Conservatives complain a lot about show business, but in fairness, show business is a suppurating pustule of leftist rot. I used to think that Hollywood had reached a singularity of sucking. That is, I thought it really couldn't go any further downhill, but I underestimated the ability of Hollywood to be terrible. I really did. I hadn’t even gotten close. The last week has put me over the edge. See, because of stupid politics, Hollywood has managed to screw up modern Venezuela as a setting for a show. It should be a perfect setting. You got a commie dictatorship, there’s chaos, dogs and cats are living together and are then being eaten by the locals because there’s no other food.
My, what an exciting location for some compelling action and adventure! Heck, my pal Matthew Betley even set his latest novel "Rules of War" in that palantir of California’s failed state future. How lame do you have to be to screw up that premise?
You have to be "Jack Ryan" lame.
So, season two of "Jack Ryan" has come out on Amazon, I think, or maybe it’s Netflix or Hulu or whatever. I pretty much have to write every day to feed your insatiable lust for my columns and books, all of which are incredible, but they take time and sometimes I like to relax by turning off my mind and watching the idiot box. Usually, I have Barkey the dog biting my feet as I try to drink a glass of wine. Well, when I tried to watch "Jack Ryan," it hurt more than the dog gnawing on my digits and the wine didn’t help.
So, I’m viewing this time suck, and Jack Ryan is going to have an adventure, and he’s going to Venezuela, and there’s stuff going on there, and I’m like, “Great, a show that will take on those commie bastards.” Finally, a real villain instead of some fake conservative evildoer.
Except in this version of reality, where Venezuela is about to get nukes for some reason, it’s not Maduro’s skanky dictatorship of the proletariat our hero is dealing with. It’s some run-of-the-mill, Latin general with rows of ribbons right out of the Big Book of Tired Clichés. And the plot surrounds this leftist social justice woman – they literally call her a social justice candidate – running for election against him.
Did I take crazy pills? Did I have too much of that wine?
On our planet, Venezuela has been a communist hellhole for going on two decades, but for some reason, Hollywood can’t face up to that. It can’t deal with the reality that socialism equals poverty, oppression, and murder. No, it has to send the hack writers off to sign out a bad guy from the warehouse of stereotypes, make it some old school caudillo, and that’s going to be our villain. Are they trying to suck up to Sean Penn and his pinko pals? Zombie Tom Clancy is going to come back from the grave and slap someone – he was a patriot and loved icing the commies.
We got through two miserable episodes of "Jack Ryan II." And the fact that they had to whitewash the communist angle was not the only bad thing. It was sooooooo boring to boot. This binge-watch thing can be good if your show isn’t awful, but when you have two hours of story to somehow stuff into 12 hours of run time, it’s going to drag.
We’re refusing to watch a lot of stuff lately because I’m not going to sit and be dissed. There was this "The Boys" show about evil superheroes that was kind of funny. We got up to the part where the heroine decided to go off on Christians.
Done. Dead to me.
There was this "Insatiable" series, really mean and funny despite starring Alyssa Milano (who makes a memorable appearance in my upcoming novel "Collapse"), until they started … dissing Christians.
Done. Dead to me.
The new woke "Watchmen" series on HBO. Nope.
Done. Dead to me.
There are a lot of shows we get a couple of episodes into and then…boom, what the great John Nolte calls “the leftist sucker punch.” Suddenly, after a show sucks you in, it starts sucking by launching some surprise attack on you. Well, I won’t play that and neither should you.
What am I watching? Well, not much, since I’m writing all the time, but when I do, it’s pretty limited thanks to Hollywood choosing to alienate half of America. We’ve recently watched "Schitt’s Creek," "Silicon Valley" and "Succession" (I cannot get Kendall’s VERY NSFW rap out of my head). None of them is by any means “conservative,” but I’m not demanding everything mirror my politics. What I am demanding, what is non-negotiable, is that the Tinseltown jerks do not presume to insult me.
And if they try, adios.
Hollywood will never make shows out of my action-packed yet hilarious novels, "People's Republic," "Indian Country" and "Wildfire." Too bad. The fourth, "Collapse," drops later this month, taking up where the others leave off. Will it annoy cruise-shilling hacks like Bill Kristol, who called them “appalling?” Yes. Okay, there’s my best blurb!
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