Has The American Story Jumped The Shark?

Once upon a time we all gathered around to watch the American Story play out on TV. It was THE show to watch. It was a simpler time back then, with fewer channels to chose from. And while many of our televisions were unable to show color, still, it was wholesome broadcasting where nobody spoke too cruelly or acted too violently. Good guys were good because they did good things and bad guys were bad because they were mean. Donald Trump would have been a bad guy back then.

Families from the Cleavers to the Bunkers only needed one bread-winner to support the family. Sure, there was a division of expectations among the sexes, but a family only needed one bread winner! Heck, it wasn’t even that sexist. Irene Lorenzo was Archie Bunker’s next-door neighbor and she was the bread winner, allowing her husband to stay at home. Because the expectation was you didn’t need two people working to support a family. And the conservative Archie Bunker never laughed at the idea of an uneducated laborer earning a living wage because HE WAS an uneducated laborer earning a living wage as a forklift operator.

Sometimes the America Show was awful but sometimes it was miraculous. We were so disgusted with such plot twists as the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy that many of us vowed to stop watching, only to be sucked back in by the amazing sight of a man setting foot upon the moon. As hard as it was to watch sometimes, it was seldom tawdry and often epic. The narrative, as I first came to know it in the early 70's, was that of a flawed character with a troubled past who showed a desire for redemption and was making many of the right moves to atone for past misdeeds.

But I can’t help feeling the series has jumped the shark in the last couple of years. Big time. I mean, look at who they have as the leading characters these days, utterly laughable in a not funny sort of way. There’s not a one of them who has any depth of character or any real likeability factor. How many of them would you want to have to work with or live next to? The Kardashians? Please. The Clintons? I wouldn’t trust them around my daughter or my wallet. The Trumps? They’re just a retread of The Beverly Hillbillies, what The Flintstones were to The Honeymooners. Plus they’re a lot less likeable. Hell, I’d take Grannie over Donald any day and as for the rest, well there’s no contest. At least Jed had some downhome wisdom to him.

And the same plotlines are constantly being rehashed, in Libya as it was in Iraq, in Syria as it was in Libya, with the same situation on the horizon in Iran. “Evil regime oppresses its own people and America must go make everything right.” God that one’s gotten old. They don’t even bother to set up the scene any longer, they just jump right into the violence. No real explanation for it, no build-up with credible characters holding vials full of anthrax, just gratuitous violence. It is spectacle over substance, and it just smacks of desperation. No different from professional wrestling or sleezy daytime soap operas, yesterday’s trusted friend becomes today’s villain, becomes an ally again tomorrow.

And, oh God, please let them come up with some new villains. Sure, Russia was an intriguing antagonist in the 80’s, when you had Sylvester Stallone battling Ivan Drago and fighting in Afghanistan as Rambo, but it hasn’t stood the test of time very well. And Russia is not the same (alleged) existential threat as it once was. The storyline has lost all its snap.

It’s not just Russia, It’s Russia Russia Russia. And the plotline is all over the place. One day the Russians are hacking the French election and the Vermont power grid and the next day that’s not a thing. Don’t they have anyone working in continuity?

The resolution to every episode is a Deus Ex Machina rather than flowing logically from what we the audience have come to understand. The free market comes down from a cloud to rescue us, or a new hi-tech weapon magically zaps the bad guy or a new miracle drug solves our most pressing problems. In the end, the only solution to any problem is to privatize it, medicate it, or bomb it.

In fact, the entire writing staff seems like they’re just going through the paces. They’re working for a paycheck rather than a passion for what the show has meant to so many of us viewers for so long. They’re shoveling slop in a trough for us and they’re getting paid outrageous sums of money to do it. They seem to have very little connection to the history of the show and the characters and ideas that we came to know and love. Rather than do a little research or grapple on how they can make new events fit in with the history of the show, they simply retcon things or not even bother to reconcile what is happening now to what has gone before.

And all of the main characters, the ones we loved, the ones we were willing to tune in for week after week because they exhibited so many fine and noble and endearing qualities, have been killed off pointlessly in order to make a simplistic and ugly narrative work. And those who haven’t been killed have either been marginalized or written out all-together as if they never existed, people like Ralph Nader and Chris Hedges. Sure, they weren’t the flashy characters you see nowadays, but they added depth and emotional resonance to the drama. They took a little while to understand, but you loved them the more the more you understood them.

Let’s face it, the writers of the script have lost touch with what made the original story so compelling in the first place. They’ve lost respect for the viewers, the ones who really matter. Instead, they work for the advertisers, slipping in product placement and selling every sort of merchandise they can imagine with the show’s logo on it.

We’ve seen it happen to our some of our favorite shows before, and we know that when it gets to this point it won’t be long before the show gets cancelled, and fittingly so. It’s best we remember it for what it was in its prime rather than allow poor production to tarnish our memories.

This is not to say that there is no way of retrieving it from imminent cancellation. This series can still be saved, in fact it can be made better than it ever was. But to do that, we’ve got to bring in new script writers, people who are knowledgeable about and reverent of what the show is all about at its core. They’re out there. So many dedicated fans of The America Show have been writing their own fan fiction on fan-sites where true aficionados of the show meet and discuss what made it great and what could make it great again. Their work is done not for money but for love. These types of writers would quickly write out the ridiculous cast of characters now dominating center stage, these clowns and floozies who parade in front of the camera oblivious to how sleezy they really are. We’ve got to bring in compelling actors with integrity, intelligence and character. They’re out there, we’ve got a stack of spec scripts awaiting implementation. We’ve got a ton of actors’ resumes of fresh new faces willing to do daring and edgy work, willing to break new dramatic ground. We’re sick of the thin facades and the painted masks that attempt to provide entertainment for us. It is a play designed for children, a ruse meant to dull our senses rather than give us something of substance.

Give us back the story we knew and loved.