Crime shows / police procedurals I’ve been watching on Britbox

I’ve been on a binge watching spree of Crime shows / police procedurals on Britbox/Amazon Prime. Some of these are 2021/2022 and have diverse casts with lots of female leads. Of these, I particularly like Sherwood, The Tower, Eleventh Hour and Karen Pirie. Shetland and Vera are a bit gloomy, both in setting and in mood.

Gemma Whelan, Jimmy Akingbola
Gemma Whelan, Jimmy Akingbola
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“Arabian Street Artists” Bomb Homeland: Why We Hacked an Award-Winning Series | Heba Amin

The series has garnered the reputation of being the most bigoted show on television for its inaccurate, undifferentiated and highly biased depiction of Arabs, Pakistanis, and Afghans, as well as its gross misrepresentations of the cities of Beirut, Islamabad- and the so-called Muslim world in general. For four seasons, and entering its fifth, “Homeland” has maintained the dichotomy of the photogenic, mainly white, mostly American protector versus the evil and backwards Muslim threat. The Washington Post reacts to the racist horror of their season four promotional poster by describing it as “white Red Riding Hood lost in a forest of faceless Muslim wolves”. In this forest, Red Riding Hood is permitted to display many shades of grey – bribery, drone strikes, torture, and covert assassination- to achieve her targets. She points her weapon of choice at the monochrome bad guys, who do all the things that the good guys do, but with nefarious intent.

[…]

At the beginning of June 2015, we received a phone call from a friend who has been active in the Graffiti and Street art scene in Germany for the past 30 years and has researched graffiti in the Middle East extensively. He had been contacted by “Homeland’s” set production company who were looking for “Arabian street artists” to lend graffiti authenticity to a film set of a Syrian refugee camp on the Lebanese/Syrian border for their new season. Given the series’ reputation we were not easily convinced, until we considered what a moment of intervention could relay about our own and many others’ political discontent with the series. It was our moment to make our point by subverting the message using the show itself.

Source: “Arabian Street Artists” Bomb Homeland: Why We Hacked an Award-Winning Series | Heba Amin

Continue Reading“Arabian Street Artists” Bomb Homeland: Why We Hacked an Award-Winning Series | Heba Amin

Boxed In: Employment Of Behind-The-Scenes And On-Screen Women In 2013-14 Prime-Time Television

As Long As Women Are Not Free

From the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film: San Diego State University, the annual report on women in television

The report is available in a downloadable PDF file: Boxed In: Employment Of Behind-The-Scenes And On-Screen Women In 2013-14 Prime-Time Television

In 2013-14, women comprised 27% of creators, executive producers, producers, writers, directors, editors, and directors of photography working on prime-time programs airing on the broadcast networks. This represents a decrease of 1 percentage point from 2012-13. On screen, women accounted for 42% of all speaking characters, a decrease of 1 percentage point from 2012-13. This year’s study also reports the findings of an expanded sample including programs airing on the broadcast networks, on basic and paid cable channels, and available through Netflix.

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Jennifer Hudson – ‘I Can’t Let Go’ on Smash

I know it’s fashionable to hate on Smash recently, but you gotta at least admit that Jennifer Hudson KILLS this song. I’ve been playing this on repeat all week. Favorite line – “And when heartache comes a’calling, / I won’t even try to run / Cause it’s all that makes me know that I’m alive.” (Not exactly applicable in my life right now given that I’m happily married, but it still resonates.)

Continue ReadingJennifer Hudson – ‘I Can’t Let Go’ on Smash

Ryan Murphy does hate lesbians, apparently

Via Vulture magazine, some interesting commentary of last night’s Glee episode, which I have yet to see. Glee Recap: Carefully Chosen Bells and Whistles — Vulture.

Speaking of chaos, if you’re a casual Glee fan, you might have missed out on exactly how directly last night’s episode knocked down the fourth wall between it and the show’s more vocal fan base. It all starts when Sam leaves a trail of Cheerios for Brittany, which she eats off the floor as she makes his way to him. This is a rare moment of character-related continuity for Glee, since last season Brittany ate a candy bar right out of an actual cat’s actual litter box. Sam tells her that he likes her and they do a surprisingly nice rendition of “Something Stupid.” But when Sam leans in for a kiss, Brittany backs off, and when he asks what’s wrong, Brittany says, “It’s like all lesbians of the nation — I don’t know how they found out about Santana and I dating, but once they did, they started sending me tweets and Facebook messages on Lord Tubbington’s wall. I think it means a lot to them to see two super-hot, popular girls in love, and I worry if they find out about you and I dating, that they’ll turn on you and get really violent and hurt your beautiful face and mouth.”

Angry, violent lesbian stereotype aside, the problem with Brittany’s explanation is how transparent of a reference it is to the Twitter kerfuffle that’s been brewing lately between Ryan Murphy and some of the more ardent Brittany-Santana fans (a group that obviously isn’t comprised exclusively of angry lesbians). Essentially, it really is just that: a spat between fans who are mad at the creator of their favorite TV couple and the creator who’s mad at them for being mad. (The dispute gets more complicated when looked at against Murphy’s track record with lesbian characters on his shows.) Frankly, if I were Ryan Murphy, know what I’d do instead of getting into Twitter spats? I would float on a raft of rubies in a swimming pool full of melted-down gold while negotiating the purchase of the Boston Celtics.

If you don’t want me to watch your show, Ryan, that’s fine – just say so. No need to be a hateful jerk about it. I have better stuff to do anyway, like writing more fully-crafted thoughtful lesbian story lines of my own. I honestly would be perfectly happy with a Brittany/Sam storyline except that:

  1. The sum amount of screen time that Brittany and Santana got through their whole relationship was less than what they have shown for Brittany and Sam in one episode.
  2. Santana’s coming out story was really terrible in a whole bunch of ways.
  3. Ryan Murphy has been such a hateful bitch over twitter towards lesbian fans of Glee.

Glee has done wonders for gay male visibility on television with Kurt and Blaine’s story lines. They’ve been pretty shitty when it comes to lesbian story lines, however. Santana’s coming out storyline was a pretty sexist slap in the face to lesbian fans, and Murphy has been cranky about the backlash to that episode ever since.

All of our regular television programs have been languishing on our DVR since I’ve spent so much time writing lately, and we’ve been particularly neglectful of Glee given my ambivalence about it over the last year. Not even listening to Lea Michele singing can get me to turn on the show anymore. I haven’t quite deleted them, but I may be fast-forwarding through most of the episodes for the Rachel Berry scenes going forward. It feels weird to take that approach to a show that has actual gay characters, as opposed to mere heavy lesbian subtext like Rizzoli & Isles and Once Upon a Time. But being openly hostile to legitimate criticism about lesbian visibility is really problematic.

Continue ReadingRyan Murphy does hate lesbians, apparently

It’s like we’re not even watching the same show

“Glee” Recap (4.01): Marley & Me | AfterEllen.com.

I can’t read this recap of Glee. You read it for me. I couldn’t get through the first paragraph, because it’s like the writer and I aren’t even watching the same show. Or sitting on the same planet, even. The crazy; it burns.

Kitty sez nope.

I thought her recaps of the last few episodes of Pretty Little Liars were bizarre and off-kilter, but this is nuts. She’s not recapping; that would be narrating the plot of the show for people who missed it. She’s outright rewriting the show with her own interpretation of events and interpretation of character motives, and it’s completely oddball.

Speechless.

Continue ReadingIt’s like we’re not even watching the same show

Aaron Sorkin’s ‘The Newsroom’

(‘The Newsroom’: Yesterday’s News, Today – Entertainment – The Atlantic Wire) This whole review is worth reading if you’re at all interested in Aaron Sorkin or his new HBO program “the Newsroom” (a fictional take on Cable News networks), but this particular quote is pithy and a good summary of the failure of the show:

It’s as if someone tried to tell the story of The Wire in the world of Game of Thrones. “Watch them corners, Tyrion.”

Continue ReadingAaron Sorkin’s ‘The Newsroom’

Episodic v. Serial – Complications Ensue

Episodic v. Serial – Complications Ensue:

So when we actually saw Rob Thomas (creator of VERONICA MARS) giving a talk at Banff, DMc asked him about his thoughts on episodic vs. serial.

Rob busted out a factoid I’d heard before, but which really hadn’t sunk in. When people say they watch a show, on average, they watch one out of four episodes.

One out of four.

It’s a shock, because when I watch a show, I really want to see every episode. I missed maybe one or two FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTs last season, and I was really unhappy about it. One out of four? So the average audience member is really not that involved in the season arcs even of a soap opera like FNL; they’re just going along for the episodic ride.

Rob said if he’d been able to do a fourth season of VM, he’d have made it entirely episodic. No serial story at all. That was a shock.

Wow, one of the better shows developed for episodic viewing, and the writer wouldn’t do it that way again. Also – who watched Friday Night Lights that way? Good god. That show was amazing for layers and building. Why would you watch it for an episode here or there?

Maybe many people watch TV that way, but I sure don’t. There’s got to be two camps on this – I wonder what the split is?

And could you write a show that works for both camps?

Continue ReadingEpisodic v. Serial – Complications Ensue