sometimes I talk about television (really!)
The problem, I think, is that most of the television I've been watching lately isn't worth talking about. For a good part of the last year or so, that's exactly what I've needed--the more brainless, the better! I'm starting to miss good, thinky TV, though, and I suspect that soon enough I'll be tapping my fingers impatiently: where is my shiny, new fandom? It's not like I don't have shows in the "to watch" queue, or that I don't have stories floating around for existing fandoms that I'd like to write. But y'all know how it is: it would be kind of fun to have a new, shiny, thinky crush (that would last for more than six episodes before going on a lengthy hiatus--yes, River Song, I'm looking at you). I'm not sure there are any particularly strong candidates for this, though. Thoughts, anyone?
In the meantime, let's talk about my non-thinky shows.
Leverage continues to fill my heart with joy, though I've been a bit disappointed that the character arcs of season 2 have been dropped a bit in season 3. Just because you don't have to think of a creative way to write around Gina Bellman's pregnancy doesn't mean you don't have to continue to think about Sophie's character development, writing staff. That goes for the other characters, as well, though I think my Sophie bias is probably hugely obvious to anyone who knows me at all. Somehow the episodes of season 3 that were supposed to be character-centric ended up not serving to develop the characters very much, with the partial exception of Parker. But what did we learn about Hardison, except that he used to play the violin well? With Eliot there were bits and pieces of things--possibly ex-military, talent as a country singer, yet more fodder (in the coal mining ep) for my personal canon idea that he's from Kentucky--but these pieces don't really go anywhere. And Nate and Sophie, whose arcs were more central in the first two seasons, have those arcs largely dropped, at least in terms of consistent development. Don't get me wrong: I love my happy caper show. I just think this writing team is probably talented enough that they could give us happy capers PLUS cool character stuff. They demonstrated this with Sophie in season 2, and I'd like to see more of it.
Rizzoli and Isles is, I think, still finding its feet, but it's doing more things right than wrong, and there is NOT ENOUGH CAPSLOCK to express how much I LOVELOVELOVELOVELOVE THAT THIS IS A SHOW ABOUT WOMEN WHO LIKE EACH OTHER!!!!!!!! I do think, though, that this show has to make a choice about which direction it's going to go: light and formulaic, or grittier and more challenging. All evidence points to the former, and I'd be fine with that, to be honest. I like procedurals, obviously, and I really enjoy these characters and their relationship, and if they just want to show up on my screen every week and like each other, I'm a happy pellucid. But there have been a number of instances in which I couldn't quite tell whether the show was trying intentionally to be edgy or subversive, or whether it was sort of an accident.
"I Kissed a Girl," for instance, was partly great and partly problematic. If you watch a lot of cop shows, especially in the L&O and CSI vein, you know that there's a fairly established, fairly offensive pattern for crimes involving LGBTQ victims: there's some odd element to the crime, something specifically to do with sex or sexual orientation, something that implies that the victim somehow had it coming by engaging in risky behavior (further implication--by being gay), etc. It doesn't happen every time, but it happens enough that it's a thing. Whereas in R&I, the entire point of the murder of the lesbian woman was that it turned out to be a very mundane kind of domestic tragedy, one that sent a clear "for better or worse, gay couples are just like straight couples" kind of message. That's not just a social and political statement; it's also a subtle critique of other shows in this genre. So good on them--except that the same episode was also rife with other kinds of offensive stereotypes. Jane is shocked and put off by a male nurse? Really, show? Etc. It's as though the writing staff here is thinking about a lot of things, but maybe not quite enough.
(An aside: I know a number of people were upset about that ep because Jane was so emphatic about her heterosexuality, etc. And I should probably rewatch the ep, but my first impressions were that Jane handled that aspect of things--if not Jorge the nurse--fairly inoffensively. But I'm curious whether it was mostly just the Jane/Maura shippers that were upset that the show gives so much subtext and then explicitly denies, or was there really some problem with the way that was handled, and it didn't ping for me--because I do try to be sensitive to that sort of thing. I'll be honest, though, part of the reason I've fallen for Jane Rizzoli, Angie Harmon and all, is that I relate pretty hard to a lot of her characteristics: she's a straight, happily single woman, who is strongly committed to her career, and whose closest relationship is with her best friend, who is also a single, straight woman. In a few fundamental ways, Jane, in particular, is the closest I've yet found to "character like me on TV." Yes, I absolutely wish there were more lesbians on television! I think there should be more of all kinds of women on television: Jane the straight, happily single woman whose central relationship is with her platonic best friend should be there, and there should ALSO be all manner of lesbian protagonists in shows. Both and, not either or. In the meantime, though, I'm not going to be offended on principle that Jane said explicitly that she's straight. I'm also not going to stop reading the occasional Jane/Maura fic for the fun of it! :)
Anyway, R&I will probably continue along in the light and formulaic vein, but if they want to change directions, it's all going to depend on how they resolve the season finale. It was, I thought, probably the weakest episode of the season. The twist was too obvious, the paroled brother a potentially good idea but kind of lost in an episode so full of other stuff, the sick tortoise a perfect example of the cannon set on the wall and never shot, and the shooting of Jane at the end an entirely unnecessary piling-on of melodrama. Guess what, show: we've watched television before and we know you're not going to kill Jane. If we come back next season and find Jane and Frankie recovering nicely, and we get back to business as usual, that will be that.
But if the show wants to become more than it's been, to get a little darker, a little more character-focused, a little less predictable, I think it would be relatively easy to do so, even leading off of that sub-par finale: kill Frankie. Now, I like Frankie. That's the point. We know Frankie, and we like him, and while he hasn't been a main character, he's been fleshed out enough that killing him would mean something to the audience. If it means something to the audience, he hasn't just been fridged. (And even if he were fridged, it would still be subversive if the character you fridge is the only young, white male in the main cast.) There's fallout there to work with: what does this do to Jane, to her parents, to Maura, who would no doubt feel guilty (if she'd stayed with Frankie rather than running to help Jane, would he have been okay? did choosing one Rizzoli kill the other? this, to me, is possibly the most interesting part).
Anyway, I ramble, but I'll go ahead and predict that much of the future direction of the show depends on what happens to Frankie. I just wish we didn't have to wait what--months and months?--to find out!
The Rizzoli and Isles season finale wasn't fabulous, but it was SO MUCH BETTER than Lie to Me's that I almost didn't notice its flaws. Lie to Me has been on notice for a while now, and I think I may be done. The biggest problem with the finale is that it just didn't make any SENSE! I suspect the idea was to introduce a plotline that's going to be ongoing next season, but you do that kind of thing in the pilot, not in the finale. We're dropped in medias res into a story full of characters we've never met, a plot that's never really explained. I was never sure who the guy who ended up being the murderer even was. Somewhere in there, there was a two-part episode that got smashed into one, or something. (Actually, didn't I read somewhere that this was suppose to be a two-hour finale? And then it wasn't.)
Mostly, though, everything I've disliked about season 2 is just getting exacerbated. I suppose some focus group somewhere thinks that The Cal Runs Roughshod Over Everything Show is fabulous, but I've run out of patience. More Cal, less of everyone else, and oh yes, let's talk about Reynolds, shall we. For the SECOND SEASON FINALE IN A ROW, the lone black guy in the cast is left hovering between life and death in the hospital. We never heard from Dupree again: did he die? Who knows! Reynolds was at least a main cast member rather than a recurring character, so I do hope we learn of his fate, but I'd be willing to bet this is a way to write him out of the show: no more FBI, no more Reynolds (even if he lives, his injuries will explain his absence), enter the Baltimore PD instead, apparently. See, Reynolds wasn't that interesting, apparently, so he gets fridged. And I love how fucking Cal was more concerned that Reynolds was wearing a wire than about the fact that his friend was just shot. See, it's all really about Cal.
My love for Gillian Foster remains, but I'm not sure I can continue to watch her be increasingly underused.
Incidentally, I stopped watching CSI: NY for the same reason--because I was tired of Stella not having anything to do--and now apparently Melina Kanakaredes has also gotten tired of Stella not having anything to do and has left the show. Predictably, the Mac/Stella crowd, such as it is, is upset about this news. I, on the other hand, am slightly inclined to cheer, especially since the story, apparently, is that Stella leaves to go be the boss of the lab in New Orleans: good for you, Stella, for moving on and up in the world, for putting yourself and your career first. (You know you're a bad shipper when the woman leaving the man is at least as happy an outcome, if not in fact more so, than if they'd actually gotten together!)
In the meantime, let's talk about my non-thinky shows.
Leverage continues to fill my heart with joy, though I've been a bit disappointed that the character arcs of season 2 have been dropped a bit in season 3. Just because you don't have to think of a creative way to write around Gina Bellman's pregnancy doesn't mean you don't have to continue to think about Sophie's character development, writing staff. That goes for the other characters, as well, though I think my Sophie bias is probably hugely obvious to anyone who knows me at all. Somehow the episodes of season 3 that were supposed to be character-centric ended up not serving to develop the characters very much, with the partial exception of Parker. But what did we learn about Hardison, except that he used to play the violin well? With Eliot there were bits and pieces of things--possibly ex-military, talent as a country singer, yet more fodder (in the coal mining ep) for my personal canon idea that he's from Kentucky--but these pieces don't really go anywhere. And Nate and Sophie, whose arcs were more central in the first two seasons, have those arcs largely dropped, at least in terms of consistent development. Don't get me wrong: I love my happy caper show. I just think this writing team is probably talented enough that they could give us happy capers PLUS cool character stuff. They demonstrated this with Sophie in season 2, and I'd like to see more of it.
Rizzoli and Isles is, I think, still finding its feet, but it's doing more things right than wrong, and there is NOT ENOUGH CAPSLOCK to express how much I LOVELOVELOVELOVELOVE THAT THIS IS A SHOW ABOUT WOMEN WHO LIKE EACH OTHER!!!!!!!! I do think, though, that this show has to make a choice about which direction it's going to go: light and formulaic, or grittier and more challenging. All evidence points to the former, and I'd be fine with that, to be honest. I like procedurals, obviously, and I really enjoy these characters and their relationship, and if they just want to show up on my screen every week and like each other, I'm a happy pellucid. But there have been a number of instances in which I couldn't quite tell whether the show was trying intentionally to be edgy or subversive, or whether it was sort of an accident.
"I Kissed a Girl," for instance, was partly great and partly problematic. If you watch a lot of cop shows, especially in the L&O and CSI vein, you know that there's a fairly established, fairly offensive pattern for crimes involving LGBTQ victims: there's some odd element to the crime, something specifically to do with sex or sexual orientation, something that implies that the victim somehow had it coming by engaging in risky behavior (further implication--by being gay), etc. It doesn't happen every time, but it happens enough that it's a thing. Whereas in R&I, the entire point of the murder of the lesbian woman was that it turned out to be a very mundane kind of domestic tragedy, one that sent a clear "for better or worse, gay couples are just like straight couples" kind of message. That's not just a social and political statement; it's also a subtle critique of other shows in this genre. So good on them--except that the same episode was also rife with other kinds of offensive stereotypes. Jane is shocked and put off by a male nurse? Really, show? Etc. It's as though the writing staff here is thinking about a lot of things, but maybe not quite enough.
(An aside: I know a number of people were upset about that ep because Jane was so emphatic about her heterosexuality, etc. And I should probably rewatch the ep, but my first impressions were that Jane handled that aspect of things--if not Jorge the nurse--fairly inoffensively. But I'm curious whether it was mostly just the Jane/Maura shippers that were upset that the show gives so much subtext and then explicitly denies, or was there really some problem with the way that was handled, and it didn't ping for me--because I do try to be sensitive to that sort of thing. I'll be honest, though, part of the reason I've fallen for Jane Rizzoli, Angie Harmon and all, is that I relate pretty hard to a lot of her characteristics: she's a straight, happily single woman, who is strongly committed to her career, and whose closest relationship is with her best friend, who is also a single, straight woman. In a few fundamental ways, Jane, in particular, is the closest I've yet found to "character like me on TV." Yes, I absolutely wish there were more lesbians on television! I think there should be more of all kinds of women on television: Jane the straight, happily single woman whose central relationship is with her platonic best friend should be there, and there should ALSO be all manner of lesbian protagonists in shows. Both and, not either or. In the meantime, though, I'm not going to be offended on principle that Jane said explicitly that she's straight. I'm also not going to stop reading the occasional Jane/Maura fic for the fun of it! :)
Anyway, R&I will probably continue along in the light and formulaic vein, but if they want to change directions, it's all going to depend on how they resolve the season finale. It was, I thought, probably the weakest episode of the season. The twist was too obvious, the paroled brother a potentially good idea but kind of lost in an episode so full of other stuff, the sick tortoise a perfect example of the cannon set on the wall and never shot, and the shooting of Jane at the end an entirely unnecessary piling-on of melodrama. Guess what, show: we've watched television before and we know you're not going to kill Jane. If we come back next season and find Jane and Frankie recovering nicely, and we get back to business as usual, that will be that.
But if the show wants to become more than it's been, to get a little darker, a little more character-focused, a little less predictable, I think it would be relatively easy to do so, even leading off of that sub-par finale: kill Frankie. Now, I like Frankie. That's the point. We know Frankie, and we like him, and while he hasn't been a main character, he's been fleshed out enough that killing him would mean something to the audience. If it means something to the audience, he hasn't just been fridged. (And even if he were fridged, it would still be subversive if the character you fridge is the only young, white male in the main cast.) There's fallout there to work with: what does this do to Jane, to her parents, to Maura, who would no doubt feel guilty (if she'd stayed with Frankie rather than running to help Jane, would he have been okay? did choosing one Rizzoli kill the other? this, to me, is possibly the most interesting part).
Anyway, I ramble, but I'll go ahead and predict that much of the future direction of the show depends on what happens to Frankie. I just wish we didn't have to wait what--months and months?--to find out!
The Rizzoli and Isles season finale wasn't fabulous, but it was SO MUCH BETTER than Lie to Me's that I almost didn't notice its flaws. Lie to Me has been on notice for a while now, and I think I may be done. The biggest problem with the finale is that it just didn't make any SENSE! I suspect the idea was to introduce a plotline that's going to be ongoing next season, but you do that kind of thing in the pilot, not in the finale. We're dropped in medias res into a story full of characters we've never met, a plot that's never really explained. I was never sure who the guy who ended up being the murderer even was. Somewhere in there, there was a two-part episode that got smashed into one, or something. (Actually, didn't I read somewhere that this was suppose to be a two-hour finale? And then it wasn't.)
Mostly, though, everything I've disliked about season 2 is just getting exacerbated. I suppose some focus group somewhere thinks that The Cal Runs Roughshod Over Everything Show is fabulous, but I've run out of patience. More Cal, less of everyone else, and oh yes, let's talk about Reynolds, shall we. For the SECOND SEASON FINALE IN A ROW, the lone black guy in the cast is left hovering between life and death in the hospital. We never heard from Dupree again: did he die? Who knows! Reynolds was at least a main cast member rather than a recurring character, so I do hope we learn of his fate, but I'd be willing to bet this is a way to write him out of the show: no more FBI, no more Reynolds (even if he lives, his injuries will explain his absence), enter the Baltimore PD instead, apparently. See, Reynolds wasn't that interesting, apparently, so he gets fridged. And I love how fucking Cal was more concerned that Reynolds was wearing a wire than about the fact that his friend was just shot. See, it's all really about Cal.
My love for Gillian Foster remains, but I'm not sure I can continue to watch her be increasingly underused.
Incidentally, I stopped watching CSI: NY for the same reason--because I was tired of Stella not having anything to do--and now apparently Melina Kanakaredes has also gotten tired of Stella not having anything to do and has left the show. Predictably, the Mac/Stella crowd, such as it is, is upset about this news. I, on the other hand, am slightly inclined to cheer, especially since the story, apparently, is that Stella leaves to go be the boss of the lab in New Orleans: good for you, Stella, for moving on and up in the world, for putting yourself and your career first. (You know you're a bad shipper when the woman leaving the man is at least as happy an outcome, if not in fact more so, than if they'd actually gotten together!)