Wesley Pruden at the
Washington Times offers a piece on the return of Roseanne and faith-based films geared towards the grassroots .
The grassroots keep sending
messages to Hollywood, but usually nobody’s home. Oblivious to real lives
outside the California bubble, the masters of the fanciful, the absurd and the
bizarre wouldn’t read the message, anyway.
But the town that tinsel made
is agog, if only temporarily agog, by the triumphant return of “Roseanne,” the
ancient television comedy that went off the air 21 years ago. The first revival
episode drew more viewers than its farewell finale two decades ago.
“While nostalgia was expected
to bring in eyeballs,” Deadline Hollywood, an aggregator of entertainment news,
breathlessly reported on the morning after, “no one predicted such a huge
amount on premiere night for a blue-collar family sitcom with a Donald
Trump-supporting protagonist, especially among the younger generation
demographic. But then, few predicted Trump would become the Republican nominee
and would win the presidential election when he first announced his candidacy.”
In fact, Hollywood and many
correct-thinking Democrats still prefer not to believe it. The premiere of the
resurrection of Roseanne Barr of “Roseanne” delivered its highest ratings in
Tulsa, Cincinnati, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Oklahoma City, Detroit,
Buffalo, St. Louis and Indianapolis — just those places in flyover country
where Hillary Clinton, Hollywood’s gift of the magi, lost the 2016 election.
Bicoastalism survived as
expected. Neither of the two top markets gave “Roseanne” much of a look. New
York was not in the top 20, and Los Angeles did not make it to even to the top
30. These markets were left looking from afar on the working-class audience
that both Hollywood (and the Democrats) crave.
It’s an audience with the
bucks by which Hollywood measures everything. Art is nice, but not necessary.
Junk and trash, with spaceships and lasers and bombs and bullets spraying blood
all over the screen, always sells, particularly to the children demographic to
whom Hollywood aims its art. Hollywood is only capable of being agog about one
thing at a time, but some of the wiser heads have noticed the remarkable growth
in the size of the audience for “faith-based films.”
The surprise this year is “I
Can Only Imagine,” a story about an abused child, surviving a violent, drunken
father and who grew up to write the hit song of the title and reconciled with
his abusive father after he had a dramatic conversion to repentance and a new
life in Christ. The movie was aimed not at Sunday school but at the wider
audience, without giving short shrift to the power of authentic faith.
You can read the rest of the
piece via the below link:
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