My only mistake was trusting a Frenchman with the fondue

Halloween is the best holiday, because unlike Christmas - with its forced comradery, a shallow and unconvincing association with a religious ceremony (Oxford comma) and rampant celebration of consumption, is more a distilled version of all that's wrong with Western civilisation than it is an actual holiday - you get to opt in or out of Halloween, making this is the absolute best month of the year.

Mostly.

The seasons of the year have moved away from days of being bombarded by nightmarish global warming-induced heatwaves to days of nightmarish global warming-induced Arctic winters which are made all the worse by it now being too expensive to turn the heating on so WOOOOOooooOOOOOooooo - that's my spooky sound effect for something scary, fyi - now Halloween really is a terrifying holiday, as it marks the point where your bills get too expensive for you to survive.   WOOOOooooOOOOoooo time to get a third job delivering food in your increasingly expensive car during your diminishingly fewer off-hours while pooping and peeing in a carrier bag oooOOOooooOOOoo and so on.
Yes, for one month, we can make-believe that the world is a terrifying place only because we've decided to pretend it is, and not because of the economic collapse and mass die-off of people in our social circles that are dropping dead from overwork, mental health issues, or even - oh yeah because that's still a frigging thing - the god damned pandemic that is absolutely still in full swing and creating a backlog in the still-underfunded NHS so bad that even serious conditions unrelated to the global death virus are going unchecked.  I caught it like two months ago, my dad caught it yesterday - it's still a thing.  The pandemic is still a thing.  Like four, five months ago I had to go to two covid funerals in one day.  I had to skip the walk from the chapel to the cemetary behind a guy I once worked with so I could wait around for another service.  Good times.
Anyway, I spent one October a few years ago watching nothing but horror-based media for the entire month, and I thought I would do it again this year.  Why?  No idea.  Do I need a reason for an act of indulgent whimsy?  We're closer to nuclear annihilation than we've been in decades, so why not forget that and just watch some movies about werewolveses and gobbalins?  It's my dang blog, I can do what I want.  When I actually post on the bastard thing, that is.

OCTOBER 1st
Despite being my all-time favorite movie monsters, there are very few objectively good werewolf movies, and 2021's WEREWOLF CASTLE is not one of them.
High definition really does no favors to cheap period-set horror movies, as within the first minute or so we're watching "medieval villagers" in machine-stitched clothing running around their pristine village of brightly-coloured signs rendered in recogniseable fonts and affixed to houses built of factory-produced planks - occasionally consulting multicoloured laser-printed maps - before scant seconds later, we're watching a kid encounter a dude with long hair and fangs who tells the child "My name is Wolf Stan.  My friends call me Wolf." and maybe I'm jumping the gun here but I am ready to call it on who the werewolf is.  Also this film may not be creating an entirely convincing illusion.  We'll see.
Obviously I am being faecitious and unkind for the purposes of satire, and I actually liked the straight face with which all this was delivered combined with the obvious camp of the two-piece werewolf costumes - yes, costumes, not CGI - that look like off-model Chewbacca cosplayers.  Yes, you can see the very pixels that join together the componant elements of every composite shot and the stitches in every costume so there is absolutely no chance of not seeing how naff the monster costumes look up close, especially in the day-for-night sequences and those scenes where the director or camera operator has decided to just let the auto focus on the digital camera do its thing, but all the way up to the inevitable final swordfight in a castle with tarmac on its roads and aluminim safety rails on its battlements, it's a schlockfest in the best spirit of the season.  Maybe calling it complete trash is unkind, but I'm struggling to think of a way to acknowledge the cheapness of proceedings while also mentioning that I did, in fact enjoy the film, even if I might never watch it again.

OCTOBREEEEEE 2nd - The Munsters (2022), a remake of old tv sitcoms The Munsters and The Munsters Today, a while back the trailer was leaked and people devoted almost a whole four hours on Twitter to rubbishing it, which is practically an eternity in internet years, and to be fair, in isolation those clips that made it into the trailer made it look like a catastrophe to the point that the dreadful RedLetterMedia made a whole video about it, but watched as a whole, the actual film is quite enjoyable camp in the style of the old shows, right down to the terrible jokes, comical misunderstandings, funny noises when someone falls over, and mugging actors - though one thing it has that the shows didn't was access to an eye-searingly garish colour palette, which is actually kind of fun and nice to see in an age when almost everything has to be dour and visually desaturated.
It's really old-fashioned in that Saturday morning movie kind of way that those of a certain vintage who remember terrestrial UK television will understand.  There's no gore, nudity or foul language - it's basically the least Rob Zombie movie that Rob Zombie has ever made - so it's perfect entertainment for kids.  Or at least it would be if the little devils didn't all have the attention spans of a gnat thanks to social media exposure atomising their ability to focus.  If they were still capable of sitting still and watching something that didn't have screaming goats or exploding heads in it, though, your kids could absolutely watch this without you having to worry about them for an hour and a half - yes, a movie that's less than two hours long.  I warned you it was old-fashioned.

OCTOBER 3rd - NOPE (2022), being Jordan Peele's third directoral outing, and very enjoyable it is.  Best gone into cold, in my opinion, but it's to be commended for making UFOs not just spooky again, but outright terrifying.

OCTOBER 4th - today's frightful offering was 2003's DEAD END, a film about a family stuck in a car on a seemingly neverending road, and not only will you guess the ending in the first five minutes of the film, but you've probably guessed it already from what little I've told you of the premise.  Don't let that put you off, though, as this was well-made and acted even if some of the character notes that the actors had to work with were a little too broad.  If nothing else, it's nice to see Ray Wise deliver the line "I forgot the number for nine one one."

OCTOPOPOPOPOR 5th - PUMPKINHEAD 2: BLOOD WINGS starts off poorly, with a physically-deformed man being beaten, stabbed and hung before being dropped into a well by a drunken teenage mob as his mother screams in agony as she feels every blow inflicted - and all this makes it kind of hard to defend the horror genre as goofy camp fun, because this sequence is just unpleasant to watch, and sadly a paradigm of what is to come in the following 90 minutes.  It's a shame, because the titular Pumpkinhead is an impressive practical effect, created by the late, great Stan Winston, only slightly let down by the director deciding to keep the cabling and wires used to work the full-sized creature clearly visible onscreen, and particularly easy to pick out because of some garish lighting choices.
Despite the usual "I expected a higher class of entertainment from a film about a giant killer homunculus called Pumpkinhead who spends his time murdering rednecks in a series of increasingly cheaper and more violent sequels" ripostes from facetious losers still writing blog entries in the year of our Lord 2022, I do kinda expect these things to be aware of their own level and not quite so po-faced that the gruesome things they depict just become a chore to be endured.  Well anyway, I didn't really like this, and it has Andrew Robinson in a mustache, so you know I tried.

OCTOBER 6th - 1933's THE INVISIBLE MAN introduces its central hook pretty early on, but then it's got a brief run time of 68 minutes as well as that title so I guess hanging about or being coy was never really an option.  All the same, I liked that it took a few minutes to establish some semblance of mystery as to the condition afflicting the main character when he turns up covered in bandages one cold winter night on the doorstep of a rural inn, but within 10 minutes he's stripping naked and vandalising the village while laughing maniacally, before finally calming down and deciding that if he wants to stop giving people the impression he's some sort of crazy man, he needs to do a series of random murders.  "We'll begin with a reign of terror."  He says, rocking back and forth in his chair. "A few murders here and there - murders of great men, murders of little men.  Just to show we make no distinction.  We might even wreck a train or two."  Yeah, I am not sure how this guy created an invisibility formula, to be honest, he doesn't strike me as much of a thinker, even before he announces "I had to kill a policeman to keep warm", and I am not a brain scientist by any measure - you only have to peruse the contents of this blog to see that - but even I know that this is not how thermodynamics work.  I did find his "reign of terror" rather quaint, as he goes about throwing random hicks down hills and derailing Thomas The Tank Engine while the cops sit around a big table scratching their heads hoping for a snow day.
Not very terrifying by modern standards, but entertaining hokum.

OCTOBER 7th - Technical difficulties arise as I accidentally watch SAVAGE DAWN (1988) thinking it was some other film I had lined up, but I continued to watch it afeter realising it was something else, as it has Lance Henrikson kicking bikers in the head for 90 minutes in a contemporary retelling of Shane, and I am, if nothing else, a man of simple pleasures.  Not even remotely horror-related apart from, of course, our man Lance's lengthy career as a genre player in classics (such as Near Dark and the original Pumpkinhead), as well as starring in complete trash (like the original Pumpkinhead), but an entertaining distraction, if only for the fight scenes, which seem unchoreographed to the point they look like Lance and the lads throwing down for a laugh after kicking-out time at their local pub more than they do action scenes.  Utter tosh, but amusing.  To me.
To keep the horror marathon going, I had to pull double time by watching Sh! The Octopus, a 1937 comedy mystery you probably know as the origin of a certain gif that did the rounds on Twitter a while back.  The central mystery is about whether or not a crime mastermind called The Octopus is at large in a lonely lighthouse populated on a stormy night by a cast of the usual characters, but also there is an actual octopus in the film because I guess they were worried that moviegoers might feel cheated otherwise.  And also there is a witch.  It's... actually pretty entertaining, and you can watch it if you type the name and year of release into a Google or Bing search, as it's rather obviously fallen into the public domain since 1937.

OCTOBER 8th - THE MUMMY (1959) oh yeah, baby, gimme some of that sweet Hammer House Of Horror action.  It remains inexplicable that Britain retains a reputation for classy cultural entertainment when it gave the world a studio so dedicated to producing utter trash full of gore and tits, but to be honest, most of British comedy is just telling a dick joke using words of five or more syllables and somehow the country has still ended up being seen as the world's primary source of enlightened witticisms rather than a holding area for horny dads perpetually retweeting Marina Hyde articles into my Twitter timeline.
Likewise, British horror still projects an image of gothic melodrama in period costumes despite the best and most memorable examples to hail from these dismal isles of wailing spirits being utter nonsense like this racially-insensitive zombie revenge flick featuring (then) living meme Christopher Lee as an "Egyptian" priest revived to take vengeance upon the Englishmen who disturbed his resting place.  The obvious problem with this setup is that considering how many cultures the English have plundered, I, like many others these days, was on the mummy's side and thought the colonising grave-robbing fuckers had it coming.  This is - unusually for British media of the time - actually called out by one of the characters, but we're explicitly supposed to view him as a cultist and zealot, so it rings as hollow as the rebuttal from Peter Cushing's character that if the British didn't dig up sacred graves, how would they ever find out about their contents?  Specifically, if those contents would look nice in the British Museum, or mounted in one of the Queen's billion pound hats.
There's a lot of coincidences in this film, too, from the protagonist's daughter being the spitting image of an "Egyptian" princess despite being a caucasian English woman, and the resolution of the central mystery as seen from the protagonist's point of view hinges on hearing a non-white has moved in next door.  I mean, yes, he's described as "an Egyptian" by the working class Joes of the English home counties and even the actual protagonist of the film offers "this is simply too great of a coincidence!" but... yeah, this is actually a Heck of a coincidence given the specific Egyptian curse-related shenanigans going on, especially as this is also a remarkably specific ethnic identifier even for a culture as potty for all things Egyptian as late 19th century Britain was, and I know from living in London that he would almost certainly have simply been identified by a far more generic slur beginning with the letter P and no-one would have been joining any dots between that and a spate of reanimated corpse-related murders.  There's a bit where Peter Cushing just spends about five minutes insulting the Egyptian dude in his home that I thought was going somewhere, like he'd figured out that this was the guy who'd been directing the mummy to commit murders and was trying to goad him into tipping his hand, but afterwards he goes home and makes it clear that he doesn't know either way and had just gone into this guy's home and called Egyptians a bunch of backwards savages with a stupid religion.  I can't prove it, but I think this character is supposed to be Winston Churchill's dad.
I'm waffling now, but I did enjoy this, just like I enjoy most Hammer offerings for the lowbrow unpretentious fare they are.  Good fun all round, especially if you're white and don't let brownface and general cultural insensitivity bother you too much, and luckily for me, I am an utter clod.

OCTOBER 9th - WEREWOLF BY NIGHT (2022), the latest Disney/Marvel product, and it's as boringly competant as all the rest, this time rather blatantly stripmining the classic Universal Monsters franchises of their most discernable characteristics, seeing as the actual Universal movie studio, when it recently remade many of the original monster movies such as The Mummy and Dracula, decided not to use any of those movies' most discernable characteristics to sell their brands and instead went with the usual washed-out colours and CGI spectacle.  Werewolf By Night instead tries to go retro, but with only marginal success as it still retains all the positives and negatives that make a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie so identifiable, most notably the over-designed characters, which is quite a trick to pull off when your main draw is a guy who looks like the old wolf man - in that he's just a dude with hairy shoulders and a set of those glow in the dark fangs that they used to give away with British comics all the time.  The human who transforms into the wolf man has lots of face tattoos, and these appear on the wolf man, too.  They just had to make a classic design more fussy than it needed to be, I guess.  Maybe it's a legal thing.  Eh.
I did enjoy it while it lasted, so don't mind my ragging on it too much, I'm just trying to fill the blog inches here.  The standard Marvel Studio type of "boring competance" that everyone keeps complaining about is plenty good enough for me, to be honest, and I'm not sure what people want when they say "I wish they'd try something different from the standard formula that's made these movies the most lucrative entertainment franchise in the history of human civilisation", like maybe they want Iron Man to be played by an elephant, or for dialogue to be recorded and re-dubbed backwards.  Who knows?  Marvel can keep churning this stuff out and I'll keep watching it like the uncultured dog I am.

When I go see Tottenham, I know there'll be no stoppin em. When I go see spurs, Its cold.

 

Dang but  ICE ROAD (2021) is one dumb film.  It's basically an episode of a cartoon show from the mid-1980s about truckers fighting evil corporate polluters, and at one point even has a slimy corporate guy try to blow up the heroes with a stick of fizzing dynamite.
The plot revolves around Liam Neeson as mumblemumblemumble, a long-haul driver in the desolate wastelands of Canada who can't hold down a job because of his explosive temper which now and then prompts him to violently defend his brain-damaged veteran brother from mockery.  They dream of owning a Kenworth truck and Neeson's brother even carries a Kenworth brochure which he peruses onscreen while listing the many fine features of the Kenworth range of long-distance haulage vehicles.  When Neeson's brother passes, the coroner solemnly tells Neeson "we found this in your brother's things", and rather than a St Christopher, a treasured family photograph of the pair in happier times, or his Congressional medal of honor, it's the brochure for Kenworth trucks - his most prized possession, which Liam Neeson then takes a moment to peruse on-camera while his brother's corpse stiffens nearby.  I am going to go out on a limb and say that I think Kenworth trucks might have given the production some money.

I don't know why I'm bothering to write a review, to be honest: it's a Liam Neeson film - an actor who knows his lane and sticks to it - and you know what you're buying into.  I did like that the film featured a First Nation actor, though, as in acknowledging First Nation people exist, the film has already done better than the actual country of Canada, which tends to only acknowledge the existence of First Nation people when its politicians have to go in front of a camera to dismiss a pile of battered bodies that has mysteriously appeared without explanation in front of a First Nation drinking water reservoir, and by "a First Nation drinking water reservoir" I of course mean an oil pipeline construction site.  Like the Canadian government, I constantly get these two things confused.

This is the whitest thing I've ever seen, and I've seen those shoes that have toes

 

Lucifer is not bad in the traditional sense of poor acting and writing - though it's not a good performer in those areas, either - but it is most definitely a cringe-inducing show for the viewer.  The concept of "engagement" as the ultimate barometer of a show's worth is a relatively new development, but in Lucifer's case it was unavoidable, from its beginnings as a One Million Moms-baiting concept to its eventual fate as a refugee from network television that found asylum on Netflix, where it no longer had to structure itself around the demands of advertising slots and the writers could do anything they wanted - literally anything, from more violence, nudity and swearing, to any possible storyline they wanted to explore being on the table.  Nothing was taboo, and all they had to do was keep their audience engaged.  Which they have done by making a show that is often amazingly bad.

While what has been produced is not very good, surprisingly, it seems to know it and doesn't care - like when a character has an epiphany in their relationship with the titular character by figuring out the plot structure of the average Lucifer episode and uses it to better understand his motivations and impulsiveness, saying out loud "he's projecting his latest issues onto the case" which for the show's writers is a bit like Donald Trump just absent-mindedly tweeting about his crimes.  No subterfuge or being coy, just... "that's what we did.  So what?"  No-one worries about telling the audience the simplistic formula writers have used on this and many other cop procedurals, because this is Netflix, baby, and we know exactly how many episodes we have to work with and then we're done with this nonsense forever.  Except Netflix renewed it for an extra 10 episodes, so it doesn't end when it was supposed to.  Presumably the ratings for this have been really good, the ploy to make something so embarrassing to watch that people tune in to hate-watch or rag on it with their friends has worked better than expected, or it is just really cheap to produce.  I suspect it's this last one, because it often looks really cheap for a show that can afford to licence so many pop and rock tracks.

Lucifer is really cringe, is what I am saying.  It is bad television and I would not recommend it to anyone, I am just saying it is interesting - to me, and possibly only to me - to see something autopsy itself in real time.  Some very capable and charismatic performers do their best with sub-par material, but there's only so much polishing they can do to that material before it starts smearing all over their hands and crumbling.  Tom Ellis, if nothing else, must be complimented on his very fine ass.

Every mining camp should have a hanging tree - makes folks feel respectable

I thought I would go back to blogging at some point, but then 2020 happened.

For what it's worth, while my last post in which I predicted humanitarian disaster for the UK was entirely correct in its central thesis that the NHS is this benighted and backwards nation of despair's one good achievement, I - like everyone else except perhaps the Wuhan Germ Warfare Planning Department THIS IS JOKE PLS DO NOT CANCEL - had no idea how or why this would turn out to be proven true, and yet doctors and nurses are still not worth a 1% pay rise because Britain is an awful country and I am glad it's dying.  Quite frankly, it can't happen soon enough, because I am tired of the white British male's refusal to integrate with modern society.  If they don't like multiculturalism and knowing people's preferred pronouns, they should just clear off and live somewhere else.  Oh no wait they can't because they voted for that Brexit thing.

Anyway, I guess for the good of my mental health I'm writing this blog again.  I only stopped for the good of everyone else's BDUM TISH etc but I mean, what could I really say about The Plague Year that wasn't already being said by far more eloquent others?  The depths of callousness and disregard for human life from the UK's establishment has been as unsurprising as its sociopathic opportunism, but the sadly-dwindling body of genuinely good and caring people of this nation pulled us through despite our best efforts to embrace oncoming disaster and pile bodies high rather than disrupt Business As Usual because we have been conditioned to sooner embrace the deaths of millions than ask for a momentary show of restraint from capitalism.  Sweet jeepers this exercise was supposed to be good for my mental health, but clearly things are already going badly.

In whatsoever place that I enter I will enter to help the sick and heal the injured, and I will do no harm

I occasionally lapse into talking about The Politics on this blog, and it says a great deal about me that this usually happens when I'm trying to talk about the plot of an episode of Magnum PI and not when there is an actual General Election in this increasingly awful country.
Can you blame me, though?  The politics of a Magnum PI episode at least won't send a sane person screaming from the room like they've just watched a tentacled thing unfurl itself from a lower dimension like an origami swan made of rotting meat but anyway the election's nearly over and I guess in a week or so we say goodbye to the NHS, as the Americans come to improve it like they improved Bolivia, Chile, Afghanistan, Iraq - you know, all the other places they went to and made better for the inhabitants.
The NHS has not just made life materially better for us all but also made altruism a part of the country's DNA rather than the racism, atrocities and enabling of American corporatism's never-ending war on the poor that's pretty much the only other thing that's a constant about our failed empire.  We are at heart not a good people, I am sad to say, because we are descended from conquerors and their servile playthings and nothing good can come of a nation that is proud of this rather than angry or ashamed - but for a time, we had the NHS.  People would come from around the world to learn in the halls of its hospitals how to care for the sick and the disabled, and they knew this was the only place they could learn it because all they would learn elsewhere was how to deliver the most cost-effective treatment rather than the best.  We sent forth from our shores the best doctors, the best nurses, and being a country that spawned this wonderful institution which contributed not just to the treatment of the sick of this country but the betterment of humankind allowed us to lie to ourselves that this terrible, hateful nation was not a thing that needed to be scoured from the Earth and its patriots mocked for the damaged children they were and driven into the sea to be eaten by crabs or bummed to death by the Innsmouth people, because we were the British Flipping Isles and the worst thing about us was that occasionally we would produce one of Richard Curtis' films.
And now we're just the country that invented concentration camps.
In Yarl's Wood we refined positive spin for concentration camps because we knew that when people thought of concentration camps they thought of open-air prisons full of skinny people and ringed with barbed wire, and not anonymous red-bricked warehouses in a random corner of a business park in Bedford.  Through the finest British ingenuity that gave us 11,000 dead Kenyans, we've not just rehabilitated the image of the unthinkable but made it a profitable business model to export.  We laugh at the Americans' clumsy caging of brown children and then just letting any old senator with a camera walk in and take pictures because we don't even let our elected representatives through the front gates of our concentration camps - we do it right and hide them like the shameful secret they should be.
We may be a small-minded, racist nation of bull-necked gammon that will not stop until we hear only English spoken on our high streets and only white people have our dreadful low-paying zero-hour jobs because we are the British Fucking Isles and we are going to Hell and we're taking you all with us, but for a time, we were a people that helped.

Oh and also the planet is on fire.

I salute your honesty, my dear - not necessarily a quality to be despised

Let's take a look at a list of the utter garbage I've been shoveling down my mental gullet with all the awareness and distinction of a pig at a trough this last week or so, shall we?

Bull - a US tv show about a rich guy who tries to get money from other rich people who aren't as nice as he is and give it to poor people, because rich people only care about money, and not the important things like family and... puppies.  This is a show with a confusing set of priorities and a smug lead character that often confuses being an arsehole with being clever and/or right, though that's pretty much every lead character in an American tv show, and has been for quite a while.

Some thing with Jimmy Smits whose title I can't be bothering Googling but which clearly did not make a lasting impression: see above.  A law thing where Jimmy "HOLY" Smits plays the dad of a lady lawyer but it was so ham-fisted I can't even remember if she was the idealistic one or if her dad was, or which one of them had to convince the other to use their law powers for good - well anyway it's another Jimmy Smits winner.
I don't know why I'm being sarcastic - I like Jimmy Smits.
Make me a Bail Organa tv show, Disney, you cowards.

Magnum PI and also

Hawaii Five-0 - these are essentially interchangeable shows set in Hawaii about ex-marines tackling violent crimes while surrounded by underwear models.  Occasionally they help a sad child with a problem that involves either parental involvement in crime, or sexual trauma, they have big muscles and salute the flag at least once an episode.  Now and then a gay person will appear and they will be totally cool with that person's sexual orientation - most likely they will even take time to lecture someone about loving gay folk unconditionally, and then possibly within the same episode or even the same scene someone will make a homophobic gag of some description, usually implying that a male character is in some way too effeminate.
There was a recent episode of... uhhh.... let's say it was Magnum, not that I or anyone else really knows the difference, and there were some Hawaiian protestors doing their protesting about Hawaiian things that I know nothing about but I will still lay good money it boils down to something white people did wrong - because if you follow the news in even a cursory fashion it always is - and a Hawaiian character makes an appeal to some police officers who are also Hawaiian to consider their heritage and not arrest all the peaceful protestors who are doing nothing but occupying private land meant for property development and the cops take all of a hot second to decide they have their orders, and no kidding, "only obeying orders" is not challenged or redeemed at any point because these are shows 120% in the tank for both the military and militarised policing.  The unambiguous message is that cops will absolutely mess you up if you challenge capital, but they will do it "with a heavy heart", which as anyone who's been following British politics lately will know as the rallying cry of bougoisie bastards like Brian Cox and Robert Webb who are off to vote Tory on December 12th.
Okay I think I might be letting my personal politics get in the way of enjoying perfectly good Western capitalist propaganda, but getting back to these shows, they really are interchangeable to the point that the Halloween episodes of both shows were about escaped lunatics, and someone in one of the shows actually says "what are the chances of there being two escaped lunatics on Halloween night?" even though this happens literally every year, and is an annual Hawaii Five-0 event.  Yes I am steeped in Hawaii Five-0 lore - I might be an irredeemable communist but I'm still addicted to bullshit tv shows.

You won't solve all of the world's problems with kindness, but none of the world's problems can be solved without it

This will come as something of a surprise to the (checks view counter) three people who read this unpopular and despised blog, but I tend to watch an awful lot of really bad television and films.
I don't mean "bad" in relation to their objective quality or production values, though a lot of them certainly aren't good when evaluated in those terms, I mean in their philosophies and in what they contribute to culture, and what they say about us as people.  Years ago, I stopped watching US medical shows for reasons I didn't fully understand as I hadn't explored my own political views in any meaningful way, though I assumed I was some kind of limp-wristed liberal because I liked Star Trek, but it's only recently as I've slipped to the dark side - the left - that I've come to understand that my objection to American medical dramas stem from an understanding of one of the fundamental principles of anarchist political theory: that all cops are bastards.
I will assume you are not aware of the underpinning philosophy and explain: not all cops are actually  bastards by dint of incomplete lineage or in the vernacular sense of being a troubled individual with histories of questionable morals and/or actions, but all cops, in being cops, are representatives of an oppressive mechanism of control that acts in the interests of capital rather than the interests of the populace, and are - through collective guilt - to blame for its failings which at worst manifest in the widely-publicised actions of "bastards", thus all cops, in their active support of this system and its bastards, are bastards themselves, hence "ALL cops are bastards."
I realised that I had stopped watching medical dramas made in the US because all American doctors are also bastards.  Interestingly, this is not purely because they support one of the worst healthcare systems in the world that is essentially a glorified kidnapping racket in which paramedics roam the streets abducting the vulnerable and pressganging them into a life of debt slavery, though obviously a good person would never condone this atrocious state of affairs let alone actively participate in it, no, I mean they are bastards because they act like it.
I don't think that real-life American doctors are as big a bunch of assholes as the doctors on tv, but to be fair, I am pretty much certain that this is not possible as it takes literally dozens of overpaid writers months of creative back and forth to make doctors in American medical dramas as utterly unlikable as they are, and some schlub just out of medical school hasn't got the time or energy to replicate that kind of effort on top of managing their work-life balance while staring down the barrel of their own lifetime of debt.  Anyway, the doctors on US tv are assholes obsessed with money, so that's why I stopped watching medical dramas, but there is also a case to be made that since they support and materially benefit from a system which preys on the poor, they are not just assholes personally, but collectively.
Ugh I am pretty sure I started out this post trying to figure out if I should stop watching American cop shows because they're just propaganda - is "copaganda" a word?  It should be - for a corrupt imperialist nation of warmongering capitalist psychopaths but this is the kind of thing that distracts me now, and I just made you read about it.  So who is the real asshole?  Impossible to say.