Extremely non-senile Congressman asks why these Netflix cartoons can't be more like Andy Griffith

Tennessee elected official yells at streaming cloud.

By William Hughes | October 4, 2025 | 6:23pm

The Andy Griffith Show, Screenshot: YouTube

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Extremely non-senile Congressman asks why these Netflix cartoons can't be more like Andy Griffith

In its ever-widening efforts to find its base things to be mad about that are not the way no amount of rage expressed at trans rights, immigrants, or late-night talk show hosts seems to actually make their own lives any better, the American right-wing has gotten itself into a tizzy about Netflix this week. We reported earlier about how Elon Musk has hit on the streaming service as his latest hyper-fixation, specifically targeting a two-year-old animated TV series called Dead End: Paranormal Park for having a trans main character. (He is also mad about Strawberry Shortcake, a sentence that has historically only ever been written about our most powerful and noble culture warriors.) Now, though, this latest bout of “Don’t worry about the economy, just look at that” has infected lawmakers, too, with a member of the House Of Representatives asking the question we’ve all been asking about modern television lately: Why can’t it be more like The Andy Griffith Show?

This actual statement that sounds like something we’d make up to be mean comes courtesy of Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett, who’s chosen to pick up the thoroughly hand-wrung gauntlet that Musk threw down with his “Cancel Netflix” calls. To be fair to Burchett, he started out a Saturday appearance on Fox News (per Mediaite) working from the standard playbook, calling Netflix a “left-wing propaganda outlet,” and suggesting he’s going to bring in the FCC to try to regulate it. (Which is actually a pretty interesting/scary legal question, in so far as the federal government hasn’t managed to get a lot of precedent down on paper yet on how far its regulatory authority with streamers extends.) But then Burchett abruptly veers off into the weeds of his own mind, noting that he tried watching some Dead End, and, hey, why does it have to move so dang quick?

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I’ve kind of dug into this a little bit more, and the way they do it is they do these scenes, and they switch them around very fast. In the old days, Andy Griffith, it was just one camera and it was great. And they do different scenes and it’s moving around every second, and that releases certain things in young children’s minds, and we need to find out why are they doing like this because this is contracting their brains, this is molding their brains.

We will note that we have also watched some Dead End this week—mostly thanks to this bizarre conservative marketing push—and will point out that it seems pretty normally paced by the standards of modern animation. (Admittedly, the show’s very first scene is a little frenetic, thanks to deliberately mimicking the camera work of horror films, including a couple of fast-moving faux-Steadicam shots. Wait, was Sam Raimi trying to control our minds?!) Having really started to rail on that infuriating cloud, Burnett then went on to cite the old advertising saw about fast-moving images subliminally priming viewers of entertainment to drink Coke—something actual scientists have had a complicated time replicating, by the way—implying that Netflix is using its shows to subconsciously instill the idea that being trans is okay into our nation’s children.

Which is patently ridiculous, since Dead End—which is in part about a teen who moves out of his home into a dangerous environment because his parents won’t support him in the face of transphobia from an older family member—is not shy about the fact that it’s concerned with how we should not treat trans people like shit. There is absolutely nothing subliminal about its message that bad things happen when we don’t listen to and support our kids; it’s not trying to trick anybody by suggesting that standing up for your trans friends and family members in the face of spewing hate is an obvious act of moral courage. Burchett, meanwhile, dubs the whole thing “demonic,” but, then, he also said the show looked like “Claymation” in a different interview, so it’s possible he should just stick to watching Mayberry R.F.D.