SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT:

A SAD SIGN OF THE TIMES – FROM HOLLYWOOD REPORTER:  NBC is loading up its fall 2021 schedule with so much drama, it’s not funny.  Literally: For the first time in at least 50 years, the network will start a season with no half-hour comedies on its schedule. NBC is instead saving returning shows Kenan, Mr. Mayor and Young Rock and first-year series American Auto and Grand Crew for early 2022.  The final season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, however, will debut on NBC in August following the close of the Summer Olympics. The 10-episode run will conclude before the official start of the 2021-22 season in late September.  Susan Rovner, chairman entertainment content for NBCUniversal Television and Streaming, told reporters Friday that the lack of comedies in the fall lineup doesn’t reflect a lack of commitment to the genre. “In recent years our comedies haven’t performed as well in the fall, so we’re doubling down in midseason with two big nights of comedy,” she said.  Or maybe the industry has just gotten too serious and too political.  It should lighten up.  America could use some good laughs, aside from the ones we get from Washington.

SOMETHING TO CHEER – FROM FOX:   A new right-leaning group plans to fight against cancel culture by giving the "woke left" a "dose of their own medicine," its founder told Fox News.  The group, called Unsilenced Majority, was founded by Mike Davis, a former staffer for the Senate Judiciary Committee under Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.  Davis also runs a different group called the Article III Project, which "punches back on radical assaults on judicial independence" and began with the mission of supporting Trump-appointed judges. Davis told Fox News that Unsilenced Majority will use a similar approach in fighting against cancel culture.  "These corporations go woke because they have pressure from shareholders, they have pressure from the liberal media, they have pressure internally from within," Davis said. "What we want to do at Unsilenced Majority is to provide a counterbalance. And so these corporations understand that if they go woke there's gonna be consequences from everyday Americans."  We need more efforts like this, and we need them everywhere, especially among parents of school-age children.  The radical left only represents a small percentage of the country, and it can be beaten.  We are the unsilenced majority.

May 17, 2021