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Originally Posted by Chris
I thought her revised suit was actually kind of smart, but I got to the point where I really couldn’t stomach being preached at by Millennial scriptwriters any longer. Whoever was making that show in its latter seasons lacked any kind of subtlety and had clearly never heard of the principle show, don’t tell.
I was reading somewhere last week, w.r.t. Star Trek Discovery, the reason why TOS worked and Discovery doesn’t, when it comes to what it considers to be knotty social issues, is that TOS generally just portrayed the future as Roddenberry saw it (so there’s a black woman on the bridge, and a Russian sitting next to a Japanese man, and they all just get on with it) whereas Disco’s writer’s can’t help lecturing the audience about gender ideology in screeds of dialogue on a weekly basis.
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Yes, there has always been political and social commentary in movies and TV and there hasn't been an increase in it but instead it seems to have become less nuanced.
I can't work out if it's always been like this or as the amount of television that's made increases we get more variance in quality of the writing. Maybe there has been a decrease in media literacy, and writers feel they need to be more didactic in their script to impart the message to their audience directly.
Marvel films are pretty bad for this even compared to other comic book movies. Marvel lacks any sort of dimension whatsoever even when it comes to the main plot points. Marvel trusts its audience has seen series 3 of whatever spin-off TV show they've made for Disney+ but they don't trust them to understand subtext. The Doctor Who Christmas special was bad for this as well, I have no problem with RTD choosing to express support for transgender people in his writing but he made the character solve the ending with their bi-status and directly say that out loud. It was a lazy cop-out.
As you said. Show, don't tell. It's why Parasite is such a great film. That's extremely political but at no point do the characters break off to tell you it's message directly with clunky dialogue.