Too Much TV: Defining The Line Between 'Bending The Knee' And Simply Preventing Mediocre TV
In a collaborative business, determining why a decision is made can be challenging.
Here's everything you need to know about the world of television for Monday, May 27th 2025:
IS IT 'BENDING THE KNEE TO TRUMP, OR SIMPLY PUSHING BACK AGAINST BAD CREATIVE CHOICES?
By its very nature, television is a collaborative medium. There are hundreds of decisions and pressure points along the production process and it's not often when you can point to a specific moment or decision and say with any accuracy, "this is what happened and why that choice was made."
Which tends to make my job as a journalist much more difficult as I try to explore the impact the Trump Administration is having on the TV shows being developed - or not being developed - in these challenging times.
For instance, there are a myriad of reasons why TV shows aren't picked up to series. And the general perception among TV producers I've spoken with is that the networks and streamers are looking for more Trump/conservative-friendly programming. And that's likely the reality, although it's difficult to find any actual examples of that trend. How much of this shift is due to what the networks & streamers want vs. what producers *think* they want? After spending dozens of hours talking to people, I can't answer that question with any clarity.
One showrunner recently gave me a couple of examples of notes they received from an executives about lines the executive felt should be eliminated or changed. And while it's true they were lines that would have been seen as anti-Trump or anti-conservative, they also weren't especially great lines. So it's hard for me to say for sure politics was the primary reason behind the requests.
I had someone else complain about Prime Video's lackluster promotion of the recent comedy series Clean Slate, which starred transgender actress Laverne Cox. This writer made the argument that Prime Video didn't adequately promote the series because it was scared about blowback from conservatives. And that likely was part of the decision-making process. But it's also true the series was first ordered and produced by the now-shuttered Amazon streaming platform Freevee. And Amazon has similarly dumped most of Freevee's other original programs onto Prime Video with little or no promotion.
I have no doubt a fear of Donald Trump and his administration is having an effect on the shows coming to your TV screens. But it's also true that any series premiering was likely ordered six, nine or even twelve months ago. So anything new you are seeing now was ordered long before anyone knew Donald Trump was going to win the election. Much less predict how he was going to view Hollywood.
SPEAKING OF A MORE 'CONSERVATIVE' HOLLYWOOD
A piece in Wired entitled Hot Farmers, Trad Wives, and an Immigrant Reality Show: Welcome to TV’s MAGA Era is getting tons of attention today and it kinda, sorta touches on the issues of producing television under the Trump Administration. But it is so awkwardly constructed and written with so little context, you would be hard pressed to know if this was a thing or not:
Julia is a 22-year-old model, student, and self-proclaimed “princess” from Malibu, California, with one nonnegotiable: She refuses to shovel cow shit. But she’s down to play the part, she tells Farmer Jay, handing him a framed black-and-white photo of her in a bikini and cowboy hat. Grace, 23, dreams of being a stay-at-home mom with four kids. Jordyn, a 29-year-old country singer who lives in Nashville, Tennessee, says she would relocate across the country for her partner.
The three women are among 32 contestants on the most recent season of Farmer Wants a Wife, Fox’s rustic spin on The Bachelor. They come from different backgrounds and have all sorts of interests, but their goals are ultimately the same: to settle down, get married, and have kids.
While the women don’t explicitly talk politics, their focus on traditional values fits into a genre of entertainment that is rapidly reshaping the industry: Welcome to Hollywood’s MAGA reboot.
Sounds bad, huh? Except for the fact that the show is not a reaction to the Trump Administration. The series is a reboot of a show which first premiered on The CW in 2008. Oops. And yes, the women of the show do talk about wanting to settle down, get married and have kids. But that doesn't make them necessarily part of the MAGA movement. That is the most likely choice for someone wanting to live on a farm. Part of deciding to have that lifestyle is becoming a partner with the farmer in question. And as any farm wife will tell you, her life is as much about helping to organize and run that farm business as it is being a traditional wife.
Maybe you’ve also noticed the subtle changes on your TV screen—content that favors Christian values, heartland themes, or law-and-order style programming. Yellowstone, the Paramount drama about cattle ranchers in Montana, gained a massive audience during Trump’s first presidency, routinely breaking ratings records, and has since spawned successful spinoffs. Tim Allen’s Shifting Gears, about a grumpy widower with manosphere viewpoints, is a ratings hit for Disney’s linear broadcast audience, with “more live viewers on average than The Conners season 7 and Abbott Elementary season 4,” according to ScreenRant. It pulled in 3.7 million viewers for its season one finale. Farmer Wants a Wife has held steady ratings, averaging 1.5 million viewers weekly, and works as easy counterprogramming to more raunchy dating fodder like Temptation Island and Too Hot to Handle (both on Netflix).
Sigh. Tim Allen's new show is not that much different than the television he has been making since the 1990s. Yes, he's conservative and so are his TV characters. But it's not some creative pivot in the television industry due to a reaction to the MAGA movement.
My biggest problem with this piece is that it conflates being set outside an urban area with being automatically politically conservative. And while ranchers are more likely to be conservative than not, anyone living in Montana or South Dakota or in any of those surrounding states will tell you there is a wide range of political opinions and beliefs. And the politics in those areas is a lot more nuanced than someone in NYC or LA might think. You might be very culturally conservative, yet support protecting national parklands and working to prevent climate change, which are seen as very liberal causes.
Yes, pressure to create more conservative television is a real thing. But as this Wired piece illustrates, there is a also a great deal of smug dismissal of the people living in America's heartland by creatives living on the more reliably liberal coasts.
ON THE OTHER HAND
News broke earlier this evening that President Trump has offered a pardon to reality TV stars Todd and Julie Chrisley, the former stars of USA Network’s Chrisley Knows Best. The pair was sentenced in 2022 to 12 and seven years in prison, respectively, for "conspiring to defraud community banks out of more than $30 million in loans and evading federal income taxes for years."
But daughter Savannah has been publicly pushing hard to overturn the convictions:
A vocal Trump supporter, she spoke at the Republican National Convention last year and also visited the White House in February to lobby for a pardon for her family members.
During her RNC speech, Savannah Chrisley said her parents were “persecuted by rogue prosecutors in Fulton County due to our public profile” — appearing to try to draw a connection to District Attorney Fani T. Willis, who indicted Trump and others in connection with their attempts to reverse Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia. However, the charges against the Chrisleys were federal and filed under then-U.S. District Attorney Byung J. Pak, who was appointed to the role by Trump.
The worst part of this for TV viewers is that last week Lifetime greenlit a new Chrisley family TV series:
“In the wake of the family’s controversy and upheaval with their parents sentenced to time in federal prison for bank fraud and tax evasion, the Chrisley family is now pulling back the curtain and offering unprecedented access to their lives in a deeply personal and dramatic new series,” a news release for the project said. The series will follow Savannah’s effort to get a presidential pardon for her parents while also maintaining custody of her two younger siblings, according to the release.
Sigh.
YES, RANKER HAS JOINED THE AI SLUDGE MOVEMENT
There are a lot of challenges in the entertainment journalism business. Google has changed its search business into a way to optimize AI recaps of other people's work, the Penske Media regime continues to strangle the top end of the trade journalism business while most of what's left continues to cut pay and rely increasingly on rewritten press releases to generate stories.
But from my perspective, one of the most loathsome problems are the AI sludge farms. They often feature a bit of original "journalism," but in recent years have shifted to mostly computer-generated crap. Stories that sort of read like actual journalism, but include a number of perplexing errors and awkward editorial choices.
One of the more irritating iterations of this AI trend is Ranker.com, which launched in August 2009. It was founded by Clark Benson, who saw the site as an alternative to traditional review web sites. Readers would rank their favorite TV shows, movies and other forms of entertainment. Ranker would publish those lists, with journalist-written wraparounds and pieces that would make it easier to license the info to other companies.
But as you might imagine, this business model is a fairly low-margin one and while the company reported $22 million in revenue in 2017, the situation is apparently a lot less rosy in 2025. And when it's time to tighten the belt, why not lean into those computers, who will crank out somewhat accurate stories for pennies?
Senior Entertainment Editor at Consequence Liz Shannon Miller noticed back in April that a piece posted on Ranker quoted her review of The Minecraft Movie, although it included things she did not write. Which is often the calling card for cheaply-produced AI crap. She also had a strong suspicion that the byline on the offending piece was not a real person.
And it's a problem I've noticed for awhile at Ranker. From what I can tell, less than 20 percent of the bylines on the site can be identified as being an actual human being. There are an increasing number of bylines from "journalists" who have no presence online other than their Ranker profile.
And then there are the bylines like the one named "Lila Reid," which uses a profile photo that was also used on a 2017 Facebook page for someone named "Belinha Ferreira."
So it didn't take me long to find the profile photo is actually a piece of clip art available for free on OpenClipArt.com. I could be snarky and mention Ranker was so cheap it didn't even bother to pay for clip art, but that would be tacky of me.
I found a few other similar examples as well as some bylines that seemed suspiciously made-up, although I can't prove it. And I suppose on one level, expecting actual journalism from a site that is primarily cranking one #1-20 rankings of things such as "Best Prison TV Show" or "Sexiest Boy Band" is perhaps asking too much.
But given that no one is visiting Ranker for the bylines, I'm not sure what executives there think they are accomplishing by just making up journalists.
ODDS AND SODS
* One thing you can do to help support independent media is by pushing YouTube TV and Hulu Live TV to add C-Span to their lineups. The network is facing a financial crisis brought on by cord-cutting and receiving carriage fees from either one of those services would go a long way towards securing their future viability.
* Max has renewed Hacks for a fifth season.
* CBS is scheduling Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen in the 12:30am slot for the 2025/26 broadcast season. That follows the decision to end After Midnight after two seasons. This is certainly the cheapest option the network could choose and while the show previously aired in the timeslot before the premiere of After Midnight, it's a disappointing choice.
* While the official review embargo for the series hasn't lifted, I can say that I really enjoyed the new Netflix series Dept. Q. It took most of episode one for it to settle in for me, but it turned into quite a challenging and entertaining ride. It premieres on Thursday and I’ll have a link to the review in tomorrow’s newsletter.
WHAT'S NEW TONIGHT AND TOMORROW
WEDNESDAY, MAY 28TH, 2025:
Adults Series Premiere (Hulu)
F1: The Academy Series Premiere (Netflix)
Government Cheese Season One Finale (Apple TV+)
Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster (Discovery)
In The Kitchen With Harry Hamlin Season Two Finale (IFC)
Raid The Cage Season Premiere (CBS)
THURSDAY, MAY 29TH:
And Just Like That.....Season Three Premiere (Max)
Bob's Burgers Season Premiere (Fox)
Death Valley Series Premiere (BritBox)
Dept. Q Series Premiere (Netflix)
Family Guy Season Premiere (Fox)
Grimsburg Season Premiere (Fox)
Jersey Shore Family Vacation Season Premiere (MTV)
Mad Unicorn (Netflix)
Scrublands Season Two Premiere (AMC+)
The Better Sister (Prime Video)
To Get Her (BET+)
The Great North Season Premiere (Fox)
SEE YOU ON THURSDAY!