(no subject)
I have four posts half-written at the moment, but I'm ignoring them all to write this instead, sorry. My mind's all over the place lately.
Anybody else watching The LA Complex? It's a Canadian show about young people trying to make it in LA. Most of them live in a big apartment complex with a central pool that owes not a small debt to Melrose Place, but there's a sweetness to the show that that series always lacked. Also, it's much more like a teen soap aged up than a nighttime soap, though there is quite a bit of sexy fun, which is indeed both sexy and fun.
The characters are Abby (aspiring actor/singer), Alicia (aspiring dancer), Nick (aspiring comedian) and Tariq (aspiring music producer). There's also Connor, a guy who's on the verge of making it when he's cast as the lead in a Grey's Anatomy-style show, but quickly realises he was hired for his looks, not his talent, and Raquel, a thirty-year-old who was in a hit show as a teenager and has been struggling ever since.
For a show with only six episodes, it burns through a surprising amount of plot. There's also some reasonably nuanced examinations of subjects like depression, homophobia in black culture, and the way any hyper-competitive industry takes people in and spits them out. I'd never heard of the series until the AV Club gave the season finale a good grade (warning: massive spoilers), so I thought I'd give it a go and ended up watching all six episodes in an afternoon.
I've seen zero talk about this show, so to encourage you to watch and then talk with me about it, some fun facts!
1 :: The LA Complex is made by the producers of Degrassi. (Which is still going! Who knew?)
2 :: It originally aired on Canada's Much Music. Aww, popslash flashbacks.
3 :: It stars Jewel Staite as the thirty-year-old actor who was in a cult show ruined by a bad timeslot a decade ago. (A cute reference to Firefly, though Staite has actually worked a fair bit since then.) Her character is probably closest to the über-bitch these kinds of shows have, but she quickly becomes layered and complex and so twisted by her own schemes that I'm not sure she even knows where the line is between reality and pretend. Some of her acting towards the end of the season, especially a long monologue that's presented as a single continuous shot, is wonderful.
4 :: Jonathan Patrick Moore is Australian. And gets to keep his accent! Apparently he was on Neighbours at one point, like every Aussie actor ever.
4 :: Chelan Simmons looks disconcertingly like Britney Spears from certain angles. (That was the best pic I could find, but it's even more obvious in motion.) I'm amazed she's never played her in a tv movie, though imdb tells me she was once Lindsay Lohan in Paparazzi Princess: The Paris Hilton Story. Wow, that looks terrible.
5 :: There's queer characters of colour. Two of them! And their plotline is all kinds of interesting.
(The next five paragraphs contain spoilers.) So Tariq is an aspiring music producer, and in episode two, he's tasked with working with rapper Kaldrick King. At first, Kal comes across as a horrible cliché, all angry black man, but as Tariq spends a day with him we see Kal's anger comes from feeling boxed in by the man he once was. He grew up rough and did some unidentified gang things that resulted in spending time in jail, then came out and became famous by rapping about them. Now he's grown and changed, but people still want him to be that thug guy. So he hasn't put out an album in years.
At the end of the episode, when Tariq and Kal kiss, it's hot and unexpected. Though my favourite moment is in episode four, when Tariq and Kal are sort of pushing each other around (in a sexy way, you know what I mean), and Tariq stops them and looks up at Kal and cups his cheek in his hand, and Kal's eyes close as his head goes back, and damn.
Of course, Kal is deeply in the closet. Tariq chafes against that, even though I'm not sure he could successfully come out in the working environment he's in either. Things end horribly, with the two of them kissing in a recording studio they think is empty, but of course isn't, and when Tariq's boss walks in on them, Kal shoves him away and yells at him, outing Tariq and protecting himself at the same time. And then he beats the crap out of him, clearly hating himself as he does it.
It's powerful and it works within the context of the show, but it's always rough to see violence within gay relationships, especially non-white ones. I'm not sure where The LA Complex is going to take Tariq and Kal's storyline next season, or even if Kal will be back, but hopefully they handle it with the gravitas it deserves.
(And not, say, like The Circuit, where an Aboriginal guy beats the crap out of his white boyfriend and everybody's all, "Oh, he didn't mean it," and badgers the guy to forgive his boyfriend and take him back. That pissed me off so much, I stopped watching. Also not cool: calling the episode "You Always Hurt the Ones You Love.")
I would be really interested in hearing thoughts on the Tariq and Kal plotline from others who've watched it.
6 :: Every sex scene in this show goes basically the same way. Five seconds of passionate kissing, everybody rips their shirts off (apparently the only way somebody can signal intent to have sex is through the removal of a shirt), and then the two characters fall out of the frame. Make a drinking game out of it!
7 :: The show's coming back for thirteen more episodes in July. So now's the perfect time to jump on board.
Whee.