When’s the last time there was a TV episode about whether it’s OK to spank your kids? (On Last Man Standing, Mike had never spanked his three daughters, but the oldest of them, a left-leaning type, spanked her son after he ran out into the street and was almost run over by a car.) And the show was always critical of Mike. The writers, led by then-showrunner Tim Doyle, took a while to get the hang of this, but they eventually turned out a show that seemed as tuned into these debates as anything on TV had in years, mostly because nobody was talking about this stuff anywhere else. He wanted to talk about guns and spanking and PC culture. He wanted to dig into why Obama was such a disappointment. He wanted to talk about how maybe bullying toughens kids up a little bit.
The show was obviously written by a bunch of Hollywood liberals, but their star, the reason the show existed, wanted to use it as a platform to talk about the kind of red-state conservative issues that had become whatever the conservative equivalent of “woke” is about.
It got, if not consistently good, at least interesting on a regular basis. A curious thing happened in the show’s second season, though, that prompted me to tune back in.
