Why I rarely watch US sitcoms - the relentless TV propaganda war against conservative values

Here’s a list of the US sitcoms – including animated series – I have watched regularly since 1980: Friends, Frasier, The Simpsons, King of the Hill and the occasional episode of South Park. I got into Friends and Frasier because my wife enjoyed them, and I watched The Simpsons and South Park because my son is a fan: the King of the Hill was my own choice. Given how many of the damned things have been shown on British TV, that’s a surprisingly small number. I only realised how few US sitcoms I’ve watched while reading Ben Shapiro’s Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV (available here). 

I’ve always considered myself a fan of TV comedy, and I adore Jewish humour (almost all US sitcoms are written by Jews). So why, I wondered, have I avoided the likes of Seinfeld, Will & Grace, Family Guy, Modern Family, Roseanne,  Ellen, The Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, 3rd Rock from the Sun, and 30 Rock – well, name it and I haven’t seen it. I’ve tried, believe me  - but when I try to engage with one of these things, I find myself becoming irritated after a few minutes. Now, after reading Shapiro’s genuinely excellent book, I understand why: they’re all written by left-wingers for youngish left-wingers, and they all push a cultural Marxist agenda – all gays are lovely; gay marriage is adorable; all blacks are noble or oppressed; lesbians are simply to die for; babies are fashion accessories; war is never the answer; the traditional family is just one of many lifestyle choices (and a pretty sucky one at that); Christians are rural fascist idiots; women are pretty much the same as men when it comes to the sex urge; sex can be indulged in without conscience or consequence; all corporations are evil; in order to be, like, mega-happy, you just need to ditch all that guilt crap your school and your parents taught you; all conservatives are racist, homophobic, misogynistic kill-joys; the culture we were brought up in is nothing to be proud of; the government is your buddy, apart from the military and the spies of course, etc.

It struck me that, whenever I try to watch a US sitcom I haven’t seen before, it doesn’t take long before I find one of these messages – often several at once - being lobbed my way. As a conservative, I don’t agree with any of them – so why (unless I’m laughing my head off) would I go on watching? The Simpsons and South Park manage the trick, because they tend to be fairly even-handed when it comes to targets – especially South Park, whose vile attacks on traditional values I’m willing to overlook because I know some left-liberal shibboleth is about to get a right old kicking a little way down the line.

Of course, it isn’t only comedy programmes that attack practically everything someone like me believes in – US drama’s anti-conservative bias is almost as relentless. For instance, I was truly bemused recently when an Asian cop character in the horror series, Grimm, suddenly made an utterly irrelevant remark about the cruelty of capitalism, which had absolutely sod all to do with the plot. Huh? I gave up watching the crime series Law & Order a few years ago when I realised that its central message seemed to be that, whatever crime has been committed, a white, middle-class, male businessman is bound to have been ultimately responsible for it – and if it ever featured a Muslim immigrant or a young black as the main suspect, you knew they could be discounted instantly.  Even in crime series which take a robust law & order stance, the levels of social liberalism are eye-watering – it often feels as if the writers and executives feel the need to justify their own somewhat louche moral and sexual attitudes.

This isn’t a modern phenomenon – US TV turned sharply leftwards in the early ‘60s when producers and writers who didn’t want to go on churning out stuff like The Beverley Hillbillies convinced advertisers that the demographic to go for was young urbanites rather than older viewers. This of course makes absolutely no commercial sense, because (as Shapiro points out in the video below) young urbanites don’t have nearly as much disposable income as people who’ve been working for a few decades and who’ve packed the kids off to college. But the creatives knew they couldn’t produce the sort of edgy, liberal, society-changing stuff their hearts were set on while being made to cater to an older, more conservative demographic: so they hoodwinked the ad-men.

Ben Shapiro, who has his own radio show, is the editor-at-large for Breitbart and founder and editor-in-chief of TruthRevolt, a right-wing media watchdog group. He’s young, incredibly smart, and very conservative. While researching this book – which was published in 2011 – he interviewed a large number of the liberal writers and producers responsible for the unremitting left-liberal slant of most American TV since the ‘70s. Here, in an entertaining interview with Glenn Beck (yes, I know) Shapiro reveals why so many of the men and women who’ve done so much to reshape the American mind over the past half century were willing to spill their left-liberal, cultural Marxist guts on tape:

What confuses me about many compassion-mongering leftists is how incredibly nasty they are: I'm a right-winger - that's my job! Given that they've basically won, what the hell are they so angry about?

Nothing to do with any of the above - and now way out of date, given that the appalling Piers Morgan was sacked by CNN lst year, but readers might enjoy this 2013 interview, during which Shapiro utterly shreds the vile Brit on (inevitably) the issue of gun control. (It must be really galling to be intellectually destroyed by someone who looks like a schoolboy):