We’re lucky “Breaking Bad” ended this year instead of next.
Thanks to a new propaganda initiative to promote the health-care policies of the Obama administration, there’s now a board of entertainment-industry creative types (including “Bad” creator Vince Gilligan) whose stated mission is to push the great news about ObamaCare.
So here’s what “Bad” might have looked like in 2014:
INT. CAR. NIGHT.
Walter White, the most-wanted fugitive in America, sits on a lonely New England road trying to figure out how to hot-wire the stolen car he’s sitting in. Lights flash behind him. An officer steps up to his window.
OFFICER
Good evening, Sir, how are you?
WALTER
(Frantically trying to think up another lie)
Um, fine. Look, I . . .(coughs)
OFFICER
Lung cancer, am I right? Say, did you know that under the Affordable Care Act, your pre-existing health condition is no longer anything to worry about?
WALTER
Huh?
OFFICER
You thought I was a cop, didn’t you? I get that all the time. No, I’m a Department of Health and Human Services information officer. I just wanted to introduce you to some of the amazing features of the Affordable Care Act’s new website. Lemme see your iPad.
WALTER
(Handing it over) Okay . . .
OFFICER
You just log in here and . . . (tapping) There you go! Easy, right? Don’t worry about that “catastrophic fail” error message, that’s what we in DC call a “glitch.” Just keep re-entering your information every few minutes. For the next six months. Have a nice night!
(Gets in car, drives away.)
WALTER
(Turns to camera) I only have six months to live, so ObamaCare was too late for me. America, don’t make the health-care mistakes I made. Let ObamaCare be your crystal meth.
(Drives off into distance. Credits roll. Bruce Springsteen’s “We Take Care of Our Own” plays on soundtrack.)
Earlier this month, the California Endowment nonprofit granted $500,000 to a USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center program, “in the latest push to get Tinseltown to promote President Obama’s Affordable Care Act,” Deadline reported.
A flack for the disturbingly titled Hollywood Health & Society program said, with no apparent shame, that “Our experience has shown that the public gets just as much, if not more, information about current events and important issues from their favorite television shows and characters as they do from the news media . . . This grant will allow us to ensure that industry practitioners have up-to-date, relevant facts on health care reform to integrate into their storylines and projects.”
Among those who sit on Hollywood Health & Society’s board are the showrunner of the Disney Junior cartoon “Doc McStuffins” and “Under the Dome” chief Neal Baer.
Now we’re all living under the ObamaCare dome: Even when you flick on a thriller or a kiddie show, there will be no escaping the message that the Affordable Care Act is really, really affordable and super-especially caring.
Hollywood Health & Society has been active for years — it got a storyline about chlamydia inserted into a 2007 episode of “House” and on “ER” worked into the script mentions of the importance of a surgical checklist and BRCA (the gene mutation linked to breast cancer).
Decades ago, the AMA used to vet shows like “Marcus Welby, M.D.”
But no one is pro-breast cancer, whereas ObamaCare is controversial.
Once Hollywood is eagerly chewing up and regurgitating White House talking points like a mama bird feeding us, its innocent little chicks, where does it end?
Will Hans Moleman on “The Simpsons” tell us all about how ObamaCare got him free Lasik? Will Barney from “How I Met Your Mother” stroll in the room to say, “I got six babes knocked up last year and I’m still not a daddy! Thank you Mr. President!”
Here I’ll just pause to remind the entertainment industry that it has about half the approval rating of the NRA. (In January, at the peak of NRA attacks, the gun-rights group had a 44% favorability score as against 24% for the entertainment industry, an NBC News/WSJ poll found).
Nor is pushing politics a winning business model: In the last frenzy of Hollywood propaganda, during the mid-2000s peak of Bush Derangement Syndrome, we were treated to such dismal and didactic Iraq War dramas as “Lions for Lambs” (final gross: $15 million), “In the Valley of Elah” ($6.8 million) and “Grace Is Gone” ($51,000 — that’s right, thousand, as in “less than the cost of the Evian they drank on the set”).
At least those films weren’t planted by the White House, though. This time it’s different. An industry that loves to trumpet its fierce devotion to the First Amendment is putting itself at risk when it willingly becomes another tool of the DC power elite.
Once you’re taking dictation from Washington, it becomes harder to say no when the politicians start telling you what not to say.