The Hollywood-based entertainment industry appears to have written off most of America in Flyoverlandia (according to this post) as hopelessly unwoke, racist and dumber than dirt, in their untiring efforts to embody the soul of Woke in their various offerings. Apparently, they believe in an audience just waiting uncritically out here; An audience intellectually gape-mouthed like baby birds just waiting to swallow uncritically whatever gets dropped into them. In pursuit of that goal, according to the same article, they have made their own professional hellscape, what with the growing fear that one wrong word, tweet or visual will make them the unemployable target of their peers, in the grand scramble for achieving ultimate wokery by scapegoating each other. Couldn’t happen to a nicer lot of vicious, vacuous, jerks, hypocrites, and pedophiles … even as the audience for movies released in theaters drops through the floor, and the most-watched continuing streaming video drama is one which has done so practically unnoticed by the mainstream news and entertainment media. Hollywood’s current travails are of their own making. Meanwhile, it appears that lot of us have been abandoning establishment mainstream TV and movies with all speed and finding other stuff to watch of an evening. Old and pre-woke movies, and classic TV series; so, OK, the sets and costumes are laughably low-rent when it came to production values. Many were filmed or taped in the same old locations, year after year. I do cherish the memories of spotting many off-set locations for such programs filmed in the Los Angeles area as places that I knew – as well as spotting utility poles and the backs of warehouses in the vicinity of Griffith Park in action shots for the original Wild, Wild West series, and a short stretch of the then-unfinished 210 freeway through the Shadow Hills for car chases on Chips. (We also spotted the same old industrial sites and abandoned quarries where so many episodes of the Blake’s 7 crew set down planet side.)

Anyway, what the current wokerati in Hollywood appear to have forgotten is – there is so much out there to watch. Even if you limit yourself to color movies shot after WWII, or TV series after 1970 or so – there is so much out there, and from every nation which has a movie- or TV series capability, and is available (for now, anyway) on DVD, or streaming on various subscription channels. There’s high-quality historical series like Mr. Sunshine, set in turn of the last century Korea, which I’ve been watching intermittently. My daughter likes interesting police procedurals and historical documentaries from everywhere – British mostly, although there was one from Turkey about their special forces, which she appreciated for the gritty, realistic feel to it. Even Tube of Ewe, for its’ many faults and their own political double-standards, has a glorious sufficiency of original and intriguing stuff: reality series by family units who have no problem putting their personal lives and challenges out there … hey, they’re volunteering and in control, as opposed to those poor attention-starved clots who have signed over their lives to some Big Media Producer to basically be a kind of performing monkey. Frankly, I’d rather watch those families in Flyoverlandia do their various home-building projects, mostly for their complete lack of artifice. Lately, I’ve started watching a restoration series, LADB Restoration where a couple of mostly faceless craftsmen restore rusty and decayed antique household and industrial appliances to functioning use. They do complete metal and wood fabrication of elements too far gone to repair (and some of them are very far-gone, as assemblages of rust and wood-rot held together by habit alone). They are supervised by their genii of place, a ginger cat named Avril. It’s strangely addictive, as is EpicUpcycling – another gentleman crafter with an enviable collection of wood and metal-working tools, who builds elaborate furniture pieces out of old wood pallets and scraps of this and that. I’m certain that the woodwork designs are so elaborate and ornate because the wood is basically scrap, and the designs have to hide that as much as possible. Still – I am overcome with envy at the collection of power tools on hand and wish more than ever that I had been able to take wood and metal shop classes in high school, and the temptation to try my own hand at renovating something rusty and ruined is almost overwhelming.

So what is out there – and not out of the Hollywood entertainment complex that you are watching these days and evenings?