Try being Bob Denver and walking into an audition.

“Hey, Gilligan!” “Where’s Thurston Howell, heh heh.”

Kelsey Grammer may have found the role to make us forget, if for a moment, his superlative work as the stuffy, cerebral Dr. Frasier Crane on both ‘Cheers’ and his eponymous sitcom.

Grammer’s new series ‘Boss,’ debuting at 10 p.m. tonight on Starz, is getting the kind of reviews the actor’s mother might pen. The latest rave comes courtesy of Politico,

Fans of the actor’s work won’t be surprised. He’s proven his range over time – he even donned blue fur to play the hirsute Beast in ‘X-Men: The Last Stand.’ But when you’ve created a character as indelibly etched into pop culture as Frasier, you’re bound to be overlooked in some quarters.

That may not be the case much longer, especially since Starz has picked ‘Boss’ up for a second season before the first episode even aired.

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.

Primetime Propaganda is not a content analysis of the last 60 years of TV. Instead, Shapiro wore his Harvard Law baseball cap and interviewed some of Hollywood’s most influential television creators. Assuming from his alma mater and last name that he was one of them, the Hollywood insiders were too honest for their own good. Time and again Shapiro found them confessing that A) Yes, the Left dominates Hollywood, B) Yes, conservatives are blacklisted, C) Yes, they did try and use television to push their politics, and D) No, they did not see anything wrong with any of this in the slightest.

(For the evidence on tape see Big Hollywood’s thorough archive of the many damning admissions from the creators of history’s most influential TV shows.)

The revelations Shapiro unearths are only the beginning. This is also a masterful history book that will transform readers’ understanding of television. Shapiro leaps back to the 1950s and in the first 220 pages of the book interweaves his blockbuster interviews with the story of how a small clique of executives, producers, and writers created most of the TV shows that have shaped four generations of Americans. The heart of the book is the second and third chapter, focusing on the history of TV comedies and dramas. Shapiro goes down the line from The Honeymooners to All in the Family to Cheers and Friends. He documents the subversion of the cop and legal dramas from the early days of righteous cops and prosecutors to the nihilism of Hill Street Blues and Picket Fences.

The picture that emerges from Shapiro is of Hollywood leftists distinct from Washington, DC Democratic Party leftists, ACORN community organizing leftists, and the academic Ivory Tower leftists. The defining characteristic of the Hollywood leftist is an embarrassing abundance of anti-intellectualism. Most of the producers and writers Shapiro profiles have barely thought through their politics. If that’s the case then what drives Hollywood to embed leftist ideas in their programs and exclude conservatives? Superficial notions about what feels right. The Hollywood Left fantasizes that they are the champions of the “have-nots,” the outsiders, the oppressed.

This anti-intellectualism is why in Hollywood the ABSOLUTE MOST IMPORTANT politics are the social issues. (As evidence that Hollywood leftists care about these subjects above all others, observe how they will tolerate hawkish, fiscally conservative Republicans as long as they’re pro-gay and pro-choice. Shapiro’s example: “Desperate Housewives” creator Marc Cherry.)

Hollywood is not a town of deep thinkers. It’s a bubble filled with deep feelers. Next time a Hollywood leftist is on TV spouting their clichés note how often they “feel” instead of “think.” That’s a Freudian slip confessing a disagreement not with what conservatives think but in how conservatives think. The rejection is not just the Western tradition of individual liberty, but in the Enlightenment process of rational thought.

What are the unique implications for apostates of this church of the Left?

In parts two, three, and four of this series I’ll explore Roger L. Simon’s Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine, David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge, and Andrew Breitbart’s Righteous Indignation. Each author’s book is an important component in the revolt against the Hollywood Left’s mental gulag. They each bring the best of what their generation has to offer in the fight to retake our culture and our country. Read all three along with Shapiro’s book and a comprehensive picture of the Hollywood Left – and the means for defeating it – emerges.

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5.   The Screaming Viking from “Cheers”: 

The Screaming Viking comes from the first episode of Cheers to feature Kirstie Alley in her roll of Rebecca Howe.  Sam (Ted Danson), trying to purge anything that was associated with former flame, Diane (Shelly Long), out of his life, sold the bar, bought a boat, and planned on circumnavigating the globe.  The problem was that Sam was about as good at being a sailor as he was at being a MLB pitcher.  He sank the boat and returned to Cheers, penniless and looking for a job.  New manager, Rebecca Howe, hires him but must make room by either firing longtime Cheers assistant bartender, Woody (Woody Harrelson), or a new, but extremely talented bartender she had hired.  The new guy claimed he knew ever drink known to man, and made a bet that if a customer asked for a drink he was unfamiliar with, he would quit.  After some conspiring between the Cheers regulars, the fictional drink the Screaming Viking was born.  Obviously the new guy didn’t know what this concoction was, and left in disgrace.

After the defeated bartender leaves, everyone who had ordered the Screaming Viking spits it out.  This is probably the appropriate reaction to this drink.  The ingredients are vodka, dry vermouth, celery, lime juice, and a cucumber (bruised). 

This drink doesn’t make the list because it is good, but rather it delivers on its promise to be horrible.  When a bar full of people spit the Screaming Viking out, this is not a tremendous endorsement.  After the first three, you stop noticing the way the celery, alcohol, and cucumber slice seem to be completely at odds with one another.  After five of them, you stop noticing your brain stem (or it stops noticing you, either way it isn’t good).  After seven of these drinks, you can see through time.  When you get up past that you are risking a trip to the emergency room.  Overall this drink was an enjoyable experiment and one of the few times that fun could be had with a bruised cucumber that didn’t involve the 2AM scramble for companionship on bar night.

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4.   Milk and Pepsi from “Laverne and Shirley”:

Pop and milk in the same glass is not a new concept.  My grandmother used to make me a drink called a “Boston Cooler” (this drink is virtually unknown outside the borders of Michigan).  This drink consists of ginger ale and milk.  Being the Sicilian rebel that she was, grandma used a small Detroit brand named “Grillies” instead of Vernors.  Grandma also cured my sore throats by frying salt, putting it in a sweat sock, and wrapping around my neck and believed sugar cookies and cannoli were the answer to just about every problem life could throw at you.  So not every idea she had was a winner (save for the cannoli).  But the pop and milk thing worked when she did it.  Laverne Defazio from the show “Laverne and Shirley” was less successful with her milk and Pepsi concoction.

While the taste of ginger was strong enough to stand up to the milk, the cola taste in Pepsi was overwhelmed.  In a drink that is two parts Pepsi and one part milk, the taste of the cola was almost completely lost and the whole thing wound up tasting like sugar milk that had been sitting around at room temperature a little too long.  While that was the experience when the standard Pepsi product was used in the recipe, it actually tasted better when the “Throwback” Pepsi, the one that uses real sugar instead of corn syrup, was mixed in to the milk.  In order to be fair and balanced when testing this drink, a glass of milk and Coke was also experimented with.  This drink was much better than the milk and Pepsi.  The nutmeg taste in Coke didn’t fight the milk so much and it worked in a rather odd way.  While milk and Coke was surprisingly pleasant, chocolate milk and coke was a gastronomic holocaust. 

Those who want to try this drink need only pour one part milk and two parts Pepsi/Coke/RC/Jolt into a glass and enjoy. 

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3.  Spaghetti Tacos from “iCarly“:

Something seems very wrong about mixing the sort of food they serve at Olive Garden with a Taco Bell offering.  However when a massively successful show like iCarly advocates for Spaghetti Tacos, it is very hard to ignore.  The base recipe for this is exactly what the title implies: Spaghetti , marinara sauce (with meat), and common, corn based, taco shells from any grocery store.  While the base recipe tasted great, but the beauty of this food is in the versatility of it.  Like any proper taco, additional toppings can be added, such as jalapeno peppers (which really popped), Mozzarella cheese, tomato chunks, Pepper Jack Cheese, etc.  In short, if it belongs on a taco or pasta, it will fit in this a spaghetti taco.

The one drawback to the spaghetti taco was the “mess” factor.  Long, stringy, linguini style pasta eaten from a taco shell tends to be untidy.  I tried versions wit mostaccioli and shells.  I found those worked much better than the classic recipe with the long spaghetti.  Not only were they less messy, but the thicker, more concentrated pasta added a texture that was much more enjoyable than the linguini style spaghetti taco.  I am sure that the whole spaghetti taco thing started as a joke, but it turned out to be a great recipe.

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2.  Bacon Burger Dog from “The Cosby Show”:

If more people ate Bacon Burger Dogs, the world would be a less angry and violent place.  Mostly because there would be a lot fewer of us to do the fighting.  Those who survived this meat filled WMD would be way too happy, full, and emotionally content to be angry at anyone.  This recipe is the ultimate comfort food perhaps the Cosby shows greatest contribution to society. 

The success or failure of the Bacon Burger Dog depends heavily on the ingredients.  In short, if your meat plumps when you cook it, you are probably using the wrong hot dogs.  I experimented with this recipe using Kowalski hot dogs, an 80/20 mix of Angus  ground beef, and Dakin Farm Cob-Smoked Bacon.  If you just get some ball park franks, some rancid turkey bacon, and ground meat that may or may not be from an ungulate, well…you deserve what you get.  The Bacon Burger Dog should be served on a quality hoagie roll. 

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1.  The Upside-down Flint Rubble-Bubble Cake from “The Flintstones”:

Considering the fact that this year marks a half century of the Flintstones, we can’t ignore them.  They also came up with perhaps the most interestingly named confection in all of television history.  The Upside-down Flint Rubble-Bubble Cake is a recipe that Wilma and Betty came up with for a televised cooking contest, but due to a number of circumstances, Fred and Barney (in drag) wound up on the show actually making the cake.

The real recipe for is either a closely guarded or died with William Hanna and Joseph Barbera.  Well, if it was a closely guarded secret, it would have found its way to the New York Times front page or Wikileaks (especially if the cake can be damaging to national security and give aid and comfort to our Islamic enemies).  While there is no actual recipe for this, the mere mention of the cake sprinting out to the bakery in order to fill my desire for this item with Hostess products and the occasional cheesecake.  Oddly enough, even after a pastry bender, I feel strangely empty inside. 

This item is the number one television food item based on a really interesting name and its ability to inspire the sort of longing that not even an entire French Silk pie can satisfy.  If anyone has an actual recipe for this, please send it along.

Fraser masterminds Woody’s campaign as a social experiment: He is convinced that anyone, even a bumpkin, can get elected, simply by spouting vague cliches. His advice to Woody? Don’t be specific on the campaign trail – just repeat empty slogans like “change.”

When I saw this, I burst out laughing – perhaps this is where Axelrod & Co. received their inspiration for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign theme, I surmised.

In the show, Fraser’s guess proves accurate. Woody is elected. But in the aftermath of Woody’s victory, Fraser has a terrible foreboding of the future – Woody’s election to city council begins a long climb up the cursus honorum, and he eventually becomes president of the United States. Because Woody is stupid (in Fraser’s mind), this of course leads to a nuclear holocaust.

“Thanks Dr. Crane. I couldn’t have done it without you,” Woody tells Fraser at his victory party. “No one can prove that,” the psychiatrist responds, shaken by his vision.

But of course, avid Cheers viewers know Woody to be far from brainless. For instance, there was the time when owner-bartender Sam (Ted Danson) tried to cheat Woody out of an agreed upon raise – Woody sees through the ruse. Or the time Woody snookered a group of firemen out of their Dalmatian. And on and on.

Sure, Woody was sweet. Kind. Honest. But stupid? No way.

But to Fraser, Indiana-born Woody was clearly an idiot. Fraser, being a Harvard educated, Eastern seaboard-dwelling intellectual, naturally shared the prejudices of his breed; that anyone from fly-over country must be mentally deficient.

For my own part, if we had a Woody Boyd for president, I would sleep soundly. It is men like Fraser Crane, with their smug airs of moral and intellectual superiority, who think they know all and think they especially know what is best for others, who frighten me. It is rulers like that who bring ruin and call it “reform.”

Barack Obama may have campaigned like Woody Boyd. But he governs like a Fraser Crane. God help us.

Hank is the first of two family-oriented comedies ABC is running back-to-back on Wednesday nights beginning at 8 p.m., with each show featuring a big former sitcom star.

Most TV sitcoms, and that goes double for ABC, are largely about what the great filmmaker and satirist Preston Sturges referred to as Topic A. That is because Americans presumably have nothing else on their minds–other than being murdered or having to go to the hospital, the subject matter of most TV dramas.

Hank bucks that restriction, attempting to mine humor from family relationships, romantic love, and social conditions–which used to be the central subjects of Anglo-American comedy before the relaxing and eventual discarding of social and cultural restrictions on discussions of sex freed Hollywood to parade its inner sex maniac with impunity and in fact great financial success.

The concept of Hank is this: newly fired big-business CEO Hank Pryor—played by Kelsey Grammer—moves his family out of their now-unaffordable Manhattan apartment and goes back to his hometown, River City, to start over.

Without money and servants to take care of them, the family members have to live like actual human beings. And without a job at which to hide out, Hank has to deal with his family. Those are reasonable ideas on which to build a comedy. Unfortunately the pilot episode does not try to go for many really amusing jokes, and the second episode is funnier but definitely does not conform to the contemporary trend of trying to mine as many laughs per episode as possible.

If the standard for judging a situation comedy is simply the number of laughs per episode, Hank will not do well. However, that is not necessarily the best way to look at the genre. Older classics such as The Honeymooners, The Andy Griffith Show, and Cheers were actually short dramas with varying amounts of humor deriving organically from the characters and situations, instead of cardboard characters and merely skeletal plots on which to festoon a string of double entendres and outright sexual references intended to be funny by virtue of their exceeding public vulgarity.

One could even argue that Seinfeld, far from being a “show about nothing,” did a fine job of showing the rootlessness of ‘90s America and the dismaying results of the lurch into relativism.

Thus one can surely make a case that the situation comedy can be more than just jokes—and perhaps that it should be. Hank attempts to do just that, affording some insights into the characters and their situation, in particular the title character. For example, Hank’s attempt to connect with his family, as he has never done before, rightly suggests that overcoming one’s selfish impulses is essential if one is to have a truly satisfying life.

A scene in which Hank awkwardly tries to connect with his son in the pilot episode illustrates this theme and is both funny and touching in the odd way the best TV sitcoms often manage such scenes, and it shows the series has the potential to be effective.

In this fish-out-of-water scenario, Grammer’s Hank becomes the type of clueless, would-be Autocrat of the Breakfast Table character made famous by William Powell (Life with Father) and Clifton Webb (Cheaper by the Dozen, etc.) and reiterated by countless sitcom actors since then.

Like those predecessors, Hank also has a wholesomely attractive, smart wife who keeps the household running, and a pair of intelligent, quirky children who continually point out his personal shortcomings.

In addition, Hank’s attempts to get back on his feet and start up another business, suggested in the first two episodes, are both ripe for comedy and, if developed, will be a welcome treatment of an essential and characteristic aspect of American life which is all too seldom given positive attention by Hollywood: entrepreneurship.

Hank ultimately supports bourgeois, middle-American values, which is rather unusual for both ABC and contemporary TV sitcoms. As such is it quite refreshing. Mainstream critics, however, will not like it, for it does nothing to contribute to the devaluation of all values and the effort to transform the United States into an oversexed socialist paradise.

Quite the contrary. Hank doesn’t try to break any new ground, and it doesn’t grasp for too many memorable jokes. However, the characters are largely likable, and with Grammer leading the way, the show might survive if ABC gives it time.

But that’s a big if.