I've had enough

[swan_tower]

The other day I was having to reinstall the operating system on my laptop, which is a tedious process that involves lots of waiting for things to be done. While this was going on, I poked around on Netflix, trying to find a new TV show to watch.

I actually watched a bunch of things that day, one of which was the first episode of Peaky Blinders. I like Cillian Murphy as an actor, and I'm a sucker for well-detailed historical periods, and the show is solidly written . . .

. . . and I just didn't care.

Because I'm starting to feel like I've had enough. There's a genre of TV right now that somebody on the internet once dubbed "blood, tits, and scowling," and while there is a wide range of splendid material belonging to that type -- for starters, look at just about everything HBO has done in the last decade -- I think I'm hitting my saturation point. There's a cynicism about human nature that tends to be endemic to the genre, and the representation of women is often problematic -- though, in fairness' sake, I should note that Peaky Blinders made a couple of moves with its female characters that I quite appreciated.

At dinner the other night, a friend of mine said he wanted to find a TV show where nobody died, nobody was murdered, nobody did awful criminal things, etc. Ironically, we wound up chatting about two shows that feature people getting murdered as a central plot point -- but in both cases, the entire tone is different. One was Pushing Daisies, which is candy-colored and good-hearted even though the main character brings people back from the dead to solve crimes, and the other was Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, following an outrageous lady detective in early 20th century Australia. They are both very, very far from blood, tits, and scowling.

I'm starting to crave the change of pace. My taste leans toward drama, so people getting killed is going to be a regular feature of many of the things I watch (and read) -- but I can do without the cynicism, the muted color palette, the parade of morally dubious people doing morally dubious things. Right now I'm enjoying the heck out of Agent Carter, with its cheerful pulp heroics. I need to get hold of The Librarians; the made-for-TV movies it's based on are the best Indiana Jones films apart from Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade. I want some light, some humour that isn't grim, some fun.

It isn't that the other stuff is bad. I've just had enough of it for now.

Comments

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

Sing it, sister! (I really want to watch The Librarians, I loved the movies.)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I think the first one was definitely the best, but they're all just so much fun. :-)

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly!

In general, though, I really do hear you. There are a lot of movies out that I'd like to see but don't think I have the emotional constitution for, for reasons you describe, and others.

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

I know its not TV, but have you read Aunt Dimity series by Nancy Atherton? I fell in love with the first book, where its pure mystery. And Reginald of course.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I haven't, no! Tell me more?

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

I dont want to spoil it for you if you read it, but, the heroine inheirts a cottage in England from her godmother, Aunt Dimity. Mystery ensues. The first book was just a wonder (Aunt Dimity's Death), and it made me cry. The series is ongoing, and I have to confess that there was a stretch in the series where I felt that the books werent up to standard, but, they are back in stride. I am a few books behind due to a medical issue, but I have been saving them.

Reginald is the stuffed bunny that Aunt Dimity made for the heroine.

[scribblemyname]

I hit that a couple months ago and watched Jane the Virgin, Nashville, and The Voice until I was willing to dip back into darker waters. Still haven't gone back to Gotham though.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Gotham and the other comic-book shows don't bother me too much. My lack of engagement with Gotham had a lot more to do with the unfortunate way it keeps shackling itself to Bruce Wayne than with its tone. I'm still watching Arrow, The Flash (which is way brighter than is sibling show), and Constantine. Arrow and Constantine are dark-ish, but not to the "blood, tits, and scowling" level.

[scribblemyname]

I've always been squeamish, and it's just too gory for me. I never had any real DCU exposure, so the Bruce Wayne bits actually help me.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Whereas for me, the theoretical appeal of Gotham was that it wasn't going to be about Batman. So the more it focuses on wee!future!Batman, the less I care.

My favorite parts of it are the bits where it shows characters further removed from their ultimate ends. Nygma is a case in point: I recognize that he's the guy who will eventually be the Riddler, but he isn't a villain yet. It's like having Lex Luthor be the good friend of Clark Kent on Smallville; that's way more interesting to me than if they'd made him the arch-nemesis of high-school Superman.

[burger-eater.livejournal.com]

Peaky Blinders is on my *soon* list, mainly because it looks like a Men In Hats movie (crime movies usually set in the 30's-50's, with a lot of corruption and repressed urges), but I'll be ditching it if it gets too pay cable.

But even among shows that are somewhat dark, there are clever intriguing shows like Person of Interest.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I really don't think me bouncing off it had anything to do with the show itself, so much as me having hit a personal saturation point. It doesn't shove sex in your face too much (Marco Polo, I am LOOKING AT YOU), the one instance of it I can recall in the first ep is shown as consensual and loving, there are places where the female characters matter, etc. It even pays attention to the fact that many of its male characters are WWI vets, and some of them have shell-shock (i.e. PTSD). It's just that in the end, it's about the leader of a criminal gang doing criminal things, and I've had enough of that for now.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I love Miss Fisher's, to the point where I even sat through their Boxing Episode. I am so tired of The Boxing Episode in every damn crime show I watch (which is a lot of damn crime shows), but hey, Dot didn't get fridged, so on with The Boxing Episode!

For me it's the misogyny. I can deal with a muted color palette, I can deal with cynicism, but once you add misogyny on top of it, I'm out.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Heh. Clearly I do not watch that many crime shows, because I wasn't aware of The Boxing Episode as a thing. Now I am looking forward to seeing Miss Fisher's instance of the trope!

I think the thing I am most tired of is misogyny-by-neglect, if I can coin a phrase. There are relatively few shows I've watched that actively seem to dislike and mistreat women; there are a great many more that just don't pay the slightest bit of attention to them. I can say any number of things against George R.R. Martin on the gender front, and ditto (in a different way) Robert Jordan -- but both of them at least have women in their stories. And not just that one token woman + some whores, either. Multiple female protagonists pursuing their own ends, by whatever means they can. Whatever criticisms I have of those characters (and oh, I do), the fact remains that they are there for me to criticize. Which I will take over that one cool female character all by her lonesome any day.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

There are some ways of handling a small female cast that I don't mind. But they all involve taking it head-on, rather than "oh, we happened to pick ten people at random and only two of them were women, how strange, well, whatever." In Flashpoint, for example, there was initially only one woman on the team, Jules. But a) they deal with how hard it is for Jules to be in a profession that is so very very male-dominated, and sometimes in complicated ways; b) there are women outside the main SWAT team--the dispatcher, for example, is female; and c) in keeping with how male-dominated professions are actually behaving over time, they added more female SWAT team members as the show went on.

Other shows that don't even seem to notice when they've only got one woman and they never let any of the villains attack her...less good.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

_Game of Thrones_ had 8 POV characters, 4 of whom were female. I don't know about comparative page count, but still. The later books aren't all as balanced -- one, I think FFC, tilts very male (mostly due to lots of new male characters) -- but yeah, he's fairly good at giving women a voice.

(Plus, apart from Dany and maybe Ned, usually the POV characters are near power but not wielding it. Catelyn, not Robb. Davos, not Stannis. You probably know this already, but still.)

[gelsey.livejournal.com]

The Librarians is such a fun show! I'd love to hear what you think when you see it.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I will try to post when I do!

[carbonel]

The Librarians TV show is fun, though I think bunching the entire season (or half-season) into just a few weeks by doubling up on a number of Sundays does it a disservice. One episode at a time is usually enough for me.

Also, I want more Noah Wyle.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I generally like mainlining shows, but I will bear that in mind when I watch The Librarians. Some things work better taken in small doses.

[carbonel]

I generally like mainlining shows, too. I think the problem may be that this one is just enough on the edge of camp that smaller doses work better for me.

[lowellboyslash.livejournal.com]

You've seen Leverage, right? It is my favorite happy-making TV show.

[pathseeker42.livejournal.com]

It's cheesy, but I watched all of Heartland (on Netflix) when I was in the stage of having a newborn attached to various body parts most of the day. It's a Canadian western where things almost always work out for the good guys, even when they make mistakes.

It took me a while to figure out why I was so twitchy ("That character is so going to die!" "They're going to lose the farm!") until I realized what you said here, that I had been saturated with dark dramas full of death and doom. It was nice to watch something light and happy for a change.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The saturation with dark and doom does have weird effects, doesn't it? I've been watching Hawaii Five-O with my workouts--not a good TV show, but a reasonably watchable one for my purposes--and I find that I have been trained to expect things of lingering shots of landscape. Specifically, lingering shot of landscape = something unpleasant happening here. And Hawaii Five-O is a cop show, so unpleasant things do happen in it! Sometimes outright gross things! But the lingering shots of landscape are not there for that. They're supposed to be there to sell you on Hawaii as a vacation paradise--Hilton and Hawaiian Air are sponsors of the show. So they're going for, "What a pretty volcanic mountain!" and from me they're getting, "SOMEONE IS DEAD ON THAT MOUNTAIN ACK! KIDNAPPING VICTIMS! EXTORTION! SOMETHING!"

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting convergence of two different visual grammars. Because yeah, the lingering shots of landscape have a very specific place in the marketing discourse of Hawaii (they show up all the time on Hawaiian Airlines in-flight ads and such), as well as in how they're used in the establishing shots of TV shows and movies which were filmed in Hawaii (e.g. Jurassic Park, Lost, Pirates of the Caribbean).

If I was a film-focused media scholar, I would be all over that shit, but A) games, and B) I'm not in academia any more.

[raktajinos.livejournal.com]

Heartland is delightful - I mean it's a horrible show, but it's charming. I've found that most of the CBC's originally programming tends to err on the optimistic/hopeful side of life.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I've found a taste for what I call "nice people being nice to each other". A thread (http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?723589-Nice-people-being-nice-to-each-other) on it mentioned "Parks and Recreation" as an example, and some (not all) of the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer; also http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Iyashikei as a concept. My own examples are anime/manga and a webcomic, and might be too saccharine for you, I don't know. (Aria, Maria-sama, Yokohama Shopping Trip, and City of Reality.) Azumanga Daioh and Yotsuba got mentioned too.

MLP:FIM should probably qualify too, but the few episodes I saw didn't suck me in.

You do say drama, and most of these are weak on Story and big on Character and D'awww and maybe Scenery Porn. City of Reality does have some drama as the characters expand into a darker universe, and I think Maria-sama pretends to have tension and intercharacter conflict. Aria's just audiovisual antidepressant with occasional intrusions of semi-hard SF.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

A whole new set of Poirots has just shown up on Netflix. Lots of Christie already on there too. Okay, they have murders and sometimes sad bits, but overall they're in a good world with nice people. Who behave well!

About the same kind of mix as Miss Fisher's.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

If you do animation, Gravity Falls is kind of concentrated essence of opposite of that genre, with pleasingly much substance with its nominal target audience.

[lizvogel.livejournal.com]

Amusingly, I was just quoting this description of Miss Fisher's to my housemate, and the DVD she'd just popped in started running an extended ad for... Miss Fisher's. We've been looking for more light, fun dramas; sounds like we should check that out.

Have you seen Murder In Suburbia? It follows two female police detectives who solve crimes in between bantering about their terrible love lives. Pretty much the anti-Bechdel, but in a fun way. One review described it as "frothy", and I think that's pretty fair.

[aliettedb.livejournal.com]

So much in agreement--we stopped watching Breaking Bad for precisely this reason (it's also a very specific case of morally dubious, if that makes sense? I can't put my finger on why exactly, but Breaking Bad didn't strike me as more believable than the Avengers--it's the relentless insistence on being edgy and showing us a bad individual that feels more as though it'd done for shock value rather than for character reasons).

(the violence/murder feels deeply embedded into what is acceptable as a good story--I had a *lot* of trouble when I was writing On a Red Station Drifting, because the right ending for the story did not involve anyone dying or anything exploding, and my brain kept insisting that wasn't the proper resolution...)

[raktajinos.livejournal.com]

"blood, tits, and scowling" - that is a *great* description of it.

I'm tired of it too. I'm tired of the 'we show explicit female nudity so clearly we're quality programming' mentality that is tv right now. If the nudity was more equal I'd be less exasperated with it, but it's not - it's just like we've lifted the limits of what misogynistic content we'll put up with and cable networks have just run with it.

I was catching up on my tv the other day and I realized as I pushed into hour 6 (shut up, it was a Saturday lol) that everything I'd watched that day was a murder crime show. I love Elementary, Castle and The Mentalist and these shows aren't even the most gristly of programs, but I was a little tired of the 'murder murder murder'.

It was a bit of a relief to put on The West Wing (which I've been rewatching with my sister - her first time seeing it). It's a complicated show but without the 'blood, tits and scowling'. But I wouldn't say it's fun ... and you're right we do need fun programming (probably why as I type this I'm watching Full House hahaha).

*Do* get ahold of The Librarians, it is just fun and actually isn't terribly problematic. Also, if you've never watched it Psych (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psych). Murder is the point of every episode, but its an absurd comedy and it's 100% fun.