MAKE ROSEANNE GREAT AGAIN

Trump has finally made good on his promise to make life for the American family great again!

Unfortunately they are the Conners and they do not exist.

Dan and Roseanne live in the very same Twilight zip code of The Apprentice where dreams come true, especially if you are easily seduced by all these splashy ads that they show in-between act breaks that are carefully crafted to  hypnotize you into spend lavishly, in the true style of Vegas, on cars, clothes or any number of drugs which just might lift you out of the real, actual depression, both behaviorally and financially.

The star of the show, like Trump, is a multi-millionaire loud mouth who is pretending to care about the average American Joe and Jane while laughing all the way to the bank.  

Roseanne Barr, I remind you, did not take a knee at a football game.  She manically shrieked the National Anthem at the top of her lungs and then grabbed her cynical crotch, just like, well, the other guy who prefers his crotches grabbed too.

Literally overnight, Roseanne has become the darling of Fox, which specializes in pretend patriotism by scripting intentionally distorted news and head spinning, zero logic or evidence free conspiracies in order to lure in the very same cheap seat crowd. The ones who are bleacher white.

None of the characters on Fox, especially Sean Hannity, are real and neither is Roseanne Conner.   And yet just as Dan Quayle did years ago when he attacked Murphy Brown for being an out of wedlock mother,  the members of his very same party are today cheering their new leader who is as fake and full of shit as Trump.

To understand how deep this goes, you don’t have to go any further than the ongoing response to last week’s March for our Lives.

To normal, empathetic human beings the march was a show of force led by emotionally distraught children who, instead of winding themselves up in frantic ball, chose instead to fight for their lives with unbridled courage, purpose and genuine patriotism.

Since the Parkland shooting over 73 children have been killed by guns.

That’s pretty much the number of all the actors who are currently appearing on sitcoms.

Poor or middle class America has all the reality it can take which is why they fixate on pretend TV people.

They are collectively desperate and scared which makes them cling even closer to the life that they know.....which is not serving them on any level.

To give up guns or racism or the insistence that marriage is for men and women only, creates a disconnect to their mommies, daddies, grandpas and grandmas and when you feel like a helpless child, forgotten or ignored, you hold on even tighter to what you know.,

That is why it takes a National tragedy to pull us, however briefly, together as one.,  But that doesn’t last very long. 

Within hours of say a shooting,  guys like Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh are already on the attack, spreading paranoia like clown confetti over their second amendment lambs who are being programmed, like a national TV network, to believe in what they are being told.

Television shows, plays and movies, except during Awards season, give us the truth that we think we want to hear.   

No one from Friends got ovarian cancer or committed suicide because having them for friends made them and by association, you, invulnerable.  

Procedural shows continue to dominate the airwaves because all mysteries and murders are solved in under sixty minutes.   

People win on Jeopardy right along with you.  

Your local sports team gets all your love and support and in return you spend thousands of dollars on their franchises and when they actually win a game, you feel like you did too.

America is one vast public relations stunt that pushes dreams as personal entitlement and fucks with reality so it seems like whatever is happening in the real world should be avoided at all costs.

That is not the American dream.  It is the American illusion.

Local news turns reality into a nightly nightmare.  They hard sell, with the swagger of a side show barker, violent crimes, violent deaths or crooked politicians who are claiming their innocence.   That will puff you up and make you feel superior.

Sometimes the daily tease is “A Cure for Cancer using Pineapples?  Tonight on News 7 a possible miracle cure.”  And then it turns out that some Hawaiian named Bob beat prostate cancer eating only pineapple for ten years.

Locally broadcast news wears us down to the point that we can’t wait for the goofy weathermen or upbeat sports guys to talk us off the ledge.  I find myself taking weather really personally.  It’s like the forecast is really about my own temperament.  A sunny day means one for me.   A dark and gloomy day: why bother getting up?

The cable news networks, like MSNBC and CNN are the liberals version of Roseanne.  

Their shows star and feature college educated professionals from the worlds of government and law who look, sound and think just like us, as they try, like us, to find some crumb of sanity, as their eyes roll around in their heads like the drugged out orchestra leader during the Ed Sullivan show in “Bye Bye Birdie.”  I’ll give you a second.  He was Russian.  Whacked out on speed.  Got it? Good.

Newspapers are the same deal.  

It all depends on what level paper you are reading.  Here in NY, The New York Post, which is Rupert Murdoch’s own, personal urinal, sells death, mayhem, Butterfly McQueen quality hysteria, preaches right wing nonsense and then leads you to your reward: Page Six gossip, the winning lottery number, your horoscope, the TV and Sports pages.  All that is nothing more than weeks old, pigeon-digested Wonder Bread crumbs that the hungry suck up like a three course meal.

People in the media do not, for the most part, give you a flying fuck about what you need.  They give you what they want you to think that you need so that they can make billions of dollars off your unreachable fantasies.

There are all sorts of alternatives, thank God.  You can always go have a chat with TED, listen to Teri Gross, watch a documentary on HBO or a sparkling show like Love on Netflix, which will inform your mind, body or soul.

But when it comes to the lower and middle class they think to their core that they are fresh out of choices and that is what Trump has capitalized on.   He is not an expert in anything but chaos and tantrums.  He is the Baby Boss.  No.  He is T’rump the White Panther from their walled in pond, exclusive and pure world who is going to make sure that the old world order will be protected by literally any means necessary.  They don’t want him to break the rules.  The want him to SMASH them.  

They want him to create the very same discord and panic that he has specialized in for his entire life.

He has never been in the construction business.  That’s for the American Mafia.   He has been in the destruction business which is the provenance of the Russian Mafia. which includes spectacular failure on the shoulders of thousands of day workers, including lawyers, who never to this day have gotten paid.

The Trump base digs Rap Master Putin, because they dig the whole thug mentality.

You see, what we see as a scandal, his base sees as a victory.  They want Trump to fuck porn stars, cheat on his wife,  collude with the Russians and as a reward, make a fortune by being president.

They do not want Shane.

They want Jack Palance. 

As long as he occasionally sits with  in-house bobble head Mike Pence, who seems to really like his men tanned with bleach blonde hair.

And this is what helped Roseanne come roaring back.

Trust me, the execs at ABC  did not sit around with the intent to nourish and and cultivate the souls of those who identify as neglected.

They just joined in on television’s #metoo movement which is now decades old.

Not being able to compete with the quality and laser focused depth of cable shows, Bob Greenblatt (who I happen to be a fan of) over at NBC, decided to resurrect Will and Grace, probably thinking that those who despise Trump which is most of America needed familiar faces and voices that were not Ari Melber and Rachel (who sound like part of the new cast of Friends) to calm them down.

TV, like Broadway (where Bob Greenblatt is a producer) is all about resurrection and we’re not just talking about Jesus Christ, Superstar (which is coming to NBC next week).  TV and Broadway are now one and the same.   On Broadway get ready for the return of Cher and Donna Summer, My Fair Lady, Carousel and god knows how many shows that are based on popular movies or your favorite local jukebox.

The reality is, cable does not have to play it safe because you are, in fact, paying it to be unsafe.  

The problem is there will be 500 scripted shows next year.  500.  If you watch just one episode a day for a year, you will still have 135 more days to go in order to finish and by that time there will be 600 scripted shows.

So to make your choices easier here comes Will and Grace, Murphy Brown as the stars of old timer’s day TV.   You KNOW them.  You LOVE them.  

But if this were baseball, that would only be the opening ceremony.   We pay to watch the young and vital, not the ancient guy in a wheelchair who throws out the first pitch.

It’s a fad.

But Roseanne is going to be misinterpreted as the clarion call to overload the networks with blue collar families.  Tim Allen, who is a conservative, is a lock to bring back Home Improvement.

One thing in Roseanne’s favor which I do like, is her struggle with inclusion.  Let’s see how many fights Jackie wins.

The real problem which we are faced with, thanks entirely to Trump, is not an issue of blue and red.

It’s an issue of black and white.  Just like the TV of the good old days where no one of color existed other than to welcome us aboard that train or to shine our shoes.

Just because Roseanne speaks the same language as Trump does not make it any easier to understand how a young, unarmed black man can be shot twenty times at night by cops in his grandma’s backyard.

It does not make it easier when the extreme right tries to destroy a traumatized teenager, Emma Gonzalez, because of the way that she looks or who she chooses to have sex with.

Roseanne is nothing more than another moment of vanity and narcissism for the depoorables (sp).  

She is a slick package of witty writing (just like a presidential speech writer) who will say and do the right thing and for thirty minutes make you feel like the networks see you and most importantly care.

They don’t.

They just want to get you to drink their Kool Aid, buy their Hondas and take the drugs that will make you numb and empty headed.

Which is just the way that they like it.