A Twitter/X Animated Sitcom Featuring a Person Behind the Kremlin/TENET Media Scandal

Dave Rubin as a voice on The New Norm

A few months ago the pilot episode of a new animated series called The New Norm was going to be exclusively shown on Twitter/X. It was supposed to be a conservative family sitcom that was going to serve as a counter balance to all of those woke liberal sitcoms both animated and live action. Here's the original tweet promoting the pilot with the tag line “legalize humor.” It also asked for donations so they can make new episodes and, in their words, “help fight the ‘woke mind virus’ with laughter.”

As of this writing only the three-minute pilot has been produced, which you can still see right here.

When it was originally released The New Norm received mostly negative reviews. You can read some of them at the Internet Movie Database. I remember the numerous YouTube videos from people that totally slammed The New Norm, such as this one.

There were reasons for the hostile responses. For one thing, in three minutes there were only maybe one or two funny jokes, which is bad for a comedy. If you're of a certain age, you might notice that the layout of Norm's home is similar to the layout of the Bunker household from the 1970s sitcom All in the Family. In fact, Norm even resembles Archie Bunker.

The main four characters mirror the ones in All in the Family. You have the bigot Norm in the Archie Bunker role. Norm's wife, Janice, is a less-dingbatty version of Edith Bunker. The couple's teenage daughter (whose name I wasn't even able to find out) is a younger more hip version of Archie and Edith's daughter, Gloria Stivic. Gloria's husband, Mike Stivic, is replaced with a teenage non-binary character called Chaz, whom Norm's daughter immediately likes when she first meets Chaz after they move into Norm's house.

The pilot ends with a brief cameo appearance from an animated Elon Musk, who doesn't speak at all, and it's obvious that the people behind The New Norm were giving a shout out to Musk.

I can understand the hostility towards The New Norm. That pilot is full of transphobic jokes and there's nothing even likeable about Norm nor any of the other characters. If you want to see an animated sitcom featuring a main character who's a conservative, you'd be better off with watching old episodes of King of the Hill. Hank Hill maybe an uptight conservative but he's much more of a likeable human being than Norm. King of the Hill is also way funnier than The New Norm.

But there's another twist to The New Norm that's way more interesting than what you see on the screen. Yesterday I mentioned that the US Justice Department had charged two Russian state media employees of the Kremlin media channel RT of covertly funding a Tennessee-based content creation company known as TENET Media, which hosted podcasts by right-wing influencers. A day after the Justice Department's announcement, TENET Media's YouTube channel was deleted by YouTube.

One of those TENET Media podcasters, Dave Rubin, was the voice of the nonbinary character Chaz on The New Norm. That's the same Dave Rubin who was paid a monthly fee of $400,000 along with a signing bonus of $100,000 for four videos each week.

I find it ironic that the makers of The New Norm were asking the general public on Twitter/X for donations so they could afford to make new episodes when they could have asked Rubin to invest a small portion of the insane amount of money he was making for his podcasts in exchange for a cut of the revenue if that show had become a big hit.

It's not known at the moment if there are any more connections between the Kremlin-funded TENET Media and The New Norm other than Dave Rubin's participation in both. But The New Norm is the kind of sitcom that Russia would like, given that nation's current hostility to the LGBTQ community. As this tweet states: “imagine being a Russian soldier having to plug your bullet wounds with tampons because instead of buying bandages, your government used that money paying Dave Rubin to make New Norm.”

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