In the wake of the cancellation of “Cops” and “Live P.D.” and the temporary pulling of “Gone with the Wind” from HBO Max, numerous other shows are suddenly finding themselves being abruptly pulled from streaming services.
The decisions come as networks and streaming services are reassessing what is considered acceptable in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests around the world. However there has been push back with claims that such censorship shifts the focus away from the real points and aims of the movement.
As previously reported, UK comedy shows “Little Britain,” “The Mighty Boosh” and “The League of Gentlemen” have all been removed from Netflix & BBC iPlayer along with numerous shows from Australian comedian Chris Lilley like “Summer Heights High” and “Angry Boys”. Many of these series had their white male hosts playing black and Asian characters complete with brownface makeup.
Now comes word of other shows being yanked. One of the most unexpected is a single episode of vintage Brit comedy “Fawlty Towers” titled “The Germans”. The episode is one of the show’s most famous for its often repeated line “don’t mention the war” and star John Cleese’s goose-stepping impersonation of Adolf Hitler.
However the episode also features regular character The Major using racial slurs about the West Indies cricket team. The BBC removed this element from repeat transmissions in 2013, but the UKTV service was airing the unedited version and so that episode has been temporarily pulled from said service.
Cleese himself, speaking with The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper in Australia, says the whole point of the episode was to critique racist attitudes:
“One of the things I’ve learned in the last 180 years is that people have very different senses of humor. Some of them understand that if you put nonsense words into the mouth of someone you want to make fun of, you’re not broadcasting their views, you’re making fun of them. The Major was an old fossil left over from decades before. We were not supporting his views, we were making fun of them.”
Meanwhile Vulture is reporting that 1980s sitcom “The Dukes of Hazzard” has been flagged for internal review at Amazon. The series has been on notice for years over concerns about the use of the Confederate flag on the lead character’s iconic vehicle the General Lee, but reportedly no decision has been reached internally at this point about whether to yank it from the free IMDB TV service.
Then there are some entirely unexpected targets, such as Nickelodeon’s animated kids series “Paw Patrol” according to The New York Post. That series, which depicts anthropomorphized pets doing various blue-collar jobs, it taking heat on social media for its German shepherd character Chase who is a police officer in the series and is portrayed positively.
Source: THR
