| |
| Did you ever run across one teeny tiny small thing in an episode or something that just bugged you so much you wanted to smack the people responsible? And you know it's tiny, and you know it's not meant the way they said it, and you still want to smack them?
In last night's episode of Glee, they made the students pair up with each other to sing ballads to each other, as it would be required at sectionals. Fine and dandy. And the students were paired randomly by picking names out of a hat, which allowed for people to be paired in hi-larious ways. The club has an interesting yet very Hollywood mix of apparent ethnicities -- a black boy and girl, Matt and Mercedes, and an Asian boy and girl, Tina and .... They have, interestingly enough, resisted the temptation to pair everyone up romantically along ethnic lines. So far, so good. For last night's episode, the black guy, Matt, was supposedly out sick, leaving Mr Schuester, the teacher, to pair off with the student who he discovered had a crush on him. Larf riot! And then Tina pulled a piece of paper out of the hat, and said: "Other Asian."
Ha.
Ha.
Ha.
Here's the thing: Glee club only has 12 students. They've been going for several weeks in the show's time. Mr Schu is practically neurotic about trying to be a good mentor to his students. You're telling me that after all this time, he wouldn't know the student's name? Moreover, he wouldn't know how humiliating it would be for that student to have it stated in public that the teacher couldn't remember the guy's name? Mind, it's also possible -- perhaps even probable -- that Tina said that on her own, as an insult to someone who might well have been one of her persecutors. Which ... OK, but in that case, the teacher should have said something. It shouldn't have passed unnoticed. And in either case, quite honestly, it feels vaguely like the powers that be were trying to avoid giving him a name because once he has a name, he'd actually maybe get lines, and the speaking cast is quite crowded already.
I suppose I shouldn't be terribly surprised. They screwed the pooch rather badly the last time they brought up anything like ethnic issues played for comedy, in the episode "Throwdown", but that was easier to get past, since they were trying to make a point -- albeit badly, and the point was actually quite quite wrong -- and the good intentions were practically glittering on their sleeves. (And, in fact, in light of later revelations about Sue Sylvester, the episode makes a great deal more sense ... though the point Schu makes is still quite quite wrong.) In "Ballad", this was just a small moment played straight up for comedy ... and they should have known better. Anyone thinking about it for a tenth of a second would have known better. It's not true to the characters as they've built them, it's not true to the situation, and it's wrong on its face. Plus, it's just plain not funny.
To be sure, last night's episode was wildly uneven. One thing they did right was showing other parents, finally, and how they react to the news that their children are going to have an untimely baby, which the entire school including faculty already knew. Finn's mother was hurt, but supportive; Quinn's parents threw her out. There's also the gay kid Kurt with a crush on Finn, and Finn having the brains of a flea (and, to be fair, being a teenager) has not the slightest idea how to handle it. And the actual crush plot with the teacher and student was handled fairly well, and done in one, which is good. And we will not speak of Mercedes' advice to Puck, which was not only wrongheaded, but possibly also wrong for the character as we've seen her built to date. (She seems to have very firm ideas about what's right and wrong, and to tell someone that they should just shut up about what's true in order to make life easier for someone else doesn't seem in character.) It wasn't, overall, a bad episode, and it had some very good moments in it.
But that "Other Asian" crack ... it still nags, for some reason. It's a tiny, small thing. I know this, I absolutely know it. It just ... vexes me.
It vexes me, you hear? | |
|
| Media Relations: harlequin is publishing WHAT?/ November 9, 2009: So Harlequin is going to be publishing Gay and Lesbian romances. And, like, smutty books.
No, really.
No ... really.
Carina Press [...]
... Most likely, to the extent that gay romances get published, they're going to be M/M romance rather than gay -- that is, aimed and oriented at their women readers, rather than at the gay market. Developing a new client base would be massively difficult, after all, and they've had Torquere and Samhain and Dreamspinner and Ravenous Romance and (somewhat accidentally) Cleis Press to show them that yes, there are lots and lots of women out there who will read stories of men in love and/or gettin' it on. And Carina, as long as people know that it's a Harlequin imprint, would be a desperately hard sell to gay bookstores and gay male readers. After all, men have long been conditioned to run screaming into the woods at the very sight of a Harlequin romance, because gooshy books that women like are icky! Icky icky icky! (We men are delicate flowers that wilt at the mere mention of women's literature and/or romance. Be gentle with us.) [...]
...I have to admit, I am rather curious as to how Harlequin's M/M books will turn out. My main issue with the M/M romances that I've read is that the men frequently aren't particularly realistic, but then, I'm never quite sure how realistic romances are supposed to be. After all, they're a fantastical sort of literature, entirely by design. It seems rather pointless to harp at fantasies for not being real. I suppose my particular taste in romantical literature would be for more real men, though. Somehow, that seems to make for a story that works better.... | |
|
|  Media Relations: allegory and relevance/ September 16, 2009: ... But on the ... well, not so much an upside as a "gee, wonder if they were paying attention" side, it looks like they're going to be reinventing the better years of Deep Space Nine -- only with characters that weren't quite developed for any story that dark, and putting it in a terribly compressed storyline. After all, one can but assume that they're not going to make war with the Klingons/Romulans any kind of long-running theme through the next and succeeding films; that would hamstring their ability to tell stories that didn't have to do with the wars of the worlds. Any war is likely to be a one-and-done story, maybe with enough time passing between the films to say, "So, right after Nero, the Romulans/Klingons did this thing, and then the Federation finally retaliated, and then we had this war, see?" [...]
[...] Sounds like the new film is going to be all about defining the parameters and ethics of the new Federation.... | |
|
| Media Relations: what's the deal about johnston's johnson? (or not, as the case may be)/ September 4, 2009: Would someone please explain this to me? Why do so many people want to see this guy naked? (Or, as it seems, possibly only mostly, but not essentially, naked, if you know what I mean and I think you do.) Because I truly, truly do not quite get it...
[...] Playgirl vs Unzipped is only the tip of the hot throbbing iceberg, as it were. Other gay porn outlets have been offering him money to pose naked, and possibly do a bit more. Mr. Johnston does not, it appears, seem to be taking those offers even remotely seriously...
[...] there's also been a veritable feeding frenzy over the shirtless photos of him changing his kid's diaper. (Scroll to the bottom of the Advocate article for a sample.) Is he a good looking guy? Well, yes, I suppose. Needs some chest hair. But yes, he's perfectly decent looking. Is there perhaps a touch of the schadenfreude in having the baby daddy of Sarah Palin's daughter's child doing something of which former Gov. Palin and her social conservative set would strongly disapprove? Oh, hell, yes! Does all that account for all the unseemly feeding frenzy in wanting more, more, MORE of him? Well ... not really, no.
Sometimes, I just don't understand the gays. I'll bet I lose my Gays Union card again over this one. And I just got back off probationary status, too! | |
|
| Media Relations: the mouse and the spider/ August 31, 2009: ...Disney keeps growing and growing and growing. One wonders what the debt load of this company is these days. (And there's something that people never thought about before recent years. I wonder if it's possible for a media company like this to hit the official "too big to fail" point. But I digress.)
The puzzling thing about this transaction is that Disney just licensed several of its characters to Boom Studios. You'd think that if this was in process for a while -- and given the sheer size of the transaction, it must have been -- that they'd have held off and given the license to Marvel. Though, that said, the puzzling thing about giving the license to Boom in the first place is that Gemstone Publishing has long held the rights to most of the Disney characters. Though, given Gemstone's recent struggles, Disney may have been thinking of pulling the licenses, or at least was understandably reluctant to give them new business. Even on Gemstone's own site, there's an ad for a title that Disney gave to Dark Horse.
In any event, as the story notes, this is going to allow Disney access to expertise to reconnect with the young male market. In theory, at least. It is interesting to see that Marvel's movies -- as opposed to their comics -- really do connect to that young audience, while the superhero comics audience is aging and shrinking. You'd think that the film success would indicate that Marvel could connect with the younger audience in its comics, but strangely, that doesn't happen. The youth audience seems profoundly disinterested in the source material for the films.... | |
|
| Media Relations: i now pronounce you retailer and retailed/ June 3, 2009: I am deeply amused. This makes me suspect that they were likely trying something out with Amazonfail that went very badly indeed. (So all the protesting about the "rogue cataloger in France"? Probably not so much of one, no.) At a guess, there was probably some erroneous programming, yes, and the switch got tripped far too soon -- possibly a test that was meant to be done on a backup copy of the system, and not the main public catalog. That said ... even if they were doing it for the Logo store and video content, the metadata on the items was, and remains, far too broad. But I digress.
On the whole, it looks like it's just a subsection of the Amazon catalog -- albeit a strangely invisible one.... | |
|
| Media Relations / Southland / 2009-05-07 So I've been watching the new police procedural show on NBC, Southland, since it debuted about a month ago. And mostly, I like the show. It's an interesting balance between showing the mundane aspects of police work, and the more interesting investigations. To the extent that we've seen them, I like the various characters. I like the interplay between rookie cop Sherman and the gruff older (and gay, though it's been very very understated) cop Cooper. Regina King's detective Lydia Adams is kind of awesome. The characters mostly seem like real people, and not types or charicatures. But something about it has been bothering me, but it wasn't until this week that I understood what it was. And it's just this: the show takes place in the modern day, but they're showing us the Los Angeles Police Department of 1980....
[...] at some level, it seems like they should have thought about how their televised Los Angeles and LAPD would look against the real Los Angeles and LAPD. And beyond that, they should have thought about how casting the way they did would make their LAPD look against their Los Angeles. And I really don't think they did.
I still like the show. I still think it's worth watching, and that it's enjoyable, overall. But it is deeply and sincerely problematic, here and there.
| |
|
| Sci Fi Channel Has a New Name - Now, It's Syfy - NYTimes.com
By STUART ELLIOTT
FOR years, television viewers, journalists who write about TV and services that compile listings have wondered how to refer to a certain cable network: Sci Fi Channel? Sci-Fi Channel? SciFi Channel? SCI FI Channel? Soon, to paraphrase Rod Serling — whose vintage series, "The Twilight Zone," is a mainstay of the Sci Fi Channel — executives will submit for public approval another name, not only of sight and sound but of mind, meant to signal a channel whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the signpost up ahead — your next stop, Syfy....Media Relations: beyond scifi/ March 16, 2009: ...Actually, I'm pretty sure that this will convey to "the fan-boys and -girls who love the genre" the opportunity to relentlessly mock the corporate overlords at NBC Universal. Because, seriously, Syfy? Seriously? Seriously?
NBC Universal has been searching ceaselessly for a way to rebrand SciFi almost since they bought it. [...] it's clear that SciFi's corporate overlords ardently desired a way to rebrand and trademark the channel for ... well, that's just it. What does having a trademark in a television channel get you, exactly? The right to run around telling the kids to get off your intellectual property lawn? What?
With this name change, NBC Universal manages to inflict upon itself the worst of all possible worlds.... | |
|
| Avert your eyes, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) columbina.
 Media Relations: freep and detroit news
...I will admit, apart from being surprised that this might happen so soon after the Monitor went online-only, my main curiosity is about what, precisely, the Freep and News plan to offer in those subscription online editions, and what that will mean for the current freep.com and detnews.com sites. After all, you can't reasonably charge for online delivery of the same content that you're largely delivering online for free if the only major difference is format. And whatever the market may be for the NY Times and Wall Street Journal online PDF replica editions -- which, frankly, always seemed like a way of marrying the most inconvenience to a profound lack of need -- I can't imagine that either of the Detroit papers would have the same proportion of users even a little interested in that....
| |
|
| |
