A percipient commentary by John Oliver regarding Dick Wolf’s Law and Order empire revealed how propagandistic and unrealistic it is. Diane Neal, who played an assistant district attorney on the show, chimed in to concur a few days later.
It’s neither new nor limited to the Big Bad Wolf.
Return with us now to those conformist days of yesteryear. Vigilantism via Zorro or the Lone Ranger was but the start of the lying in a lawless world.
Mayberry NC was fiction, rooted in Mt. Airy, NC, but it was a hotbed of perversion. Airy rhymes with Fairy, remember. Fairy Mountain.
Aunt Bee was either transvestite or transgender; listen to the voice, watch the movements, check the horse face.
Barney Fife puppy-dogged Andy and called him “Ange,” short for Angela. His one pocketed bullet represented a one-shot kinda guy, a guy whose gun wasn’t loaded and prone to premature bangs.
This means Andy was himself either a transvestite or bisexual and had a hidden persona called Angie. He was more into power and control than sex.
Floyd the barber was outrageously twisted and likely a child molester.
Otis the town drunk prowled around peeping and possibly raping, and most likely spying for Andy Taylor, which is why Otis had the run of the jail.
Goober, a word for peanut, was someone’s illicit son and, given his relative brains, probably Andy’s.
Gomer was just a big dump happy inbred lump of duh but his operatic singing voice indicates he was the by-blow of a passing circus performer.
And need we wonder where Opie came from? Helen the school teacher is a beaten-down character who tries to hang around but can’t, in the end.
You have Andy Taylor living with his aunt with a young child whose mother is never mentioned. Gone fishin’ indeed.
May is Spring and berry’s a wee bush fruit. It’s all right there. No wonder Andy’s a whistlin’ fool as he became the Pied Piper for rednecks trying to survive the hippie onslaught. Andy was more than just a face in the crowd.
Don’t get me started on Petticoat Junction, which was about a rural whorehouse run by Aunt Kate, with the three “sisters” each of a different hair and body type, with Uncle Joe the live-in aged-out bouncer. Hanging their petticoats or underwear over the water tower’s edge was advertising. When that happened, the train stopped to take on water so it could build up steam, while the passengers visited the establishment.
By the time we get to Green Acres we find everyone except Mr. Douglas on LSD. Or maybe it’s just him tripping and the whole place is his hallucination.
Things got normal, comparatively, with The Beverly Hillbillies, in which a solid family unit with eccentric Appalachian habits gain wealth and status enough to bend a banker to their will.
The end result of all this would seem to have been The Munsters, a family of monsters who perceive themselves as normal. Welcome to America. They even pity their pretty, conformist niece, Marilyn, for being a grotesque, in their eyes. Not being a monster means you’re an outcast, in Murka.
Yet The Munsters derived from The Addams Family, demonstrating a lineage, and heritage, of monstrousness descending from rich founding families. Once again, America’s ills are traced elegantly by its crap TV shows.
At the other end of the spectrum lay the propaganda shows, such as Dragnet, The FBI, or Law and Order’s many franchises.False safety preached via action, adventures, and chase scenes, with courtroom drama to make Perry Mason blush. In the Wolf shows they even pull a Colombo by going after rich, entitled, arrogant bastards because, as Wolf himself admitted, “That’s the one type you can go after and nobody cares.”
Well, it IS Manhattan. Lisa Douglas would understand completely as she shopped with Holly Golightly, chauffeurs in tow. Can’t gun down impoverished people of color if there aren’t any, and hey, lets keep that squad room a sausage festival, shall we? Women are victims, we all know that, right America?
Add to that skewed view of noble cops fighting the good fight against the rich and powerful bastards the fractured lies about history in the form of Westerns like Gunsmoke or Rawhide or, cartoonishly, Bonanza. More modern propaganda included Combat. Foreign policy got the gloss with Mission: Impossible and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. while the kiddies learned that law enforcement is a farce via Batman.
For a brief excursion into history’s malfeasance, how about The Wild, Wild West? Shaken, not stirred, a bonded pair of men, one toxic, the other sweet as molasses, on a secret train and reporting only to the President. North was apparently West’s kin. Or The Big Valley, where Miss Barbara Stanwyck rode herd on her boys with riding crop and spurs. Ooh-la-la.
Yes, the history of crap TV is inadvertent confession from manipulators, liars, and dupes. Audience stared rapt, absorbing it all without realizing. If it got weird for you, there was Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, or One Step Beyond. Alfred Hitchcock assured us all that you can’t trust anyone ever, while Lucille Ball and Sid Caesar and Jackie Gleason diverted thinking with acid-dipped cynical pratfall and mocking farce.
Decoding what’s offered as “mere entertainment” is important if climbing out of the buried box we’re in matters. If it doesn’t, sit back, relax, and enjoy the show while capitalism kills us all.
Who’s the leader of the club that’s made for you and me?
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NOTE: Draconian copyright and trademark laws forbid offering images for this post. Words, words, words.
