Is Apple TV Following the Disney Woke Playbook?

Activist propaganda is masquerading as entertainment

I’m with Apple for life, I think.

I’m in way too deep with Apple Music to migrate all my lovingly curated playlists over to another provider. I am wedded to my iPhone, I run my consulting firm from my MacBook Pro (on which I’m typing this) and store all my business documents on iCloud.

It was therefore a no brainer to sign up for Apple One, not least because it includes, as part of the package, access to Apple TV. Never having paid for Disney, I watched from the sidelines as others documented its circling of the entertainment drain. Apple seemed okay - I heard complaints about Ted Lasso but had never watched it. I enjoyed Slow Horses and felt it was mostly faithful to the books. Criminal Record was a nuanced, complex drama which was pretty well pulled off. My main complaint to date has been that Apple TV seems to specialise in very slow burn dramas which, particularly when it comes to the sc-fi genre, often appear to be going nowhere.

Recent weeks have caused me to reappraise.

First of all, The Big Cigar caught my eye. Seventies Hollywood meets the Black Panthers. Cue LA pool parties, Kool and the Gang music and afros. But watching the first episode, it quickly became apparent that the series was at best sanitising and at worst glorifying the life of self-acknowledged Marxist revolutionary Huey Newton. The drama portrays him as the unarmed victim of police brutatlity in the 1967 incident that left two police offers wounded and one dead. Although he was ultimately freed after an intitial manslaughter conviction was reversed, there is certainly more uncertainty around Newton’s involvement in the incident than is portrayed in the drama. The following year he took part in another ambush on police following which he was arrested.

Newton was, as a matter of historical record, a violent revolutionary and incited violence on the police in his writing:

“When the masses hear that a gestapo policeman has been executed while sipping coffee at a counter, and the revolutionary executioner fled without being traced, the masses will see the validity of this type of approach to resistance.”

I bailed after watching episode 1 of The Big Cigar.

Putting this behind me, I sat down with my wife to watch Season 2 of Loot, both having enjoyed the first season. In fact, Loot is the only show sitting in the sliver of overlap in our wretchedly separate marital Venn diagram of TV viewing. It was for the this reason that I endured the whole of season 1 without saying anything about the casting of trans actor Michaela Jae Rodriguez as a biological female. This happened with Fake Heiress on Netflix in which another trans actor was cast as a real-life biological female. Is it transphobic to find this intrusive?

In the spirit of maintaining the Venn diagram overlap, I’ve said nothing. But watching episode 2 of Season 2, I noticed that the actor playing the Rodriguez character’s love interest pitched up wearing a keffiyeh. As Zoe Strimpel has observed in the Telegraph, wearing a keffiyeh is not a fasion statement. She describes it as a symbol of hatred. I agree. So why is actor O-T Fagbenie wearing one when his character is (like me) from Wembley? It’s not clear whether or not the episode was filmed before or after October 7th - some of the filiming was delayed due to the 2023 writers’ strike. Fagbenie has tweeted in the past about Gaza. What is going on and why should I even have to think about this while watching a comedy on Apple TV?

Are these isolated examples or do they speak to a discernible pattern? Are these just reactions of a far-right boomer raging at the TV or is something else at play? Christopher Rufo’s excellent book America’s Cultural Revolution: How The Radical Left Conquered Everything helps make sense of this. Rufo writes:

“Critical race theorists imagined their academic theories serving the same function as Marxist ideology, with race replacing class as the key axis of oppression and resistance.”

Just as the Left explains what is happening in Gaza in terms of oppression and resistance, so it explains the history of race in the US in terms of the same axis. Where is the Apple TV series on Martin Luther King who campaigned peacefully for a colourblind coexistence for everyone?

King no longer fits the narrative. Rufo writes of an incident in 2022 at Philadelphia’s 94 per cent black William D. Kelley elementary school which had a mural featuring images of Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama. The school administrators painted over the mural, replacing the faces with those of Angela Davis and…

…Huey Newton.