How will the #MeToo movement alter TV?

[Blue_Adept]

I've been rewatching the first season of Brooklyn 99 the last couple of days as I was looking to find something silly to watch amid back pain issues. It'd been a bit since I saw this particular season but it's so rife with workplace sexual comedy that in the current atmosphere it almost felt shocking - even though it's essentially the norm for ~any~ workplace comedy since forever.

Thoughts on how what's going on will alter these kinds of comedies, or if they'll be able to exist if they become targets?

[samnsara]

1. we will only have tv shows featuring all women casts is this continues..

[marble falls]

2. We won't be seeing Matt Lauer again for a very long time? I've been getting my news from women...

Rachel Madow and Joy Reed for quite a while now. Works fine for me. And Christine Amanpour is a better interviewer than Charlie Rose.

Seems like there may be a general improvement. How do we get rid of that gawd awful Chuck Todd???????

[Still Blue in PDX]

3. Context is everything, isn't it? I hope we don't go back to pre-Norman Lear days.

One of our Oregon state senators (one of the women in Time's list) commented on a Facebook post regarding the Franken/Tweedon incident that "joking about rape is never funny." I didn't see that photo as a joke about rape but as a stupid and immature . . . well, joke. I understand that such a thing might be a "trigger" for some women (gods, I hate that word), but I have had three quite memorable "me too" moments myself and the only thing that photo of Al triggered in me was the thought that it was juvenile. But so was what they were doing onstage, so probably not that inappropriate or unexpected among that particular group.

NB: Most of what I know about comedians and comedy writers is what I learned watching The Dick Van Dyke show growing up and reading books by Carl Reiner and Allan Sherman, et al.

[Blue_Adept]

4. Yup, I saw a lot of those types of comedians/writers growing up in reruns

And it was certainly different from what the newer 70's shows were with the sexuality and the like, and the increase in social politics mixed into it all.

My exposure to comedians past that was with the 80's boom and things like the comedy central boom with stand up and the thing that whoopi, billy, and robin did whose name escapes me. But the critical one for me were the comedians like George Carlin, and his way of skewering "common sense" thoughts about things like you can't joke about rape. It's all about the context.

I get the idea that if you see it on TV it can influence it to be acceptable in the real world. There's truth to that. The power of TV shows bringing more gay couples into mainstream programming made it a whole lot more acceptable in general.

But there's also that exaggerated sense of things where you get shows like Brooklyn 99 that play fast and loose with sexual politics where it's going to be more divisive. It'll change to some degree, but I'm wary of how much. Sorta like how a "hand on the hip" suddenly becomes sexual misconduct worth losing your job over.