Yeah, the show is going to have big PC problems, which they will probably roll over totally for......just a couple of stray thoughts:
1.) Why do this show? They knew they were going to stir things up with a show about P-non-C designated Losers of History (in the Hollywood canon) white Southern boys.
2.) There's gonna be an instant stink about the flag -- either they screw with it, and p.o. the old fans, or they don't, in which case they're going to be wearing an NAACP hatemonger-lawyer like a cheap suit. Or maybe doing the show is all about losing the flag -- again. (Seen one on a televised NASCAR event lately?) Maybe the whole rationale of the show is to say "OK, here's how we think y'all ought to be now!"
3.) If they make Boss Hogg black, they'll introduce another element of racial tension they hadn't bargained for -- uppity white boys versus progressive sheriff-of-color (who damn well better not be like the old Boss Hogg, right?). And how are they going to portray the Roscoe Coltrane character, who was in cahoots with Hogg half the time, and just out to lunch the rest of the time? He was a caricature himself -- put him next to a black Boss, and his white Stepin Fetchit caricature becomes really hard-edged. Too, in the South today, if blacks have enough votes to elect a county at-large commissioner or sheriff, they generally have enough votes to prevent any white from reaching elective office -- and do. In Orleans Parish, in Louisiana, black politicians run a truly corrupt and venal administration whose only pride point is that all the Confederate monuments but one have been snatched away and gathered in a warehouse (and possibly destroyed -- only a few people know), and whites can't get elected to parish or City of New Orleans government outside the occasional district spot. Having a black mayor or sheriff doesn't automatically mean you arrive at some sort of racial Shangri-La -- it simply means that different people are now disfranchised and unhappy about local government, and unable to do anything about it except move away. So that's another reef the producers and writers will have to steer around, and in so doing represent Hazzard County as some kind of Neverland that not even the original Hazzard never was.
4.) As regards Hispanic deputies......probably not, but that CB radio the Duke boys will be using will probably have a ton of Spanish on channel 19 now, and the schools pro'lly ought to be full of kids just arrived from Mexico and Central America, if it's set in contemporary west Georgia. I know, it depends on the county, but still......
5.) That "Rebel Yell" horn will be illegal on some campuses in Mississippi, so they'll have to watch in their dorm rooms with the volume turned down. Or else the producers will just lose that little detail, too, because someone will complain that they just don't have their mahnds raht.
Ain't this all a load of crap?
Now that I think about it tho, most of the movies I have seen in the last 20 years have been awful but someone is watching them.
Great post LG...I'm still laughing