I have spent the better part of 15 years passively consuming slop on streaming services. I watch the good stuff too, but I relied on the churned-out, over-lit rubbish to tide me through break-ups and house moves and incapacitating hangovers. This kind of show can be ignored as white noise, or you can actually watch it, smiling gormlessly at the familiar beats and amiable faces. The slop goes down easily because it is so formulaic that it barely has a form. I will watch eight seasons of the incomprehensibly inane octogenarian dramedy Grace and Frankie over the course of a particularly difficult winter and, by the time it’s over, I’ll have forgotten the beginning enough to restart it.
In 2025, though, there were a few moments when something disrupted the slop – tiny off-key blips that jarred me out of my self-induced stupor. At first it was merely a benevolence so pronounced it seemed perverse; why were all these characters peering earnestly at one another and exchanging aphoristic reassurances about tomorrow’s sunrise? Then there were the plot points so rote they seemed torn from public-service advertisements – sneaking alcohol, underage driving, pre-marital pregnancy. Finally, there was actual group prayer or invocations of Christ disrupting girls’ dinners or a barn dance. Wait a minute, I thought, is my slop Christian slop? Is my slop conservative slop?
Earlier in 2025 I realised with alarm that I had watched all 64 episodes of Virgin River, which is so repetitive it’s difficult to relay in even the most general terms. The programme follows a plucky, traumatised nurse named Mel who moves to a small town in Northern California in order to leave her past behind. The show, which debuted in 2020, is adapted from a series of romance novels by Robyn Carr, a Christian. Though the adaptation isn’t overtly religious, it has the sober undertone of Christian soap operas: the wise-cracking homespun wisdom of surly but good-natured old coots, the valorisation of rural community, the insistent reminders of military sacrifice. The absence of religion feels odd, like an accidental omission; fans on Reddit ask each other if the long-sleeved modest dresses of the leading woman indicate a particular denomination.
If Virgin River is the melodramatic expression of the good old heartland aesthetic, Sweet Magnolias is its more chipper and pastel-hued little sister.
Maddie (JoAnna Garcia Swisher) is a stay-at-home mother cheated on by her husband Bill, who is played by Chris Klein in a remarkable performance that leans into the gee-whiz, thank-you-ma’am American suburban stereotype so aggressively one swears his eyes actually begin to cross with the effort. She must rebuild her shattered life and look after her kids, swaddled in the overbearing care of her mother and her closest friends who call themselves the “sweet magnolias”. Here, the religion is all on the surface; nary a girls’ night can pass without one of the women pausing to thank Jesus for refilling their Margarita glass, and if Bill has transgressed by impregnating his assistant, well, at least he does the right thing and marries her.
There is something surreal about Sweet Magnolias, not just in its blinding colour palette, but in its insistence on a fictional, uniform and unrealistic America. It’s an America that is harmoniously and homogeneously conservative – no pesky dissenters to this way of life. Any character who exists outside the strict boundaries of their version of decency is either a villain or comedic fodder. Multiplicity must not be tolerated. It leaves me feeling worried and alarmed, like I’m being submerged in another person’s fever dream.
I began to realise, regarding the strangely fossilised tone of what I have been watching recently, that these are alternative universes in which the real world simply doesn’t exist: a timeline in which progressivism, multiculturalism and “woke culture” never took place at all.
T he American sitcom has been fertile terrain for culture wars, most directly in the case of All in the Family, which first aired in 1971. Patriarch Archie Bunker is a “lovable bigot”, who isn’t shy in delivering his judgements on black people, Jewish people, women and whatever other demographic he perceives to be taking his slice of the pie. In plotting so crass it seems designed to incite a race war, his black neighbours rapidly ascend the social class, moving to Manhattan as he, the white, blue-collar Everyman, shakes his fist from the proverbial gutter. He disputes the matters of the day with his more liberal daughter and her hippie-ish husband, articulating the generational divide of Nixon-supporting oldsters and free-spirited New Agers.
Each episode began with this message: “The programme you are about to see is All in the Family. It seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices and concerns. By making them a source of laughter we hope to show – in a mature fashion – just how absurd they are.” The show’s creator, Norman Lear, insisted he intended to lampoon Archie’s archaism. This was not how the material was received – Archie became a hero. While authorial intention can always be debated, especially where irony is involved, the theme song chiming out “Those were the days…” left little mystery about which direction the sympathy of the show was directed.
This year’s spring offering from Netflix, Leanne, devised by Chuck Lorre, the so-called king of sitcoms (Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory), appears to be a conscious return to the classic American sitcom format: a show that enshrines a lovable, irate, slob patriarch. But Lorre takes the values found in All in the Family’s slovenly Archie, and places them in a likeable woman, Leanne Morgan. After her husband of 33 years gets a younger woman pregnant and leaves her, Leanne must learn to make her own way in the big bad world – so long as it only extends to the Tennessee suburb in which she dwells.
But because of this different dynamic, the conservative tropes are actually more obvious. Some examples of this are harmless anachronisms – such as sickly sweet references to the location (“Of course we have a mason jar, we’re from the South!”) – while others are more depressing because they hark back to a time of conformity, when women had to apologise for their age and bodies, opinions and existences. The only regular non-white character is Nora, Leanne’s liberal, shrill, controlling daughter-in-law, who is a means of lampooning “woke” ideas about parenting.
The moment when I understood that a real shift had taken place was one not everyone would be bothered by. A pregnant woman is embarrassed because her weight is announced aloud at the doctor’s office: 142 lb (64kg). My body gave a little start. I have become used to it being thought inappropriate to label weights as “good” or “bad”. There had been a minor improvement in the way bodies were evaluated since I was a child, when I suffered from an eating disorder and would compare my weight to others’. But now we have gone backwards.
The meagre advances mainstream entertainment made in widening its perspectives already look dated. Nostalgia, that reliable staple of the right, is helping to solidify the regression. Nostalgia says to us: wasn’t it nice before, when you could say whatever you liked? Wasn’t it easier not to be forced to acknowledge that other lives different to your own exist? There was moral coherence, there was order, things were less confusing. Wouldn’t it be easier to go back to that time? The answer, of course, is that it would be easier – but only for a select few.
[Further reading: The Abandons needs a better idea than “girlboss Western”]
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This article appears in the 12 Dec 2025 issue of the New Statesman, All Alone: Christmas Special 2025
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