The Gilligan Manifesto (2018) At the height of the Cold War, Gilligan's Island depicted seven Americans living in an analogue of a post-apocalyptic world where the survivors have to rebuild civilization. Remarkably, the society they create is pure communist. Interviews with the show's creator and some of the surviving actors, as well from professors from Harvard, reveal that Gilligan's Island was deliberately designed to be dismissed as low brow comedy in order to celebrate Marxism and lampoon Western democratic constructs.