Primetime Propaganda

by Ben Shapiro

  DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES (2004–PRESENT): PARADOXICAL LIBERALISM

  On October 3, 2004, America met the women of Wisteria Lane. And they loved them. They adored Teri Hatcher’s Susan Mayer, a divorced mother with a penchant for clumsiness; Felicity Huffman’s Lynette Scavo, a saintly suffering wife taking care of her four children despite an absentee husband; Marcia Cross’s Bree Van de Kamp, an uptight conservative whose addiction to perfection utterly destroys her family; and Eva Longoria’s Gabrielle Solis, a former fashion model who spends time shagging the gardener. The banter was witty, the plotting intricate, and the show was always pretty to look at. It was, in short, one of the most entertaining things ever put on television.

  The show was also controversially liberal. Susan Mayer talks about her sex life openly with her daughter; Lynette, the only one of the four with a lasting marriage, has to suffer through her husband’s wandering eyes and idiotic career moves; Bree, the Republican, has to deal with a gay son, Andrew, whom she predictably attempts to “convert” back to heterosexuality, with disastrous consequences; and Gaby’s cheating is looked upon as a natural consequence of her husband’s neglect. The show’s frankness regarding sexuality and casual approach to serious moral issues deeply bothered those on the right.

  However, the show never treated the lives of the housewives themselves with the scorn so often heaped on suburbia. It wasn’t thirtysomething, with trite people complaining about trite problems. It was a dramedy, but it took its characters seriously and didn’t dismiss them for staying home and attempting to bring up their children (however badly).

  This seeming philosophical split comes directly from the incisive mind of Marc Cherry, creator of the show. When I met Cherry at his home in the San Fernando Valley, his street looked suspiciously like Wisteria Lane itself. His home was perfectly painted and manicured, and spotlessly clean.

  Cherry is gay, and he is also a Republican, which makes him a rarity both in the general population and in Hollywood (where it is more common to be gay than conservative, and certainly uncommon to be both). Cherry went to Cal State Fullerton, where he got his degree in theater. He soon decided, however, that there wasn’t much he could do in the acting field—Cherry isn’t a leading man type, he’s got more of a character-actor look—and so he started writing spec scripts for television. In the spring of 1989, Cherry and his writing partner got into the prestigious Warner Bros. Writers’ Workshop, and parlayed that into a job on a show called Homeroom, which then translated into another job working for Susan Harris on Golden Girls.

  Cherry loved working on Golden Girls. “Very few writers ever get to work on their favorite TV show, and I was lucky enough to have that opportunity,” Cherry told me. After Golden Girls, Cherry went through a dry spell in which he was unemployed. Then he wrote the spec pilot for Desperate Housewives.

  The story of how the show got on the air has become famous in the industry. It was viewed and rejected by virtually every network, including cables HBO and Lifetime. Finally ABC bit, and it became one of television’s longest-lasting major hits. It is now in its seventh season, and it has spent every season in the top ten except season six.

  Cherry drew the inspiration for Desperate Housewives from his mother, who once told him that during his childhood, she felt desperate. But his artistic influences are wholly of the left: “I would read Aaron Sorkin and David Kelley, because they were two television writers who I admired tremendously . . . probably the primary influence was Alan Ball, who had created Six Feet Under and who had done American Beauty.” But Ball had something Cherry never had: a hatred of suburbia. “The thing is that I love suburbia. I grew up there. I was raised in Orange County,” he continued. “While I was certainly up to writing about the problems of women in suburbia, housewives going slightly crazy, I didn’t approach it with any kind of disdain. . . . I actually think that these are good people, and the backbone of the country, if you will.”

  Cherry told me he didn’t really understand the conservative hubbub over Desperate Housewives. “I knew in my heart I’m not doing anything particularly groundbreaking here in terms of the sexuality or the depiction of it.”86 Cherry had one particularly big supporter on this topic: Laura Bush. “I am married to the president of the United States, and here’s our typical evening: Nine o’clock, Mr. Excitement here is sound asleep, and I’m watching Desperate Housewives—with Lynne Cheney,” the First Lady joked at the 2005 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. “Ladies and gentlemen, I am a desperate housewife. I mean, if those women on that show think they’re desperate, they oughta be with George.”87

  As Cherry mentioned, he’s conservative fiscally and on foreign policy, but he’s certainly not socially conservative, which means he was happy to promote gay rights on Wisteria Lane. “One of the things I’m proudest about is the addition of the neighbors, the gay neighbors on Wisteria Lane, because they’re there, they’re part of the neighborhood, no one seems to notice it.” That style of political persuasion, Cherry said, is “the most effective political message . . . it’s not particularly aggressive. It’s just there and it’s slowly changing a perception.”

  It’s that stylistic approach that makes Cherry’s work so popular. In the 1970s, Cherry explained, “I think they hit people over the head with the messages, and I think we’ve gotten a little more subtle about it. . . . I think we’re a little bit more sophisticated than to do the preachifying that was going on back then.” Don’t be fooled by messaging subtlety, Cherry said. “There’s all sorts of different messages that can be implanted into entertainment and just because a lot of the people doing television today don’t feel like doing political messages doesn’t mean that they’re still not getting out what they want to say.”

  Even though Cherry recognizes that television is often used as a vehicle for message promotion, Cherry told me he doesn’t believe that America has a lot of values left that need transformation outside of gay rights. “I’ll tell you something,” he said. “Because I’m fairly conservative, I feel that most of the social issues that needed to be talked about have already been talked about, and they won. Does society need to be more permissive? I don’t think so.” Here, Cherry puts his finger on the liberal conundrum—where can they channel their outrage against society if they’ve won all the battles?

  Cherry is not interested in shocking the bourgeois. Cherry actually takes a rather objective view of his own show—he objects to its being watched by children. “I have to admit, I’m constantly horrified when women with twelve-year-old children come up and meet me in malls and stuff and they say, ‘Oh, my daughter and I love to watch your show together.’ ”

  It seems to be an internal contradiction for Cherry; he doesn’t embrace the sexualization of children—that’s something he “heartily disapprove[s] of,” he said—but at the same time, he doesn’t want to restrict his own creative output too much, since “one salacious image in one man’s eyes is a necessary storytelling tool about an important social issue in another’s.” Cherry doesn’t pretend to have the answer to that internal contradiction. Instead, he says that he can only be “responsible for the images I put out on a television show.”

  Cherry’s willingness to take responsibility for his work, like his open embrace of his political positions both in his shows and nationally, is a refreshing rarity in Hollywood. So is the complexity of his politics, which allows him to somehow stand on the razor’s edge between promotion of certain social messages and an innate conservative sense that the job of television is to entertain, and that the never-ending social revolution has to end sometime. In a certain way, Desperate Housewives may be the culmination of the political debate over the last forty years: acceptance of more liberal social standards, simultaneous recognition of the role of women as mothers and wives, and celebration of the continued presence of the American dream—even if Desperate Housewives exaggerates that dream’s dark side. Desperate Housewives is a ringing endorsemen
t of the bohemian side of the bobo experience.

  HOUSE (2004–PRESENT): THE BALANCED EXCEPTION TO THE LIBERAL RULE

  Gregory House is easily the most sadistic, meanest, cruelest bastard ever to be made the hero of a television show. He’s a pill-popping, unrepentant narcissist and reprobate, uncompassionate and brutal. He’s also tremendously fun to watch because he’s politically incorrect, quick on his feet, and smarter than everyone else in the room.

  His main political characteristic is his atheism—House is militant in the Bill Maher mold. “I choose to believe that the white light people sometimes see . . . they’re all just chemical reactions that take place when the brain shuts down,” he says in one episode. “There’s no conclusive science. My choice has no practical relevance to my life, I choose the outcome I find more comforting . . . I find it more comforting to believe that this isn’t simply a test.” More to the point: “You can have all the faith you want in spirits, and the afterlife, and heaven and hell, but when it comes to this world, don’t be an idiot. Cause you can tell me you put your faith in God to put you through the day, but when it comes time to cross the road, I know you look both ways.” Upon doing a brain scan of a religious character: “Isn’t it interesting . . . religious behavior is so close to being crazy that we can’t tell them apart.” Getting the message yet?

  The beauty of the show lies in House’s interplay with the nice people who surround him. House’s theory of life strips bare all pretensions—he doesn’t care about playing nice, about social standards, about bedside manner, about comforting people. All of his colleagues do, and they’re constantly trying to convince him to be decent to other people. House’s view is that other people aren’t decent and therefore don’t deserve decent treatment.

  Because House is a liberal anti-hero rather than a liberal hero, his liberalism is vulnerable to attack. He’s often confronted by his insensitivity and his moral apathy. The show, while leaning liberal, therefore often tends toward balance on particular issues. For example, in season three’s “Fetal Position,” House is forced to save a twenty-one-week-old baby in the womb of a mother who refuses to abort; we see a 4D ultrasound of the baby, and the show even reenacts the famous picture in which an unborn child caresses a surgeon’s hand. House is obviously moved as the baby’s hand touches his, before he covers it over with his usual cynicism: “It’s all right—I just realized I forgot to TiVo Alien.” It’s one of the strongest pro-life messages ever placed on television. That same season, House ran an episode titled “One Day, One Room,” in which House convinced an STD-ridden patient who was raped to abort the baby. Both episodes were done with sensitivity and richness of character. House handles such hot-button issues routinely in the same way, from euthanasia to abuse to promiscuity (although, as always in Hollywood, when it comes to gay rights, there’s no doubt where House stands—just ask Olivia Wilde, who plays television’s most notorious bisexual).

  If House is more balanced than other shows, the credit should go to the show’s creator, David Shore. Shore was a lawyer before deciding to move to Los Angeles and try to write. “I packed up my stuff and hit the road and then I started writing,” he said. “It was a really stupid decision that worked out very well.”

  He got his first break writing for David E. Kelley’s The Practice. He interpreted Kelley’s style as even-handed, although Shore’s work is far more even-handed than Kelley’s. “I’ve aspired throughout my career to do a good job of not just creating straw men, [but] creating a situation that people of good will and intelligence can take contrary positions on,” Shore said.

  House started as a “hot procedural show, and basically a medical procedural show,” Shore told me. “A whatdunit instead of a whodunit, a cop show in which the germs are the suspects. And it evolved from there, obviously, because it became much less of a procedural and much more of a character study.” Shore came up with House’s atheism because he thought it would be interesting—and because he saw a vacuum of atheism on television (although in truth, organized religion on television has been watered down to the point of nonexistence and replaced instead with new-age-y references to the power of the universe). “Probably in the back of my mind, certainly, I saw the vacuum on TV, if you will, of true rationality,” Shore said.

  Rationality is the hallmark of Shore’s work—the theme of the show, which is why he takes debate so seriously. “I lean over backwards not to take any specific political stances. I think what’s interesting about stuff—frankly, preaching is boring on TV.” Shore’s goal is Socratic in its essence: “What I do try and do is to try and present both sides of an argument, and . . . [to get people] to just frankly think a little more. Not for people just to blindly follow the rules that are placed before them, but to think about it.” Which rules did he think people ought to challenge, I asked. “It’s about the stuff that you believed since you’re six years old,” he answered. “Why do you believe it? It makes [the rules] ultimately valid [if you consider them].”

  Because House so often challenges both sides of the political debate—and because the left is not used to being challenged seriously in any way by television’s product—House received an inordinate amount of flak for “Fetal Position.” “As you can imagine, we’re in Hollywood, we’ve got our share of rabid left-wing Democrats here,” Shore said. “I remember when we were doing ‘Fetal Position,’ there is that image of that little finger of the fetus clasping Dr. House’s hand. And it was a powerful image. And we recognized at the time that’s going to go up on billboards and websites for pro-life organizations. But it was true, and it was accurate, and it was real.” This may be one of the only times in television history that anyone in the industry has called the pro-life message “real.”

  Shore’s commitment to balance is what makes House such a unique property on television—and what makes it television’s best water-cooler show. No other show can spark debate—real debate—because no other shows take the issues so seriously, refraining from taking the easy way out.

  GREY’S ANATOMY (2005–PRESENT): HOT AND HEAVY AT THE HOSPITAL

  Nobody had ever heard of Shonda Rhimes until she burst onto the scene in 2005 with Grey’s Anatomy. She’d never written on another major show. She’d never had a successful movie, other than Princess Diaries 2, which was bound to do decently (she also penned the Britney Spears starrer Crossroads, which was a box office disaster). She’s the perfect example of the obscurity-to-riches fame that television can bring when it finds a talented creator.

  Rhimes grew up in University Park, Illinois, then attended Dartmouth. Finally she headed to USC to study screenwriting. She began writing television pitches; her first was about “four women who covered war and drank a lot and had a lot of sex and on a bad day, people died.” The networks rejected it because war television doesn’t get ratings. Then she wrote another pilot, about a hospital in Seattle. It was picked up by ABC.88

  Rhimes believes that it is her moral duty to infuse politics into her shows. It’s clear that she does it on a regular basis—for a while, Grey’s Anatomy was the only show to feature an ongoing lesbian relationship (with open conversation about the procedures of lesbian sex), and it has taken liberal stands on abortion, teen sex, and euthanasia, among other issues. When the show first began, Rhimes, who is African American, set down a “mandate” to the cast and crew. “I remember everybody in the room looking at me like I was crazy,” she told Ebony magazine. “But I was like, ‘There will never be any Black drug addicts on our show. There will never be any Black hookers on our show. There will never be Black pimps on our show.’ A lot of shows feel the need and enjoy stereotyping, and we’re going the other way.” Of course, it’s not stereotyping for some drug addicts or hookers or pimps to be black—it’s reverse stereotyping, in fact, to suggest that there’s no such thing as a black drug addict or hooker or pimp. (At least she’s racially blind when it comes to casting, where Rhimes says she has never cast by looking at ra
ce, with the excellent result that a massively diverse cast now stars on one of television’s biggest hits.)

  In similar fashion, Rhimes has stated that she wants women to know that they don’t need men. “It’s fabulous to have a partner,” she said. “But if you don’t, you’re going to be fine.”89

  Grey’s Anatomy is, according to Rhimes, “chick” television—that is, television designed for women. In Hollywood, “for women” is synonymous with “pushing the 1960s feminist agenda.”

  GLEE (2009–PRESENT): SUBVERSIVE LIBERALISM

  High schoolers singing in choir club. That’s the premise of Glee, a Fox show that has received enormous critical attention, including nineteen Primetime Emmy nominations after its debut season. How could writers draw so much attention to a show about a high school glee club? By making it subversively liberal, of course.

  Glee isn’t High School Musical. It’s more like Gossip Girl meets Disney Channel. While the show’s candy coating lies in its rehashes of hit pop tunes, its colorful cast, and its well-choreographed routines, the show’s core is pure sexualization, anti-Christian bias, and pro-gay-rights messaging. One of the main characters is a teenager who gets pregnant; one of the main female characters has two dads; another is a flamboyantly gay high school kid; two others are cheerleaders with lesbian tendencies (in one episode, the two make out, with one remarking that it’s “a nice break from all that scissoring”—scissoring, by the way, is a lesbian sexual practice). A teacher on the show suggests that Lincoln was gay. One episode features four teenagers fantasizing about having sex while singing Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.” Another mocks abstinence education, with one of the main teenage characters telling the other teens, “Did you know that most studies have demonstrated that celibacy doesn’t work in high schools? . . . The only way to deal with teen sexuality is to be prepared. That’s what contraception is for.”