George Will invokes “Goode Family”
I should have mentioned earlier that although George Will finds animated TV shows a bit beneath him, he still hopes ABC’s “The Goode Family” will pass along to the little people a sort of Cliff Notes version of his contempt of environmentalists.
In a syndicated column published in various newspapers over the last few days, the bow-tied conservative says:
The incessant hectoring by the media-political complex’s “consciousness-raising” campaign has provoked a comic riposte in the form of “The Goode Family,” an animated ABC entertainment program at 9 p.m. Wednesdays … . Cartoons seem, alas, to be the most effective means of seizing a mass audience’s attention. Still, the program is welcome evidence of the bursting of what has been called “the green bubble.”
Will considers a New Republic article by Terry Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger more in line with his towering intellect. Read more
Earth 2100: Two views of the TV screen
Last night’s ABC News’ documentary/graphic novella on climate change — Earth 2100: Civilization at Crossroads — elicited very different reviews, depending on which side of the TV the critic sat on.
Earth 2100 was hosted by real-world reporter Bob Woodruff. But it starred a fictional anime-style character named Lucy.
Grist.com was ga-ga about the show: “Hurray for the mainstream media exploring the worst-case scenario aka Hell and High Water!”
But the “Boone Pickens Free Market Fellow” at the free-market oriented Business and Media Institute called the show “a two-hour, left-wing, Obama commercial.” Read more
Eco-satire on the ‘The Goode Family’
Are politically correct environmentalists ripe for mocking?
Maybe tonight’s premiere of “The Good Family” will provide an answer. The animated comedy on ABC pokes fun at a lefty, granola-ish clan.
“You look at them and you say, ‘Oh yeah, I know those people,’” creator Mike Judge, of “King of the Hill” and “Beavis and Butthead” fame, says on a promotional video (see below). “They’re hanging out at every Whole Foods, having a hybrid — just kind of feel forever guilty about being a human being on the planet. … It’s something that I think is pretty relate-able and that the time is ripe for.”
I’m not so sure about that. The dialogue in a couple of clips seems dated — more like: You hear that joke and you say, “Oh yeah, I’ve know those punchlines.’”
Maybe, I’m being an overly sensitive treehugger. Or maybe I’m being influenced by a not-so-favorable New York Times review:
[T]he show feels aggressively off-kilter with the current mood, as if it had been incubated in the early to mid-’90s, when it was possible to find global-warming skeptics among even the reasonable and informed. Who really thinks of wind power — an allusion to which is a running visual gag in the show — as mindless, left-wing nonsense anymore?
I’ll reserve judgment until I see the whole thing. It airs at 9 p.m. Eastern time”King of the Hill,” with its stick-figure-ish style and deadpan humor, kind of grew on viewers, and it stuck around for 13 years. Still my sense is that satirizing political correctness is about 20 years past its prime.
