#usculture — Public Fediverse posts

Why is this desirable or necessary? Are we fresh out of stories to tell? Are the “content creators” in Hollywood so desperate for eyeballs that they’ll vomit up any IP of the past, hoping to exploit nostalgia while delivering another boring ass retelling of a story that somehow evades everything anyone enjoyed about said story?

#creativity #tv #carrie #pathetic #usculture #latecapitalism #conservativescantmakeculture

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/sep/14/my-wife-and-i-had-couples-therapy-on-tv-it-nearly-wrecked-our-marriage

Painful reading.

My first thought before reading the article was to wonder why on earth this couple had agreed to have their couples therapy televised.

Then I read that the couple made very little money, so the offer of a free sessions with a therapist who regularly charges $700 an hour must have been difficult to resist. As the husband/author writes, "I wanted to save my marriage. I was desperate for help."

I won't dissect the whole article but will instead note a couple of more general thoughts.

Much of the unhappiness in this marriage can be traced to the continual changes in residence, prompted in turn by scarce job prospects and insecurity in employment. One of the most ugly consequences of the neoliberal political economy pushed by "family values" conservatives is not just the wreckage of marriages by economic insecurity, but the insidious pressure on couples turn inwards and blame each other for problems generated by social forces.

Contra Margaret Thatcher, there IS such a thing as society, and a deeply inequitable society can warp intimate relationships and destroy families.

Fitting in horribly with this antisocial individualism is the deference accorded to "therapy" by so many Americans . All too often a mishmash of self help nostrums, poorly grounded popular psychology, and moralistic bullying is offered as a panacea to both individual and social problems.

Of course, psychotherapists have a legitimate function in modern society, but, in the US in particular, "therapy" has become something like a religion to a significant portion of the population. Consequently I often - as I do now - feel the stirrings of the functional equivalent of anticlericalism within my breast.

I am not recommending a turn to the "traditional" way of life advocated by conservatives. I would just plead for a turn to the social rather than the constant reduction of all problems to those of individual psychology.

Here, the combination of therapy with voyeuristic TV, itself a product of a ratings chase shaped by neoliberal values, turns out to be disastrous.

#CouplesTherapy #Therapy #Relationships #USCulture #Neoliberalism