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Posts Tagged ‘tv’

a question

What is it with the writers of Dexter and incompetent female police lieutenants who only got their jobs for political reasons?

LaGuerta lied to earn her promotion, flirts with her subordinates, allows her a priori dislike of another female officer to hamper the progress of an investigation, and generally has the sole redeeming professional quality of being a media darling. It wouldn’t bug me so much if her replacement were an improvement, but no — Pasquale’s even worse. Granted, the chief of police is a jerk who makes plenty of his own mistakes, so it isn’t like women are being singled out as bad leaders. But the ep I just watched had the chief saying Pasquale “set back women in this department by twenty years,” while the only alternative the show has yet offered me is LaGuerta.

And the only other female cop shown in detail is Debra Morgan, who is sometimes so stupid and clueless and clumsy in her interactions with people that I want to kick her in the head. (Seriously, Debra — you’ve been a Miami cop for how long, and yet your Spanish is worse than mine?) Yes, she sometimes does things successfully, and so does LaGuerta — but it feels like those things happen despite the characters’ manifest incompetence at basic aspects of their job.

I’d like there to be one woman on the police force, in a leadership position or otherwise, who’s decent at her job the way that Doakes and Angel and Masuka are. The men’s character flaws don’t make me question their fitness for the job. And given that women in male-dominated fields generally have to be more competent to earn respect and promotion, the scenario Dexter presents me with feels all the more implausible.

Measuring a drop in a bucket

It’s International Blog Against Racism Week again, and boy do we have things to choose from — at levels of fame ranging all the way from Sonia Sotomayor and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. down to things like the U.S. cover of Justine Larbalestier’s Liar. (And quieter things than that, no doubt, from one corner of the world to the other, in every city and town.)

Riffling through my brain to see what I might have something to say about, I landed on, of all things, movies. Specifically, the live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Most of my Avatar news has come via anima_mecanique, who has been posting off and on about the head-desk moves of the filmmakers in whitewashing their source. Avatar, if you don’t know, is an animated series set in a fantasy world that I tend to think of as western Pacific Rim in inspiration: the various elementally-themed societies are mostly different varieties of Asian in basis, with the Water Tribes blurring over into northern Pacific natives/Inuit. In other words, not Eurofantasy. But along come the filmmakers with their live-action movie, and suddenly not only is the whole cast white, they’re committing cultural blunders right left and center, like telling people to show up for casting calls in their “traditional cultural ethnic attire. If you’re Korean, wear a kimono.” <headsplode> Well, they backpedaled a little to cast some brown people, like that nice boy from Slumdog Millionaire since everybody likes him, right . . . only last I heard, that nice boy and all the other non-white actors are playing members of the Fire Nation. Who are, y’know, the enemy.

Oh yeah. That fixes everything.

The problem is, I’m not sure what I can do to protest this problem other than make a blog post. Boycotting the movie? Not effective. My one lost ticket sale won’t make anybody take notice, and if a lot of people boycotted it, enough that they did notice, Hollywood wouldn’t say “oh, I guess we should cast Asian actors next time.” They’d say, “oh, I guess we should go back to Eurofantasy.” I can buy the animated series, and I’m going to (I’ve seen the first season and loved it), but after that, it seems like all I can do is talk.

Which isn’t totally ineffective. After all, it was fan outcry that got them to cast Dev Patel (even though he would be way better as Sokka than Zuko). And now that I look on the IMDb, it seems they’ve got a Korean actor for one of the Earthbenders, so hey, there’s one who isn’t on the wrong side of the war. At least some of that has happened because people talked about the problem.

I just wish I knew how to do more. I’ll probably end up going to see the movie, because I suspect that I’ll achieve more by supporting baby steps toward non-Eurofantasy than holding out for perfection, but it’ll annoy me. Especially since it’s pretty obvious that the filmmakers don’t even really get where they went wrong.

Star Trek: The Original Watching

CBS has all of the original series available online, so I’ve been running episodes while I clean my office or do laundry or whatever. Not entirely sure why; I have to admit that my opinion of the show hasn’t changed much. There are the occasional moments I enjoy, but there’s also hella clunky writing, cheap sets, overacting, and a general lack of the things I love (like arc plots and long-term character development).

It’s interesting to look at it with historical perspective, though. The technology: I presume they did their best to be futuristic, but now it’s this weird mash of incredibly dated limitations (tapes???) and still-implausible handwavium (tricorders). The plots, reflecting the concerns and ideals of the time. But what really gets me, as you might expect, are the characters.

I think I have an easier time coping with the show’s racial shortcomings because it’s easier for me to recognize the ways in which it was progressive for the time. I mean, two non-white bridge officers? Sure, Uhura does almost nothing of note (at least as far as I’ve watched), but as Whoopie Goldberg said to her mother, there’s a black woman on television, and she ain’t no maid. And there’s the occasional black or Asian background character, too. I still cringe at things like, oh, the casting of a Mexican actor as a northern Indian Sikh, but I can usually manage to get past it, by focusing on the ways in which this was an improvement over the mass of media at the time.

With gender, it’s harder. Maybe I just don’t know enough about female roles elsewhere on TV at the time? Because it sticks in my craw that the women are mostly just sex objects, and on the rare occasion that one of them has a relevant professional role (the psychologist in “Dagger of the Mind,” the historian in “Space Seed”) their narrative function is to be incompetent and screw everything up. The men constantly reduce them to their attractiveness and/or treat them like children, and the women respond accordingly. I damn near cheered when I watched “Amok Time” (I’m at the beginning of S2 now), because while Vulcan marital tradition blatantly reduces women to prizes for the men, T’Pring quite cleverly manipulates that tradition to achieve her own ends. Go go gadget agency! And you get T’Pau, who’s respected, powerful, and able to help the protagonists — because she chooses to, not because she has to. Vulcans: 2, Humans: 0, where non-objectified women are concerned.

(Incidentally, having watched “Amok Time” — I don’t know when exactly K/S came into existence, i.e. whether it existed before that ep . . . but ye gods is that thing slashy. Much is now explained.)

The fact that I’ve watched so much is really more a testament to my obsessive sense of completism (and the ease of online watching) than any growing affection; there’s maybe two or three eps so far I’d have any desire to watch a second time. I really wish some of the other series were available online, so I could give them a shot, but sadly this does not seem to be the case.

more linky

Both of these are at least tangentially writing-related.

First, the humor: “Six Writers Who Accidentally Crapped Out Masterpieces”

Second, the analysis: Daily Kos on Dollhouse. Not normally a place I look for writing about TV, but I found it an interesting post. Truth is, I haven’t been watching Dollhouse, not because I think it sounds bad, but because I think it sounds like a concept that’s doomed to failure given the environment of TV production, and I don’t want to get attached to it only to have it pulled out from under me. But I suspect the analysis given there isn’t far off the mark. It doesn’t automatically negate the criticisms I’ve also heard — just because Whedon is trying to do this kind of thing doesn’t mean he’s succeeding — but I’m thinking of opening a betting pool as to how many papers on Dollhouse there will be at next year’s ICFA.

Oscar thought

Imagine being Anne Hathaway, twenty-six years old, sitting there twenty feet from Shirley MacLaine while she tells you how awesome she thinks you are.

I actually really liked that aspect of the Oscar ceremony — having the acting awards presented by groups of previous winners, each of whom addressed one of the nominees personally, instead of speaking impersonally about them in the third person. And it fit the whole aesthetic of the ceremony, which was, as one of our party said, “glam on a budget.” How do you do Hollywood glitz in a recession, without seeming grotesque in your conspicuous consumption? Well, inasmuch as that’s even possible, you do it by hearkening back to classic Hollywood style, and also by leaning on the star power of your people, rather than big-budget displays. (lowellboyslash, I know you hated the song-and-dance numbers, but Hugh Jackman actually does a fair bit of musical theatre, and both he and (later on) Beyonce actually carried off the style of it decently well.)

Kate Winslet wins the Best Acceptance Speech award for the night, by being all sweet and touching and then telling Meryl Streep she can suck it. *^_^*

Not the most memorable ceremony ever, but we enjoyed it. The key to the Oscars, as always, is to watch them with a big ol’ group of friends and as much snark as you can bring. They’re dead boring on their own.

The Sandbaggers

It’s come to my attention that there are people on my flist who have never seen or even heard of The Sandbaggers. I must do what I can to remedy this.

The show ran for three seasons on the BBC around 1978-1980. This being the BBC, that means there are only twenty episodes, all told. Almost every one is brilliant; the few that aren’t, were not written by the usual guy, and even then they don’t suck.

This is a spy show, but as the main character points out in the first ep, “if you want James Bond, go to your library. If you want to run an intelligence service, sit at your desk and think, and then think again.” 90% of most eps covers the planning, the piecing together of information, and most especially the politicking necessary to make the missions happen (or to stop them from going through). The fieldwork, when it happens, usually looks a bit cheap, partly because it isn’t the slick flashiness Bond has conditioned you to expect, and partly because it’s the BBC in the late seventies, and the production wasn’t exactly rolling in cash.

“Sandbaggers” is a nickname for a three-man special section in the Secret Intelligence Service, aka MI6. The main character, Neil Burnside, is the Director of Operations for SIS, but the show focuses particularly on the deployment of the Sandbaggers for particularly delicate or difficult missions. In practice, this means the plots often involve Burnside ricocheting back and forth between the offices of C (the head of SIS), the deputy chief, and the Permanent Undersecretary at the Foreign Office, as he tries to get clearance for or obstruct various operations. Also, thanks to a “special relationship” of information-sharing between SIS and the CIA, he’s usually wheeling and dealing with the head of their London station. Burnside, being a character somewhat of a type with Francis Crawford of Lymond and Dr. Gregory House, is very very good at what he does, but not remotely afraid to be a manipulative bastard in pursuit of that end.

I mentioned that a few of the eps are less good. This is because much of the show’s awesomeness derives from its scripts, written by a guy named Ian Mackintosh, about whom there is much mysteriousness. It’s widely speculated, even by people who worked on the show, that Mackintosh was ex-naval intelligence himself. The scripts certainly came close enough to realism that one of them was censored under the Official Secrets Act; that’s why there are only six episodes in the second season.

And why didn’t he write all of the third season? Because he disappeared. Without a trace. He was flying in Alaska with a friend who was (I believe) an ex-RAF pilot, and they radioed in a call for help just before flying into the one zone that wasn’t covered by US or Soviet radar. Nothing was ever seen of them again. It’s possible they crashed into the ocean and the wreckage all sank, but it doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to wonder; some of the people involved in the show honestly thought Mackintosh had defected to the USSR. They found no sign of him after the Iron Curtain fell, though, so it remains a complete mystery to this day.

So that’s why you get only twenty episodes. They hired people to fill out the remainder of the third season, but understood that nobody was up to Mackintosh’s standard, and decided to stop there.

You can get the show on DVD these days. The image and sound quality are bad enough that the disc puts up a disclaimer/apology while it’s loading, but the scripts and the acting are fantastic, full of twisty plot and authorial ruthlessness.

. . . and now I want to go watch more, instead of doing the work I should do. Siiiiiiigh.

dramatic thoughts

Re-watching some season two Sandbaggers tonight, I figured out Yet Another Reason why drama more often floats my boat than comedy does.

(The first set of reasons, btw, involved me figuring out which kinds of humour I do and do not find funny — the latter category mapping with unfortunate closeness to the kinds of humour generally seen in modern American comedies.)

I really like watching characters do the thing they do well. I like competence. Whether it’s Burnside planning a mission or House diagnosing an illness or whatever, I can be happy just watching the clockwork go. Some of my favorite X-Files episodes were the ones where Mulder — who, after all, came out of the Behavioral Science Unit — dusted off his profiling skills to figure out what the bad guy was doing. Massive character drama is good, too, of course, but competence can be fun to watch.

And TV is a particularly good venue for it, since the episodic structure allows for repeated demonstrations of competence, instead of just the one big sequence a movie might have. But this, as I said, gives me another reason I don’t like sitcoms: they’re more likely to focus on the characters’ incompetence. I can find that fun, too, but only as a flavoring, not a main dish.

Should read about Mesoamerica tonight. Wanna watch more Sandbaggers. Whine whine whine.

Brits do TV right.

Whoever it was on my flist that mentioned enjoying the first episode of Jekyll: THANK YOU.

Okay, yeah, I wrote a novel called Doppelganger; I’m predisposed to like stories in this vein. But still. The British mini-series Jekyll is kind of awesome.

Some of it is standard-issue awesome, if that makes sense: good bits of dialogue, nicely twisty plot, and so on. But there’s also special-order awesome, like the lesbian PI couple, and the general sense that the female characters carry roughly half of the weight of the show, instead of being a couple of tokens running around for variety. I didn’t like Claire at first, and she fell down again a little bit toward the end, but she had a nice stretch in the middle there where she went from plot-fodder wife to an active agent in the plot. And that was very pleasing.

(The other thing that was awesome? I didn’t have to leave my house to make the magic moving pictures come to me. Netflix’s streaming option, via XBox Live, is da bomb.)

So, for those not aware, this is essentially a sequel to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, featuring a modern-day guy named Tom Jackman who’s got more than just your average case of split personality. He’s recently estranged from his wife and children (owing to his fear that his other side might, well, kill and eat them), and he’s being chased around by an evil organization that wants to do god knows what kind of experimentation on him, but there are enough wrenches thrown into that run-of-the-mill setup to keep it quite interesting. If I have one substantive complaint, it’s that I would have liked more than six episodes; I wholeheartedly agree that it’s better off as a mini-series than an ongoing thing, but another two or four episodes would have allowed for more exploration of the very interesting side characters. In particular, the way the opening scene plays made me expect Miss Reimer to have more central of a role, and I was mildly disappointed that she stayed pretty resolutely secondary.

James Nesbitt pulls off the major requirement of a role like this, which is to play a convincing difference between the two personalities. He’s helped along by minor prosthetics — altering his hairline, ears, chin, and eye color, since Hyde is not supposed to look exactly like Jackman — but the important thing is the behavior. David Boreanaz never did it well enough for my taste; Angelus, for me, mostly existed in the dialogue written for him, which Angel would never have spoken. Hyde’s got the dialogue, but he’s also got the change in pitch and tone and especially body language. Hyde moves differently than Jackman does. (He also goes through a pretty wide range of accents, for various reasons.) So props to him.

If you’ve seen this, please flag any spoilers in your comments, since I imagine a lot of people haven’t come across it yet.