TV shows like The Wire and Man Men are popular in part because of their unshrinking portrayal of reality of life in a broken world.
There is a place for this.
However, such “prestige TV shows” often neglect to portray the real beauty and goodness (read: grace) that also abounds in the world. That’s real as well, and there are shows that exaggerate evil or so comprehensively deny kindness, love, etc that the audience is actually shaken out of buying into the story.
This is, in part, because the acceptable ideological constraints required to work in Hollywood are way-of-life narrow, and almost completely secular. In ‘Egalitarianism As A Revolt Against Nature,’ Murray Rothbard wrote, “At the heart of the egalitarian left is the pathological belief that there is no structure of reality...that all the world is a tabula rasa that can be changed at any moment in any desired direction by the mere exercise of human will."
Film and tv allows directors to operate in a real sense as gods, creating entire worlds that grant them full executive oversight over even the most granular details of a story. They hire a cast to work as one, saying, “Let thy kingdom come, let thy will be done.”
This enables them to paint (at least semi-) credible and consistent stories that leave out God as a participant and either diminish (if not completely deny) or exaggerate consequences of choices made by characters. As Lewis once wrote, “You cannot go on seeing through things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it... If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To see through’ all things is the same as not to see.”
There are redemptive and “more real” portrayals of life on film, and I’m grateful to have met several people working to create holistically faithful work.
