Insight: MTV Entertainment Head Calls A Doctor To Help With Writing Scripts For Clone High And Other Series/Dangerous Precedent Set

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Recently, Quentin Tarantino was on Joe Rogan Experience talking about the parallels between the decade we live in now versus the 1980’s and the 1950’s in terms of Hollywood attempting to self-censor itself. Since I wasn’t around in the 1950’s, I’m going to point to the 1980’s, a decade made famous by advances in the music industry that included both the founding of Music Television (MTV) and the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC).

MTV was started with the simple and laughable purpose of having round-the-clock music videos from the decade’s top artists which, at the time, included the likes of Guns ‘N Roses, Madonna, N.W.A., and others, thereby helping kick off a musical revolution that really hadn’t happened since the 1960’s. Feeling frightened on what effect this might have on children, the “Washington Wives” would take out an article in the Washington Post outlining rules that, they felt, the music industry should adhere to when releasing their content. The irony, this decade saw increased conservatism by way of both the Democrats (Tipper Gore who helped lead the charge against music companies was the wife of Al Gore) and Republicans (read: Ronald Reagan). A hearing would take place, the likes of Dee Snider would show up and try to explain to the government officials on this committee all art is a metaphor and nothing really should be taken literally. The next year, California Court of Appeals upheld a verdict against Ozzy Osbourne when the parents of John McCollum attempted to sue the rock musician for lyrics stemming from the track “Suicide Solution” that they felt helped inspire John, who at the time was suffering from alcohol abuse and emotional problems, to take his own life. The judge who ruled in Ozzy’s favor, I think, put it very well:

“Musical lyrics and poetry cannot be construed to contain the requisite ‘call to action’ for the elementary reason they simply are not intended to be and should not be read literally,” Superior Court Judge John Cole said. “Reasonable persons understand musical lyrics and poetic conventions as the figurative expressions which they are.” [Loudwire]

Fast forward to today. Understand we now live in a climate where the “Parental Advisory” stickers politicians fought so hard for in the 1980s are now obsolete, but we are now in another decade where both liberal and conservative parties are attempting to censor entertainment. The latest example of the former is MTV Entertainment’s Chris McCarthy who, according to a new article in the….you guessed it…Washington Post, has hired Dr. Jesse Gold as a sort of “mental health consultant” for TV shows that are being produced by ViacomCBS. The article later states that Dr. Gold is molding writers to be able to effectively cover the modern-day mental health crisis. While I 100% agree that we are in a mental health crisis, there is no science to back up any claims that Dr. Gold surmises in this WaPo article. Starting with the first line:

Dr. Jessi Gold was emphasizing the importance of messaging in entertainment, and she had a troubling statistic to prove it.

Suicides, she said, rose some 10 percent in the months after Robin Williams took his life in 2014.

Dr. Gold’s theory is that Robin Williams more or less inspired 10 percent more of the US population to take their own life. Unfortunately for her, CDC data seems to indicate that there is no parallel between Robin Williams’ death by suicide and an increase in suicides. In fact, the CDC reports that the rate of suicide among the US population has increased, on average, 2% per year from the years from 2006 through 2014. It’s also worth noting that Robin Williams passed away in August of 2014, more than half-way through the year, thereby further disputing Dr. Gold’s claim that Robin’s passing had anything to do with the eventual increase year over year of deaths by suicide.

The hiring of Dr. Gold was done so by MTV Entertainment head Chris McCarthy who felt that the networks he had programming say over could potentially be contributing to the increase in mental health issues in the United States. Well, there is no data that Chris could pull from to make that claim. In fact, the underlying question of what Chris is asking, “Is MTV important?”. According to the ratings, the answer is no. Check out these numbers from Business Insider that show that, on average, the MTV network gets around 300,000 viewers…on the high-end. The network’s target market, 25-54 female, is at an all-time low right now as viewers cut cable and flock to streamers and mobile devices for entertainment that is both of higher quality (i.e. more of it) and cheaper (i.e. Youtube is free). If anything, one could find a better correlation between younger audiences spending more time on mobile-bound social networks and rates of mental health disease increasing than they could of that of cable television and anything MTV is airing today. In fact, in 2014, the year in which Dr. Gold is referring to, suicide was less than it was today, but that was a year when cable television was in over 90% of American homes, that number is now under 80% and dropping.

The article goes on to detail Chris bringing in writers from Clone High, with this question, What would result if a company known for animated satire and reality melodramas began shaping them with mental health in mind — what happens when people start being polite and stop getting really outrageous?

I don’t know anything about reality TV, so maybe I’ll give ViacomCBS companies that nod, but this is NOT a company known for animated satire, other than South Park. Chris doesn’t have really any say on how that show writes itself, nor should he, but if the “animated satire” that WaPo is referring to is Clone High, recall that the show hasn’t been on the air since 2003 after one-season and 13 episodes. Also note, the underlying question begs us to take a series, set in a high school with teenage clones of American historical figures, seriously enough that it somehow damages our psyche? First thing’s first, Clone High will be streaming on HBO MAX which further extrapolates my earlier point, second, what credentials does Dr. Gold have that she can be a defacto writer on an animated television series? Her “guide” for mental health sensitivity is subjective at best, and furthermore is an assault on freedom of expression. In fact, Daily Show producer Jennifer Flanz had this to ask Dr. Gold which, came with it, a hilarious response, ”

“We’ve used words like ‘unhinged’ or ‘intense’ to replace ‘crazy.’ Are there words you would suggest using?”

“Can I think on that and get back to you?” Gold said

Understand that those are two common words in the English dictionary that Dr. Gold didn’t understand, and then further note that this is still opinionated content coming from a few psychologists who refuse to bring up a truer underlying reason for the increase in suicides and, my favorite “accidental deaths”, that are being piled on among our youth.  Here is far more compelling evidence as to what the underlying ghost is here and what none of the outlets mentioned in this article has failed to explain to you with the exception of one…JRE.
On a recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience,  comedian Andrew Santino was on the show discussing his 2017 Showtime (ViacomCBS) stand-up comedy special Andrew Santino: Home Field Advantage. One of the quirks that Andrew had to deal with in his anticipation of his special is that 1) he had to discuss his act with the standards & practices department of Showtime. One of the jokes that Andrew had was about Ritalin, a Novartis pharma drug used essentially to sedate those who suffer from two miracles of modern psychiatric “care”, ADD and ADHD. A note about Novartis Pharma. Before a merger in the mid-90s, Novartis went by the name of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, a company commissioned by the United States to develop drugs for extended mental health illness, one of those derived from those studies was lysergic acid diethylamide, also known as LSD. LSD was widely available on the market for five years until the mid-60s when it was discovered that a local pharma distributor (also linked to the CIA) in California was linked to selling LSD to one Charles Manson.
I bring that up to tell you that in the early 2000s, Novartis settled multiple cases out of court for negative side-effects of Ritalin, and that today, Novartis spends billions of dollars in spending in advertising with companies like ViacomCBS and Washington Post to promote lines of products that include Excedrin, Theraflu, Lamisil, and more. One could simply look at the over-prescription of Ritalin and other psychotropic drugs in the early 2000’s and then point a finger at the number of deaths caused by “poisoning” and “accidental” (a common cause of death is “accidental overdose”) 14 years later, and point to a far more compelling reasoning as to, as Dr. Gold puts it, saw an increase in suicides among youth, all those years later. Increases in multiple dysphoria disorders, mass shootings, and easy manipulation of those who ascribe to religious texts are also all side effects to consider. Another industry that profits from increased prescription of drugs for mental illness?

Psychiatric professionals like Drs. Gold and Joy Harden Bradford rake in millions of dollars from prescription drug companies to peddle their drug products to susceptible patients. Courtney Knowles, another “expert” named in the WaPo piece, also is not a licensed doctor and has no experience in any medical field other than to say as a communications representative aka PR. It would be career suicide for any of these people to note that there is a better correlation between increase in psychiatric prescriptions and suicide than there is between entertainment and suicide.
Right now, Hollywood is censoring itself, and it’s pointing the fingers at wrong causes of mental health as a result.

About John Schwarz

John is the Chief Editor and Founder of Bubbleblabber.com. While at first a part-time project, Bubbleblabber quickly grew into a full-fledged operation and officially became a company in 2014. When John isn't running a business full-time, he likes to go to concerts with your mother.