Designing Women (TV Series) Julia Drives Over the First Amendment (1989) User Reviews

...thankfully, First Amendment survives...

[ziklag1990 · 26 January 2015]

I normally don't take "issues" sitcom episodes seriously, but I'll admit this one shocked me. That people whose professional calling is creative expression would issue propaganda (and it IS propaganda; Julia clearly represent the show's views) against free speech is revolting. It's an example of Liberal meeting Conservative in authoritarian ideology.

Sitcoms had done episodes taking easy potshots at right-wing censorship, school book-banning, etc--the rep for such efforts often played by that guy who resembled Jerry Falwell, normally dressed in a light-blue, cheap suit. Easy to slam someone trying to ban "Catcher in the Rye"--a cause we can all rally around, of course; it gets murkier (and more dangerous) when the book is "Huckleberry Finn" and the complaint isn't "dirty words", but racism; or when porn isn't attacked by some southern yokel fulminating against "dirty pitchers", but gender oppression and exploitation, etc. Is it more awkward to defend free speech against that kind of threat? Probably; which is why it's even more important.

(As far as the quality of the episode itself, there are some funny lines; but mostly it's dry and preachy, and cheats by giving all the good lines to the pro-censorship characters)

Julia's a little off the beam this week.

[mark.waltz · 5/10 · 16 February 2021]

While it's the same actress and same character, Julia Sugarbaker seems to have had a personality change here, becoming something she's always fought against. She's angry over a newsstand which has recently opened in her neighborhood that sells pornographic material and shows her objection to it being there by constantly running into it. This gets her into trouble and pretty much into debt by breaking the law, and even if the material she's protesting is vile, she's going about getting rid of it the wrong way.

It seems odd that in the conservative south, such a newsstand would open in a residential area, especially with the posters that Charlene described in view of every passerby. They try to explain the change in Julia's sudden push for censorship, but all it does is make her seem unreasonable and unwilling to pursue more legal ways of getting rid of it. The writers then takes the story even further where Julia confronts the female executive who runs one of the magazines she is protesting.

While her reaction to the magazine poster might justify one attempt to knock it over, repeated attempts just make it appear that she is just being stubborn. Every time you hear that screeching sound of a car, she gets herself into trouble even further and she begins to lose credibility. This is not the Julia that we've come to know and respect in three seasons, and I'm surprised that none of the other women didn't try to have her checked to see if she had been kidnapped by pod people