Television fall season has begun and the old shows are back on air again. The new pilots have aired. Unfortunately there's not much good to say about any of these. The old shows aren't getting better and the pilots were subpar as expected.
Also, Emmy awards were given last week and not that surprisingly the show was a mess, lacked a theme and wasn't funny. I just wasn't able to buy into the self-serving hype, pat on the back and 'cruel is funny' mentality that has permeated the industry.
I did watch the show though and Amazing Race deservedly won again after Top Chef's unexplainable win last year. Ty Burrell also gave a speech so eloquent and honest that no Hollywood writer would ever even dream of writing it. So it wasn't all bad.
In any case, the broadcast would have been a somewhat non-eyebrow raising event for me, had there not been Steven Levitan's acceptance speeches for Modern Family's Emmy wins. Because he really made me do the full 'Phil-move'.
To be exact, Levitan gave two acceptance speeches. The first one (for comedy writing) was pretty superficial, but since I found it to be at least somewhat funny, I gave it a pass. It was about how his children had caught him and her wife in action.
On the other hand the second time he was accepting an Emmy for best comedy series, I couldn't give him a break anymore. That is because I found it pretty disturbing when he said (message behind his joke) that Modern Family has changed the way Americans think about gays.
That's right. Cameron and Mitchell have supposedly changed the way republican bible thumpers perceive homosexuals.
I guess what this is supposed to mean is that there's no need to worry about gay hate crimes or gay discrimination anymore. No need to worry about getting bullied and there also won't be any more proposition 22s because our caricature gay couple has come to the rescue (while playing lion king in the background).
I don't think so.
To me these kind of statements are pretty revealing and also rather irresponsible.
I mean, first, even if the whole thing was only meant as a harmless joke, which I bet it was, the truth is that Hollywood does very little to promote social justice. It rarely provides substance even though that's what it's supposed to do. Given their abysmal track record, the joke was about as funny as president Bush joking about not finding those weapons of mass destruction.
Let's face it folks, Cameron and Mitchell won't change a thing.
The other problem, the revealing part, I have with these people is that they honestly seem to think that their problems, being super rich and white, represent the problems of the blue collar America. They think that they understand your pain, your worries and your anguish.
It's too much like with the politicians on Capitol Hill where these same rich white guys live inside their bubble thinking that the biggest problem facing the country is their corporate paymasters not getting enough tax breaks.
Apparently Hollywood (as in the case of Modern Family's episode) seems to believe that if you get caught in the act with your wife, it's pretty much the worst thing that could ever happen to you.
Is it?
