A show about fake ultrarich people played by less rich people watched by poor people. A show that has pretensions about flagellating the rich while still somehow revelling in their debauchery and parasitism, a sort of recursive self-awareness that is supposed to somehow absolve the characters (and the irl rich?). Somehow it is both the sale of anti capitalism back to the anti capitalists whilst also scratching a Keeping Up With the Kardashians itch for watching the inter-familial spats of our feudal overlords.
A contemporary Game of Thrones where everyone is bad and there is no good and it’s just a TV show so it doesn’t matter, which handily conceals the fact that our everyday reality is literally this show, and that the stakes in real life are actually weighty and have moral and material value and can easily be viewed as right and wrong.
Along with a healthy dose of “their daddy was mean to them so it’s not their fault they’re all disgusting bourgeois pigs”.
What the fuck. We desperately need prolekult. I’m so sick of this two faced culture that sells our own hatred back to us and pokes the reward centres in our brain - “hey you just watched a pithy comment that could KIND SORTA be construed as anti capitalist on a million dollar show on a billion dollar network, you’ve done your leftism for the day!”
What stage of capitalism is it when everyone is so widely aware capitalism sucks that the most successful business model is pretending you agree that capitalism sucks?
AAAAAA
Wait isn’t succession about how incompetent and fucked up the characters are. Like they’re not even good at doing the one thing they should be good at
Halfway through the pilot I realised, yes, it’s probably good, but rich people in NY? I’ve seen that already.
I think the shows I enjoyed most in the past few years all took place outside of the clichéd NY/LA settings. Righteous Gemstones, Justified, Fargo. Recent Breaking Bad discourse also had me curious if it’s success is not partly explainable by its setting of New Mexico not California as they intended.
This thread is full of leftists subtly talking themselves into supporting the Hayes Code lol
First world leftists are so alienated from the idea of a genuine proletarian revolution – though not entirely wrongly so – that they can only imagine getting into power as like a Blanquist takeover where all media needs to be managed personally by the party from above rather than destroying the material and social bases for reactionary thought in the first place.
What stage of capitalism is it when everyone is so widely aware capitalism sucks that the most successful business model is pretending you agree that capitalism sucks?
Capitalist realism bro
Yeah, same with It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. There is a thin veneer of a moral standpoint, the characters recieve ocasional comeuppance for their naked greed and capitalist ambition as small business owners, but ultimately the puppet-master production company behind all the decisions is obviously also trying to sell us on the glory of being an all-day alcoholic who goofs off with your friends and gets into bad-natured hijinks. The failure of both shows to be anticapitalist propaganda is why you can immediately disregard any leftwing ‘activist’ who claims to enjoy either
it’s a show about one insane rich guy funding his own schemes and those of a group of absolute scumbags. everyone hates them and they literally never succeed because they act like crabs in a barrel. pretty much every episode has them receiving comeuppance because the next episode shows them back in the bar doing whatever bullshit they fill their lives with
It’s ok to enjoy things that aren’t activism. In fact, entertainment by definition is not activism.
The moralism here is weird. If someone enjoys a show that isn’t Das Kapital then they aren’t a leftist?
I don’t think art is really praxis at all. Hot take maybe.
The impulse to categorize all art into “good and leftist” and “bad and capitalist” and applying some type of moral value to consumption of one or the other is a form of moralism. Neither are good or bad to consume, you are just consuming entertainment either way and it doesn’t matter
I think some of it is leftover Christian puritan brainworms. It’s a personal “sin” to consume certain art, and a personal “penance” to consume other art. Personal art consumption is not praxis, and policing the consumption of others is extra silly.
Watch the art, or don’t. Have your takes and interpretations, discuss it. I don’t buy that it’s some sort of anti-praxis if you watch a “bad” show.
