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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2337 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 11, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Cultural critic Nathan Rabin once had a column at The A.V. Club called "My World of Flops", in which he reviewed films, TV shows, albums etc. which are famous for being huge commercial and/or critical disasters. Since departing The A.V. Club, he's kept the series up under the same name at his personal website.

Today, I came across his MWoF entry for the animated sitcom The Goode Family (which I haven't seen) by Mike Judge, which ran for one season in 2009. As I understand it, The Goode Family is a satirical show which mocks the neuroses and hypocrisies of American progressives, as epitomised by the eponymous family. In analysing why the show was much less successful than Judge's other animated TV shows (King of the Hill, Beavis and Butthead), Rabin suggests that part of the reason might be that the show was satirising a cultural trend which had crested long ago, and hence came off as dated and irrelevant:

Judge generally has a genius for timing. Beavis And Butt-head and Idiocracy indelibly captured the dumbass spirit of the age, but The Goode Family sometimes feels like a period piece from the early days of Bill Clinton’s presidency, when fevered debate over identity politics swept campuses all over the land, white folks’ minds were opened to the reality of racism by a little film called Malcolm X, and the rise of Afrocentric rappers like Brand Nubian and X Clan somehow made white college kids think it was okay to dress up like members of Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

Of course, liberalism hasn’t gone away... but the heyday of what was popularly if irritatingly known as “political correctness” seemed to have come and gone by the time PCU was released in 1994.

So while earnest folks continue to listen to NPR and shop at Whole Foods and do corny things like try to save the environment by reducing their carbon footprints, the show nevertheless often seems to be spoofing a very specific variety of tree-hugging, touchy-feely, oppressively sensitive progressive that doesn’t seem to exist anymore. Indeed, some of the show’s stereotypes feel mothballed and anachronistic, like a snooty art critic who delights in mocking the tastes of the hoi polloi and a quiveringly sensitive aggregation of girly men who gather at a drum circle.

This article, of course, was written in 2013. A year later, the Great Awokening would begin in earnest, and "political correctness" (now rebranded as "wokeness" or "social justice politics") would be back at the forefront of American consciousness with a vengeance. It seems incredible to think that, barely ten years ago, prominent left-leaning cultural critics would be denying the claim that "oppressively sensitive progressives" even existed, never mind their being a worthwhile target of satire or ridicule. This was, of course, years before "trigger warning", "snowflake" and similar terms had entered common parlance.

This leads to an interesting question. If The Goode Family failed because it was satirising or mocking a cultural moment which had long since passed - if that cultural moment subsequently makes a striking resurgence, does that mean The Goode Family was actually ahead of its time?

It was of its time and Judge saw it clearly - hormones watching ABC or wherever probably ‘pffffft’ it away as stale without much thought.

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