I HATE IT. I CAN'T STOP WATCHING BUT I HATE IT. GRADE A HALLMARK CHANNEL BULLSHIT.
It's the most late stage capitalist thing ever. You got a crazy Vietnam War vet who looks like he partook in the My Lai massacre, a sensei who still relives his Reagan era youth with hair metal and is pretty much stuck in the 80s, and a sheltered car salesman who is Mr. America Bourgeois values all trying to influence their poisonous energy on to kids who end up fighting each other and are on the receiving end of generational trauma. All while being played out through Okinawan Karate which was used as self defense against what we now call Japan, used by Americans in their suburban hell hole.
It's a fun spectacle.
I watched the first season and was similarly baffled at how much I enjoyed it. The politics are pretty awful, the writing isn't really creative... I think its just the overall sincere cheeziness of it all idk.
We've all eaten an entire sleeve of Ritz crackers and Easy Cheese. It's enjoyable, goes down surprisingly easy, and yet we still acknowledge that it's absolute garbage. Kobra Kai is the television equivalent.
And as we learn in the latest season, Lt. Surge volunteered to go to Vietnam, so you don’t have to feel any remorse at all
The scene with the snake pit was wild, it really felt like some chauvinist Zenz-level paranoid propaganda.
It's actually slightly amazing.
It's dumb schlocky bullshit and that sort of thing has been sorely missing from movies and TV for the last 20+ years (or however long it's been since The Wire came out). It doesn't take itself seriously and it's completely and totally in on the joke.
I think that's a good point. It basically avoids any of the peak TV hallmarks, with extremely non-prestigious main actors (seriously, Macchio cannot act), embraces utterly corny storylines that CW shows would reject, and just knows what exactly it is.
Fucking hell, the most liberal garbage I've ever seen. Goddamn teens coming of age, them youngins gotta get off my grass. Chock full of woke scolding thickly layered over even thicker normalization of capitalist and liberal miasma.
I'm more perplexed that the LA county government didn't call the kids in the TV show a bunch of rival street gangs since they're basically acting like what conservatives and libs say they think street gangs are like
The show calls it out like constant at least lol. It doesn't pretend anything going on is reaonable
