NY Times: Knives Come Out for ‘The Goode Family’
by John Nolte
In the closing sentence of her New York Times review, Ginia Bellafante damns Mike Judge’s new series, “The Goode Family” — which appears to mercilessly mock everything anyone employed at the Times holds dear — with the harshest of criticisms:
Mr. Judge, who remains obsessed with the insanities of political correctness, still has his head very much in the Clinton years, and it is possible to watch “The Goode Family” feeling so thoroughly transported back to another time that you wonder where all the Monica Lewinsky jokes. Sometimes you’ve just got to move on.
Ouch.
In the world of pop culture-dom, to be accused of not being cutting-edge is bad enough, but the Times engages the nuclear option by dismissing the new series as passé, outdated, antiquated, behind the times… Pick your poison.
If the goal here is to strangle this ideological apostate of a cartoon in the crib, withholding outrage, confessing it’s funny and then burying it as dull and out of touch is a pretty genius way to go about it.
Most interesting is the sentence just before the closing haymaker:
But the show feels aggressively off-zeitgeist, as if it had been incubated in the early to mid-’90s when it was still possible to find global-warming skeptics among even the reasonable and informed. But who really thinks of wind power – an allusion to which is a running visual gag in the show – as mindless, left-wing nonsense anymore?
The politics here are obvious, as is the tactic. One of the great leftist propaganda tools is to repeat the lie until it sounds true. But all the better if a matter-of-fact delivery can be added for effect: ”Ho-hum … water’s wet, the sky’s blue, and today the reasonable all believe global-warming is real…”
Now some may want to give the reviewer the benefit of the doubt. After all, she may live in one of those precious New York Times/Manhattan bubbles where such nonsense actually sounds true. Fine. But then you have to ask yourself when the left changed the rules about what is and is not “cutting edge.”
According to Bellafante, leftist environmentalism, which is personified by a belief in global warming, is now no longer a political issue – it’s now a conventional wisdom held by all reasonable Americans.
Well, if that’s the case, doesn’t that mean that what Judge is really doing with “The Goode Family” is mocking the mainstream values of a majority of Americans who share the same beliefs as his cartoon clan?
And if so, when exactly did the left stop defining the mocking of mainstream American values as the very essence of cutting edge?
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6 Comments
[...] ChrisTo says “The Goode Family” is occasionally “hilarious” and “brilliant” in his writeup. The New York Times, meanwhile, makes the curious point that the show seems stuck in the mid-90s — the last time, according to the Times, that people with values like the Goodes’ could be mocked. Now, you see, we all know they’re right about wind power. (Which costs, like, five times as much as coal power. But it’s obviously worth it, right? You don’t mind if you energy bills quintuple, do you?) John Nolte takes down the Times here. [...]
[...] It’s redundant to link to Big Hollywood, but I can’t resist John Nolte putting the screws to the Times and its logic. According to Bellafante, leftist environmentalism, which is personified by a belief in global [...]
[...] “The Goode Family” feeling so thoroughly transported back to another time that you wonder w click for more var gaJsHost = ((”https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : [...]
Is ABC trying to kill this show? They completely pulled it off of Hulu and their website.
[...] film Extract and – assuming it gets revived on a new network – the conservative-friendly series The Goode Family, while Greg Daniels continues to work on the American version of The Office. King never got the [...]
[...] EDITOR-IN-CHIEF John Nolte put it: In the closing sentence of her New York Times review, Ginia Bellafante damns Mike Judge’s new [...]
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