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Amazon Weighs The Dukes of Hazzard’s Streaming Future
NASCAR has banned the display of the Confederate flag on race cars. HBO Max pulled Gone With the Wind. And now, Buffering hears a problematic classic on Amazon Prime Video’s sister streamer IMDb TV — The Dukes of Hazzard — could soon be driving off the service.
The 1980s comedy-drama about two “good ol’ boys never meanin’ no harm” was a smash hit for most of its seven-season run on CBS, and also had a long life in reruns for decades on channels such as CMT and TV Land. But in recent years, Dukes has rightly raised a ruckus because one of the show’s inanimate co-stars — the General Lee race car — is painted with a Confederate flag, the racist symbol of traitorous rebels. Buffering has learned Amazon is currently considering whether the show should remain on the platform, with a spokesperson for the service telling us the show has been flagged internally for review as execs revisit and evaluate their overall content guidelines. This could lead to the show exiting IMDb TV, though it’s also possible Amazon could opt to keep the status quo.
If the series does get the boot, it wouldn’t be the first time those Duke boys have been disappeared. Back in 2015, the show’s studio, Warner Bros. TV, announced it would stop licensing images of the car to toy-makers and other merchandisers following the mass murder of nine people in a South Carolina church by a white supremacist who proudly posed for pictures with the flag. Around the same time, ViacomCBS (then known as Viacom) dropped the series from TV Land, realizing it wasn’t appropriate to air a show with racist imagery at a time of national trauma. Fans of the show complained, but the world moved on.
And yet despite the backlash of 2015, Dukes quietly made a comeback via streaming about two years ago. At some point in 2018, Amazon added the show to its ad-free Prime Video subscription service, where it was one of thousands of TV shows and movies available to stream at no additional cost beyond membership in Amazon Prime. It streamed on Prime Video for at least a year, before appearing to once again go out of circulation for a few months, based on social-media posts from fans lamenting its absence.
By the start of his year, however, Dukes popped back up on an Amazon platform, though not Prime Video: It moved to IMDb TV, the company’s free, ad-supported service available to anyone with an internet connection (though it’s optimized to work best for anyone with a Prime Video subscription or Amazon Fire TV device. A source familiar with the matter notes that Dukes didn’t end up on IMDb TV as part of a deal specifically for the show (the way, say, HBO Max made a deal to grab Friends from Netflix). Instead, the series was part of a package of content leased to Amazon by Warner Bros.
In recent days, at least partially in response to protests related to the killing of George Floyd and a broader national reckoning over race in America, several major Amazon rivals have dropped programming not seen as suitable for these times:
• Newly launched HBO Max suddenly pulled Gone With the Wind on Tuesday, quickly clarifying that the movie was removed so that the platform could add explanation and context regarding its racist depictions (much as sister cable network TCM has done during its showings of the film). It will be readded to the service at some point, a platform spokesperson said.
• Netflix and Britbox this week dropped U.K. comedy Little Britain because several episodes include the show’s characters dressed in blackface. The BBC, where the show first aired, has dropped it from its iPlayer service.
• And on the linear front, A&E on Wednesday pulled the plug on its massively successful Live PD franchise, while Paramount Network has canceled its revival of Cops.
It’s worth noting that Dukes has never faced any protests over the scripted content of the show, save perhaps from TV critics at the time who lamented how silly and stupid the show could be. It didn’t use blackface; it didn’t delve into politics. When TV Land pulled the show in 2015, the decision seemed entirely related to the use of the flag, which was in the news because of the Dylann Roof shooting. A critic for Time argued then against the need to completely erase the show from TV, even if he didn’t take issue with its removal from TV Land: “The Dukes of Hazzard — like any TV in our past — is part of us, whether we watch it or not,” he wrote, though noting he understood being “weirded out by the awesome stunt car flying the flag of slavery.”
And indeed, even if Amazon does pull Dukes, the show is unlikely to be buried away in a vault, unavailable for viewing. Like Gone With the Wind, episodes and full seasons will almost surely still be available for purchase on iTunes and other platforms (including Amazon’s own digital video store); DVDs are still around, too. What Warner Media and Netflix have done this week, and what Amazon may do, is acknowledge that all shows and movies don’t need to be given a platform on major streaming services at all times, particularly without added context or the proper framing.
One last thought: In the case of Dukes, critics might note that the reasons that made it appropriate for TV Land to drop the show in 2015 didn’t go away in 2018 when the series returned via Prime Video. The Confederate flag didn’t become any less racist, and Amazon (along with studio Warner Bros. TV) didn’t add anything to the series to note its disapproval of the flag in the show. What did fade away was the spotlight, as Americans moved on to other controversies and concerns. Hopefully, 2020 will be different.
Source: Vulture
NASCAR has banned the display of the Confederate flag on race cars. HBO Max pulled Gone With the Wind. And now, Buffering hears a problematic classic on Amazon Prime Video’s sister streamer IMDb TV — The Dukes of Hazzard — could soon be driving off the service.
The 1980s comedy-drama about two “good ol’ boys never meanin’ no harm” was a smash hit for most of its seven-season run on CBS, and also had a long life in reruns for decades on channels such as CMT and TV Land. But in recent years, Dukes has rightly raised a ruckus because one of the show’s inanimate co-stars — the General Lee race car — is painted with a Confederate flag, the racist symbol of traitorous rebels. Buffering has learned Amazon is currently considering whether the show should remain on the platform, with a spokesperson for the service telling us the show has been flagged internally for review as execs revisit and evaluate their overall content guidelines. This could lead to the show exiting IMDb TV, though it’s also possible Amazon could opt to keep the status quo.
If the series does get the boot, it wouldn’t be the first time those Duke boys have been disappeared. Back in 2015, the show’s studio, Warner Bros. TV, announced it would stop licensing images of the car to toy-makers and other merchandisers following the mass murder of nine people in a South Carolina church by a white supremacist who proudly posed for pictures with the flag. Around the same time, ViacomCBS (then known as Viacom) dropped the series from TV Land, realizing it wasn’t appropriate to air a show with racist imagery at a time of national trauma. Fans of the show complained, but the world moved on.
And yet despite the backlash of 2015, Dukes quietly made a comeback via streaming about two years ago. At some point in 2018, Amazon added the show to its ad-free Prime Video subscription service, where it was one of thousands of TV shows and movies available to stream at no additional cost beyond membership in Amazon Prime. It streamed on Prime Video for at least a year, before appearing to once again go out of circulation for a few months, based on social-media posts from fans lamenting its absence.
By the start of his year, however, Dukes popped back up on an Amazon platform, though not Prime Video: It moved to IMDb TV, the company’s free, ad-supported service available to anyone with an internet connection (though it’s optimized to work best for anyone with a Prime Video subscription or Amazon Fire TV device. A source familiar with the matter notes that Dukes didn’t end up on IMDb TV as part of a deal specifically for the show (the way, say, HBO Max made a deal to grab Friends from Netflix). Instead, the series was part of a package of content leased to Amazon by Warner Bros.
In recent days, at least partially in response to protests related to the killing of George Floyd and a broader national reckoning over race in America, several major Amazon rivals have dropped programming not seen as suitable for these times:
• Newly launched HBO Max suddenly pulled Gone With the Wind on Tuesday, quickly clarifying that the movie was removed so that the platform could add explanation and context regarding its racist depictions (much as sister cable network TCM has done during its showings of the film). It will be readded to the service at some point, a platform spokesperson said.
• Netflix and Britbox this week dropped U.K. comedy Little Britain because several episodes include the show’s characters dressed in blackface. The BBC, where the show first aired, has dropped it from its iPlayer service.
• And on the linear front, A&E on Wednesday pulled the plug on its massively successful Live PD franchise, while Paramount Network has canceled its revival of Cops.
It’s worth noting that Dukes has never faced any protests over the scripted content of the show, save perhaps from TV critics at the time who lamented how silly and stupid the show could be. It didn’t use blackface; it didn’t delve into politics. When TV Land pulled the show in 2015, the decision seemed entirely related to the use of the flag, which was in the news because of the Dylann Roof shooting. A critic for Time argued then against the need to completely erase the show from TV, even if he didn’t take issue with its removal from TV Land: “The Dukes of Hazzard — like any TV in our past — is part of us, whether we watch it or not,” he wrote, though noting he understood being “weirded out by the awesome stunt car flying the flag of slavery.”
And indeed, even if Amazon does pull Dukes, the show is unlikely to be buried away in a vault, unavailable for viewing. Like Gone With the Wind, episodes and full seasons will almost surely still be available for purchase on iTunes and other platforms (including Amazon’s own digital video store); DVDs are still around, too. What Warner Media and Netflix have done this week, and what Amazon may do, is acknowledge that all shows and movies don’t need to be given a platform on major streaming services at all times, particularly without added context or the proper framing.
One last thought: In the case of Dukes, critics might note that the reasons that made it appropriate for TV Land to drop the show in 2015 didn’t go away in 2018 when the series returned via Prime Video. The Confederate flag didn’t become any less racist, and Amazon (along with studio Warner Bros. TV) didn’t add anything to the series to note its disapproval of the flag in the show. What did fade away was the spotlight, as Americans moved on to other controversies and concerns. Hopefully, 2020 will be different.
Source: Vulture
