My folks wouldn’t let me watch it, either.
There reason was similar - The Nazis and Holocaust weren’t something to be belittled.
So I’d add Dragnet (the original series) as it pretty much single handedly created the idea of the police as brave uncorruptible public servants, putting themselves in harms way to protect the law abiding public from the terrors that lie in the underbelly of society, rather than the bumbling idiots they are portrayed as previously (e.g. Keystone cops or inspector Lestrade from Sherlock Holmes)
Not only that this wasn’t an inadvertent side affect of the plotlines or a reflection of societies attitudes to cops. It was a deliberate piece of propaganda by the LAPD, intended to have exactly that effect.
Oprah was a cultural juggernaut rivaled by few other daytime talk show hosts. Maybe Jerry Springer is next in line after Oprah as far as their influence on popular culture went. I certainly won’t argue Oprah was the worst talk show host, but she had such a cultural footprint that anything harmful on her show reached far more people than most other talk shows.
Nitpicking: The Oprah Winfrey Show was based in Chicago.
You’re right- I should’ve fact-checked but thought that was just Phil Donahue
We were regular watchers of Hogan’s Heroes when I was growing up. The only pushback we ever got about it was my father commenting that if the Germans had been half as stupid or incompetent as they were in the show the war would have over in a year.
Of course, this may have had something to do with him being of German descent. (His father had emigrated to the US in 1901, so there’s no chance he would have been a Nazi sympathizer.)
Read the Wikipedia entry on Oprah. She had a very hard childhood. Despite that, she went to college and immediately began working in television. She worked in Nashville and then Baltimore and then Chicago as a news anchor and then as the host of a talk show. She produced many other shows and appeared occasionally on television and movies. She could get lots of famous guests for her shows because she didn’t ask them very hard questions. She is now the third richest person (after George Lucas and Steven Spielberg) in the entertainment industry who has appeared on screen or who works at a job just off screen (rather than just financing things). Had she asked more of her guests hard questions, she would probably never have been as successful because she wouldn’t have got as many guests.
There was a similar thing in the UK with the film version of A Clockwork Orange. Kubrick had it pulled from distribution there (but not in other countries) and it wasn’t shown again until after he died.
I recall reading how a Drano murder in one of the Dirty Harry movies inspired a true crime murder (more torture than quick death like in the film). Looking for the details I found “15 Movie Scenes That Inspired Real Life Tragedies”. Read at your own risk.
This isn’t as bad as some of the examples in this thread, but I’ve always had a bit of a problem with Survivor. It seems that the key to victory is to be popular, form alliances, lie to people, and turn on them before they can turn on you. That’s probably an oversimplification, but it does seem to reward scheming and machinations more than cooperation and loyalty. Not the sort of behaviors I like to see lead to fame and fortune.
I’ve seen a few episodes, but never a whole season from beginning to end, so apologies if I’m missing the show’s more noble qualities.
I suppose The Apprentice was somewhat the same way. The catch phrase was “you’re fired”; are there really so many people who enjoy watching others lose their jobs?
Yes, I believe The Apprentice was deeply problematic.
In a similar vein I thought of Bear Grylls’ survival show ‘Man vs. Wild’. It was never about actual, practical survival advice, it was all about Grylls doing sensational stunts or eating and drinking gross things of questionable benefit to get eyeballs.
He’d rappel down waterfalls, or climb a fallen tree that had angled at about 45 degrees over a river to avoid crocodiles, or explore an abandoned gold mine to see if anything inside was useful. He’d eat raw game meat, drink his own urine, and once he even squeezed water out of elephant poop and drank it.
Even worse, he was a big ol’ faker-- those dangerous stunts were carefully planned and choreographed, and he even spent the night in hotel rooms in between ‘survival’ shooting.
Following Grylls’ advice in an actual survival situation was just about guaranteed to get you killed.
Isn’t that how the classic board game Diplomacy works? In the first few rounds you have to form alliances to have any chance to survive, yet in the end you must turn on them to win the game. I never heard anybody call Diplomacy problematic.
Diplomacy is the original “We don’t play that anymore because it causes too many fights,” board game. It’s pretty famously problematic in exactly the way Robot_Arm described.
I’ve thought Survivor was a reflection of 1990s downsizing culture, where while before your job was once just something you went in and did all day, now your job meant gaming the system to avoid the corporate hatchet-men. Jeff Probst’s previous career was as a smarmy internal PR weasel at Boeing, which we now know is a snake pit.
Even Jeopardy! has a basis of strategy over skill. Maybe that’s why it’s failed repeatedly in its UK version. Instead QI ran for years, with smart questions and answers followed by a brief, fun discussion on the topic.
I’ve never played Diplomacy, so I don’t know how it works. However, if you win a game of Diplomacy, you’ve won a game; win on Survivor and you get $1,000,000. I remember after the first few seasons the winners became rather famous, too, probably temporarily. If people want to be jerks to their family members for the sake of a game, that’s one thing. Making rich heroes out of those jerks is another thing, entirely.
I don’t think so. The current strategy is to select clues that are more likely to contain the Daily Doubles, partly to keep your opponents from getting them, but that only gets you so far. You still need to get correct responses to win.
Also, there isn’t any sense on Jeopardy! of forming and breaking alliances among the contestants. I have no problem with spirited, fair competition between people. I’m not a big fan of folks who stab others in the back to advance their own interest. I have a bigger problem when back-stabbing seems to be the whole point of a game.
It was essentially a Business gameshow. None of the contestants lost an actual job.
I know, but it still seems like a strange sort of scene to celebrate.
I thought the Daily Doubles were placed randomly. What strategy would help you pick a Daily Double?
Not entirely randomly. They’re almost never in the top row, and rarely in the second row.
It used to be de rigueur to select the clues in order from top-to-bottom, easiest-to-hardest, and to often continue in one category for several clues in a row. I haven’t seen it done that way in a ong time. Most contestants now will start with clues in the third or fourth row, and to jump randomly from one category to another. The explanation I’ve heard is that it increases the chance of finding a Daily Double, and jumping around keeps the other contestants off balance.