America 1982-Chapter 362 - 34: Please, Spare Tommy_2
A one-liner to sum up the shitty plot they adapted: it’s about the Wakandan Blacks fighting a massive battle against the White 3K Party under the leadership of Black Panther.
The core of the story, originally emphasizing anti-war in the comics, was completely flipped, with Black Panther telling his Black countrymen, "If Whites can’t coexist with Blacks, then let them get out of our country, and if they dare refuse, we’ll grab our weapons and kill those Whites who discriminate against us."
The lower-class Blacks will like this Black Panther, and the Whites will like this Black Panther too because he’s liked by the lower-class Blacks, but this Black Panther definitely can no longer be considered a superhero for the Black people.
Moreover, Tommy once seriously discussed with him their plan to make a reality TV show that focused on Black women, filled with humanitarian care, aimed to help those women struggling with family or emotional crises and unable to recover, allowing them to regain confidence in life. They tentatively named the show "The Lamplighter."
Of course, BT Television did make a program full of humanitarian care for Black women and indeed genuinely helping them regain confidence in their lives.
But Wolfe always felt it deviated quite a bit from the initial concept.
Because the program that should have been called "The Lamplighter" is now titled "Finding Daddy in America"...
"Finding Daddy in America"—when this name appeared on the TV screen, Wolfe felt an urge to grab a gun and go on a shooting spree at the BT Television headquarters!
Was this something a human could do? Presenting each fragmented Black family’s tragedy, each Black child’s loss of a father, as a joke to the viewers, and even making the subjects of this humiliation consider it a lucky reward, closing with a no-interest loan, absurdly labeled as humanitarian care.
Fuck your humanitarian care.
"NiggerBoss," an absolutely fantastic crime series, the rise of a Black boss, could be described as the Black version of The Godfather. Wolfe Tuck didn’t need to wait for the ratings agencies to release data to know that this series would definitely win a lot of Black people’s love. But at what cost?
The Black audience watching this series, when they identified with the Black protagonist, would find it extremely satisfying—the White bastards getting a harsh lesson from the Blacks. However, upon absolutely analyzing the protagonist’s methods, they were sinister, ruthless, completely unprincipled; treacherous to Whites, stopping at nothing to achieve their goals...
Even at this moment, the sitcom "How to Marry a Millionaire," lighthearted and humorous, starring Lisa Burnett from The Cosby Show, may have seemed charming and eased the mood. But to Wolfe, it was actually helping to cement the stereotype of Blacks held by Whites. It featured three low-income Black girls, vain and materialistic, whose biggest dream was to marry a rich man and then live a carefree, indolent life. The story always revolved around the women’s failed attempts to snag rich men, creating laughable situations. Funny, yes, if Blacks weren’t thinking.
"I should have stayed at BT, stayed with Tommy. These assholes who only care about ad revenue and ratings don’t deserve a boss like Tommy," Wolfe lamented, seeing the female lead dressed up in sexy fashion to tempt the viewers. He couldn’t watch any longer. Getting up from the sofa in the living room, he grabbed a beer from the fridge, muttered to himself frustratingly, and then took a big swig.
He knew that as soon as he took his team to join the California regional network SBG, Tommy immediately hired a new team in a rush. Now, BT Television’s publicly announced CEO was Earl Rash, a Black lawyer, and the other executives were all White. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎
So, it was no surprise that BT Television was producing this crap.
After all, lawyers, those money-grubbing types, obviously put money first. For ratings and advertising fees, they could indeed disregard everything.
And only Whites could make a series of garbage programs filled with stereotypes about Blacks.
Anyway, Wolfe felt that as Tommy’s friend, he should give Tommy a call in the near future, sit down, and have a serious chat. To make it clear to Tommy that those who took over ruined the original intention behind the creation of BT Television, and these trashy programs may keep many Blacks glued to the screen, but they do nothing to change the status quo for Black people.
As for Tommy wanting to make money from TV advertising revenue? Wolfe had never thought of Tommy that way. If Tommy wanted to make money, he would have made more in the software industry than by setting up a television station. There was no need for him to enter this traditional industry to accumulate wealth. Wolfe had witnessed Tommy’s wealth even before meeting him.
Back when he hadn’t joined BT, his previous employer’s financial talk show just happened to air an episode featuring the nouveau riche of California’s computer industry. Wolfe remembered clearly, the guests on the show were three young Asian men with yellow skin, none over the age of twenty-five. They started their venture in college, owning a tech company established in 1981, based in San Jose, called Wyse Technology. The company mainly sold data analysis software and terminals to financial institutions.
During the interview, right after the company went public, leveraging strong sales figures, their products spread throughout financial cities like Wall Street, London, Tokyo, and the company’s market value nearly hit four hundred million US dollars.
Three young men under twenty-five, a company worth nearly four hundred million US dollars. When asked by the host how it felt to achieve financial freedom through the IPO, the trio’s answer was: it felt like being robbed of a lot of money by those sleazy investors, yet feeling unable to call the cops, with no choice but to keep it all bottled up inside.
