I’m not pretending I’ve never enjoyed a show like Power. The point isn’t that it’s unwatchable. The point is what it does to the appetite. Power is cultural McDonald’s: it hits fast, tastes good for a moment, and leaves you wanting more of the same. But you can’t build a life on it. You can’t feed your mind and your community on a steady diet of low-brow violence, cheap sex, and endless criminal “wins” and then act surprised when people start treating degeneracy like the baseline.
The real danger is repetition. When the same images run through our homes and phones long enough, they stop feeling like entertainment and start feeling like familiarity. Familiarity turns into acceptance. Acceptance turns into identity. You start hearing people talk like the dysfunction is “just us.” Like it’s the culture. Like it’s inevitable.
That’s not harmless. That’s conditioning.
Crime Becomes Relatable Instead of Repulsive
The defenders always say, “It’s just a story.” But stories don’t just reflect reality. They train the imagination. They tell you what to admire, what to excuse, and what to normalize. The question isn’t whether crime exists. The question is what the story does with it. Does it end in consequence, or does it end in celebration?
The Wire could show crime without selling it. It had depth. It forced you to sit with institutions, motives, codes, betrayals, and the slow rot of a city. Even when it was bleak, it wasn’t candy. It made you think. It made you reflect. It didn’t just feed you the same formula and call it “real.”
Power, on the other hand, too often runs like a recipe: sex scene, drug scene, kill scene, roll credits. It’s not that the content is “too dark.” It’s that it’s too shallow. It doesn’t elevate the viewer. It hooks the viewer.
Low-brow entertainment doesn’t just show the worst. It makes the worst feel normal.
Depth Separates Art from Propaganda
There’s a difference between gangster stories that become timeless and gangster stories that become product. Heat, Goodfellas, The Godfather—those films aren’t “good” because they feature criminals. They’re good because they’re built like art. They have restraint, symbolism, irony, and consequence. They show you the weight of choices. They show you what a man becomes when he chooses power over principle.
That’s why you can watch them decades later and still learn something. Not because you want to imitate the lifestyle, but because you’re forced to confront the cost of it.
When a show strips away depth and replaces it with stimulation, it doesn’t create insight. It creates appetite. And appetite is easy to monetize.
The Industry Sells What We Keep Buying
It’s uncomfortable, but it’s true: the market responds to what people consume. If the audience demanded depth at scale, the industry would produce more depth. Instead, the system learns that the safest profit is repetition—anything that locks eyes to the screen and keeps the brain from turning on.
And it’s not just about one network or one producer. Faces change. Funding structures change. But the formula remains because the appetite remains. We keep confusing “popular” with “good,” and then we wonder why our standards drop year after year.
If we don’t control what we consume, what we consume will control us.
When the Church Becomes a Set Piece
One of the ugliest tricks is when sacred things become props. If a show uses the church as a backdrop to justify criminal life, or turns the pastor into just another corrupt figure with no consequence, it doesn’t merely portray darkness. It teaches cynicism. It tells people that even God is part of the hustle. That repentance is optional. That the holy is negotiable.
That matters because the culture doesn’t need more reasons to distrust faith, family, or authority. It needs examples of truth, correction, and moral clarity. When entertainment refuses to show any light, it doesn’t simply “keep it real.” It keeps people trapped.
The Culture Doesn’t Heal on Candy
I’m not arguing that every show has to be a sermon. I’m saying the culture can’t survive on junk. When the bad guys keep winning, when the resolution is always another body, when the only “redemption” is a new scheme, it trains people to cheer for the rot.
That’s why Power feels like McDonald’s. It’s engineered to sell. But it isn’t engineered to build. And if we keep feeding ourselves the same low-brow chaos, we’re going to look up one day and realize the culture didn’t just watch the story.
The culture became the story.
