The old slogan holds that the customer is always right.
But that may come as a bitter pill to some today particularly to woke extremists who are hellbent on reshaping culture.
And now this HBO showrunner lost it after fans’ criticized the show’s over-the-top worship of woke extremism.
One of the emerging trends that we’ve seen throughout 2023 is that companies are making decisions at odds with what their customers want.
Sometimes this is being done gleefully and in a defiant manner.
Already this year, Bud Light was dethroned as America’s best-selling beer.
This of course happened when the company’s working class customer base cried foul after executives made the fateful decision to partner with a transgender extremist many saw as making a mockery of women.
Not to be outdone, Target decided to loudly and proudly display LGBTQ merchandise during a Pride Month promotion that was marketed to children.
Parents everywhere cried foul, staged a boycott, and the company saw sales decline precipitously.
Given the Bud Light effect, one would think that companies would be more mindful of how pushing a political agenda on customers who don’t want any part of that could result in a backlash, but these instances keep happening.
The Bud Light effect spreads again?
HBO’s The Last of Us is the latest in a long line of zombie apocalypse shows.
While the genre might not be for everyone, it has become clear in recent years that it has quite a following.
In the show’s latest episode, fans were treated to an entire episode focused on the love affair between two gays that completely deverted from the source material the show is based on.
Fans cried foul for a couple of reasons.
Some simply didn’t like the episode because they felt that it was a manipulation of the source material, and merely filler that had nothing to do with the overall plot – it was just shoehorned in.
Others felt as though it was a kind of bait and switch, given that the series took a “colorful” turn, but not until three episodes into it, after people were already invested.
The show’s creator, Craig Mazin, took umbrage at the difference of opinion and criticized the show’s fan base’s assessment in an interview with IndieWire.
“Some people didn’t like Episode 3 because, you know, gay stuff,” Mazin claimed. “And then they kind of retroactively try and come up with a [different and inoffensive] reason why. [But] one of the complaints I saw was, ‘Oh, it’s just a filler episode. It doesn’t advance the story.’ And I was like, ‘I think this episode advances the story more than any other episode we have’ — because it’s not plot, it’s character. It’s the letter Bill leaves behind to Joel that powers the rest of the show.”
Got that?
According to the show’s creator, people crying foul three episodes into a brand-new series where a detour was taken to inject woke extremism into the story is somehow not valid.
Of course, he’s welcome to have that point of view, but fans can have an opinion too.
Furthermore, since the overall percentage of the LGBTQ population is relatively small, a betting man wouldn’t expect the series to last very long without some tweaks, given how an entire episode dedicated to woke moral preening isn’t what the majority signed up for when they initially watched the first episode.
In the end, it’s just like the Target and Bud Light fiascos.
If the customer isn’t given what he or she wants, be that a product or moral preening, don’t be surprised when they start to look elsewhere.
US Political Daily will keep you updated on any developments to this ongoing story.
