| I'm well aware of the nuance of 'COPS' but those issues don't remotely rise to the need for cancellation. There is quite a lot of 'reality' that comes through even the producers lens, and that's worth something. It's the original 'reality TV'. And as for 30 Rock: they were obviously not doing 'Blackface' - they were using the notion of Blackface as a comedic device. 'Blackface' is a vaudevillian concept of dressing up as Black people in order to mock them. In 30 Rock, the device was used only by idiotic characters doing stupid and embarrassing things. If anything, they were embellishing the obvious social principle that 'Blackface is bad'. That people misconstrue 'doing Blackface' with 'mocking Blackface' is quite literally at the heart of the problem of the 'mob mentality' - and that's not even getting into the more complicated issue of whether 'dressing up as someone of possibly another race' is even wrong or immoral in the first place. And of course, sometimes jokes are a little off - that's comedy and it's ok. In what world do we start banning gags for this reason? Blackface was obviously wrong 10 years ago and nothing has changed. It's still wrong. What has changed is the fascism and power of the Twitter mob's ability to deny any kind of context. Edit: I should add that 'Banning 30 Rock' is not 'catching up with popular interest' - this is misconstruing the opinion of the mob (or your opinion) with the opinion of 'most people'. Nobody cares about 30 Rocks antics but a few people on the fringes with outsized voices. Network and Ad execs are fearful of said voices - and that's mostly it. We all live in 'thought bubbles', it's worth walking down the street and looking around, because it's immediately clear that 'most people' are not 'like us'. If you were to show 100 random episodes of comedy, with a few 30 Rocks sprinkled in, to a 100 Americans, I don't believe a single person would initiate an objection to any of it, let alone 30 Rock. I'll go further: not even those people who even noticed the cheekiness of the comedy thought to themselves that they ought not to publish it. Not even most of the press writing about it - they're just following the themes and narratives of the hour because that's what they do. It's being pulled because some people (a very small group) are looking for reasons to be outraged and in a hyper-sensitive moment, nobody, but nobody wants to 'disagree' with said outraged person. |
This one. To be honest, I'd be real careful right now to pick any hills to die on right now with respect to language, humor, and various other things unless you're really prepared to die on those hills.