I haven’t watched Amazon’s “Jack Ryan” series. I heard season 1 was good… and I’ve heard that season 2 was a trash fire. After watching this review, I can believe it.

Basically, it seems that season 2 revolved around Venezuela being an economic basketcase run by bad people. Well… sure, because that’s the actual factual case for Venezuela. But it seems that “Jack Ryan” has decided to rewrite history and claim that Venezuela is this way because of a pseudo-right wing government… and that the heroic opposition is just a female version of the socialists who in reality trashed Venezuela in the first place.

Those of you who remember the awesomely awful  action movies and TV shows of the 80’s doubtless remember Our Heros going to some Latin American craphole run by tin pot dictators. And when you’d crack open your World Book encyclopedia set, you’d find no mention of the craphole country… because Hollywood simply invented it. And that’s a fair way to go. Invent a country and you can claim anything about it you like. But when you use a *real* country and your show isn’t explicitly an alternate history show, ya gotta kinda stick to the facts. Those same 80’s action shows that featured fictional South American, Caribbean, Asian and African countries would also often send Our Heroes to places like East Germany and the Soviet Union… where Our Heroes would tangle with commies. Not Nazis or emperors or magical wizard realms, but the bad guys who were actually there. So why does “Jack Ryan” swap out the actual bad guys in Venezuela with not just fictional ones but 180-degree-off-axis bad guys? Really only one reason springs to mind as being at all realistic: the writers want to use the humanitarian disaster that is Venezuela, but they still like the ideology that produced it. You can’t show the electorate that the policies pushed by Bernie and AOC will lead to Americans being forced to eat their pets; do that, and Bad Orange Man might get re-elected!

So, yeah, I guess I can scratch “Ryan” off my “must watch” list.