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PaperclipPerfector
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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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Last week, I recommended "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," and JarJarJedi replied "Second this, and despite them addressing a lot of topics that would be classified as "social justice" and "woke", it does not give off the impression of being a woke product. I have very low tolerance for "agenda" productions, and I quite enjoyed it..." What other shows "thread the needle" well?
The legal procedural/political dramedy "The Good Wife" was interesting: It was set in Chicago and the (almost exclusively liberal) characters were always openly cynical about local "Machine Politics," and neither side was portrayed as having the moral high ground. Early episodes included "cross-racial identification" problems by witnesses in a criminal trial, a judge being suspected of racial bias and statistical challenges to the evidence (the big reveal was that it was a "kids for cash" scheme), and multiple instances of lawyers saying they stereotype jurors because it works. Later episodes had the liberal main characters battling progressive ideological excess, like a college that interpreted "diversity of expression" as "privileging expression by 'diverse' students," and the odd principled alliance with a red-tribe cause, like a defense of a Project Veritas stand-in against prior restraint. In examples of the main characters being openly ideological, the show was scrupulous about giving the opposition "their day in court." (Not every episode, but if it was a recurring topic.)
(I've never seen it, but I've read the sequel series does all the wrong things.)
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is just a higher budget/concept Gilmore Girls. Though it has better beats because it doesn't have to pad out entire seasons with silly plots and being something of a more exacting version of what came before it necessarily makes most of it better. Gilmore girls took like a season or more to find itself but the same kind of comedy, cadence of writing, loveably weird characters all exist there and if you're willing to deal with something 50% more plodding and girly, it's definitely worth a watch even if Lorelai is a much harder character to like than Miriam. It even does has the same thing where pretty much every man in the show is nearly perfect (except one or two) save for flaws that are basically trying to be remedied which makes them look even more perfect (like Joel in Maisel). There's also Bunheads which was the interim between Gilmore Girls and Marvelous Mrs Maisel which again is basically the same show with different content again. I do think that Daniel Palladino became more involved in the writing with Maisel than he had been previously, though he still was fairly involved but I think it made Maisel sharper or more cutting rather previous iterations. And the show basically existed mostly pre-woke being standard for TV shows so it's not really threading any needle. In fact many of the storylines which were probably thought of as benign back then wouldn't exist.
The Good Wife was a show I really liked but gave up about four or five seasons in because I could not handle the fact they stopped giving you information about the cases, but just started in the middle of the case and the audience wasn't privy to all the information about so it was hard to form an opinion on.
The Good Fight I watched all of because it was just that insane. It threads no needle and is basically about Trump Derangement Syndrome. And it's very hard to tell if they're being ironic. To some extent I think they are being ironic to have a certain amount of plausible deniability but I think they did lean into it specifically because I think it's literally what it is about. The main character is completely broken by Trump being elected that they try to change their life, they dedicate their life and time into fighting Trump, the world has this weird sheen that's somewhere between The Good Wife and Evil (another King spouses show) where Trump's impact on the world is given this surreal aspect. My brother once asked me if the show was being ironic when seeing an episode out of context and I said it was being post-ironic, which is something I'm not really sure what it means. But I think it absolutely is about people who have TDS are self-aware that they have it and just have to live it while they try to fix the reality warping impact of Trump by doing everything they can to fight his policies. But it's actually something where the people who are advocating for these things are not really trying to do it with misrepresentations, it does elide a lot of arguments that would win but gives the other side a lot more room to speak than most shows about wokeness (in the same vein as the good wife but not having nearly anyone who's a real main character representing the right, so it could come off that only side characters and bad guys represent anything pro trump or anti-woke) and I think part of the weird post-ironic aspect is the dissonance a smart person who understands that Trump is just a man is effected far beyond the capacity that a man should be able to impact so Trump becomes this kind of icon in the show that not only represents everything wrong with the world but a Cthulhu that always swims right and can only be observed with horror. The show starts the main character seeing Trump get elected on the news and dropping their wine glass in horror and ends with trump announcing his next campaign and dancing around as they watch in horror.
This is just a description because it's another spinoff of the Good Wife and not really a recommendation in any way: Elsbeth is another spinoff of the good wife and if you like or hate her character you'll know where you'll stand on that show. It's a Columbo made for children though it started a bit better than that, it's basically devolved into complete nonsense where characters act like they're from a Disney channel sitcom. I wouldn't recommend it unless you find Elsbeth from the Good Wife/Fight delightful and even then only for the first season. But I have a bias against Columbo style mysteries because they show you who did it (and this is even worse because at least Columbo has figure out how, Elsbeth just knows immediately past the pilot episode). It also is getting woker as it goes along but in the benign Disney channel sense where the preaching is not subtle but also seems like it's intended for children and not even in a condescending way.
Evil (sadly not a spinoff of The Good Wife) is another King spouses show that has a lot of modern/woke themes throughout. It basically takes the tone that woke is right by default and it is pervasive in culture but it's not worth getting in to the weeds over. So it will deal with a lot of woke topics but not really address them as you need to be preached about them. Just that woke is right (or mostly right) and lets deal with demon possession or whatever X-files thing they have this episode. It's actually very good at sort of presenting the modern world and not really giving too much of a shit about making it about being moral for a show about good and evil which is interesting. My main problem with the show is that it deliberately does not resolve information. It will show you demons, monsters, evil AI, and sort of just go well that exists (or maybe doesn't) your investigation is over. There is a lot of histrionic parenting and children talking over each other and a lot of people who checked out early cited these as problems but in terms of presenting the culture war aspect of the world and not really becoming a focused diatribe against it, it's better than the good fight and from what I can remember probably as good as the good wife because back then it was less contentious to be differently political/cultural than it was to be when Evil came out. (And I say sadly it's not a spinoff is because the main villain is Michael Emerson who is married to Elsbeth in real life and it would have been great to have their characters interact, he just plays a bogstandard villain Elsbeth when they finally got them together but Emerson's character here is great because he's almost like a cross between a Hannibal Lechter and Wile E. Coyote which the dissonance does kind of ruin the horror aspect of it but it makes his villainy fairly endearing.)
Another recent(?) show that thread the ideological needle is The Resident. It was a medical procedural that redeems what old men bad guys and has a black man and asian man as a villain at one point. It has some preaching about things but it's mostly about stuff like guns are bad and do a lot of damage (the most culture war thing I think I can remember) but wokeness is even less present than something like the Pitt and it feels like they listened to their experts, at least for the first few seasons, and they'd often mention things that feel like actual concerns of doctors. It's a terrestrial tv show and I wouldn't say it's great but it's passible and I remember very little overbearing wokeness that rubbed me the wrong way and I was surprised at how the show seemed to not get drowned out in being about the moral aspect of everything that happens (like the Good Doctor). If you like slightly above average medical shows then I'd recommend it but you gotta want a medical show and the standard familial/friend drama in any show that goes on for 20 episodes a season. Along with The Good Wife (Cary) and Gilmore Girls (Logan), it also stars Matt Czuchry who is pretty easy to look at (though gets a bit too thin in this show).
I wouldn't recommend this show unless you just like watching TV and don't care if it's good or bad but one thing I've pointed out before is Switched at Birth which had a whole arc about campus rape that was misinterpreted by everyone and resulted in a worse situation for all involved because the bureaucracy that had to happen because of the report (of which was done without the knowledge of the person raped) ruined everyone involved and there was no real bad guys except for the people that decided to report drunken sex (where the girl just reported she felt bad about it) as rape for someone else and the school destroying the man afterward because it was just a blanket policy for any situation where this came up. Her reputation is ruined as a liar because she didn't even believe she was raped and he reputation became that of a rapist. A lot of people were really mad that the storyline existed at all because they felt it denigrated women by not showing an actual situation that involved real rape.
Oh, there's also Criminal (UK): It's only a few episodes for each season and it also goes both ways on culture war aspects but it definitely shows the limits of what we should accept as blanket fact just because of the culture is woke. I'm actually shocked that the episode was allowed to come out considering how anti-woke it ends, a certain second season episode. Otherwise it's a pretty good show with a neat idea of being just the interview with the criminal and nothing else and watching them crack the case during the interview (it's not always about getting them to confess). Criminal Germany was probably the best one and Criminal France the weakest. But I really only remember the UK one dealing with the "woke" reality of the world, and maybe it doesn't thread the needle more than just showing results like the above campus rape situation where intentions and belief are not worth more than evidence.
I know he does sort of misrepresent republicans as confused democrats in his shows but Aaron Sorkin almost always has this idea of the world where people from both sides have ideas worth listening to and even moreso once he left the west wing (though I still think he ghostwrote for it occasionally) as people who can also put aside their differences and solve the world's problems. It's a little irritating listening to characters who are so smart they can't be wrong even if you agree with them but it never went out of its way to truly present people on the right as morally bad which I think is basically just the standard worldview of a young leftist person, sadly. Back when Studio 60 came out the show was basically the subtext of Sorkin have a relationship with a Christian woman and being angry and embittered about it because of his own Reddit style atheism but by the end the character that thinks this way is praying to God. Sure, it's a kind of literary reversal that's probably just for drama but I do think it works in a threading the needle kind of way where even if it's just something done with no lasting impact to wring as much out of a situation as possible it's still better than where we were a few years ago with New Amsterdam and All Rise that were basically pure propaganda in one direction.
I have so many shows in my head I can't really remember anything right now but if I remember more I'll post more, but there's still tons that exist before the current year and get to feel as good as the ones that thread the needle without really having any woke content at all. Granted a lot still fought the culture war in their own way, but it was so much better than it is now.
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Arcane is very clearly about class struggle and has a lot of woke casting and other type things, but it is also simply good, and is able to do the class struggle through enough of a historical lens that it doesn't run into modern woke issues.
The Pitt recently finished its first season and is an excellent medical drama. Some of the doctors get mega preachy and at times their is some serious "very special episode" energy but it's overall very good and anyone who has worked in those settings know that's how a lot of people talk.
I'm on the third episode of The Pitt right now and it was pretty jarring whenthe Indian doctor chewed out the aw-shucks white guy for being unsure if the sickle cell patient is drug seeking or not , but I'm willing to give it a pass so far since the Indian doctor got chewed out later in the episode for spending too much time on the sickle cell patient . However, I am pretty sure I see an incel school shooting arc coming from a mile away which promises to be very tedious.
It's also very black pilling about how many scarce ER resources are used up by drug users and the underclass, like the guy who had to be airlifted(!) to the hospital after a copper theft went wrong. I doubt that the showrunners intended this interpretation though.
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The Pitt felt like it had obvious woke energy but it was nearly subsumed by trying to just give glimpses of the doctors' personal lives and focus more on the cases. It basically speedran itself to being like half about the doctors' personal lives by the end where where characters personal relations happen to show up at the hospital for different reasons and it felt really forced. Though you're right the preachiness is very bad and eyerolling, but unlike something like New Amsterdam, it moves on fairly quickly in most regards from being entirely about preaching. I'd recommend it to anyone that can tolerate the idea that it's a good doctor show, probably the best currently airing, but it's also going to woke preaching that often seems nonsensical (admittedly the briefest preaching they make but the most hilarious was saying that being fat doesn't impact someone's health). Though maybe that is reflective of reality at this point, dunno.
It's basically like ER if it was done as a single shift with episodes being in real time, which lends itself very well to the reality of it. I don't know if it's real but the way it presents itself and shows treatment rather than explaining it to the audience feels as real as I'd expect.
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