◼ The white-trashing of American television. - John Podhoretz/Weekly Standard
What does a poor or lower-middle-class white person, especially one from the South or Southwest, have to do to get a break from fancy high-end TV producers? It is a remarkable fact about this new Golden Age of television, which began with The Sopranos in 1999, that its primary focus of attention is the population cohort known (with the exquisite cultural sensitivity we have all learned in the era of political correctness) as “white trash.”
...{HBO's True Detective, True Blood, AMC's Breaking Bad, Walking Dead, FX series Sons of Anarchy}
...FX takes a lighter touch with Justified, the highly amusing series about a U.S. marshal forced to return to his white-trash home turf of Harlan County, Kentucky. Harlan was the nation’s paradigmatic coal-mining community and, in its day, the source of a great deal of leftist sentimentality about the plight of the working class.
No longer! We don’t care about the plight of the white trash folk who provide all this glorious local color; instead, these shows positively revel in the shabbiness of their upholstery, the grunginess of their bars, their casual brutality, their offhanded abuse and/or neglect of children. There is precious little sympathy expressed for them. Even Mad Men’s Don Draper, the well-to-do man from Westchester, was damaged forever by being born to a hooker in rural Illinois and raised by a vicious farmer who beat him regularly.
....(with the exception of True Blood), they’re just too good, too interesting, too flavorful. Still, rich Hollywood folk making mincemeat out of poor rural folk is another element of the ongoing American culture war that should not go unremarked.
