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rfmcdonaldI have a significant number of Firefly fans on my various friends lists who will have plenty to say about this starting news, as reported by MacLean'sJamie Weinman
The full post is about at the MacLean's site, while the list Weinman is talking about is here.
Like most lists of this kind, it suffers from several problems. One is the implication that it’s hard to enjoy something if you’re not in sympathy with its message. Another is that it assumes that a conservative character equals a conservative message: sure, Family Ties had Alex, but he always had to learn some liberal lesson at the end of the episode. But the biggest problem is that it takes certain values that are basically apolitical and defines them as “conservative.” I mean, Magnum is a conservative show because it portrays “a well-adjusted, happy Vietnam veteran?” CSI Miami is conservative because the hero is a practicing Catholic? And the argument that Buffy is conservative because it “acknowledges that evil exists in the world and we have a duty to fight it” is actually one I’ve heard in several places, and it makes no sense unless you completely buy into the stereotype of liberals as pure moral relativists. Otherwise, belief that evil exists is not a political value at all (it doesn’t become political until you decide what is and is not evil).
A lot of these lists tend to start from very strange assumptions about what will piss off liberals; another recent example is Sex and the City 2, where several conservative commentators floated the idea that liberals would hate it because it was against the oppression of women in Muslim countries. The idea being, presumably, that liberals love Sharia law. If you set up a liberal strawman, almost anything seems conservative by contrast. You could just as easily create a conservative strawman to prove that every show ever made is actually liberal, e.g.: 24 has portrayed corrupt businessmen, conservatives love businessmen, therefore, 24 is a liberal show.
The full post is about at the MacLean's site, while the list Weinman is talking about is here.
