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- 14 de Mayo, 2019
I wanted to start a thread, kind of like the vidya thread on tracking woke, on wholesome media. But by that I don't specifically mean "anti-woke" or political or anything like that, I mean in a general sense. Old TV shows are welcome, and most of this list is actually old, but new stuff is especially needed.
I also have shit I have to do IRL, so this is gonna be a half-assed OP, but to start off, I have a couple of suggestions. The video clips aren't meant to be wholesome, they're just funnies.
List:
King of the Hill
My Name is Earl
The Kids Are Alright
The Wonder Years reboot
All in the Family
Sanford and Son
Smiling Friends
The Andy Griffith Show (family show)
The George Lopez Show
Perfect Harmony
Young Sheldon
Leave it to Beaver (family show)
Children's shows:
Spongebob Squarepants (early only)
Avatar: The Last Airbender
KING OF THE HILL
King of the Hill was a very special show and I'm mostly preaching to the choir here. It makes a huge contrast with what I'm going to call MacFarlanism: Family Guy and its million ripoffs that all imitate its style. MacFarlanism is ugly for many reasons, some of which contrast with Smiling Friends too, but the biggest thing is its utterly cynical take on everything and its world where everybody hates everyone and is a scumbag. Characters usually get their moral lesson, but it's always some cheap, insincere thing undercut by its cartoonishness.
King of the Hill was very different. Really, it was like a more restrained Simpsons in its ability to do social satire in a cartoon format, but while Family Guy, South Park and such leaned harder into the cartoony and the subversive/edgy, KotH actually pulled back to be more grounded and mature. You have the life of a regular Texan family, not actual rednecks (despite what Kahn likes to say) but normal blue collar Southern folk (Bill's an army barber, Boomhauer is a Texas Ranger, Dale is an exterminator, Hank sells propane and propane accessories) living in a decent-sized city. I've heard it described as being about a very familiar personality - the conservative, salt-of-the-earth Red State father - coming to terms with modernity. Most of the time, you can tell Hank is right, but apparently a lot of Leftists watch the show and like it, and that makes me secondguess if it wasn't just so nuanced and evenhanded that people see in it what they want. But that's what KOTH was like. It could poke fun at these Texans and not come across as cruel but as sentimental in its fun. It could poke fun at the freaks Hank encounters without demonizing them as people. Above all, in an era that shifted towards the "fat idiot clown" model of sitcom father, Hank was a throwback to the good old days where the father is wise and in charge. You often see that Hank doesn't understand the world around him, but Hank is a good person and with effort usually comes to some middle ground with things. My family ain't some clone of the Hills or anything, but I feel a lot of my father in him.
Also, Bobbeh may not be right, but he is a total Chad. Real refreshing to see a character in one of these that isn't just the writers doing the same "oh I was a bullied nerd faggot thing." Bobby may be weird (kind of girly) and eccentric and fat, but he's a funny guy, charms the girls (at his age), is a good guy.
MY NAME IS EARL
(No, I don't know why the editing is so messed up.)
Unfortunately, this show was so long ago that I don't remember much of it. Unlike KOTH, MNIE (live action sitcom) is about White trash. Their county (whatever it's called) is meant to be a kind of placeless place, and the show creators were actually inspired by New Jersey, but it feels a tad like Florida to me. At any rate, whereas KOTH depicted regular blue collar folks, this one does depict lowlifes, but it still has the same kind of mundanity and sentimentality. The premise is that Earl Hickey is a degenerate and derelict who gets hit by a car one day right after winning the lottery. He has a sort of spiritual awakening - based around cheap faux-New Age karma bullshit - and decides to commit to it, finding his lottery ticket soon after, confirming it to him. Earl then goes on a quest to make right every wrong he's ever done to his fellow man. That's the formula, like Smiling Friends being about them fulfilling their contract to make someone smile, or KOTH usually being about Hank getting flustered over something bizarre.
As I said, I don't remember that much of it, but I do remember that tension: these people are low-lives, but they're also believable low-lives that are trying to do good. And the world could sure use that.
THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT
Alas, this one wasn't on real long. What it was was a period piece sitcom set in the 1970s about a huge family of Catholic Irish-Americans (mostly boys). If you've seen Malcolm in the Middle (which probably belongs on this list), the mother is kind of like Lois in terms of being a little bit of a crazy shrew. It was just old-fashioned wholesome. They killed the show to make "Mixedish" (of fucking course, can't have White people having nice large families).
THE WONDER YEARS REBOOT
This one makes a delightful little contrast to The Kids Are Alright. Now, I don't know how it's been since it moved settings to NYC, but I wanted to plug it here. This and the next two I included for how they deal with race (the great dividing line of our times), so if you're bored of that sort of thing move on. It's just that this one is about a Black kid growing up in the immediate aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham. The thing is, civil rights ain't really a big focus of the show. That's what got my attention. It's a pretty accurate take on how most Black folks that old remember life in the 1960s/1970s South, in that there were some jerks around and some tension, but the kids especially tended to get on fine with each other; integration started happening, where it was natural, pretty quickly. You have to teach kids to hate each other for no reason. If you want a nuanced take on that era and culture, this is good, it's not propagandistic at all.
ALL IN THE FAMILY
I've talked about this one a lot. Archie Bunker is like Hank Hill with a lot more edge, in that the show is all about this ignorant Irish-American (NYC) butting heads with the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Like Uncle Ruckus, he's meant to be a joke character to laugh at in scorn, but he got this huge peripheral demographic of people that thought his old man rants about Polacks and kikes and fags was absolutely based and hilarious. The real lovable thing about this show is that Bunker is an utter fool, but he's a fool who, like Hank, is a good person at heart. This was an era when you could still laugh off how your uncle is casually racist towards the Eye-talians, because it was an era that hadn't gone fucking insane yet and recognized that these things were character flaws but were not character flaws that totally define and override all else that is good in a person. Archie was also balanced by George Jefferson, his prosperous Black neighbor that was Archie in reverse, every bit the same petty bigot (and against not just Whites, they can bond over hating anything), and the show would frequently set up plots that exploited this. Then you've got Meathead, his dumb Polack son-in-law who is the obnoxious college boy that's always spouting off what his Marxist teachers say.
They're all lolcows in a lolcow world.
It kills me that people were making great, thoughtful TV like that in the 1970s, coming right out of one of the worst periods of racial turbulence in this country, and then backslid so shamefully over the last two decades.
SANFORD AND SON
This is All in the Family meets King of the Hill with Black people. Sanford is a wonderful salt-of-the-earth blue collar (he's a ragpicker) old man with a son that's drunk the Black Panther-style Kool Aid. But most episodes, what it comes down to is that the son will get into some stupid fad related to fighting the Man, Sanford just clowns on him, and in the end Sanford is right. Sanford is between Archie and Hank in that he's a bit more of a fool than Hank, but is still a voice of reason compared to Archie. To copy something I said in another thread, and is basically the plot to one episode, a typical Sanford and Son episode would be like this: the son shows up in a dashiki and leopard-print hat like Mobutu Sese Seko. Sanford makes a bunch of jokes about him looking like a spearchucker and the son tells him that his new name is Muhammad Shaka Zulu Ali. It turns out that the son is cruising for Igbo pussy, but when he brings his Igbo girlfriend around (after talking down to his dad about how to not culturally offend her), dad effortlessly charms the girl with his gee-shucks folksy way while the son ends up sinking his dating prospects by showing himself for being disrespectful to his father, which in Igbo culture gets your penis cut off and you eaten.
Wonderful show.
SMILING FRIENDS
I'm getting tired of writing this junk. You all already know this one. What I'll say is that this one (I'm parroting you all) contrasts well with Rick and Morty. Nihilism? Mocked relentlessly. Meanness? We love each other in this workplace. Bad vibes? Outlawed. Smiling Friends is great because it is the same kind of chaotic, edgy world as any other modern cartoon - chaos, killing, sex, all that kind of junk - but it depicts it in a way that somehow transcends it and becomes clean. Your whole premise is that this company exists to make people smile, and that goofy-ass premise bleeds into how the characters interact. These guys LIKE each other. Their boss is a GOOD boss instead of a bad boss. Every story gets its happy ending no matter how deranged stuff happens along the way.
Just be happy!
THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW
This thing is ancient, but I'm going to plug it because I watch it a lot. I started watching it because I was going to visit Andy Griffith's hometown (which was also where the Siamese Twins settled as plantation owners) as a target of opportunity and I got hooked on it. His hometown, by the way, Mt. Airy, North Carolina, really is a real life Mayberry, even compared to other Appalachian towns people there are so abnormally relaxed and friendly that you wonder if they're not a little retarded. Can kind of imagine it as being like the fictional town of Spectre in "Big Fish." Andy Griffith, playing Sheriff Andy Taylor, is the kind of lawman in the kind of town that doesn't carry a gun. He's a widower, but his son's aunt takes care of the boy. Andy is a man of immense integrity and so is Opie. Barney Fife is a lolcow (somebody pointed that out in the Fictional lolcows thread), a rabid chihuahua of a man that yearns to somehow be great and swagger around with his phoney intellect and his police authority, but he's an absolute softie who will choke up with tears at the drop of a hat over anything moving.
Mostly I included it for two reasons. Firstly, it's a great depiction (in its early seasons, this aspect was ruined with seasonal rot) of pre-Civil Rights small town Appalachia. Civil Rights actually doesn't factor; Mayberry is White, although Mt. Airy in real life is actually fairly mixed. But if you want to see that particular regional flavor explored in a way that isn't gimmicky but is just threaded deeply into the setting (accents are, early in the series, perfect, there's lots of allusions to the surrounding countryside of the real-life places that inspired it), you'll get that. Again, a time when people could depict that part of the country without obsessively fixating on certain political elements.
Secondly, it taught me what old TV was all about that made it so good. In modern MacFarlanism, the joke is that the family and friends hate each other. In old time TV, the joke is that the family and friends love each other so much that they will move heaven and earth to avoid hurting each other's feelings or offending another, leading to an absurd tangle of silliness that eventually crashes down on their heads. One memorable episode involved Opie getting a good grade by accident, but Sheriff Taylor buys him a new bicycle before Opie can correct it, and then Opie just kind of struggles with ducking that, because he feels too ashamed to ride it but too embarrassed to admit to his Pa what happened, and of course, he eventually comes around to it. You'd never see that in MacFarlanism.
EDIT: I want to emphasize, you'll be SHOCKED at how SMARTLY WRITTEN this show is. Just because it's old that doesn't mean its cheesy or schlockish or that this is just for vibes, this show is genuinely hilarious.
PERFECT HARMONY
I only saw a little of this, so I can't promise it stayed good. This thing was always dumb, too, and in terms of social issues it had this sort of Modern Family-like whitewashing when it came to stuff like the gays. But this one is set in a small town in Kentucky where a caustic, hardass washed-up music professor wanders into the lives of the good-natured yokels that inhabit the place. Revolves around their church choir. It's like the kind of cheesy bullshit you would have gotten before the Rural Purge.
THE GEORGE LOPEZ SHOW
George Lopez the comedian ultimately turned into a real douche, hardcore anti-Trumper, bitter Latino type. The show was good, though. His abusive mother is less grimdark (like in a lot of hacky cartoons and live actions it would be now) and more goofy and the family isn't really dysfunctional, but they're not sickeningly sweet like the old TV stuff either. It's just measured, realistic TV about a family of Los Angeles Chicanos (Lopez is a factory floor manager type) getting by in life. I want to bang Lopez's wife.
YOUNG SHELDON
Say what you will, but I swear that the early Big Bang Theory was good and it rotted because they started pandering to a larger crowd (meaning less science jokes and more pop culture nonsense, more romance subplots infesting everything) as it hit success. But Young Sheldon went on to be a lot better anyways. Do you like the family setting of King of the Hill? Then you get that, except instead of being a man's war on modernity it's the trials of a family raising a little shitbag savant. Sheldon is far and away the least pleasant element of the show, even though he's necessary to it and honestly really well written (Young Sheldon acts more like a real turbo-autist Nobel winner than Grown Sheldon does... again, The Big Bang Theory got worse and worse over time). The redneck older brother is great. The tomboy sister is great. The dad and the church Bible-thumper mom and the earthy drinks-and-slot-machines grandma are great. Good semi-comedy, semi-drama.
LEAVE IT TO BEAVER
Haven't watched that much of it, but apply what I said about The Andy Griffith Show to a more generic suburbia setting.
FOR THE KIDS:
(EARLY) SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS
Suck my dick, you know it to be true. This doesn't apply for adults, but I will defend to my dying day Spongebob Squarepants. The only reason I think of this is that I had a high school teacher once that was bitching about it - she had a little boy - and I played Devil's Advocate and it actually gave her a better opinion of it. Adults, I remember was a kid, all thought Spongebob was gay (because of his effeminacy and high pitched voice... something they don't apply to Pee Wee Hermann or Mickey Mouse) and obnoxiously retarded. Main reason Spongebob's on here is that he is a beautiful personality. Dude works a shit-tier blue collar literal burger flipper job, but that's his passion and he gives 110% to it. Dude is kind to everyone and enthusiastic about everything. Compare to Gomer Pyle (the friendly idiot), compare to Pee Wee (the man-child), whatever the case, he's just blissing. That's wonderful.
As for the writing, I remember it being quite
Of course the show got fucked up through seasonal rot.
AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER
I'm not going to relitigate this because everyone already knows and agrees.
I MAY ADD LATER:
MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE (for dysfunctional families done tastefully)
AMERICAN DAD (for MacFarlanism done tastefully)
EVERYBODY HATES CHRIS (I don't remember this one that clearly, but I recall it being a quite good take on the urban Northern Black experience from before we all started pretending pre-Obama was some kind of hell world for them, Terry Crews did some great acting in this)
I also have shit I have to do IRL, so this is gonna be a half-assed OP, but to start off, I have a couple of suggestions. The video clips aren't meant to be wholesome, they're just funnies.
List:
King of the Hill
My Name is Earl
The Kids Are Alright
The Wonder Years reboot
All in the Family
Sanford and Son
Smiling Friends
The Andy Griffith Show (family show)
The George Lopez Show
Perfect Harmony
Young Sheldon
Leave it to Beaver (family show)
Children's shows:
Spongebob Squarepants (early only)
Avatar: The Last Airbender
KING OF THE HILL
King of the Hill was very different. Really, it was like a more restrained Simpsons in its ability to do social satire in a cartoon format, but while Family Guy, South Park and such leaned harder into the cartoony and the subversive/edgy, KotH actually pulled back to be more grounded and mature. You have the life of a regular Texan family, not actual rednecks (despite what Kahn likes to say) but normal blue collar Southern folk (Bill's an army barber, Boomhauer is a Texas Ranger, Dale is an exterminator, Hank sells propane and propane accessories) living in a decent-sized city. I've heard it described as being about a very familiar personality - the conservative, salt-of-the-earth Red State father - coming to terms with modernity. Most of the time, you can tell Hank is right, but apparently a lot of Leftists watch the show and like it, and that makes me secondguess if it wasn't just so nuanced and evenhanded that people see in it what they want. But that's what KOTH was like. It could poke fun at these Texans and not come across as cruel but as sentimental in its fun. It could poke fun at the freaks Hank encounters without demonizing them as people. Above all, in an era that shifted towards the "fat idiot clown" model of sitcom father, Hank was a throwback to the good old days where the father is wise and in charge. You often see that Hank doesn't understand the world around him, but Hank is a good person and with effort usually comes to some middle ground with things. My family ain't some clone of the Hills or anything, but I feel a lot of my father in him.
Also, Bobbeh may not be right, but he is a total Chad. Real refreshing to see a character in one of these that isn't just the writers doing the same "oh I was a bullied nerd faggot thing." Bobby may be weird (kind of girly) and eccentric and fat, but he's a funny guy, charms the girls (at his age), is a good guy.
MY NAME IS EARL
Unfortunately, this show was so long ago that I don't remember much of it. Unlike KOTH, MNIE (live action sitcom) is about White trash. Their county (whatever it's called) is meant to be a kind of placeless place, and the show creators were actually inspired by New Jersey, but it feels a tad like Florida to me. At any rate, whereas KOTH depicted regular blue collar folks, this one does depict lowlifes, but it still has the same kind of mundanity and sentimentality. The premise is that Earl Hickey is a degenerate and derelict who gets hit by a car one day right after winning the lottery. He has a sort of spiritual awakening - based around cheap faux-New Age karma bullshit - and decides to commit to it, finding his lottery ticket soon after, confirming it to him. Earl then goes on a quest to make right every wrong he's ever done to his fellow man. That's the formula, like Smiling Friends being about them fulfilling their contract to make someone smile, or KOTH usually being about Hank getting flustered over something bizarre.
As I said, I don't remember that much of it, but I do remember that tension: these people are low-lives, but they're also believable low-lives that are trying to do good. And the world could sure use that.
THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT
Alas, this one wasn't on real long. What it was was a period piece sitcom set in the 1970s about a huge family of Catholic Irish-Americans (mostly boys). If you've seen Malcolm in the Middle (which probably belongs on this list), the mother is kind of like Lois in terms of being a little bit of a crazy shrew. It was just old-fashioned wholesome. They killed the show to make "Mixedish" (of fucking course, can't have White people having nice large families).
THE WONDER YEARS REBOOT
This one makes a delightful little contrast to The Kids Are Alright. Now, I don't know how it's been since it moved settings to NYC, but I wanted to plug it here. This and the next two I included for how they deal with race (the great dividing line of our times), so if you're bored of that sort of thing move on. It's just that this one is about a Black kid growing up in the immediate aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham. The thing is, civil rights ain't really a big focus of the show. That's what got my attention. It's a pretty accurate take on how most Black folks that old remember life in the 1960s/1970s South, in that there were some jerks around and some tension, but the kids especially tended to get on fine with each other; integration started happening, where it was natural, pretty quickly. You have to teach kids to hate each other for no reason. If you want a nuanced take on that era and culture, this is good, it's not propagandistic at all.
ALL IN THE FAMILY
They're all lolcows in a lolcow world.
It kills me that people were making great, thoughtful TV like that in the 1970s, coming right out of one of the worst periods of racial turbulence in this country, and then backslid so shamefully over the last two decades.
SANFORD AND SON
Wonderful show.
SMILING FRIENDS
Just be happy!
THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW
This thing is ancient, but I'm going to plug it because I watch it a lot. I started watching it because I was going to visit Andy Griffith's hometown (which was also where the Siamese Twins settled as plantation owners) as a target of opportunity and I got hooked on it. His hometown, by the way, Mt. Airy, North Carolina, really is a real life Mayberry, even compared to other Appalachian towns people there are so abnormally relaxed and friendly that you wonder if they're not a little retarded. Can kind of imagine it as being like the fictional town of Spectre in "Big Fish." Andy Griffith, playing Sheriff Andy Taylor, is the kind of lawman in the kind of town that doesn't carry a gun. He's a widower, but his son's aunt takes care of the boy. Andy is a man of immense integrity and so is Opie. Barney Fife is a lolcow (somebody pointed that out in the Fictional lolcows thread), a rabid chihuahua of a man that yearns to somehow be great and swagger around with his phoney intellect and his police authority, but he's an absolute softie who will choke up with tears at the drop of a hat over anything moving.
Mostly I included it for two reasons. Firstly, it's a great depiction (in its early seasons, this aspect was ruined with seasonal rot) of pre-Civil Rights small town Appalachia. Civil Rights actually doesn't factor; Mayberry is White, although Mt. Airy in real life is actually fairly mixed. But if you want to see that particular regional flavor explored in a way that isn't gimmicky but is just threaded deeply into the setting (accents are, early in the series, perfect, there's lots of allusions to the surrounding countryside of the real-life places that inspired it), you'll get that. Again, a time when people could depict that part of the country without obsessively fixating on certain political elements.
Secondly, it taught me what old TV was all about that made it so good. In modern MacFarlanism, the joke is that the family and friends hate each other. In old time TV, the joke is that the family and friends love each other so much that they will move heaven and earth to avoid hurting each other's feelings or offending another, leading to an absurd tangle of silliness that eventually crashes down on their heads. One memorable episode involved Opie getting a good grade by accident, but Sheriff Taylor buys him a new bicycle before Opie can correct it, and then Opie just kind of struggles with ducking that, because he feels too ashamed to ride it but too embarrassed to admit to his Pa what happened, and of course, he eventually comes around to it. You'd never see that in MacFarlanism.
EDIT: I want to emphasize, you'll be SHOCKED at how SMARTLY WRITTEN this show is. Just because it's old that doesn't mean its cheesy or schlockish or that this is just for vibes, this show is genuinely hilarious.
PERFECT HARMONY
I only saw a little of this, so I can't promise it stayed good. This thing was always dumb, too, and in terms of social issues it had this sort of Modern Family-like whitewashing when it came to stuff like the gays. But this one is set in a small town in Kentucky where a caustic, hardass washed-up music professor wanders into the lives of the good-natured yokels that inhabit the place. Revolves around their church choir. It's like the kind of cheesy bullshit you would have gotten before the Rural Purge.
THE GEORGE LOPEZ SHOW
George Lopez the comedian ultimately turned into a real douche, hardcore anti-Trumper, bitter Latino type. The show was good, though. His abusive mother is less grimdark (like in a lot of hacky cartoons and live actions it would be now) and more goofy and the family isn't really dysfunctional, but they're not sickeningly sweet like the old TV stuff either. It's just measured, realistic TV about a family of Los Angeles Chicanos (Lopez is a factory floor manager type) getting by in life. I want to bang Lopez's wife.
YOUNG SHELDON
Say what you will, but I swear that the early Big Bang Theory was good and it rotted because they started pandering to a larger crowd (meaning less science jokes and more pop culture nonsense, more romance subplots infesting everything) as it hit success. But Young Sheldon went on to be a lot better anyways. Do you like the family setting of King of the Hill? Then you get that, except instead of being a man's war on modernity it's the trials of a family raising a little shitbag savant. Sheldon is far and away the least pleasant element of the show, even though he's necessary to it and honestly really well written (Young Sheldon acts more like a real turbo-autist Nobel winner than Grown Sheldon does... again, The Big Bang Theory got worse and worse over time). The redneck older brother is great. The tomboy sister is great. The dad and the church Bible-thumper mom and the earthy drinks-and-slot-machines grandma are great. Good semi-comedy, semi-drama.
LEAVE IT TO BEAVER
Haven't watched that much of it, but apply what I said about The Andy Griffith Show to a more generic suburbia setting.
FOR THE KIDS:
(EARLY) SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS
Suck my dick, you know it to be true. This doesn't apply for adults, but I will defend to my dying day Spongebob Squarepants. The only reason I think of this is that I had a high school teacher once that was bitching about it - she had a little boy - and I played Devil's Advocate and it actually gave her a better opinion of it. Adults, I remember was a kid, all thought Spongebob was gay (because of his effeminacy and high pitched voice... something they don't apply to Pee Wee Hermann or Mickey Mouse) and obnoxiously retarded. Main reason Spongebob's on here is that he is a beautiful personality. Dude works a shit-tier blue collar literal burger flipper job, but that's his passion and he gives 110% to it. Dude is kind to everyone and enthusiastic about everything. Compare to Gomer Pyle (the friendly idiot), compare to Pee Wee (the man-child), whatever the case, he's just blissing. That's wonderful.
As for the writing, I remember it being quite
Of course the show got fucked up through seasonal rot.
AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER
I'm not going to relitigate this because everyone already knows and agrees.
I MAY ADD LATER:
MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE (for dysfunctional families done tastefully)
AMERICAN DAD (for MacFarlanism done tastefully)
EVERYBODY HATES CHRIS (I don't remember this one that clearly, but I recall it being a quite good take on the urban Northern Black experience from before we all started pretending pre-Obama was some kind of hell world for them, Terry Crews did some great acting in this)
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