A Turning of the Tide
The most BASED streaming series ever shows us the heroism of defiant pop art.
This review is cross-posted to the “Posts” section of my donation site, buymeacoffee.com, where even a minimum contribution of $5 USD will grant you full access to this and other kinds of weird, paywalled content going forward.
Now, if you’ll permit me to let my hair down, I want to tell you about a cool show I watched.
“Be merry! We meet again, at the turn of the tide. A great storm is coming, but the tide has turned.”
— Gandalf the Based (“The Two Towers”)
The “miniseries" format, a relic of my youth, has made a resurgence in recent years. Thanks to the binge model of streaming services, many of these shows play out like very long feature films, in which a single narrative unfolds over the course of seven-to-ten hours (or thereabouts).
One problem with this binge model — which many executives apparently couldn’t see over their massive stacks of HR microaggression complaints — is that such a format tends not to linger in the cultural conversation for long. The window for buzz at the watercooler and its digital equivalents becomes very short, in other words, as audiences move on to the Next Big Thing.
That’s bad for the distributors, because the business purpose of such watercooler talk is to generate more subscriptions. In the old drip-drip weekly broadcast model, the window for conversation could be spread across many months, and even many years. “Breaking Bad” famously gained a huge audience over the course of its run, rising from 1.2 million in its first season to 5.9 in its fifth and final, mainly through word of mouth.
In recent years, it seems many streaming platforms are awakening to this problem. Their solution was to simply revert to the older model, making new episodes of a mini-series available on a weekly basis.
The show I’m going to write about today was released in this fashion, staggered across two-and-a-half glorious months. It seems to have worked as planned, too. YouTuber critics in particular have been buzzing about it, almost from the start. And while I can’t speak for any Clown World hot takes, critics from the dissident Right all appear to stand in firm agreement. As a matter of fact, I don’t think their praise goes far enough.
Because the long, long movie I finished watching last night may be the most BASED show I’ve ever seen on a streaming platform (and, yes, I’ve seen “Reacher” and “Cobra Kai,” so don’t go there, pal).
But this show was more than just based. What I watched was like an impossible magic trick, Houdini escaping from a welded sarcophagus at the bottom of the Marianas. The final three episodes in particular were chockful of moments when I could scarcely believe what I was seeing and hearing.
There must be some mistake, I thought.
This is 2023.
The year of watered-down transexual beer. The year of virtue-signaling nazis saving us from free speech. The year of plus-size Yass Queens slayin’ fat-shamers, of purple-haired, unicorn-gendered kindergarten teachers, and of drag shows for their youthful wards.
In Hollywood, it’s also year of the The Missing Straight White Male, who’s been relegated to the back of a milk carton. Or, if not that, then to the role of loathsome, weak, incompetent wretch, who needs to be taught a lesson by his more colorful and/or sexually exotic superiors. Or, if not that, a useless, feminized manqué in need of constant rescue, rendered with less depth and agency than the most stereotypical damsel-in-distress ever was.
And not just white men. Men as a species are now held out for constant mockery, humiliation and contempt. Scripts penned by bitter, talentless hags have them beaten to pulps by 90-lb runway models, or shamed into silence by their self-insert girlboss’ latest juvenile fallacy. Whether physical, moral or intellectual, it hath been decreed that a man must lose every fight against an opponent with a vagina.
And not just men. Women may have received the most vicious beating of all from this nasty bunch, who are only “writers” in the sense that Goebbels wrote a couple of plays back in the 1920’s. Their female characters are now prohibited from being feminine in any way. They are never allowed to be vulnerable, to make mistakes, to show fear or anguish or empathic warmth. Most of all, they are forbidden to love men, or to ever call upon our strength and valor to protect them from the wolves of the night.
Never being allowed to lose or call for help is a tall order for anyone, out here in the muck and slop of the real world. Perhaps worst of all is the false confidence these flawless fictional heroines project. It could even get a woman seriously injured or killed, if she internalizes the fiction too deeply.
And not just men and women. In this latest Hollywood zeitgeist, that town’s darkest secret has wormed its way to the surface:
They are coming for your kids.
They always were. The difference is they’re now openly admitting it.
But the spiteful lesbians and dazed wine moms of these new writers’ rooms don’t care. Not about women, not about men, not about children. Narcissists straight down to their withered, musty cores, this junta of harridans has been plotting their lame coup for decades. In the wake of #MeToo and adjacent moral panics, they finally sprang it, and the entertainment industry has suffered under the yoke of their New Rules ever since.
Some of these rules remain unspoken. But others have been codified in production guidelines and legal contracts, made public through leaks and grandiose announcements. They’re the reason why each new entertainment product is more stupid, soulless and mind-numbingly dull than the last.
Maybe the latter is worst of all. These new “stories” are so predictable and redundant they might as well have numbers instead of names. They’re even dull by propaganda’s low standards, because the propagandists themselves lack any discernable creativity or talent. Leni Riefenstahl, they ain’t.
And yet the major studios, industry press and paid online “influencers” continue to march lockstep with this dull, ugly, lifeless agenda, regardless of how hard these products tank at the box office, or how many subscribers they shed. Their new religion seems to have made them immune to even huge losses of market cap — which is terrifying when you think of how greedy these bastards are.
And yet, I saw what I saw.
It happened.
And it was glorious.
Can you guess which show I mean?