Probably I should've counted tonight's post on The Wire as the first of these posts, but I didn't really think it through. STILL. TNT has (at least) three great cop shows for people who don't like cop shows. Or, at least, people (me) who do occasionally like cop shows but have certain serious concerns about the genre. Tonight's addressed concern
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Yeah, I think one could argue that it caught something real there? In that women - even women with some standout talent or another - are never taught leadership skills, or encouraged to develop the confidence that can help with credibility. So then the pool of women with authority tools shrinks to natural leaders like Sharon, at least some of whom will then be penalized for their own competence. But the show did the WORST POSSIBLE thing about that, in showing us someone who was terrible for the position, and then telling us that she deserved it because OBVIOUSLY EVERYONE BOWS BEFORE HER UNQUESTIONED SKILL - it buoys up the "exceptional woman" paradigm where men can be mediocre-good but women have to be the BEST EVER in order to get recognition, and implicitly buys into all "qualified men getting passed over for Political Correctness" by telling us Brenda should be put forward because she's a woman even though Pope was more suited to administration (largely because of his male privilege).
They never changed Brenda to make her "likeable". She remained an self involved narcissist, who did appalling things. This is a rare thing to do with a female protagonist.
I know! I wanted to like it SO BADLY.
Moving Brenda to a position where she can't continue to inflict the damage to civil rights, but where the department doesn't have to account for continuing to PERMIT her to inflict that damage for seven years in more realistic than I like.
Well, that, and the DA's office are the ones who have been cleaning up her messes for years now. They're the ones with the most reason to understand her unprofessionalism for what it is. And instead they sign up to be her safety net, and take on liability for whatever wacky shit she gets up to next? It just looked to me like "yet another Brenda critic gets in line!" except this time the critic in question was the state of California.
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