Primetime Propaganda

by Ben Shapiro

  DiBona, who also said that he was “happy” that Hollywood was completely liberal, said that the point of television was “finding what the common man needed to know and give that information out in an entertaining fashion that makes it get the message across.” Certainly MacGyver fit that bill.56

  THIRTYSOMETHING (1987–1991): BABY BOOMERS’ WHINY BOBO REVOLUTION

  As the Baby Boomers came of age during the 1980s, their generational struggles were reflected on television. On comedies like Family Ties, the bobos struggled with their kids. On the hit dramatic series thirtysomething, they struggled with their urge to buy matching dinnerware.

  When thirtysomething came on the air in 1987, it was an anomaly. In a world of glitzy, glamorous shows like Dallas and Dynasty, ABC and Brandon Stoddard decided to counterprogram a bunch of yuppie urban couples chatting about sex and kids. While the show never reached smash hit status (in its four-season run, it never cracked the top thirty), it had a cultural impact that stretched far beyond its actual viewership.

  The show revolved around a group of friends who had grown up in the 1960s and taken part in the counterculture. Now they were grown up, married with kids, or single and looking to settle down. They were looking for an identity they had lost with the descent from the heady liberalism of their younger years. “I think thirtysomething was about trying to find out who and what you are,” Stoddard told me. “What person? Who are you? And what do you stand for? What are your values?” The goal was to connect with this new generation of viewers, to connect with the suburban angst of the new jet set.57

  The creators of the show, Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, were both liberals. Zwick grew up a member of the liberal suburban elite, attending Harvard and writing for the New York Observer, Rolling Stone, and the New Republic. He got his start in film working for Woody Allen. He then moved on to Family under Spelling and Goldberg. Herskovitz grew up in Philadelphia, where he attended a private school run by “public school teachers who were Communist Party members who had been thrown out of the system in the early 1950s.”58 He, too, got his television start on Family.

  They both recognized that the yuppie lifestyle of the characters clashed with their purported liberal sensibilities—and that these yuppies weren’t satisfied by the white picket fence, the house, the two kids, and the dog. They recognized the bobo conundrum long before David Brooks coined the term.

  “It’s very clear that the politics of the characters on thirtysomething are basically very liberal—we get a lot of letters complaining about that,” Zwick told Playboy. That liberalism took shape on the show, where one married couple argued about whether or not the wife should use her diaphragm and where the network took a $1 million advertising hit to depict two gay men in bed together.

  Zwick and Herskovitz admitted to being taken aback by the furor surrounding their decision to put two men in bed together. “I felt like we were in Hollywood in 1958, having a black man kiss a white woman,” Herskovitz lamented. Sexuality, he continued, “is the area where it’s hardest to tell the truth in television. It’s a never-ending battle.”

  “It’s the area we keep coming back to and trying to explore,” Zwick agreed.

  “And we’ve made lots of headway—whether it’s Hope putting in her diaphragm or teenagers having sex,” Herskovitz said. He summed up the philosophy of the series: “It’s important to note that morality is not the first concern when we make the show. It’s third or fourth on the list. Our prime concerns are . . . dramatic and psychological. . . . The fact that we are more concerned about showing the truth than about moralizing disturbs a lot of people. . . .

  “We—this generation, that is—are attacking the basic construct of our culture: the way we raise children, the way we behave toward our parents,” Herskovitz finished. “What our sexual relationships should be,” Zwick added.

  “Whining as revolution?” asked the editor of Playboy.

  “Exactly,” said Herskovitz.59

  That whining was revolutionary: it summed up an entire generation of people who wanted to rebel against social standards while maintaining a comfortable lifestyle. In a Hegelian sense, if 1960s radical liberalism was the thesis, and if 1980s Reagan middle-class conservatism was the antithesis, then thirtysomething’s middle-class social rebellion constituted the synthesis. It also provided the groundwork for show after show reinforcing that perspective, from Seinfeld to Friends to Modern Family.

  L.A. LAW AND BOSTON LEGAL: LIBERALISM FOR SWEEPS WEEK

  The TV drama genre has four major standbys you will see every season: the cop show, the medical show, the daytime soap opera, and the law show. As in the other major genres, law programming began with the typical “lawyers as heroes” form. They praised the American legal system as a structure designed to reach just conclusions. The early legal shows, like Perry Mason (1957–1966), actually leaned conservative, since they were designed to convict the guilty. Shows like The Defenders (1961–1965) were liberal, of course—The Defenders focused on getting suspected criminals off—but they never questioned the merits of the legal system or the motives of the lawyers.

  Over time, the image of lawyers began to shift. As liberals grew more and more disenchanted with the criminal justice system, which they saw as racist and classist, they began to portray lawyers as either heroes struggling against the system or as willing participants in the fleecing of the American public. No single figure has been as instrumental in crafting our modern view of law as David E. Kelley.

  Kelley, like Zwick and Herskovitz, grew up a member of the liberal elite. He spent his childhood in Maine, then attended Princeton University and the Boston University School of Law. He used his legal background as a way to join the industry; after writing a movie script that would later turn into a Judd Hirsch movie, he was selected by Steven Bochco to become a writer and story editor on a new series called L.A. Law (1986–1994). Law, Kelley said, was always “a natural for me. . . . It’s a franchise that causes people to unearth their ideas and beliefs, and it’s such a natural spring board to tell stories about characters.”60

  Kelley’s philosophy was openly liberal, and he brought his politics to bear in L.A. Law. The show took on the usual range of issues, from the usual limited range of viewpoints—that is, moderate left to far left. The biggest political scandal of the show was reserved for season five, though. As the ratings for the show collapsed, the writers decided to have a bisexual kiss a lesbian on national television. Naturally, this occurred during sweeps week. As Michelle Green, one of the actresses involved in the scene, later said, “On L.A. Law they never intended to explore the issue of a relationship between two women; it was about ratings during sweeps, so I always found it a bit cynical.”61 It was still groundbreaking, though, and it didn’t undercut the general message of the series, which had always forwarded the gay rights agenda.

  The lesbian kiss eventually became a staple of sweeps week, with shows ranging from The O.C. to Roseanne doing it. Sandy Grushow of Fox even admitted to me that the lesbian gambit on The O.C. was a ploy: “I think it’s true, there’s no question from an insider’s perspective that sweeps created a need to tell stories that would be more likely than not to attract attention.”62 Kelley has used them repeatedly, whether it’s teenage girls kissing and considering lesbianism during sweeps on Picket Fences or whether it’s adults doing it on Ally McBeal. Kisses between men are far less popular, for obvious commercial reasons.

  Kelley is, of course, one of the greatest success stories in the history of the industry. The husband of Michelle Pfeiffer, Kelley has created Picket Fences (1992–1996), Chicago Hope (1994–2000), The Practice (1997–2004), Ally McBeal (1997–2002), and Boston Legal (2004–2008). Kelley’s take on law is almost always classist: The poor are virtuous and the rich are scumbags. That holds true whether we’re talking about clients, criminals, or lawyers. The lawyers on The Practice struggle to make ends meet—and they are righteous truth-see
kers flailing against the unjust system. The lawyers on Ally McBeal and Boston Legal work for huge firms that find motivation in profit—and those lawyers are largely nasty, venal, and corrupt, with a penchant for sin.

  No matter which Kelley show we’re talking about, however, the best lawyers all have one trait in common: they’re liberal. Bobby Donnell (Dylan McDermott), Lindsay Dole (Kelli Williams), Eugene Young (Steve Harris), and Ellenor Frutt (Camryn Manheim), the partners of The Practice, are all outspoken liberals. Even the prosecutor, Helen Gamble (Lara Flynn Boyle), is a liberal who struggles with her conscience while going after criminals. While the partners on The Practice occasionally struggle with the ethics of putting criminals back out on the street (particularly white criminals—minority criminals are never portrayed as possible recidivists), those qualms are generally outweighed by their certainty that criminals are products of their social environments. Liberal legal truisms roll off their tongues. “It’s better that ten guilty men go free, than one innocent man suffer,” Bobby claims, paraphrasing famous jurist William Blackstone without citation, ignoring the fact that those ten guilty men will go on to hurt dozens of innocent people. “What kind of fairness is this?” Bobby protests in another episode when a judge rules against him. “You’re putting the system before a person’s life.” And vintage Bobby on why defense attorneys should be fine with defending the O. J. Simpsons of the world: “Once in a while you get an innocent, and that’s why we do this.” When Bobby loses, he does so because the judge is a bigot or a racist or a fool.

  On Boston Legal, to take another Kelley example, the lawyers routinely mock conservative viewpoints. The show’s resident Republican, Denny Crane (William Shatner) is a homophobe, a charming scumbag, a greedy smooth-talker along the lines of Michael J. Fox in Family Ties. He’s also a quasi-idiot. After finding out about a liberal attempt to ban red meat, for example, he sputters, “We’re carnivores. When the pilgrims landed, first thing they did was eat a few Indians.” On environmentalists: “They’re evildoers. Yesterday it’s a tree, today it’s a salmon, tomorrow it’s, ‘Let’s not dig up Alaska for oil because it’s too pretty.’ Let me tell you something. I came out here to enjoy nature, don’t talk to me about the environment.” His conservatism is of the most simplistic brand, summed up in one episode thusly: “It’s a good feeling, you know, to shoot a bad guy. Something you Democrats would never understand. Americans . . . we’re homesteaders, we want a safe home, keep the money we make, and shoot bad guys.” In the show’s last episode, Crane marries his liberal partner, Alan Shore, in order to protect his assets—and the man performing the wedding is a look-alike of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.

  Kelley’s unique ability to stack his shows with leftist politics makes him one of the most critically popular figures in television. His peers worship his work. Larry Gelbart described Kelley as “entrepreneurial,” one of the few in Hollywood willing to push his politics.63 Allan Burns told me that Kelley’s shows were “important . . . about the law, and how to use it for the good.”64 Vin DiBona said he and his wife would never miss an episode of Boston Legal.65

  Kelley’s style is unique—and uniquely political. His philosophy of programming has never changed: Politics had to be an inherent part of the story. “Our show,” he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about Boston Legal, “is about ideas and it became very organic to make politics part of this show. . . . One of our writers was an ex-journalist and he used to get calls from his colleagues in the news business and at newsmagazine shows saying they were envious. We got to tell stories they wanted to do but were not allowed to because it was not hot enough copy for the news.”66 That’s why any Kelley show tackles the issues from a liberal perspective.

  LAW & ORDER (1990–2010): FROM PROCEDURAL TO SMEAR JOBS

  The cop genre has its ebbs and flows in terms of liberalism; it encompasses a broad variety of perspectives. Steven Bochco twisted the cop genre from outright reverence to despairing pessimism, but Don Bellisario pushed conservative messages on law enforcement in shows like NCIS and Magnum, P.I.

  The latest turn of events in the law enforcement genre has been a merger of Bochco and Bellisario—maintaining reverence for cops while ripping conservatives in storylines. These shows are apparently conservative because they uphold the status quo through a somewhat wooden procedural format, but they paper over that conservative groundwork with storylines painting conservatives as criminals and crazies.

  Dick Wolf started that trend. The creator of the Law & Order chain was born in New York, then went to the University of Pennsylvania for college, working afterward in the advertising industry. That experience no doubt gave Wolf an understanding of the commercial nature of the industry, knowledge he would put to good use after moving to Hollywood. He got his start under—who else?—Steven Bochco, writing for Hill Street Blues.

  Wolf is himself apolitical. He reportedly supported Fred Thompson’s 2008 presidential candidacy. His programming philosophy is a softer version of Kelley’s: he rips from the headlines but does so without any serious political messaging. “When Brandon Tartikoff bought the show way back in the last century, he said, ‘What’s the Bible?’ ” Wolf told an interviewer. “And I said the front page of the New York Times. And it has not been a bad piece of source material because for better or worse we can’t come up with stories better than a headless body found in topless bar.”67

  Michael Moriarty, a conservative actor who starred as D.A. Benjamin Stone on the original Law & Order, said that Wolf “is a careerist. ‘Anything that works,’ you know?” Moriarty stated that the series wasn’t anything new; he compared it to Dragnet. He did, however, point out that the series had moved to the left since its inception.68

  And he’s right. Law & Order has moved substantially to the left. Wolf has never made openly political statements—although like Bochco, he has ensured that the vast majority of victims and perpetrators are nonminorities, and according to the Wall Street Journal, “limits the number of shows containing minority victims, including blacks and Muslims, to four or five episodes a season out of 22 to 24.”69

  But now the show has moved beyond mere racial quotas. A glimpse at the early episodes of the show, which were straight procedurals examining how cops and DAs worked to put criminals behind bars, shows the difference: today’s episodes are filled with liberal calling cards. In a 2009 episode of Law & Order: SVU, a franchise spin-off, for example, a lawyer played by John Larroquette suggested, “Limbaugh, Beck, O’Reilly, all of ’em, they are like a cancer spreading ignorance and hate. . . . They’ve convinced folks that immigrants are the problem, not corporations that fail to pay a living wage or a broken health care system. . . .” That set off O’Reilly, who responded by rhetorically punching Wolf between the eyes, calling him a “despicable human being.”70 In the past few years, Law & Order has also run episodes prosecuting government lawyers for okaying torture (Jack McCoy, played by ultraliberal Sam Waterston, says that he would prosecute the Bush Administration for “assaulting suspected terrorists”); stumping for gay marriage; pushing for hate-crimes legislation protecting gays and lesbians; labeling the question of abortion “pro-choice or no choice”; and the list goes on and on. (It is worth noting that although Law & Order has moved to the left, it provides balance on occasion, as it did in 2009 in an episode on abortion.)

  Moriarty and others on the right see the culprit for Law & Order’s leftward slide in executive producer René Balcer, a self-proclaimed liberal who says, “There’s a balance, but anyone who’s been watching knows our best shows make the public question what’s going on.”71 Though Balcer may pretend balance, his programming strategy isn’t truly balanced. “I think probably on the whole, like most writers, you’re about liberty, free expression, and you generally stand up for the little guy,” Balcer said in an interview with the far-left American Prospect. “It seems like the people defending the little guy more often than not [seem] to be progressive, liberal.”72r />
  Balcer is militant in his views—he stated regarding Fred Thompson, who appeared for years on Law & Order, “when they brought me back on the show, I said I’m not coming back as long as that guy is on the show. I didn’t think much of his acting or the character.” This is the essence of the blacklist—it suggests that because a creator or executive doesn’t like an artist’s political stance, that artist can be quickly and easily labeled untalented and then dumped.

  Thompson said that when he appeared on the show, he had an agreement with Wolf that “as long as we had an exchange of ideas and it wasn’t skewed to the other side, is all I wanted. To have an opportunity to make some conservative points along with the ever-present liberal points.” Balcer fought for the liberal point of view as hard as possible, Thompson recalled: “[He] was fixated on Iraq and it was all about oil or it was a premeditated deal.” Thompson noted that once Balcer took over, things changed.73 Balcer, said Moriarty, “is the shamelessly far-left villain. . . . [He] became the major inspiration for Dick’s consistent desires to please the Obama White House.”74

  Law & Order isn’t the only crime procedural that layers its conservative foundations with liberalism. CSI (2000–present), created by liberal Anthony Zuiker, targets criminals and praises law enforcement. But its story arcs often target conservatives in pathetically blatant ways. In the 2010 premiere episode, “Shock Waves,” teen heartthrob Justin Bieber played an anti-government juvenile delinquent, obviously a member of the Tea Party, who helped bomb a police officer’s funeral. In an interview with radio host Laura Ingraham, Zuiker admitted that his own political persuasion stood behind the ridiculous plotline. “We wanted to take, you know, a position of a faction—and, again, Tea Party, I have no idea what all that means, so, forgive me. But, in terms of talking, we call it the Church of Crazyology in the room, meaning when we were breaking the story, we just wanted to have, you know, a faction taking a position that we shouldn’t have driver’s licenses, and why pay taxes, and just take that position,” Zuiker rambled nonsensically. After Ingraham grilled him on his ignorance—he doesn’t know what the Tea Party is, but he calls those who agree with it the Church of Crazyology?—Zuiker called upon the usual Hollywood defensive playbook. “We took a position in that particular fictional faction to be anti-government, and that’s about as deep as it went,” Zuiker protested. “Our job is to be, just entertain people. And that’s what we did.”75