"Modern" "Family" . . . My gosh, do folks actually watch this thing every week? And now in re-runs too!
Guess so. It's the number-one viewed American "comedy" show and the winnah of the last five Best Comedy Show Emmys. Really? The program -- and never before has that word been more applicable -- is like something created by the Stepford Wives or Donald Sutherland after the ending of Body Snatchers. The lighting and colors are the lighting and colors contained within every suburban shopping mall ever entered. While every possible identity-politics "character" moves through the zone of sterility like the zomboid he/she/it is. And such fresh ideas! The idiot dad. The over-sexed grumpy grandpa. The kids who are always smarter than their parents. The spunky soccer mom. The always-more-sensitive-than-the-straights gay guys. The crazy koochie-koochie-koo woman who gets all her laughs by not being able to pronounce correct English. The "realistic" whining direct into the camera. And no blacks or working-class stiffs to upset the stomach. The series reminds me of those movie shorts produced by Goebbels in the mid-1930s showing happy, beautiful, industrious, healthy Germans. Watching this corporate narcotic, one would never know that the US has been taken over by the military and the police, that it's conducting aggressive war all 'round the world, that everyone is spied upon, that every American-made product is a piece of shit, that corporations have their fists up everybody's bums, that half the country is unemployed or underemployed, and that most every citizen is a meth or a coke addict.
'Course the same hypnosis can be said to be laid on the self-regarding office posers and social parasites who feed off neo-liberal hate-fests such as House of Cards, Game of Thrones, or Seth MacFarlane's latest bowel movement. Ladies and Gentlemen -- your New Golden Age of Television!
