Yesterday, the creators of the hit show “House” announced that at the end of this, its eighth season, Dr. House and his cast of characters would fade into the distance.

“The decision to end the show now, or ever, is a painful one, as it risks putting asunder hundreds of close friendships that have developed over the last eight years,” said executive producers David Shore, Katie Jacobs and Hugh Laurie, “but also because the show itself has been a source of great pride to everyone involved.

The producers have always imagined House as an enigmatic creature;  he should never be the last one to leave the party.  How much better to disappear before the music stops, while there is still some promise and mystique in the air.”

Now’s as good a time as any for a post-mortem on one of the quirkiest, most interesting character shows of the last decade. “House’s” focus on a thoroughly unlikeable character was risky, and it paid off; the creators’ decision to make him a thoroughgoing atheist constantly at conflict with others subtly made the case for the bankruptcy of his ideology.  Or, at the very least, it offered philosophical contrast.

Most famously, “House” featured a very pro-life episode in 2007, “Fetal Position,” in which an unborn child reached out of the womb and touched House’s hand, mirroring the famous photograph. That was mirrored by a pro-choice episode that same season that made the case for abortion for a religious rape victim. That was House’s style.

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Guys Adams in The Independent:

After two seasons behind one of the nation’s most talked-about programmes and with two Golden Globes, four Emmys, and 10 million viewers under its belt, the musical drama’s creators are aiming their satirical howitzers at the choppy waters of electoral politics.

A third [season], which starts in the US on Tuesday, and in the UK shortly afterwards, will feature the storyline of an attempt by high school PE teacher Sue Sylvester to run for the US Congress. Controversially, given Sylvester’s pantomime villain status, Glee’s influential profile among young viewers and the impending 2012 election, her bid will be built on an exaggeratedly conservative platform, so satirising the Republican right.

Later in the same programme, she suffers an indignity that befell Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich, two Republican presidential hopefuls: a “glitter bomb” attack, in which opponents video themselves throwing glitter at Sylvester, before uploading footage of the incident to YouTube.

So far, so cheeky, you might think. But given the polarised state of US politics, the public airwaves are no place for light-hearted satire. So news of the storylines has enraged right-leaning pundits.

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Just so that I have this right… We have an actual letter from a senior producer at the “Daily Show” who says declaratively, “we never book conservative pundits” and no one cares. Not even the Usual MSM Suspects who howl at the first sign of any kind of discrimination against anyone … who’s not a white, Christian, conservative male. In fact, after all that damning audio released by Ben Shapiro with his “Primtetime Propaganda,” all we got from Patrick Goldstein over at the L.A. Times was his assurance there’s nothing to see here … because he talked to an Emmy winner who assured him there’s no discrimination.

That’s some real Woodward and Bernsteining going on over the Incredible Shrinking L.A. Times, I tell ya.

Well, we do have this and we do have Steven Crowder sounding the alarm for all conservatives who asking from the entertainment industry for nothing more than a level playing field. As Steven told me in his email, “This isn’t about me, it’s about the systemic form of discrimination everyone on the right faces in this business.” And he’s right. This isn’t about him and there’s absolutely no upside for him in going public. In fact, he’s all but lost his manager over this.

As we all know. whistle blowers always pay a price, especially right-of-center whistle blowers who are usually destroyed or ignored by the left-wing media instead of turned into overnight folk-heroes like their left-wing counterparts.

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Crowder issued this challenge on Saturday. Thus far Stewart’s only answered in his usual cowardly way: savaging our side to the delight of the MSM under the guise of a New Murrow Satirist.

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Click here for Part 1 on Ben Shapiro’s Primetime Propaganda, here for Part 2 on Roger L. Simon’s Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine, here for part 3 on David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge, and here for part 4 on Breitbart’s righteous Gen-X indignation.

Generation Y’s great filmmakers have not yet arrived. And don’t expect too many of them.

William Strauss and Neil Howe argue in their fourth book of generational theory, Millennials Rising, that the babies born from 1982 through 2003 are part of a “Civic” generation. This is the same as the GI Generation (the accurately named “Greatest Generation”) born from 1901-1924 who went through World War II as young adults.

The Greatest provided us with many cinematic giants but none made a deeper footprint on the 20^th century than Walt Disney. The Disney Effect came not just in the artistry of his films but his technological innovations and capitalist ventures. He constructed a billion-dollar corporation which has changed our lives. That’s what leaders of Civic generations do: build transformative institutions.

The Millennial Generation has already seen our Walt Disney emerge and release his equivalent of “Steamboat Willie.” It’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Facebook is only the primitive beginning of what he’ll build in the coming decades. Today because of our saturation in cartoons we fail to appreciate how groundbreaking “Steamboat Willie” and “Snow White” were to a world that had never seen such creatures. And so it shall go with Facebook in a few decades’ time.

Narrative films and television programs were America’s unifying, transformative cultural experience of the 20^th century. Computers, the internet, and technology are their equivalent for the 21^st. (more…)

Well done, Mr. Shapiro.

From Variety:

A common refrain used by progressives against conservatives is a deconstructionist war against the concept that there even is such a thing as the Left: “There’s so much diversity and disagreement in ‘the Left’ that you can’t just call it ‘the Left.’”

This is just a defense mechanism the leftist employs to avoid having to actually examine their movement. Cult members need to have criticism of their cult obscured. It’s the equivalent of “The first rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club…”

There’s a grain of truth here, though. All leftists share core ideas – particularly hatred of conservatives and an infinite faith in big government – but there is a range of thought, not unlike denominations within religions. There are variations in doctrine and tactics between Marxists, Alinskyites, Mother Jones populist progressives, Nation socialists, Daily Kos Democrats, Counterpunch communists, and Dissent social democrats. Grouping them all together under the label “the Left” is no more inaccurate than describing Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, and Lutherans as Christian.

Today, thanks to the extraordinary journalism and research of Ben Shapiro for his must-read book Primetime Propaganda, the focus is on one “church” in particular: the Hollywood Left. (more…)

Mike Flynn recently wrote a cri de coeur on Big Government asking why conservatives have failed to move back the needle on government spending despite the profusion of conservative think tanks, foundations, policy shops, grass-roots organizations, and sundry other pointy-headed groups, mostly based in Washington, DC (although every state now has their equivalents, usually in the state capital.)

Why? It’s the culture, smarty-pants.

By “culture,” I don’t mean Washington, DC culture. I mean pop culture.

While the brightest and most talented conservatives pour into DC and pump out one study after another, endlessly debating arcane policy with a handful of other pinheaded intellectuals, the left has been busy consolidating their iron grip on the real reins of power — movies, TV, music, art.

If half the conservatives who pine to work at Heritage or Cato would only turn their ambitions to moviemaking and showrunning, conservatism might have a fighting chance.

As it is, you can move the musical chairs in DC around all you want, but if you don’t recapture the culture — or even a healthy slice of it — you may win a political battle or two now and then, but you’re destined to always play catch-up in the war long-term.

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Ed. Note: Please welcome Ben Howe to Big Hollywood and encourage him to return! — JN

Renewing America is back on FTR Radio after a short lived hiatus filled with vacations and car wrecks. This week I break down the interview of Jon Stewart by Chris Wallace. Since Chris looks up to me in a lot of ways, I felt it my duty to provide some analysis and point out the opportunities he missed (and boy, were there a lot).

Also on the show, I’m joined by Primetime Propaganda author Ben Shapiro. Primetime Propaganda is an excellent history and current analysis of liberal bias in entertainment as revealed by the very people that work to ensure that conservatives stay unemployed in tinseltown. I thought I knew how bad it was. I did not. And neither do you.

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Today in Variety:

You’ve certainly heard of the new film Super 8.  Not the self-serving Anthony Weiner autobiography– the new summer flick about a small town in 1979 invaded by a strange alien creature that was written and directed by J.J. Abrams and produced by Steven Spielberg.  With that pedigree in mind, I took off work early to take the little monsters to see it in the hopes that it would do what the trailers seemed to promise – capture the feeling of those uniquely American summer movies of the 70’s and 80’s like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. and The Goonies that mixed action, laughs, and special effects together in a way we see all too rarely in the Michael Bay world of today.

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Yeah, it kind of did that, I suppose.  Except I was too busy wondering why the central premise somehow had to be that American military personnel are sadistic, bloodthirsty, cold-blooded murderers.  Then I remembered that this is Hollywood.

Now, to talk about Super 8, I will have to reveal what some might call “spoilers.”  Except, they aren’t really “spoilers” because to be that the plot points I reveal would have to be unexpected and surprising.  Sadly, Super 8 adopts the same tiresome clichés that have been wrecking Hollywood films for the last 40 years.  The only surprise was the total lack of any surprise.

What do we have? Crazy, evil military officer as the baddie?  Check!  Kid with daddy issues?  Check!  Climax where the hero rescues the girl from monster’s lair?  Check!  Monster that is the real victim even though he’s freaking killing US military people and eating civilians left and right?  Check?

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Ed. Note: Video below is a must-watch.

THR:

Some members, though, told The Hollywood Reporter, on condition of anonymity, that the claim of being “non-political” is disingenous, considering the Caucus prides itself on evaluating political activities that affect the entertainment industry and it often invites political heavyweights to speak at its gatherings.

They also complain of hypocrisy, given that item five in the Caucus’s “Television Creative Bill of Rights” stipulates “the right of diverse ideas,” which they say seems unlikely if members of the liberal majority are allowed to discriminate against the conservative minority.

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The videos in question are portions of interviews that Ben Shapiro conducted with TV-industry elites for his just-released book, Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV.

THR revealed the first batch of videos a week ago and Shapiro has been slowly rolling out more ever since.

The latest one is from Nicholas Meyer, director of The Day After, one of the most successful TV movies in history.

In the video, Shapiro says to Meyer, “Criticism from the right is usually that right-wingers get discriminated against.” Meyer responds: “Well, I hope so.” …

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This week has been a shocking one for Hollywood. Shortly after releasing my syndicated column last week, I handed The Hollywood Reporter a bevy of tapes showing tremendous liberal bias in the entertainment industry — and a tape of one top Hollywood creator, Vin Di Bona (“America’s Funniest Home Videos” and “MacGyver”), celebrating anti-conservative discrimination in Hollywood. Matt Drudge linked the piece, sending my book, “Primetime Propaganda,” to the top of the Amazon.com best-seller charts.

I began receiving emails from underground conservatives in Hollywood thanking me for revealing what everyone in town knows but few could confirm: that liberal Hollywood kills careers of those with whom it disagrees. I even got a few calls from liberals congratulating me on my attempts to open up the industry to different political viewpoints.

But traditional Hollywood remained silent. They were unruffled by the revelation that many in their industry hire and fire out of ideological bigotry. They didn’t even see it as controversial.

Then Lionel Chetwynd stepped up.

For those who don’t know Lionel, a multiple Emmy-award nominee for his television writing and the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.” Lionel is also a member of an elite honor society called the Caucus for Producers, Writers and Directors. The Caucus was co-created by television icon Norman Lear in 1977 in order to promote “creative freedom” and “quality and diversity of all television.”

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There’s a theory that in order to ensure you never get hassled again, you walk up to the biggest guy in the room and knock him on his butt.  If you win, no one will ever mess with you because you knocked the biggest guy in the room on his butt.  And even if he gets up and pounds you into the ground, people will still avoid messing with you because you were crazy enough to try to knock the biggest guy in the room on his butt.

In the battle for the soul of our country, popular culture is the biggest guy in the room.  And it’s time that conservatives took a swing.  The Powerline Prize contest is a potential haymaker in one of the most important battles of our campaign.

Here’s how it describes itself:

The Power Line Prize of $100,000 will be awarded to whoever can most effectively and creatively dramatize the significance of the federal debt crisis. Prizes will also be awarded to the runner-up and two third-place finishers. Anyone can enter the contest—individuals, companies (e.g., advertising agencies) or any other entity, as long as the contest rules are followed. Any creative product is eligible: videos, songs, paintings, screenplays, Power Point presentations, essays, performance art, or anything else, as long as the product is unique to the contest and has not previously been published or otherwise entered the public domain. Entries may address the federal debt crisis in its entirety, or a specific aspect of the debt crisis, such as: the impact of the debt crisis on the young; the role played by the “stimulus” (Where did the money go? Why didn’t it stimulate?); how entitlements drive the debt crisis; the current federal deficit; how the debt crisis impacts the economy; or any other aspect of the debt crisis. The contest is non-partisan. Its purpose is to inform the public about the federal debt crisis.

Conservatives often dismiss the world of art as a milieu of posing half-wits seeking government subsidies for the unsellable, ridiculous and boring crap they churn out for the benefit of goateed posers and other suckers.  This is because an enormous amount of what is today labeled as “art” is manufactured by   posing half-wits seeking government subsidies for the unsellable, ridiculous and boring crap they churn out for the benefit of goateed posers and other suckers.

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Need a break from all the bad news saturating our airwaves, printed news, and cyberspace about the sad state of affairs we face as a Nation?  Tired of all the political correctness and leftist group-think disguised as “art” being foisted upon us by the left?  Fed up with the elitist Hollywood liberals’ unabashed hatred for all-things-conservative as so brilliantly exposed in Ben Shapiro’s explosive new best-seller “Primetime Propaganda”?

You’re not alone.

With the advent of do-it-yourself internet radio shows and webcasts, the number of grassroots, conservative talk show hosts augmenting the daily news stories covered by conservative kingpins like El Rushbo and The Great One is growing exponentially.  These citizen activists are effectively using new media venues to circumvent the barrage of liberal propaganda spewed by today’s so-called ‘journOlists’ and Hollywood celebs.

What is noticeably missing, however, are radio shows and webcasts that focus primarily on conservative pop culture.   Most, if not all, of the internet shows provide the hosts’ commentary on current news and politics because, like it or not, it’s what’s on most everyone’s minds these days.  But what do we conservatives have right now that is just for entertainment that is NOT laced with the ill-informed, anti-American ideology of the left?  Not much, if anything…

Until now.

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