Years ago — specifically in the 1990s — U.S. TV screens were teeming with MOWs (or Movies of the Week) about one deadly disease or another, each one seemingly more lethal than the last. Then the sector evolved, and began airing TV movies about the natural disaster of the week. These flicks even anticipated what Global Warming would do to our world. (Although when former president Donald Trump said he welcomed “Global Warming,” explaining that New York City was too cold during the winter, this term changed to the easier to understand “Climate Change.”)
Some memorable disease-of-the-week titles were 1992’s The Plague, 1993’s AIDS, and two great movies about epidemics: Outbreak in 1995 and Contagious in 1997.
No less dramatic were disaster movies like Night of The Twisters (1996), Volcano (1997), Inferno (1998), as well as Tornado (2006) and Polar Storm (2009). All possible natural disasters were basically covered.
With the return of the “business knows best” era of deregulation in the 2000s, creatives found a great source of inspiration from the weakening of government regulators and the rise of widespread corruption. This period gave us gems like Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street; The Dropout, about the Theranos scandal; Varsity Blues, about the college admission scandal; and Dopesick, about the Purdue Pharma opioid addiction scandal.
No sector has been spared. We should soon expect to see a film about Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of FTX, detailing the crypto currency scandal, as well as one about George Santos, the newly elected Republican congressman from Long Island, New York who is being investigated in Brazil for check fraud and in the U.S. for reportedly lying about a number of things, including graduating from Baruch College, working for Citigroup, and that he’s Jewish.
Indeed, while diseases and natural disasters are in limited supply, scandals and corruption have unlimited potential, and as they say in television, “The story is more interesting than the news!”
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