The Goode, the Bad and the New York Times

A new television animation show will be debuting tonight on ABC, and it has the potential to be really “Goode.”

“The Goode Family” is the story of a politically correct family of environmental zealots and there are two reasons I will give this show a chance. First of all, it is created by Mike Judge. While I did not take part in the “Beavis and Butthead” craze, I was an avid fan of “King of the Hill.”

I’m still disappointed that Hank Hill and his friends are leaving after 13 seasons. In the history of television, there will never be a character as cool and incomprehensible as Boomhauer. Grandpa Cotton was also a feisty one.

“King of the Hill” was about a group of Texans, but did not make fun of Southerners. It made fun of those who misunderstood them. When a Massachusetts client insisted on calling Hank “J.R.,” and asking him to wear a ten gallon hat, Hank coolly replied that “Texas has changed a lot in the last 150 years.” When a touchy-feely liberal wanted Hank to “bond with him,” and “meld their positive energies,” Hank responded for all of Middle America when he said to the do-gooder, “How ’bout I just kick your @ss?”

Hank was just a regular guy who believed in Jesus, the Dallas Cowboys, and propane over charcoal. He was at his best lamenting about his son, saying, “Well I want to hang out with Bobby, but the problem is the boy’s not really good at anything.”

All good things come to an end. Out of “King of the Hill” comes “The Goode Family.”

And here’s reason number two I’ll give “Goode” a chance: It’s hated by the bad and the ugly — that being the Jayson Blair Times. The Jayson Blair Times has become a despicable entity specifically because it treats anybody right of center as either being evil, or a complete imbecile. The examples are endless, but the bad and the ugly coming out of the JBT can be found most recently in their article knocking the Goode.

…the show feels aggressively off-zeitgeist, as if it had been incubated in the early to mid-’90s when it was still possible to find global-warming skeptics among even the reasonable and informed.

Oh, those off-zeitgeist people. Don’t you just hate them?

Being a skeptic is soooo 1990s. Only an unreasonable and ill-informed person could possibly question anything that Al Gore says. After all, he won an Academy Award and a Nobel Prize. He has to be right. Here’s some more pompous drivel from the JBT.

But who really thinks of wind power — an allusion to which is a running visual gag in the show — as mindless, left-wing nonsense anymore?

Apparently Ted Kennedy does. He refused to allow a wind farm in front of his home because it blocked the view off of his Nantucket paradise.

Mr. Judge, who remains obsessed with the insanities of political correctness, still has his head very much in the Clinton years, and it is possible to watch ‘The Goode Family’ feeling so thoroughly transported back to another time that you wonder where all the Monica Lewinsky jokes went. Sometimes you’ve just got to move on.

Move on? This coming from the newspaper that thinks that FDR is in his 20th term? This from the paper that wants to throw President Bush and all of his advisers in jail? This from the paper that still gets page one stories wrong and issues mealy-mouthed retractions on page 37?

This leftist paper not only wants to declare global warming skepticism passe, but political correctness as well.

While it is a shame that Hank Hill will no longer be fighting the good fight, Mike Judge still will be. I expect the show to succeed because Mike Judge understands that while the social message is important, the main goal is to be funny. “King of the Hill” did have mild political overtones, but it lasted 13 seasons because it was likable and funny.

Long live the Goode family. May they triumph over their bad, ugly critics.

eric aka the Tygrrrr Express — blacktygrrrr@earthlink.net