Favorite Right-Wing TV Shows

-- tremendoid (kemeti...), December 31st, 2005.

who knew?

LOL, Will Geer was a blacklisted commie!

I get seriously weirded out by Family Affair, was this show supposed to be “feel good”? Every episode seems super sad. The kids seem perpetually traumatized. Brian Keith is so cold and slightly pissed most of the time, he acts like he’s being directed by Michael Mann or something. Feels like the show was a reaction to the counterculture, a shot fired by the “silent majority” or w/e but it started in 1966. It just seems 10 years older than it is.

Haven’t watched it in a while but it does seem to have a wealth aspiration vibe while at the same time feeling unusually somber. It debuted at the same time as That Girl, which is also arguably a more conservative show than it might seem, at least in the early seasons.

WALLY GEORGE

Omg, Hot Seat!. Best reason to watch OC public access tv in the 80s.

i admit that i got a soft spot for certain copaganda shows. i don't mean, like... like "nypd blue" is copaganda but i wouldn't call it "right-wing". i wouldn't watch a show with cops as the heroes today but back in the '90s, you know, i was more ignorant.

i tell you what i love the hell out of though is "dragnet". not that '60s dragnet shit that's just jack webb ranting about hippies. nah the '50s stuff, radio and tv. i just find it _really_ narratively satisfying. the people friday and his partner, ben romero or frank smith or whoever, interview, most of them are kind of stupid, i like that. a lot of the times you have these detective shows and everybody is extremely clever. same way... friday isn't some deductive genius like lt. columbo (i fuckin' love columbo, too, but again i wouldn't call that "right-wing"). he just keeps working the case until it gets solved, which it always does because it's right-wing copaganda and not real life.

If the X-Files came out today it would be regarded as right wing.

Chris Carter rather awkwardly acknowledged in the revival the extent to which theorizing about conspiracies has shifted markedly rightward.

xposts I've been vibing hard with Miami Vice on my first-ever watchthrough but, like...it gets to a point where I don't know if they even carry handcuffs anymore. By halfway through season two, they just wantonly murder pretty much every perp they encounter. There was that one episode where Gina got kinda half-assedly called to the carpet for shooting someone down but it seems to be otherwise accepted as an unambiguously heroic act.

I dunno, in terms of my own consumption, I view decent cop shows basically the same way I do horror movies. I'm pretty opposed to IRL people being killed with finger-knives, as well.

By halfway through season two, they just wantonly murder pretty much every perp they encounter.

The remake of Hawaii Five-O was insane in this regard. Every episode, they'd kill not just the primary villain, but five or six people, it seemed. There were multiple episodes where the cops were shooting at moving vehicles in traffic.

re: X-Files right-wing drift, Law & Order is just bizarre in retrospect. I remember catching episodes where the Meloni character rails against anti-vaxxers and puts himself in solitary confinement as some weird personal investigative journalism project and the experience convinces him to become a prison abolitionist. Oh, yeah, Ice-T and Richard Belzer are cops, and they're partners?! What leftist freak fantasy is this?

Oh and Munch appearing both mean X-Files and Law & Order (and the Wire) are in the same universe?

re: the OC, it's weird (and somewhat satisfying) that Gilmore Girls is now considered the more problematic of the two, and the main OC actor turned into an anti-crypto activist.

When I rewatched the X-Files last time there were more moments of "oh yeah Mulder is definitely 100% cop" than I remembered. He believes the government has been infiltrated by alien collaborators but he would also be on board with locking up protesters who damage property.