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Audie Cornish

00:00:00

I'm Audie Cornish, and this is The Assignment. People have been talking about the Yellowstone empire for years and whether it's "red state TV." We're talking about shows often set in the South or West centering families. Maybe there's a working class hero. But usually it's a full on rejection of the liberal ethos that has dominated television for ages. And if you're not sure what I mean, listen to Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in this Texas political ad.

Matthew McConaughey

00:00:35

Restrictions, regulations, nickel and diamond productions, political lectures, Hollywood, it's a flat circle of wood. Round and round, like a record with the sound off.

Woody Harrelson

00:00:47

So what, you just want to turn the record off?

Matthew McConaughey

00:00:51

I want to change the tune.

Audie Cornish

00:00:54

The state is planning to spend $1.5 billion over the next decade on incentives to lure film and TV projects there. The Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick says it's an opportunity to export Texas values. For the rest of us, it means we'll likely see plenty more shows in the mold of Taylor Sheridan's Landman, starring Billy Bob Thornton as a West Texas oil executive.

Billy Bob Thornton

00:01:17

'And unfortunately for your grandkids, we have a 120-year petroleum-based infrastructure. Our whole lives depend on it.

Audie Cornish

00:01:25

Or like Netflix's surprise summer hit, the raunchy soap opera, The Hunting Wives, which was recommended to me by a Republican pundit during a commercial break on set.

Dermot Mulroney

00:01:35

They don't want a boy scout. They want a man.

Malin Akerman

00:01:38

I'm a woman. It's different for me.

Dermot Mulroney

00:01:41

Enough with the feminism.

Audie Cornish

00:01:42

'It's all part of the rise of this red state entertainment. But according to ratings, it's bipartisan. Everyone is watching. So are media companies backing away from so-called woke programming because of Trump? A response to public backlash? Fallout from the financial cost of the streaming wars? Or is this the latest turn in the wheel of a pop culture zeitgeist with new voices in the spotlight? Comedian and longtime television producer Larry Wilmore has some answers. We'll be back in a moment. My guest today is Larry Wilmore. He hosts the Ringer's Black on the Air podcast, but that's just his side gig. He's a writer and producer who's worked on some of the most successful shows of the century. In Living Color, The Bernie Mac Show, The Daily Show, Blackish, Insecure, we're just naming a few. But in his heart, he's still a comedian.

Larry Wilmore

00:02:41

'I'm getting back into doing stand up again, which I really haven't done full time in a while so-

Audie Cornish

00:02:46

What? Wait a second. Like you're going, you're doing open mics.

Larry Wilmore

00:02:50

I'm going up a Saturday night. I'm gonna start working on a new hour. Yeah. So it's a little scary, Audie. Don't get me wrong.

Audie Cornish

00:02:57

I can imagine. What do you think is is pulling at your chest here?

Larry Wilmore

00:03:02

It's, you know what? I feel like I have to say something. I can't stay silent anymore about just the world that I'm in. I've always considered myself, I call it a passionate centrist, which it's not really a political term. It's really just, I wanna make up my own mind by looking at the facts, really is what it is. I hate being in a tribe. And I think tribalism is just, it just kills me right now, especially in our politics. So I'm kind of, from a political standpoint, I'm coming from that point of view, but it really is. Just trying to make sense out of a world that, you know, seems to make less sense every day.

Audie Cornish

00:03:38

'That perspective, his unique combination of knowledge, experience, and openness is exactly why I wanted to talk to him, to help me make sense of the cultural whiplash it feels like I've been watching where one year the Handmaid's Tale is the new it-show and the next it's Yellowstone. All right. So first of all, when you consider what I think experts call cultural polarization and our entertainment. The literal version is sort of like red state entertainment and blue state entertainment. In your mind, what's in those buckets?

Larry Wilmore

00:04:13

Well, here's the thing, I mean, I'm kind of a historian in some of this too, so sometimes I take an academic approach to it, so I apologize if some of it sounds a little dry.

Audie Cornish

00:04:22

No, that's literally why I called you.

Larry Wilmore

00:04:26

So before cable came along and before we had a thousand channels, we really had three channels or two channels, depending on where you live and television was called broadcast. And what a broadcast is, is you're making programming that is appealing to the broadest audience all in one package.

Audie Cornish

00:04:45

'And it's a one-way street. We put it out, you take it in.

Larry Wilmore

00:04:51

And the shifts started happening really in the early seventies where CBS said, you know what, we don't really care about that broad thing. We, we want to make television a little more meaningful. You know, we wanna make it a little bit more urban. I think it was Fred Silverman who first did that. And he took off hugely successful shows, you know, Gomer Pyle, uh, I think was one of them Beverly Hillbillies like that type of what people call the rural comedies. And he put on things like All on the Family, Mary Tyler Moore show. These are more what people called the smart urbane type of comedies, but it started a wave also of more of a certain style of progressive content, I think in television in particular that was considered elite.

Audie Cornish

00:05:40

And I like that you made the distinction between rural comedy and urban urbane, right? Because I do think so much of this Red State Blue State reframing now has to do with location and place and framing as much as values.

Larry Wilmore

00:05:56

Geography is a huge part of it. You're absolutely right. Which is kind of an interesting thing, you know? And here's how, how it evolved. So, and this is how people's perceptions of it are. Urbane, citified, progressive equals awards, equals prestige, equals like bigger dollars, advertisers you're going after a certain type. Rural, working class that were not considered as prestige anymore. Those shows stop getting awards attention by and large. So what I'm saying, this is a long way to say we're now coming full circle where there's been a cultural pushback against what has been considered elite shows on television and so because numbers don't lie and because how people show up to something is what counts. I always say the most important color in Hollywood is green. The audience is just shifting in what is important to them. What's important in the zeitgeist, not just what's important to the people making it or what they think is prestige. What does the audience actually think? What did they want to see?

Audie Cornish

00:07:00

Who defines the zeitgeist? That's a huge part of it.

Larry Wilmore

00:07:03

Exactly.

Audie Cornish

00:07:04

Um, so you've said so many things. I don't know where to start, but one let's go back to

Larry Wilmore

00:07:08

I said it's going to be a bit academic.

Audie Cornish

00:07:10

No, but this is what I love. So that brings me to the money, which we're gonna come back to this later for the present. But there were also economic headwinds that forced these movements as well. So when I think of something like the CW, UPN, these upstart networks that were trying to gain ground against the traditional big three, what did they do? They catered to black audiences. They cater to brown audiences who were the only ones getting their channels for a while, right?

Larry Wilmore

00:07:40

Yeah, believe me, I was in that wave yeah.

Audie Cornish

00:07:44

You're making In Living Color, because that's the audience you have access to. And as soon as your audience broadens past that, you're like, that's enough of that, cancel all these shows, we're now making Gossip Girl. So to me, some of it has to do with where the money is for the people running the networks at any given time.

Larry Wilmore

00:08:07

Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. And you mentioned I love when you said who actually determines the zeitgeist, you know, like who's in charge of that. And it's funny. I have, this is the type of person that I am. I will actually have discussions with my friends about things like the zeitgeist. I mean, that's that's how nerdy I am about this.

Audie Cornish

00:08:26

No, no, this is who we are, this who we are.

Larry Wilmore

00:08:29

But all of us in entertainment, we are prisoners of the zeitgeist. That's why shows that we may consider good shows, people may not care about because the zeitgesist is like.

Audie Cornish

00:08:43

Not all the time. That was like the running joke about NBC for the longest time. It was like, oh, great show. No one's watching it. The Wire, amazing. Running jokes about no one watching The Wire. Like there's always a disconnect.

Larry Wilmore

00:08:56

They're sometimes they're just out of time, you know. But if you watched it in isolation, you go, oh, that's an excellent show. But at the time, the zeitgeist says, yeah, whatever. We're just not interested in it, you know. And so there's a MAGA zeitgeists out there. And by MAGA, I don't mean that in a negative political way. I mean, it's it's people that are want to reject a certain culture that they feel has been foisted upon them. And what's refreshing to them is to see content that doesn't cater to that. Um, so anytime things connect to people, they're connecting to an authenticity about it, you know, I like to call it a mythology about whatever we agree upon. Like, and once again, I'm getting academic, but like, I always feel like content works at its best when everybody agrees that the thing that you're dramatizing is what we agree the culture is, which is why, like when Westerns were big like the audience agreed with the people making the Westerns that that's the mythology of America. We agree with you on that. You know, when Western started losing favor, there was a disagreement about that mythology about America and what the Western's represented, right? And you couldn't make those same kind of movies anymore. The agreement wasn't there. So there's a different agreement happening in the culture now, right. And so when that agreement starts to shift, that's when we see big moves were shows that maybe didn't have a chance before suddenly break through. Does that make sense?

Audie Cornish

00:10:25

Absolutely, absolutely. Because when I look and did some of the research into some of the conservative creators out there who are talking about what they're doing and why, this is the language that they're saying. They're talking about breaking through, they're talking about not being beholden to the old stakeholders. When I look at something like The Hunting Wives, which is a very soapy Dallas but more nudity on Netflix. That's a series where the whole point is like... Someone from Massachusetts moves to Texas. And the show runner told the New York Times, I was thinking, how can we make this as explosive as possible as fish out of water as possible and highlight the culture war as much as possible? Like it's not hidden, you know, in those moments when they talk about abortions or marriage, their role in marriage. Like that language is there, as you said, to connect to a certain part of the zeitgeist.

Larry Wilmore

00:11:22

You know, knowing that I was gonna talk to you, I hadn't seen the show, but I watched it last night, a couple episodes.

Audie Cornish

00:11:27

I'm sorry, I scandalized you. It's not safe for work, Larry. No.

Larry Wilmore

00:11:31

No, by the way, I'm a I'm a big fan of different voices. I love it when new voices break through. I'm a huge fan of that. Even if I'm not a fan of the show, it doesn't matter. I'm a fan of new voices getting out there because I think it's good for all artists when there's a diversity of voices, you know, that's just my opinion. And so I was watching that show and honestly, I couldn't decide whether it was a satire of that. Or if it was just given it to me straight, right, right. Because the Boston character is like, is she making, are we, who are we supposed to identify with in this? Who's the actual protagonist of this thing? You know?

Audie Cornish

00:12:08

Which is probably why it worked.

Larry Wilmore

00:12:10

Yeah, it's good. That's what I mean.

Audie Cornish

00:12:13

I was reading, I think it was a column in the New York Times where they were talking with a researcher who was saying, you know, liberals, and specifically, there's a certain kind of elite, who's a cultural omnivore, as a point of pride and status. And I found that very interesting, because I grew up in the 90s. And i thought that was just what dudes did. Right? You'd like encounter these guys who were like, have you seen the Japanese import of blah, blah, improve. That you knew about all the different things in the culture. And I hadn't thought of that as almost, yeah, like a coastal pastime. And they also said that while liberal audiences are gonna embrace something like hunting wives, conservative audiences are far more likely to feel like something is being foisted on them, like something that doesn't really reflect how they connect with the world. They're just, they just are like, no thanks. And I feel like that creates a different dynamic because instead of more creators bursting through, you have studios, I think they're excluding. Yeah. Like they have cut off the spigot to some creators and move towards this thing. And that feels different from being like, this is a wider basket of things.

Larry Wilmore

00:13:31

Yeah, the whole building becomes a bit elitist, you know, the whole building of who's making the decision, they get to be a bit in a bubble. And it takes a lot to kind of burst through that. And there's always a thing. So in the 90s, I've always considered myself, like I said, more kind of in the center. I think the 90's, I was more center right than center left.

Audie Cornish

00:13:49

Oh, really? What were you making then? I'm trying to figure out.

Larry Wilmore

00:13:55

Well, I did shows like In Living Color, you know, Sister Sister and things like that. But when I did the PJs, I remember putting in certain jokes that were more center right jokes than center left jokes, and they would always get a pushback. And I'll give you an example. So we had a character named Juicy. He was kind of a he was a big kid, you know. And we were deciding what shirts the kids were wearing. And we we're going to give juicy a shirt that said choose life on it, you know, and we just, Steve and I, Steve Tompkins, we just love that idea that you just wouldn't see this on TV at that time that a kid would have a shirt like that. Yeah. And it's like, who cares? Everybody can have a

Audie Cornish

00:14:34

But it says something about the character, that's part of the storytelling.

Larry Wilmore

00:14:38

'Exactly. It's not making a statement about anything. Oh, the only statement is making is that that character found that T-shirt interesting, you know, and the pushback. I'll never forget the pushback from so many people. Like if it had been a different message that was more on the left, no one would have cared. You know, but the fact that it was on the right was all this pushback from it. And I went, wow, that's that's fascinating. You know that I remember just clocking that in my brain of the headwinds. Like if I truly was trying to do content, like overall content from that point of view, the headwind you have to go in to try to do that at that time especially was pretty strong.

Audie Cornish

00:15:21

Yeah, that speaks to something we're hearing from the Hollywood creators who feel really emboldened by this moment. I was noting that the Daily Wire, which is like conservative online outlet, they've got the DailyWire Plus and they're making programming. I think the highest ranking documentary

Larry Wilmore

00:15:39

I agree with that.

Audie Cornish

00:15:40

Documentary last year came from them.

Larry Wilmore

00:15:44

Yeah, that's great. I think that stuff is great. They should be doing that because there's an audience that feels like they're not getting the content that they want to see. And so because you, they can't do that content through the normal gatekeepers in the way that they'd like to, because they need to do it from their point of view, not filtered by this other point of view. That's the problem. I think it's great, good for the daily wire and some of these other places, and like I said, I don't say that saying necessarily I watch other shows or watch that stuff. I say it because yes, give me more voices out there. It gives creators more of a chance to do something new and to break more molds than that type of thing.

Audie Cornish

00:16:29

After the break, Larry tells us about secret meetings of Hollywood conservatives. Just the fact that we're talking about Daily Wire Plus was sort of unimaginable five or 10 years ago. I think they only came about in 2015 as an entity. But one of the leaders at that studio, he said he's coming from the Andrew Breitbart School of Politics is Downstream from Culture, which I've heard across the spectrum from a lot of people. But he mentions he's like talking about how they all got together. And he said, at the time I was running Friends of Abe. Which was an open secret group of around 2,800 Hollywood conservatives. Did you know about that?

Larry Wilmore

00:17:10

Yeah, I was invited to a couple of those meetings that I never went because I didn't really consider myself a conservative

Audie Cornish

00:17:18

Was there a secret handshake?

Larry Wilmore

00:17:19

Yeah, no, it was a secret.

Audie Cornish

00:17:21

Tell me, Larry, you got to tell me more. What happened? How did how does that work?

Larry Wilmore

00:17:25

It was a secret because many people in Hollywood felt like they would be blackballed if people knew they were conservative. You know, so they, you know, I don't know how secret it was, but I, alright, I think I don't know if blackball is the right term, but I think maybe get treated differently, who knows? You know? And like I said, I knew what that was because I was more on that side of the aisle during a certain period, you know. I'm not outing anybody by saying this, but I think people like Gary Sinise, I think was in that group, you know, and he's he's been able to have a career kind of being on the right. But he's not politically on the. You know, the content that he makes, like a lot of it is patriotism. It's war stuff, you know, things like that more from what you would call a traditional conservative bag of.

Audie Cornish

00:18:16

'Yeah, and now it's pushed even a little bit further, not with him, but just the idea like Sound of Freedom, right, which is a film that just did so well, is very much through the lens of the QAnon conspiracy ideas. And so it's, is it about protecting children? Yes, but is it also very clear it's connected to this very sort of well-known online political community, you know what I mean? It's not generic.

Larry Wilmore

00:18:45

Yeah. So now, now we're in another wild, wild West. Okay.

Audie Cornish

00:18:49

Oh, okay.

Larry Wilmore

00:18:50

We were in a wild wild west 100 years ago in the beginning of film where anybody could just, you know, start their own phone company, put it up and that type of thing. And then people started consolidating companies and then you started getting big places like MGM and all these things. And they pushed out a lot of these little places. So that's where the gatekeepers kind of started in media. But now with social media and all this stuff, now you can have these, as we said, anybody putting out content. So, before... Something like a QAnon thing would never get through the gatekeepers, probably for the right reasons in that case, you know, but there's so many niche audiences and niche groups and ways to reach them through different platforms. You know, there's just so much out there that can be done like that.

Audie Cornish

00:19:38

And promoted on its own and promoted through its own organic marketing.

Larry Wilmore

00:19:45

Influencers are more powerful and influencers platform is bigger than the Tonight Show. You know, it's bigger. That's why, you know, when Colbert went away, you know, many times those types of shows were used as platforms for promotion. That was the biggest use of those shows, by the way, but influencers now have millions of people that they reach. And if those late night shows are in the hundreds of thousands now, not in the millions, that's a problem. Like that's upside down thing so but now but who are these influencers right? Like who's their audience so that's a whole Wild Wild West that we're in now.

Audie Cornish

00:20:23

All right, so given all the things we've brought up here, what do you think when you're reading a article that's talking about red state entertainment and blue state entertainment and this current wave as someone who has all this history in their head? Because I think right now, a lot of the writing is sort of like, this is another part of the Trump takeover. It's this inevitable march of politics.

Larry Wilmore

00:20:47

I think the Trump angle, that's not quite the correct angle because Trump is riding on the on the culture, not the other way around, you know, he's just plugged into this at the right time of how people are rejecting something. I think our conversation on this, not to give us credit, I think that's more of what is going on here because this is really a long view conversation. This shift was going to happen regardless of who was president and who was doing that. It was on its way, you know, and that's just what happens. And as I said before, I believe it's good for storytelling when you have different forces coming in, breaking up models, because things get too predictable. But it's those types of things are good for TV. Like I said, I can't get enough of hearing that that's happening. I think Trump's a sideshow in it, attaching him to it makes it more political in a way that... You know, easy to reject or easy to dismiss, you know.

Audie Cornish

00:21:47

'OK, well, I'm going to be looking for your new shows. There's going to a character wearing a Choose Life t-shirt, and I'm gonna be like, I see you.

Larry Wilmore

00:21:56

'That time has already passed. I had the chance. Now it's past. Now I'm more center-left these days, rather than center-right, so there you go.

Audie Cornish

00:22:08

I want to thank Larry Wilmore for coming on the show. Please check out his podcast, Black on the Air. And as always, thank you for listening. Please subscribe, share and review. It makes a difference.

The Assignment with Audie Cornish