various television thoughts

[pocochina]

Holiday avoidance + flu has led to such a wealth of television catch-up time! Quick thoughts on:

• So far I've seen S1 and a couple of episodes of S2. It's a lot of fun. Nothing particularly special, but sweet and comforting.
• I'm loving all the women; I'm distracted by how overwhelmingly white and straight it all is. It's a similar issue to "historically accurate" sexism in medieval-ish fantasy settings.
• Regina is everything a villain should be. She's frightening, in terms of her huge magical potential and her aptitude for close personal psychological games. She's sympathetic just frequently enough to stay a character, but she's never woobified or excused. She's exactly unstable enough to be unpredictable but still also satisfyingly culpable for her actions. And now that Cora's starting to come into the story, my heart is (~shockingly) twisting in all of those places.
• The above goes for Rumple, though I'm a little less taken with him than Regina (in fairness, that's a very high bar, I like him a lot). I like the thematic conflict between the two antagonists, as well. Regina is Order, and Rumple is Chaos, and all the residents are caught between them trying to make it work.
• I'd always liked Cameron on House, so maybe I was predisposed to like Jennifer Morrison's performance as Emma, but I think she's doing a wonderful job with a character who is extremely relevant to a lot of my interests.
•  

Watched the rest of S2 of PLL and <3! Looking around for the first few episodes of S3 so I can catch up in order.

Mostly though I'm into Charmed now!

• SISTERS! Moreover, sisters who have a believable, complex, and positive set of relationships with each other. HALLIWELLS!
• It's a little bit dated in a lot of ways, of course, and I like that. It's interesting to see the things I was surrounded by as kid, through the POV of the target audience. Like, around the time when these early episodes were airing, I'd have probably tried to dress like Phoebe sometimes, but as a kid I didn't have the context for the whole idea of Nineties Femininity, you know?
• It's also hitting a lot of touchstones of feminism-influenced television in the way that early Buffy and Xena did. And so, given my love of meta and cultural history and blah blah, this group of shows are so interesting on a lot of levels. They're all fantastic for what they are, and it's refreshing to see all the ways in which they were made fantastic by the explicit determination to challenge the expectations for their female characters. There's a level of 101-ness about day-to-day sexism which you don't see on television much anymore, even though there are times it wouldn't go amiss. With the benefit of hindsight, though, it's really interesting to see how that 90's feminism-influenced media led to the more intricate explorations of gender on everything from Dollhouse to BSG to Pretty Little Liars.
• The one thing that is a little uncomfortable to me is the "no personal gain" clause. I get that some level of it is necessary to keep witches from being, you know, Nietzschean assholes, but the idea that women using their power for self-care is inherently wrong is always going to be pretty distressing to me.
• So I don't feel like this is going to be a show that I really mainline, but I've been watching one or two episodes a day for a week now, and I'm hoping to watch it the whole way through.

Anyway, I hope everyone is having and enjoying loads of time off!

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