Timothy Birdnow

Last Man Standing, the Tim Allen's popular family sitcom, is being revived by Fox.

Last Man Standing was a hit at the Disney-owned ABC, but Allen's male humor coupled with an unwillingness to completely cave to political correctness, made ABC eager to cancel the show, which still maintained a good rating. Disney has essentially become Central Television of the USSR (CT-TV) doing more agiprop than what people want to see.

The reboot of Roseanne no doubt was a large part of why Fox decided to bring the show back. LMS is the story of Mike Baxter, right wing vice president of a sporting goods chain "outdoor Man" who is raising three daughters and a grandson. Baxter is rather old school and likes the rugged image and detests whiny liberalism. His oldest daughter, who gave birth out of wedlock, winds up marrying the father of the child, who is a flaming leftist and one of Baxter's foils. His middle daughter is a shallow young lady who winds up marrying Mike's employee, a dim-witted by good hearted fellow, and his youngest daughter hero worships Mike, and is a tomboy as a result.

I can't make up my mind about the show. It's funny when it stays out of politics, but politics is an important componenet. Unfortunately Allen has to bend over backwards to keep the show on the air (and failed to do that) and thus he gives too much credence to the left wing perspective. He does make conservatism a normal choice and not characatures it as so many shows do, but he gives the weaker arguments most of the time while giving the stronger, more reasonable arguments of the Left. I get annoyed at the show frequently, because I could nuke the liberal characters (and that is all of them save Baxter himself - even the youngest is pretty much a feminist and environmentalist. At one point she's embarassed of her mother for being a geologist for an oil company, for instance.)

But at least the show gives a defense of the Right, and shows we are not the monsters the media try to portray us as.

I frankly wonder how this reboot is going to do. Family shows are hard to reboot after the kids grow up, and like all such shows it was in fact losing steam. Hopefully Allen will have some interesting things to do with it; we have nothing that even makes an attempt at portraying conservatives in a decent light.

Television has been markedly liberal for as long as I can rememeber. And television shapes the underlying attitudes and assumptions of the public at large, in a subtle way not easily amenable to reason or persuasion. It is one of the cornerstones of the Progressive empire, and it is part of what must be reshaped in order for any sort of national restoration to take place. And we desperately need a national restoration.

Despite all the talk about the new media, for instance, a Gallup poll I came across a couple of years ago showed over fifty percent of the public still gets it's news from television. And while there are these trendy, edgy shows on Netflix and the like, people still watch broadcast television, and the sitcom may be waning but it still has a powerful effect on the American psyche. Just look at how popular being a nerd has become since The Big Bang Theory, for instance.

So Kudos to Allen and company (and the extremely talented Hector Alizondo) for coming back for a seventh season!

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 06:35 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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