Political material buried in fiction shows.

Andrew Sullivan reprints a reader's email complaining about anti-Bush material woven into the dialogue on "Six Feet Under." First, there's a statement Nate made on the July 18th episode, which is best described by Television Without Pity's Djb, who writes:

Nate "Go Ahead With Your Own Wife, Leave Me Alone" Fisher sits at the Fisher family kitchen table, reading the paper. He mumbles, "Bush just lies and no one cares" to my endless amusement, in a sparkling pearl of partisan dialogue that is like a gorgeous flower popping up through so much manure.

Second, in this week's episode, as the Sullivan emailer describes:

This time it's Ruth's husband George, reading "Perfectly Legal," a book by a New York Times reporter claiming that the super-rich gouge the middle class. As he puts the book down he says (paraphrasing), "They're just hollowing out the middle class until there's nobody left." Later in the episode he's seen reading the book again. Nothing else in these scenes addresses this activity.

In the same episode, Claire and her friends create art on the walls of her room, making several comments along the lines of "dropping bombs and calling it peace," and painting the phrase "Terror Starts at Home" on the wall.

Sullivan's only comment is that anyone "sophisticated enough" to be watching this show probably won't be influenced. But why even see these lines as functioning as an anti-Bush argument? Only the first one--"Bush just lies and no one cares"--is presented in a context that suggests we ought to believe the character. Nate is the most important character on the show, the one who might be seen as representing the writers' view of things. But at the point when he says this he is deeply depressed, so whatever he says is a development of his character as a depressed person, whose view of reality is dark and distorted.

The context of the other two lines eagerly invites us to reject the statement -- especially since we're "sophisticated enough" to be watching the show. Why would we believe anything George says? That character lies all the time, and we've been given reason to have all sorts of suspicions about him. This "sophisticated" viewer sees the book title "Perfectly Legal" and thinks, hmmm, I wonder what crimes George has committed? Murder? "[H]ollowing out the middle class until there's nobody left"? This is a show about dead bodies! If George said that you should be flashing on a picture of George with a large knife and one of his many former wives that we keep hearing about. The Sullivan emailer seems to think one of the characters ought to address the political arguments in the book. Why is he even watching a fiction show? The fact that no one addresses his activity is just one more place where the viewer is encouraged to be ahead of the family in figuring out that George is a monster.

And as for Claire and the art students slopping paint on the walls and blabbering about the war: These people are all high on drugs! And they are pretty idiotic even when they aren't on drugs. What suggests that we should be buying their political opinions? It is more the case that we should view their statements as the sort of thing flaky, drug-addled, self-indulgent art kids would say.