© AMC
What does a poor or lower-middle-class white person, especially one from the South or Southwest, have to do to get a break from fancy high-end TV producers? It is a remarkable fact about this new Golden Age of television, which began with
The Sopranos in 1999, that its primary focus of attention is the population cohort known (with the exquisite cultural sensitivity we have all learned in the era of political correctness) as "white trash."
HBO's sensationally powerful
True Detective, with its subsidiary cast of sweaty, unshaven, tattooed, heavily accented, strip-clubbing neo-Neanderthals from Louisiana, is just the latest manifestation of the white-trashing of TV.
True Detective is the second HBO series set in and around the bayou, following in the footsteps of the vampire show
True Blood - and let me tell you, those swamp folk, they like their sex dirty in every sense of the word.
The new show came along just after the final episode of AMC's
Breaking Bad, about an Albuquerque scientist-turned-schoolteacher who serves as the Southwest's key methamphetamine supplier to an endless list of Caucasian scum. (The final episode featured the stirring rescue of the teacher's upper-middle-class-fallen-to-trash sidekick Boy Wonder, who will live to cook blue another day.) On air right now,
True Detective joins
Sons of Anarchy, the FX series about rival motorcycle gangs in California who spend most of their illicit gains on leather clothing. FX takes a lighter touch with
Justified, the highly amusing series about a U.S. marshal forced to return to his white-trash home turf of Harlan County, Kentucky. Harlan was the nation's paradigmatic coal-mining community and, in its day, the source of a great deal of leftist sentimentality about the plight of the working class.
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