Posts Tagged ‘Ginia Bellafante’

Pam Meister

More on ‘The Goode Family’ – Lighten Up, Libs!

by Pam Meister

After seeing video trailers for Mike Judge’s new show The Goode Family online last week, I was looking forward to seeing the show. Who couldn’t appreciate jabs being taken at a vegan family who wanted to adopt an African baby to show how much they “care” but end up with a white South African baby and name him Ubuntu? (There’s an inside joke in there for computer geeks, which my husband got but I didn’t.) Whose poor dog, Che, also on a vegan diet, is so desperate for meat that he eats all the small animals in the neighborhood he can get his paws on? Who wonder “What would Al Gore do?” when Ubuntu wants his driver’s license even though driving cars and burning fuel is evil? It helped too that I liked Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill.

My interest was piqued even more after reading John Nolte’s post about the New York Times review of the show. Apparently, reviewer Ginia Bellafante had a hard time appreciating the foibles of a family who try so hard to be perfect in how they live and how they relate to their black neighbors that their lives become highly stressful.  To quote The Times: (more…)

John Nolte

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not being cutting-edge is bad enough, but the Times engages the nuclear option by dismissing the new series as passé, outdated, antiquated, behind the times… Pick your poison. (more…)