Walker, Texas Ranger versus Gilmore Girls

I recently started watching "Walker, Texas Ranger" with Chuck Norris every once in a while. My wife and I are watching "Gilmore Girls", too. Streaming the episodes makes it easier to see the world-model the writers of the series have. "Walker" is the type of TV show or movie I watched when I was growing up. I would never watch a show like "Gilmore Girls" when I was younger mainly because the worldview of the writers is like toxic waste, and the stink would have turned my stomach. Now it's interesting to me to watch because it's a cultural artifact.

In the episodes of "Walker" I watched so far, the main character is a complete man, and really the show is about how to be a complete man. He's spiritually grounded in "native american" spirituality, because the character is supposed to be part native. His spirituality forms the core of his character. His success at martial arts is due to being "balanced", which I suppose could be interpreted as having awareness of one's place in the universe. In the show, the government is often corrupt, and the character Walker has to take action to clean it up. In short he's a super hero, but he's also human and struggles with life's problems. The episodes are a little bit like after school specials and maybe were meant to serve as a sort of tutorial for 10-18 year old boys. The movies and TV shows I watched and comic books and books I read as a kid had similar themes. They were almost all about the main characters' struggles with the forces of nature and against human evil and corruption.

The "Gilmore Girls" is quite a departure from all those themes. The only two sort of heroic/masculine characters on the show are almost always weathering a vortex of insanity from all the other characters in the show who are vain and impulsive or dominated by egomania, and all of whom are dysfunctional, or incompetent in almost every area of their life whether they are male or female. Eventually the show reveals that the main characters' family the "Gilmores" are inbred on top of being borderline people. The lead female characters of the show are very entitled, and are propped up by family wealth, or networks of friends that bail them out and provide them with money and valuable gifts basically because they are attractive and witty and quirky.

The overall idea of the show seems to be that dysfunction and mental illness and entitlement are "the way it is". The pop culture of the United States in recent years started to celebrate and push that dysfunction/insanity worldview as the norm, and the institutions push the idea that dysfunctional, crazy people need to be dutifully cheered on by everyone else.