Categotry Archives: tv (not trans)

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A Farewell to…Stealth

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, adventures in transition, all about me, i get around, omphalos gazing, tv (not trans), tv (trans)

Okay, so this has gone out to a couple of places. First, the big news:

Jeopardy!, the famous international quiz show, is having a 30th anniversary tournament. They are bringing back former champions to play, broken up (initially) by decade. All very good.

As a gimmick, they are asking the fans to vote for the last player in each decade from five former champions.

One of the champs from the 1990s…is trans.

Great! Visibility! Barriers broken! I hope she gets on!

Especially since she managed to also out herself…as me.

Aw, raspberries.

That was somewhat of a mistake. Stuff happens, I dropped a reference to my work for the Guardian and so that the producers could check, left in my nom-de-plume. And they ran it unchanged.

Oh well. There are lots of blogging aliases out there. Have I introduced you to my new blogging partner, D M Mignon?

Anyway.

Most likely, the only thing that will come from this is that I will have permanently wrecked my life. For sure, stealth is gone, done, dead; I’ve left a paper trail that you could make an origami mansion out of.

Eh bien? Non. But hey, I walked into this propeller of me own free will.

So, vote, if you like, and you want to see a trans person get a lot of visibility. More than she’s comfortable with! Much, much more!

And if you wanna pass it along, please do. If I gotta go up in a blaze of glory, let’s make it a doozy.

Meantime, I might as well write a few things. Tomorrow is no good, I’m gaming, but I’ll try to write up something on Jacques Demy (the Film Forum is currently doing a festival of all his movies) and feminism.

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Better Watch…Out!

Categories: tv (not trans)

So tonight, I had a choice in my TV watching. I could watch the new TNT show “Men of a Certain Age”, about the World’s Most Undercovered Topic–the ever so gentle male ego–or Ridiculous Wooden Puppets.

What Ridiculous Wooden Puppets, you ask? Surely you jest, Strawperson Reader I am having an imaginary conversation with! Why, these Ridiculous Wooden Puppets!

Except it wasn’t even Rudolph! Rudolph would have been cool! No, it was the much-less well known Santa Claus is Coming to Town, narrated by Fred Astaire (you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a Ridiculous Wooden Puppet representation of Fred Astaire dancing) and…Mickey Rooney? As Santa? Did I just type that right?

Anyway, Ridiculous Wooden Puppets is still better than Ridiculous Wooden Actors. Talking about, um, wood.

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You’ve Come a Long Way. Maybe.

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, politicians have penise (or should), tv (not trans)

I’ll confess to being a person who watches “24”, though if it makes you feel better, I feel dirty inside afterward. The constant nail-biting suspense of the first few seasons has long since been replaced by torture porn–every week the question is how is Jack going to hurt somebody today?

Still I watch it, probably for the fascinating train-wreck of issues it presents more than for any pure entertainment. I’ll say this about Kiefer Sutherland, he has made Jack become tighter and tighter wound–he’s made Jack become more and more unpleasant to be around, which I hope is his commentary on the right-wingism of the series as a whole. But what about that rightism? Is it truly balanced by presenting black and female presidents, by the way it almost always sides against hawkish characters? By the fact that in the show’s mythology, the Nixonian president actually got arrested?

I don’t know; but such questions are the spice to the messy massala this show has become.

This season we were treated to another first in the mythology: having anticipated by eight years the first black president (and who knows? maybe helped that along), we have the first female president, played by the marvelous Cherry Jones. (I saw her in the original production of “Doubt” and she was awesome.) Her President Allison Taylor is the rare example of the show supporting a hawkish foreign-policy choice–she consistently overrules her cabinet and generals to push for an invasion of the mythical African country of “Sangala,” a sort of Senegal-meets-Côte d’Ivroie-with-some-Liberia-sauce. Of course, her hawkishness is of a different kind: she’s motivated by a humanitarian (dare I say liberal) desire to overthrow a vile dictatorship.

I won’t get into the ridiculous plot of the season–it’s filled with the usual multiple McGuffins, twists, turns, and absurdities (an attack on the White House? Really?) Instead, I want to point out how a show with a female president still ends up in Sexistville.

First, there’s Jack’s daughter Kim. She’s long been a target for the show’s critics, and once again she doesn’t disappoint here: her main purpose in the plot is to serve as a way of controlling Jack by stalking and threatening her. And yeah, she gets a token moment where she rescues a valuable laptop, but this isn’t the most empowered character even for this show.

Then there is Olivia Taylor, the President’s daughter. A savvy political operative, she forces out her mother’s chief of staff and organizes a hit on the man who conspired to kill her brother. (Of course, doing that results in a major freakout on her part and sends her crying to the man who arranged the details of the hit.) Not bad, I guess–empowered to do evil is still empowerment.

But wait, there’s more. The kick in the teeth for Olivia also manages to catch our first female president–who has hung tough the whole show, ordering attacks on foreign countries, authorizing black ops against terrorists, reaming out subordinates for their failures. When Olivia’s role in the assassination is discovered, President Taylor decides to prosecute her. Cause, you know, that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re sworn to protect the constitution. (President Obama–I know you’re reading this–take note!) The First Gentleman (gotta love that, actually) then comes down hard on Madame President–noting that the job has now cost them both their children (not to mention his own shooting) and just lays a complete guilt trip on her that has her practically weeping in the arms of her restored chief of staff–her marriage destroyed, one child dead, another soon to be a felon.

Thanks, guys. But to be fair, the message that a woman who pursues power will lose all human contact (most certainly because she is perverting her natural role as a nurturer, provider, and handservant) isn’t something you hear all the time; I must have seen only, oh, ten or twelve examples of it. Today. Before noon.

Finally, there’s one nice little bid of absurdist misogyny: when Tony Almeida, the rogue former government agent and colleague of Jack’s, confronts the slimy leader of the cabal that (unbelievably) has authored almost all the mayhem of the show’s seven seasons, he tells him the reason he is going to kill him: it’s not just because this guy arranged the death of Tony’s wife–it’s because she was pregnant! With his son! (At which point he begins screaming, “you killed my son!”) ‘Cause, you know, it’s kinda gay to be that worked up just over a woman, even if she was the love of your life and helped you escape from the shadow world of counter-terrorism. But an unborn son! Now that’s a manly reason for revenge!

So there you have it: torture works, women should rise no higher than the vice-presidency, and only a Y-chromosome can justify a four-year revenge trip. Actually, that last one might be true.

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Southland: I love LA

Categories: let's hear it for the ladies, stuff i like, tv (not trans)

So based on some good reviews, I’ve been watching Southland, NBC’s new policier. (I usually record it on my DVR and watch it while dilating in the morning. Is that gross? You’re right!) I had some reservations, because it stars that guy from The O.C., one of the more amiably idiotic recent shows, and also because the previews made it look like it would concentrate mostly on beat cops, and I wasn’t sure there was enough of a show there.

Happily, I’m wrong; Southland is the best new police show in years. And it also tells the stories of the detectives in the squadroom.

I have a weakness for two different kinds of crime-based programming: police procedurals, and amiable con-artists with a heart of gold. Thus: Law & Order, and The Rockford Files are both favorites of mine.

Southland is a both a primo policier (it takes a very gritty view of police work) as well as a character-driven drama. It portrays squadroom life as messy, complicated, and confusing–in fact, I’m still sorting out all the characters, because the same group does not appear in each episode. In trying to show a realistic view of the sometimes larger-than-life characters who inhabit the police station, it’s easily the best show of its type since Homicide–a drama that while great in its own way, never lived up to the promise of its initial episodes. Southland holds out promise of not falling into the trap of falling in love with its own characters–all though we are gradually seeing them get fleshed out, they are still grounded in the everyday struggles of police work.

But that’s not enough to earn a mention on this blog.

What I’ve liked so far is that there are signs that there will be several strong female characters, led by Regina King’s Detective Lydia Adams. It was her character who solved the show’s very first case, and in this week’s episode, she fights to solve a case that normally falls through the cracks–the murder of an African-American prostitute–and vents her exasperation that LA has over 3,000 rape kits backlogged in their lab.

I like Detective Adams.

On the officer’s side, in addition to Ben McKenzie’s really not as annoying as I’d have thought Ben Sherman and Michael Cudlitz’s amusingly no-nonsense Tom Cooper, we have Arija Bareikis as “Chickie” Brown, a single mother who wants to become the first female SWAT trooper.

I like this show.

Southland has three episodes left in this season; NBC has renewed it for next year. I may even like NBC now.