Four high-profile shows have just had their season finales – well, three did while the other (AMC’s “The Walking Dead“) instead invented the concept of a “mid-season finale,” a phenomenon that is even less necessary than the Jon Huntsman campaign. If that’s possible.

The Walking Dead, HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire,” Showtime’s “Homeland” and Fox’s “Terra Nova” could not be more different in concept, tone or execution, but what they have in common illustrates the biggest threat to Hollywood – and the solution to Hollywood’s problems.

The industry faces unprecedented technological challenges and dwindling audiences, but those alone won’t close down the Glitter Factory. Hackneyed plots, unquestioned political premises and disrespect for the audience will.  But great storytelling, fine acting and technical work – those can save it.

This is written as a fan, as someone who wants these shows to succeed, who wants the hundreds of people who are employed by them to keep working. Please note that spoilers will run free and without restraint throughout, flowing unhindered like stupid ideas from Ron Paul’s Fed-hole.

“Boardwalk Empire” is a near-great show, adult fare not only on account of the complex themes of loyalty and greed that it explores but also in the sense that it packs more female nudity per episode than a drunken Disney teen star’s hacked cellphone camera.  (more…)

I suppose that I am somewhat unusual in never having liked the lead characters of the crime drama Law and Order: Criminal Intent, nor thought the performances of lead performers Vincent D’Onofrio and Kathryn Erbe particularly appealing or praiseworthy. D’Onofrio, of course, was known for his excessively exaggerated performing style in his portrayal of the show’s lead character, Detective Bobby Goren, and in my opinion Kathryn Erbe did a good but unimpressive job of depicting an essentially unappealing and uninteresting character in lead detective Alex Eames over the course of the show’s ten seasons.

Both characters annoyed me in essence, I suspect, because they were such perfect specimens of a particularly common and grating type of contemporary American: the Priggish Urban Liberal-Progressive Busybody Knowitall Pseudointellectual Snob. And in doing so, the show conveyed a point of view firmly based on authoritarianism, exemplifying the contemporary worldview that the political writer Jonah Goldberg calls liberal fascism.

I imagine that the unappealing character type at the center of Law and Order: Criminal Intent hardly requires any further description for most readers, as it thoroughly infests current-day TV news and talk shows, newspaper columns, Slate and the Huffington Post and other fashionable politico-cultural websites, contemporary art shows, your neighborhood Starbucks, and other such locales made repellant by their presence.

Sunday night’s episode on the USA Network, the last in the series, had a story line typical of the show’s ten-season run. Several people fighting over profits from a highly popular website are the suspects in the murders of two of the parties in the legal dispute over ownership of the site. Once again, that is, the culprits are big-business bigwigs, which makes for more interesting settings than the usual domestic violence or street crimes that most murders result from, but it is of course ludicrously fanciful for a show that has been fairly realistic in its depiction of police procedures (and which the producers seemed to take a good deal of pride in). In that way Law and Order: Criminal Intent was a thoroughly conventional example of the mystery-crime genre.

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Twelve years ago in his breakout performance as an arrogant young genius in Good Will Hunting, struggling fresh-faced actor Matt Damon sneered at his Boston psychiatrist for “surrounding yourself with all the wrong f__kin’ books. You wanna read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. That book’ll f__kin’ knock you on your ass.”

The political left loves shout-outs, and this was a direct one to Zinn himself, whom Damon actually lived next-door to as a child, and whose book apparently knocked the actor on his own behind. “Ben (co-screenwriter Affleck) and I were laughing our asses off writing that,” he recalls. (What is it with Damon and the word “ass”?) ”We liked it that the smartest guy in Boston was reading Howard Zinn.”

Self-proclaimed radical historian Howard Zinn, 87, is arguably the most popular proponent of the “history from below” school of historiography, which explores past events from the perspective of everyday people as opposed to the so-called “Great Men” theory, which actor Josh Brolin, another Zinn devotee, calls mere “propaganda.” The Boston University professor wasn’t the first academic to pioneer this approach, but he is no doubt the first to dispense with tedious scholarly ballast like footnotes and citations, and to have pop culture powerhouses like Damon, Brolin and Pearl Jam running interference for his openly politicized agenda. His 1980 book A People’s History of the United States, one of the best-selling history books of all time thanks partly to Damon’s shout-out, is a litany of oppression and exploitation on the part of America’s white ruling class, a “raggedly conceived Marxist caricature” of American history, as David Horowitz calls it in Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left. (more…)

The White House Blog on Tuesday, August 4th titles an entry “Facts Are Stubborn Things.” In it is posted a video of Linda Douglass, the Communications Director for the White House’s Health Reform Office, trying to diffuse criticism of the Obama Health Care takeover by showing two clips of President Obama re-stating his oft-heard yet irrelevant contention that the new Health Care “Reform” bill will not take away the health care options of anyone who likes his or her current provider.  Of course, facts are stubborn things, and the facts (read: common sense) stubbornly refuse to support Obama’s talking point.

Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of economics knows that what he is saying is patently false.  The moment the government nationalizes medical insurance, it will undercut all other insurers since the Government doesn’t need to make a profit, whereas insurers do.  Employers, always mindful of their bottom line, will immediately transfer over to the Government plan and all ability of the insured to choose their provider will be lost.  The resultant overload of the government system will force the rationing of health care services.  Soon, the other insurers will be forced out of business and Voilà!, we will have arrived at the goal, previously stated by the President and others like Barney Frank, of a single-payer, Government-run system–just like the failing, overburdened socialized medicine systems of Canada and England. (more…)

It comes as no surprise that the liberal blogosphere did a collective spit-take over the National Review’s recent list of the top 25 conservative films of the past 25 years (full disclosure: the Buckleyites invited me to comment on one selection).

One lefty blogger wrote, “In the end, right-wingers cannot excape [sic] from the fundamental fact that great art challenges assumptions and received wisdom and calls on us to look at the world with new eyes — and therefore is inherently progressive.”

If true, then the left’s claim on the arts is about to weaken. Because the “assumptions” and “received wisdom” of the Establishment these days are predominantly progressive. After all, who is the Establishment now? No matter your ideology, surely you must agree that there’s nothing more tired and cliche than a “rebellious” artist infusing his work with the same old leftist bromides. (more…)