Wax Lion
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Posts posted by Wax Lion
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Interesting that Mysteries of Laura also had some bad buzz this time last year, (this is all coming from the first page of the this topic) but it's still around.
The Mysteries of Laura started out with really bad reviews but the early ratings were good with overall viewers but just okay with younger viewers. I had a feeling it might be one of those shows critics hate but people watch anyway.
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There's "cancelled" and officially cancelled. No one think Minority Report has a chance and some sites may end up reporting on it as being cancelled but it's not cancelled until Fox releases everyone from their contracts. Of course, at this point I doubt anyone will pause before casting someone from Minority Report on their pilot.
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Weren't the ABC Family execs previously talking about creating "older" programming that, basically, aged with their audience? (See the horrible Kevin from Work) Interesting that the seemed to have decided to go in the other direction.
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On a small tangent, while Jason Chaffez chart was stupid and disingenuous, I'm fine with the lack of a y-axis. Yes, that's your first warning to a deceptive chart but it had the one thing that makes skipping the y-axis okay -- it has datapoint labels, which is why people quickly picked out what was wrong. Of course, whenever the trendlines are so perfectly symmetrical, there's a good chance you're being lied to.
That said, I wish someone would go after Chaffez for his smug "I got this off of your website!" when it was clear he didn't, as seen in the sourcing label. That someone who deserves to be laughed out of any serious discourse.
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There was The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries in the 70s which started out with every other episode focusing on Pamela Sue Martin as Nancy. The show lasted three seasons, but looking at the wikipedia article in the second season all the episodes were focused on the Hardy boys with Nancy being kind of a sidekick and Martin quit the show midway through that season. By the third season the show was just The Hardy Boys.
Nancy Drew is a challenging character, IMO, because she's a teen character in a book series aimed at much younger readers (I know a lot of pre-teens read them) but the books can be enjoyed by adults. Overall, tho, TV has trouble with teen characters. You have soaps where teens act like adults or teens in adult dramas where the writers struggle not to make them unbearable. What made Veronica Mars remarkable was that it was a teen drama that adults and teens could enjoy, just that a lot of adults couldn't be convinced to watch a teen drama on UPN/CW.
Trying to think of a decent template for Nancy Drew, I'd probably say they should be aiming for Alex Dumphy from Modern Family if she started solving mysteries. Nancy's supposed to be smart and willful, but still has a lot of love and respect for her father. That's actually surprisingly unique for TV.
But a 30ish Nancy as a New York cop? That's the most generic take on the character possible.
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I swear the headline crawl comes and goes on MSNBC. Every so often someone feels like they need to show they did something to demonstrate that they're in charge of the network, I guess. I remember Keith and Rachel always used to be able to avoid having the crawl, the last time was within the last two years because I recall Chris being stuck with it but not Rachel. Not anymore.
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I remember John McWhorter being on some of the weekend shows and I can't remember if his patronizing contrarian bit was part of his persona then.
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There should be a German word for the emotion where you feel both outraged fury and resigned disappointment when you learn that Fox News does something racist/Islamophobic.
I teared up at the end because it probably means a lot to hear your favorite character say your name and acknowledge your existence.
I couldn't help but wonder that if she was able to watch Days of Our Lives and her favorite character was EJ, does that mean she also watched EJ's stepson come out and fall in love? If that storyline wasn't censored, it struck me as amazing to think about how far a gay character's story traveled.
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How many soap opera actresses of color have been able to work that consistently fo that long? Forget the awards, look at ..as Viola would say.. the opportunity she's had that has been consistently denied WOC.
Which actually makes me realize a different frustrating angle, diversity has long been a struggle on soaps and her time of prominence runs when things were getting bad for PoC. Until the 90s, the writers' voice was key and an Agnes Nixon had the power to insist on stories that dealt with issues like race but that started to fade with the Luke & Laura days. Her first Emmy came at a time when Santa Barbara was a show where the producers were more in charge than the writers.
And with that change the soaps became more cowardly. Sure, the powerful writers still had power but the newer writers were left with producers who would back off when an interracial couple got hate mail. For a long period the African-American characters were pretty much segregated on Y&R because the show was afraid to put them in a relationship with a white cast member.
With, NLG's shows it's a struggle to remember any African American characters on Santa Barbara (though there was a latino family) and I think General Hospital has three African Americans in a very large cast.
If she just took around her industry she'd see it isn't just "tough all around" for soap actors, there's additional hurdles for black actors in soaps.
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Wait, I'm confused. The Brady Bunch premiered in 1969; One Day at a Time in 1976, I think. So I don't understand the comparison.
Ah, I see. I misread Wikipedia when I was checking my dates and got mixed up that The Brady Bunch entered syndication in 1975, the year One Day At A Time debuted.
I once read Sherwood Schartz said he meant for Carol Brady to be divorced but since no ex ever showed his face I always assumed she was a widow.I read that she was meant to be divorced but the network pushed back on that, the compromise was that they would never say what happened to Carol's first husband.
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As I recall, I think there were fights on One Days at a Time to make this a family comedy without a dad or to treat divorce in a more Norman Lear style. It might have still been a big deal with the network suits. That same year The Brady Bunch debuted and CBS wouldn't let the show say what happened to Carol's first husband.
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I'm rewatching the series now. The first season really works hard at being a serious social issue drama. They try to hold on to that in the second season but by then it's creating the template for the mansoap. Fashion and racism is all that separates Victoria Greyson from Vern Shillinger.
The moments from season two that might have been the shark jump:
- When Schillenger has his son killed because Beecher implies that they're having sex together. It's the beginning of constant Vern vs Beecher schemes
- Ryan falls in love with Gloria. That could start another issue storyline about something female workers in male prisons face. Instead, Ryan gets his brother to kill Gloria's husband.
- Keller arrives and is scheming with Schillinger to get Beecher to fall in love with him and then to break Beecher's heart. That probably wasn't the shark jumping moment as much as confirmation that the shark had been jumped.
Its still an entertaining show but I think after the second season the lack of glamour and the grisly violence made us overlook that, with the betrayals and scheming it had become a soap with a new veneer.
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I'd be up for a Dead Like Me revival though, if Bryan Fuller was involved.
That's where I am with pretty much everything Bryan Fuller created. I'd love more but that Dead LIke Me movie warned me against going without him. I know he quit the show, but the second season of DLM still felt like DLM, unlike that movie.
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I've seen a bit of discussion on it. In one place, there was talk about how most episodes ended suggesting the Harts were about to have sex (sex in some sort of lavish location). It would be amazing if there were a show featuring a gay couple depicted as that loving and flirtatious.
But it's a long way off and a show that had a gay couple like the Harts... I don't know how I feel about the liklihood of it happening on NBC. NBC isn't bad about having gay characters but Sean Saves the World was built on a premise that kept him single. I think The New Normal had the most prominent gay couple and they often left me wondering why they were together.
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As I recall, the copy of Dawn I had didn show Lilith as a white woman. Thankfully, the Patternmaster books, which were from the same design scheme as those Dawn books, had black people on the covers.
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I think I read Stephen is keeping the theatre a few degrees warmer.
The thunderous cheers probably means the show has a really good warm up comedian. I've been to a few show recordings in college, some really build up the audience. First they get you in a good mood with jokes, then they start telling you how much some really big applause will mean to the cast/host/crew who work so hard to make a good show.
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Which is followed up by privatizing prisons, which put prisoners to work for 10 cents an hour making products that then get sold for hundreds of dollars, essentially slave labor. The private prisons usually have contracts with the states requiring that they be provided with a sufficient number of prisoners (i.e., keep making people plead guilty, even if they aren't, and impose long sentence terms on them, even if their crimes are very minor), and former prisoners have so many rights restricted, like they can't vote, and they have a significantly harder time finding jobs, usually leading them back into committing a crime, which will then impose an even longer prison sentence as a 'repeat offender.'
Its one huge scam to enslave poor people, especially if those people are not white.
There's a documentary called Slavery By Another Name that explains that we didn't fully abolish slavery, prisoners were exempted and thus a lot of new, weird laws started showing up on the books in former slavery states, like laws against talking too loud near railroad tracks (IIRC) with governments selling prison labor. Things were pretty blatant at first, forcing the federal government to step in but now enough time has passed to let it happen again.
The long running argument for Privatization has been that government is so innately wasteful and there's always a corrupt leader looking to take a little off the top that we should give these services to businesses who will run these services like a business... except by now, at the very least, that means the corruption has moved to a CEO taking a little off the top instead of a mayor or governor (who is just setting for a big campaign donation to give the CEO a chance). There's a lot worse aspects to privatization, like now voters can't do much when corruption is discovered, just vote out the guy who put the contract in place and hope his replacement isn't similarly bought with campaign donations.
When I first saw the Church of Perpetual Exemption, I though of sending a packet of lettuce seeds but then someone decided to send a 50 pound bag of grass seed. I also thought someone would send semen but that I would never do that. I didn't think of sending them some vanilla pudding until they mentioned that some of the semen they received wasn't real.
That said, if "When someone sends you semen in the mail, it's time to stop" became a thing, there would be a list of things that tempt me to put semen in the mail. Unfortunately, I think Sean Hannity would just end up whining about "liberal hate" in response instead of stopping what he's doing.
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The last half of tonight's show was pretty good but I was hoping for more discussion of Sanders' Liberty University speech. Still the discussion we did get was pretty interesting, I liked that Chris included that some of Sanders' supporters were in the audience, so the loud cheers head in the speech didn't say anything about the LU audience.
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With the first season done, I thought I'd ask what people here think about Mr Robot. There's been a variety of LGBT characters. SPOILERS below:
Probably the most notable is a transgender character who gets very little screen time, but there's nothing done to define her as transgender to the audience, she's entirely defined by her competence and the power she amassed. There's also a scene where
she is dressed as a man which is explained in interviews that they're viewing that as her disguise.
I see what they're trying to do there and overall Mr Robot is a show that lefts plenty of details hinted at, not explained.
But is it a play on the "deceitful transgender" trope if they view a transgender female character as a woman pretending to be a man? (And is it any better that she's deceiving one of the bad guys, with the audience uncertain to what her motives are?)
I know trans activists say that casting a cismale as a trans woman is saying that trans women are just guys in dresses, but does it change anything if you're casting a cismale whose breakout role was a gender non-conforming character?
Does it help if the show is approaching the character as a woman wearing a suit?
There's also a scheming businessman, Tyrell, who
seduces a gay office assistant in order to be able to install maleware on the assistant's phone
. A recent episode put together a contrast between him and another gay businessman, Gideon. While Tyrell's wife is portrayed as a Lady MacBeth,
cutting off her husband from his family unless he gets the position they've been scheming over
, Gideon's husband is trying to get him to stop worrying about business, eat some breakfast and telling him the important thing is that they're together. The show's protagonist (an unreliable narrator) also views Gideon as one of the few purely good people in the world, though at the time
he's scheming to destroy Gideon's business for a "greater good" so that view might be inflated by guilt
.
But that seduction does dangerously put Tyrell in the scheming bisexual trope. In a lot of ways,
Mr Robot seems like a show that likes to play with tropes so maybe it will more clearly subvert the
scheming bisexual trope. They're definitely trying to do that with the deceitful transgender trope, though I don't know if they're succeeding.
Meanwhile there's also a female character who kisses another girl but it's not yet clear what the point of that was.
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I guess it's worth mentioning that everything I heard about Mr Robot before it premiered sounded like an incredibly stupid show. It probably says more about how network press people can't come up with an effective summary of a tech-themed show. I mean, here's the way the show was described when it was announced as a series:
MR. ROBOT is a contemporary and culturally resonant drama about a young programmer, Elliot (Malek), who suffers from a debilitating anti-social disorder and decides that he can only connect to people by hacking them. He wields his skills as a weapon to protect the people that he cares about. Elliot will find himself in the intersection between a cybersecurity firm he works for and the underworld organizations that are recruiting him to bring down corporate America. Slater stars in the title role of Mr. Robot, a mysterious anarchist who recruits Elliot into an underground hacker group.It's not wrong as a description of the show but it's just makes me expect a cross between CSI: Cyber and yet-another lovable crimefighting asshole show.
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Ugh. Whenever a guest starts an answer with "Because the liberals...." I reach for the Fast Forward.
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It was a dick move on Jeb's part, but I'm not as outraged as many seem to be. Maybe because I don't really care about Colbert, but I can't muster up the anger, and I really dislike Jeb.
Are people outraged? It seems like a hilariously stupid move on Jeb!'s part and Rachel seemed to feel similarly. This is the political version of those "weird news" stories where someone gets injured after stupidly putting themselves in harm's way.
Funny how it's just certain parts of the Bible or the Constitution they think should be adhered to.Yeah, it's kind of like their approach to states' rights and small government.
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I don't watch Morning Joe so I got to ask... do they promote Rachel Maddow and All In as heavily on Morning Joe? It feels like I see Morning Joe ads at least 3 times during both shows every night.
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Coach follow-up series cancelled. Apparently the pilot wasn't good.
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Gender On Television: It's Like Feminism Never Happened
in Everything Else TV
When I look at the bumbling dad trope, I don't see something oppressive to men. In the end the narrative at work is about how if a guy cares really deeply, it's okay to keep messing up and when your put-together wife who cleans up your messes shows the slightest bit of annoyance, she's an unbearable nag. I can't think of a mainstream series where the mom is a total screw-up but she cares about her kids so it's okay.
For me, there are two key factors behind "Women in Refrigerators."
One is that a lot of times these characters are just seen by writers by their relationship to a man. They're not characters on their own. For the most part, the audience aren't going to react because they've grown to like and will miss the character (save for the viewers who tend to be drawn to under-used characters). The audience's reaction to her death is all about how it makes her boyfriend feel. DearEvette put this nicely.
I think it was Masie Williams who mentioned recently how you'll see casting sheets go out where a male character is described by his skills and his personality, that same call sheet will describe his girlfriend just in terms of looks. He gets to be defined by his intelligence and medical training, she's defined by her ability to be cute and sexy at once. TV has had a few Boyfriends in Refrigerators and it too pinpoints bad writing.
However, as WiR starts with comics I think it says something about a male-dominated industry handing a female character in a shared universe. A lot of the characters on the WiR list were great under one writer and then they languished either under bad writing or were just ignored until they came up in "Who can we kill to give this story impact?" meetings.
There was a companion piece to WiR called Dead Men Defrosting and largely the point was that, yes, male characters in comics get killed too but they're far more likely to come back. I think that's where comics being male dominated matters, when you have mostly guys writing you're more likely to find someone passionate about bringing back that quirky d-list male character, but there are far less chance of a d-list female character having a champion. That's a dynamic that I think happens in a lot of male-dominated writers rooms for TV shows.