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Some pics of Nick's thirty-second birthday, via nickcarter.tumblr.com.
After I thought pretty and cheekbones!, and also Hey, somebody finally taught him how to dress his size, I tried to work out who Nick reminded me of. Then it hit me: Nolan from Revenge, who also has the cheekbones and the pretty and quite similar hair.
So: Justin is the cool, clever young man whose beloved mother was set up for a crime she didn't commit. Nick is his awkward pansexual computer genius/hacker friend (hmm). Kevin has to be Victoria, just on looks and presence, and Lance is his husband in mutual contempt. JC is the innocuous-seeming guy who's really a hustler and seduces Nick. (Also, can you imagine JC all intense with the [spoiler] on the beach? Mmm.) Brian is the sweetheart bar owner who was childhood friends with Justin, and AJ is his rebellious younger brother. And then I start to struggle, but let's make Joey Daniel, I suppose?
Then I become an Emily/Nolan shipper.
I feel quite spoilt by tv at the moment. There's been a good handful of dramas I've enjoyed this season: Homeland, The Good Wife, Revenge and Switched at Birth on the US side, and Downton Abbey and Sherlock on the UK. I also enjoy the US comedy Happy Endings, which is basically Friends + diversity.
My surprise discovery last year was probably The Middle, a very sweet middle-America comedy about a working class family. (Or perhaps "working class", since this is Hollywood.) I started watching it on a whim one day, and ended up mainlining the first two seasons in about three days whilst crocheting squares for a blanket. The characters are great, the humour is almost always kind-hearted, and it's got a really nice, down-to-earth quality about it. It's not the kind of show that's likely to win awards or accolades, but if you're bored one afternoon, you could do worse than giving it a go.
Then there's Community, a show that I have a complicated love/annoyance relationship with. It handles diversity so well in so many ways, and yet it does two things very poorly.
1 :: The show never fails to go for the cheap gay joke, and these are often unchallenged by the characters. (Compare with the race jokes: the show goes there, but they're almost always challenged.) I felt like I understood this quality more after watching some of the season one dvd commentaries, because Dan Harmon, the show's creator, can't resist going for a cheap gay joke either.
Dean Pelton, the only queer character in the cast, has his sexuality played for laughs over and over. He's also incredibly predatory towards Jeff, thwarted more by his own awkwardness than anything else, and that's a whole other stereotype that's tired and worn. Again, compare with how the show handles racism: there's jokes that play off racism for humour, but they're balanced (in my view, and I appreciate that my view doesn't count for a lot here) by all the positive characters of colour: Abed, Troy, Shirley, Chang. Chang is incredibly weird, but he isn't weird because he's Chinese-American. He's a weird guy who happens to be Chinese-American. Dean Pelton, by contrast, is in a large part weird because of his sexuality.
2 :: The show also has a patchy track record when it comes to religion. I loved the first season holiday episode, Comparative Religion, which pokes fun at how ridiculous some holiday celebrations have become (huge letters across the campus lawn spell out HAPPY MERRY) whilst at the same time acknowledging that we live in a religiously-diverse world. The episode begins with the realisation that nobody in the study group is Christian apart from Shirley -- Annie is Jewish, Troy is Jehovah's Witness, Abed is Muslim, Jeff is agnostic, Britta is atheist, and Pierce is a Scientologist Buddist Laser Lotus -- and the heartwarming conclusion is, of course, that That's Okay. Also, the fight at the end with the dance ninja guys is awesome.
The second season's holiday episode, Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas, undercuts almost all the good work of the first. Both Abed and Annie are suddenly (one might even say magically, or bad-writingly) revealed to have one Christian parent. We're also told that Abed is extremely passionate about Christmas, even though he didn't care about it at all last year; so much so that he's having some kind of Christmas-inspired psychotic break. Everybody else's lack of Christianity is swept under the rug so the show can do an episode that is technically brilliant -- much of it is claymation -- and yet bankrupt at its core, because it undercuts so much earlier character work just to get it happening. And of course, that character work is undercut in the most mainstream, edge-smoothing way possible. See, Abed isn't one of those scary Muslims. Not really. He celebrates Christmas just like you and me!
(Well, not like me, and maybe not like you, either. But you know what I mean.)
I honestly can't talk about that episode without getting a little frothy, that's how much it annoys me.
So there's much to love about Community, but not these two things.
And how about you? What're you watching that's awesome this year?