Amazingly, people survived, even into old age.
What did people do with all that “free” time? They talked to their neighbors. They practiced playing musical instruments. They wrote letters to far-away loved ones. They read books like Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare’s 38 plays, Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe, Pride and Prejudice and Emma by Jane Austen, The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, David Copperfield and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, Kim by Rudyard Kipling, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, The Waste Land and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture by T.S. Eliot, and almost any book by C. S. Lewis—and dozens and dozens and dozens of other books we used to call “literature.”
For a busy person—a man who has a job supporting his family, a woman who has a household to manage and children to bring up—time, free time, is limited.
But time is always limited—for everyone, in every culture, in every generation. The question is, how do we best fill that limited time? For those with imagination, a strike that cripples television is an opportunity that comes, probably, only once in a lifetime. It is an opportunity not to be missed, an opportunity that can change the way a person sees the world, change the way he thinks, change the way he acts, change the way he prepares for his end. How lucky can we be—we few, we happy few—to live in the time of an actors’ strike!
Strike on, oh Actors Guild, and be damned he who first cries, “Hold, enough!”
Daniel Oliver is Chairman of the Board of the Education and Research Institute and a Director of Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco. In addition to serving as Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Reagan, he was Executive Editor and subsequently Chairman of the Board of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.
Email Daniel Oliver at Daniel.Oliver@TheCandidAmerican.com.