TV "Programming"

[Ninurta]

Ninurta and I must be watching similar old TV programs on the same broadcast networks, so he should relate to my observations.

I have been watching the cowboy western TV shows on CW network, they have a lot of the classics from the 50s through the 60s. I find them interesting for a number of reasons, one thing of interest is the plots of the story lines.

In the older TV series, like Rawhide and  Wagon train, the stories have a moral to teach. Wagon train is highly conservative with morals involving the law and Christian beliefs. Pretty much all of the shows from the 50s through about the mid 60s had a plot that involved a lesson to be learned at the end of the program.

Now, sometime in the late 60s and early 70s, the story lines changed. I suspect that Vietnam played a big part, but I also suspect that film director Sam Peckinpah had a lot to do with how westerns changed during that era.

The TV series Gunsmoke ran from 1955 to 1975 and is a good example of how these stories changed. I watched one episode from later in the series with a plot that was just senseless violence and cruelty with Marshal Matt Dillon unable, or unwilling, to come to the rescue. No lesson to be learned, no moral to that story, just mindless gratuitous violence and misery.

Another thing I noticed is that the earlier westerns portrayed the Native Americans as violent dangerous savages (the only good Injun is a dead Injun) and Mexicans as peaceful and hard working villagers. Then by the 70s, Native Americans were characterized as peaceful and the Mexicans became vicious criminal banditos. Toward the end of that era, shows like the Wild Wild West and  Spaghetti Westerns  were more like parodies of the earlier ones and apparently anything goes after that point. Some of the newer westerns like "Dead man" (1995) with Johnny Depp and "Bone Tomahawk" (2015) with Kurt Russell are really bizarre and disturbing.

I've noticed that, too. The changeover to excessive "wokeism" in TV shows seems to have occurred around 1967 or 1968 in earnest, although some earlier show did exhibit it as well. "Highway Patrol" had some wokeism built into the scripts, but the cops were still "good guys" who only excessively exercised their god-like powers for good... then "Dragnet" put the wokeism on steroids, but the cops were still mostly "good guys", but trying to enforce their woke version of morality rather than law. After about 1967 or 1968, we started seeing all the "bad cops" and "cops on the take" enter into mainstream TV and movies.

As you mention, westerns follow the same pattern on about the same timeline. I suspect the writers and directors were trying to inject "realism" into their scripts, but their version of reality appears to be heavily colored by popular opinion among the younger generations rather than objective reality as shown in historical records.

It's absolutely true that Indians could be violent and dangerous savages, but what is rarely pointed out is that the white folks who met them were usually just as violent, just as dangerous, and just as savage. They had to be, in order to not just survive, but prevail. It wasn't a one way street, in either direction, and there is damned little entertainment that accurately shows that.

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