You can't watch regular episodic TV anymore. I turn on Hawaii Five O to watch scenes of the scenery and the many hotels that I have stayed at on my visits to that paradise. Hoping to see a little good natured crime stories when the villains get caught at the end of the hour. I know the villains will always be old white guys but that is just a Hollywood convention like the girl who only has to take off her glasses to find out she is beautiful.
The episode started off in a very friendly manner with the marriage ceremony of one of the main characters. Kono gets married to her long time love interest who is a scion of the Japanese crime syndicate the Yakuza who is going straight so he can marry a cop. So far so good right? Ten minutes later she is tied to a chair and being tortured. Some dude is ripping her teeth out with a pair of pliers and throwing the bloody tooth on the floor. Casual brutality. In a subplot. Among shootouts and various mayhem. She frees herself by grabbing a scalpel and gutting her torturer. Then runs off and gets her finance gut shot. All in a couple of minutes.
Things have just become worse and worse. When you watch old school dramas you realize how talented those people were. Just because you can show it doesn't mean you have to show it. Leave a little to the imagination. Leave the gratuitous gore to HBO and Showtime. Deviancy and filth are the go to level of entertainment nowadays. It is just ridiculous. I have to put this show on the list with Blue Bloods and Chicago PD and all the Law and Orders that I have not watched in years.
Luckily I DVRed a bunch of Hallmark Movies to watch.
I won't be going back to Hawaii any time soon.
37 comments:
I know the villains will always be old white guys but that is just a Hollywood convention like the girl who only has to take off her glasses to find out she is beautiful.
Capturing the old white guy villian is as old as modern story telling itself. If it isn't in mystery novel, it's in cartoons like Scooby Do. So there ya go.
Some dude is ripping her teeth out with a pair of pliers and throwing the bloody tooth on the floor. Casual brutality. In a subplot. Among shootouts and various mayhem. She frees herself by grabbing a scalpel and gutting her torturer. Then runs off and gets her finance gut shot.
Good story telling has been replaced by a horror flick.
Perfect entertainment for dehumanizing and desensitizing our kids to obscene violence.
This is why it's all crap. This is why dems have no moral objection to dismembering and selling mini-baby parts for profit. eh - hollywood hypocrites support what political party? It's all the same garbage.
Political correctness is taking all the fun out of watching TV.
For example on "Once Upon a Time" they have a new plot with King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. In it both Sir Lancelot and Merlin are black dudes. Very believable.
I think the problem the suits at the old line TV networks are up against is that a low key show can't catch on with a slowly growing audience, as quite a few did in the past. Or at least the suits don't believe that can happen anymore. Obviously the number of choices available to a potential audience is through the roof compared to the not so distant past. And with such a splintered audience how would word of mouth work today? Which leads to the suits' decision to smack you upside the haid with a two by four, i.e. gross violence, in order to "grab" you quick. Anyhoo, I'm sure there are many other factors but that's all I got now. :^O
I've only watched a few episodes. The "kono" storyline is always absurdly over the top and there's always some stupid drama where she's not doing her job. Makes me nuts. Most of the time I find the show entertaining.
I'm too politically sensitive to watch any of it and be entertained. I've never had the stomach for violence. I'm still wrecked over watching The Shining at age 9, or whatever it was...
I really watch it because of my nostalgia for the old show and the Hawaii scenery. Kono was a big fat guy in the original series. But to be politically correct they made the character a 90pound girl who routinely kicks the shit out of 250pound guys. Plus she is a crack shot.
I am removing it from my DVR and will get my Hawaii fix by watching the Real Estate show "Hawaii Life" which is a commercial but shows the islands the way I remember them.
Chickie is lucky that he lives so close that he can go there on vacation. For me it is an ordeal. I can't fly that long anymore.
That is how the left would like to deal with conservatives.
Give them time boys, give them time.
Just toss in a DVD of the REAL Hawaii Five-O. Book'em Dano.
I got a few ex-Hawaiian's working in my office. Evidently, its less than a Paradise when you have to live there day after day.
But the same is true of Brooklyn, no doubt.
I don't mind sex and violence. I mind the sameness of it all. It's the SOS stories and characters over and over again set in different contexts. It's boring. Read a book. There's still some variety of story and diversity of perspective in books, at least for the time being.
I do like Blue Bloods because there are conservative themes and push back against PC boolsheet that one typically doesn't see on broadcast TV anymore. For example, was watching a rerun last night and Frank actually went to a priest for advice on how to deal with an Al Sharpton wannabe that was making his life miserable. And you gotta love the Donnie Wahlberg character, anti-PC as heck.
Speaking of gratuitous, how about Matt Dillon and Kitty? Yowza.
Exactly.
I tell my wife if we move to Hawaii we will not be living in the oceanfront mansion that Steve McGarret owns.
You know when they have a chase and they jump over fences and they run through a yard knocking clothes off the line while two old people are sitting in lawn chairs?
That is where we will be living.
But it beats living in Brooklyn with the hipsters.
This is why I stick to the Westerns channel.
Trooper York said...
I tell my wife if we move to Hawaii we will not be living in the oceanfront mansion that Steve McGarret owns
No, McGarrett lives in a high rise. I remember that zoom in shot of The Lord every week.
The new Hawaii Five O Ed.
The new Steve McGarrett lives in an oceanfront house that his dad owned.
It's a self-perpetuating problem. Puritanism makes Americans too immature to discuss sex matters openly and honestly, so they go there with a need to "push the envelope" via the most revoltingly immature innuendo and barely muted excess they can devise. Everything's inappropriate in America because the "safe space" for just having a mature discussion or an aesthetically justifiable display or just some simple jollies simply doesn't exist.
Once the repression is gone the cheapness of the illicit thrill will go also. Think of Colorado and weed.
As for the obsession with violence the solutions aren't as simple.
Trooper York said...
The new Hawaii Five O Ed.
The new Steve McGarrett lives in an oceanfront house that his dad owned.
No, I knew Steve McGarrett. Steve McGarrett was a friend of mine.
That guy's not Steve McGarrett.
And when did Kono get a sex change? The Kono I knew was 300 pounds of linebacker. Nobody was going to pull his teeth.
Rhythm and Balls said...
It's a self-perpetuating problem. Puritanism makes Americans too immature to discuss sex matters openly and honestly
No, Puritanism made Americans understand sex was a private matter. Not something you told every Tom, Dick, and Ritmo.
Once the repression is gone the cheapness of the illicit thrill will go also. Think of Colorado and weed.
Yeah, that's going swell, too, I hear.
And the repression went away 50 years ago.
Too bad Ritmo's been wanking off and missed it.
You can live with the sex. Even though the idea of a monogamous loving couple like most of the couples I associate with is a joke on episodic TV.
It is the epic violence that is so distasteful. Every stupid show has corpses and serial killers and main characters being sliced into salami. It is just not worth it.
I am verging of giving up regular TV altogether.
I can get all favorite sixties sitcoms on Amazon.
Oh bull, balls. It's not puritanism to want to avoid filling your head or your kid's heads with mindless pointless violence porn.
The politically correct are the new Puritans. Most of us just don't want to be assaulted in the privacy of our own homes by deviancy.
That is why we live in gated communities after all.
We oughta chip in and send Schmendrick to live in Europe as punishment for his knee-jerk lefty America baiting.
The violence is a problem. Especially the way you describe it (which I've noticed for a while). As Nicholson(?) is said to have said, "in America, if you kiss a breast, the film is rated R; if you lop it off, the film is rated PG-13'."
So Scalia - (perhaps someone else ricpic [not sure what he needs to be called in place of "Schmendrick", whatever that means] would "send to live in Europe as punishment for his knee-jerk lefty America baiting) - once said that we had a tradition (that he thinks we should respect) of banning depictions of sex, but not of violence. He talked about how violent he thinks we've been as a country, and used that as a cultural justification for worshipping it in as many ridiculous depictions as possible.
"Puritanism makes Americans too immature to discuss sex matters openly" blah blah."
BOOOOORING. Same old tired Americans are too this/that/whatever bullshit. Utter crap, completely false, simply not true. A notion so saggy and wrinkled and worn out that it should be given tenure. Then shot. You have been hoodwinked and bumbled into thinking that having entertainment standards that are inconsistent with the dull ruling industry standards is somehow "prude."
European TV is the absolute worst.
Trooper York said...
It is the epic violence that is so distasteful.
I have no use for various violent cable or television shows. None. I saw all I needed to ever see half a world away a long time ago. TV/Cable violence is contrived, reality is not. See it for real up close and personal and your perspective changes and it no longer interests you. You avoid depictions in fact. That's just my take, but I suspect it is also the take of many others of my time & place. It just is...real blood in real streets will change you forever. It did me. At least.
well, in american tv the general bread and butter themes of most of the shows are based on cops, doctors, lawyers, and the occasional firefighter show. Then secondarily there are the military themed shows, then the formulaic sitcoms (straight man deliver, one liner, laugh, rinse, repeat). No, tv hasn't changed much at all.
Speak for yourself, Amartel. You're welcome to have a sex life as boring as anyone could stand to have.
Or you could just speak openly about it.
But really. Getting all personally offended about the topic of realistic sexual depictions or discussions just exposes how much you really have to hide. I didn't know you had such strong feelings about that. Or why.
For how long have you hated your penis/vagina, Amartel? Or is it "the sameness of it all" to which you've subjected yourself that makes it so insufferable to you? Ha ha ("I don't mind sex and violence. I mind the sameness of it all." -- Amartel, 9/28/2015, 4:25 PM).
Incidentally, it seems we agree on the superiority of much American entertainment - with the exception of the sex and violence depictions. But then, I do realize that there is nothing that makes a right-wing crank angrier than discovering that he has nothing about which to disagree concerning the opinion of his less right-wing fellow citizen. It takes away his whole reason for being - making enemies and fighting for no reason.
In any event, that personal scream you let out on America's allegedly non-existent Puritanism is interesting. Tell me, in which other developed country is "abstinence education" given priority over all other sex education?
In which other developed country are teenage birthrates as high as they are in America? Or are teens as ignorant of real sexual matters/concerns? (Not that you would think to find a correlation between the two).
Go ahead and shriek some more about how there's too much sex in American media but that you're not a prude about it. Just "bored" by it.
Yep. A non-prude who is just "bored" of sex. That's convincing. LOLOLOL!
Just cut out your genitals if you're so bored with them. You'll be surprised how much less angry you will become at criticisms of American approaches to sexual knowledge.
Ha ha hahahaha.
No, Puritanism made Americans understand sex was a private matter. Not something you told every Tom, Dick, and Ritmo.
Oh, so you're a Puritan! Good to know. How's the conical little hat and buckle looking?
What planet do you live on in which men ("Tom, Dick..." and BTW, how well do you know "dick"? I don't think you know dick about Dick [or about dick], but then, it's a long list) don't talk about sex with each other? Sounds like your problem is with athleticism and stepping foot in a locker room.
And also, "Puritanism made Americans understand sex was a private matter?" Really? So, before the Puritans, all sex was done in public? In orgies, too? Or just publicly?
Many things are "private matters" that we're not too stupid to block out the benefit of discussing publicly. Think of an advice column. If you wrote about your unemployment situation to Ann Landers, does that mean it's not a personal situation? You are confusing personal ownership of a situation with an inability to discuss it. Again, a retrograde confuses the fact that something's a personal matter with the tyranny of others having a say in it (as opposed to just a suggestion about it).
"Once the repression is gone the cheapness of the illicit thrill will go also. Think of Colorado and weed."
Yeah, that's going swell, too, I hear.
This is news? Everything you incorrectly think you know about the world is based on what someone gossiped about it ("I hear") to you. Evidence is better than innuendo. But then, what do you know. You're afraid someone is going to have control over your sex life just by knowing about it. Talk about a lack of self-confidence.
"And the repression went away 50 years ago."
Not according to network tv, the dominant medium for at least the last 50 years.
There's some evidence that the internet is changing this. But not fast enough for our schools and workplaces and archdioceses to catch up.
"Too bad Ritmo's been wanking off and missed it."
Now ed, remember what you said. Your personal fantasies are also a private matter. No need to tell everyone hear what sort of images you keep in mind. And personally, I'd rather prefer you keep them to yourself. The thought that you busy yourself thinking about me "wanking off" is something I find rather disturbing.
Wank yourself off instead. Just don't tell anyone about it. Remember, it's not creepy when normal people do it. Just when you do.
And the boring continues .... Now with personal attacks based on a shoddy misreading of the argument. Zzzzz.
Well thankfully I don't have to be the one to excite someone as difficult to arouse as Amartel. Pity the person who has that job!
It's like someone I know once said: If you're bored, you're boring. And Amartel is both.
The great thing about reality - it doesn't have to be exciting to be true.
But when you're a Republican, you have to live in a fantasy, and this is why. Reality is just too boring for them.
How dare reality not conform to the excitement needs of the Republicans. You tell 'em, Amartel!
I always love when Ritmo fights the last war.
I saw the second season of True Detective. It was as bad as everyone says. It was almost a parody of noir detective stories. Everyone among the good guys had a back story of abuse and abandonment and criminal behavior. Aren't there any cops with happy childhoods and successful marriages? And the Mr Big bad guys were corrupt beyond all belief. The story was set in California. It involved crooked politicians and a land deal. Since it was California, you couldn't pin it on the Republicans, but in Mr. Big's office, you can see a picture in the background of him shaking hands with George Bush. So you just know he's evil beyond all measure.......One of the cops is an Iraq veteran. It's intimated that he committed a war crime. He also has a dilettante homosexual experience. And he's one of the good guys.......Worse than all that, there wasn't much nudity, and the fight scenes looked fake.
Till the end!
Could it be Generalissimo Ritmo that people are tired of hearing about other's sex lives? We live in a society where you can wear your life on your sleeve (or twitter account) and if someone criticizes you, they're an evil judgmental jerk and bigot.
The last new tv show I've really enjoyed is the western Hell on Wheels.
I can't recall a recent TV show I've cared for at all. Gratuitous violence turns me off, and sex on the screen is boring...I've had a nice sex life without the depictions. Is not being fascinated by it all the "new" abnormal?
Post a Comment