Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
Warning, all, a longish ranty not-very-coherent post...you've been told.
Indeed. the entire "let's promote Devine and Brenda" and forget all these horrible eviiiiil WHITE MEN...it's just so over for me. You're absolutely right, they have NO feeling for the material. Brenda is nearly a sight-gag. Devine...I mean...she's just someone. She's not some beauty queen that is Mother Theresa in her spare time, for crying out loud.
The mysteries, the nostalgia (I mean, let's face it) and all that. They're just gone. Trying to turn it upside down on its head (a la what they keep doing to the Christies--I was rolling my eyes at "Murder is Easy," which, sadly, is one of my fave Christie books) just to make this point or that one or whatever...it's just sucking the life out of it.
Is it too much to ask that entertainment simply entertain?
I'm done contributing views, watches, buys, subscriptions, whatever, to Hollyweird so that they can feel free to lecture me about whatever latest PC thing is up their asses.
Think of the utter sheer hypocrisy of it—they have Lady Montague (cough, Lady Felicia) in one episode—holding up the aristocracy, mind you—and then they just throw shade on the male characters (Goodfellow, FB, Sullivan, even to some extent our resident villain, Flambeau) because well, they're white and male. But hey, Lady Felicia is okay, b/c she has girl parts!!!
...
I'm just so over it. If you rummage through BB (BritBox) or Acorn, try to find ONE lousy thumbnail that doesn't feature 1-2-3 female characters as the protags. Just TRY. I'll wait...hmmmm, sings herself some songs....
It's nearly impossible. It's...it's everything that's wrong with the entertainment industry. Sure, fine, you have 50% women in the world. Hell, let's even say that you have 50% women in a cop shop (You won't, not now, not ever, most likely). That does not mean that every goddamned top cop is a woman, a woman of color...it's like the beginning of the Netflix (?) show "The Bodyguard," which starred (a male) one of the GOT bunch. Same thing.
[U]Every single important character in the cop shop/anti-terrorism unit, sniper, you-name-it--was a woma[n/U]. Every. single. one. It was so bleeding off-putting that I turned it off.
I've been there. Done that. Marched for equal rights, fought the fight myself by hiring and promoting women, but what is represented on TV, especially UK and USA TV is ludicrously absurd. And highly unrepresentative, a bunch of silly wishful thinking and just...bad. Just bad.
(sorry for my rant). And doing that while at the same time ruining the FBs of the world--I'm sitting here holding my breath for the next "fish out of water" inspector for Death in the Caribbean. You know they're gonna Jodi Whittaker-Doctor Who that sucker (blergh) and ruin it too.
There ought to be some intelligence test or familiarity testing for new showrunners. To some extent, the same thing happened with Midsomer Murders, when Tom Barnaby (John Nettles) left, but FAR more importantly, the show-runner/producer that initiated the series also left, (Brian True-May). That show has also been effectively destroyed, but it's tottering along yet. (Mostly due to vapidity, but hey...)
Hitch
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Shame on you, Hitch...
(Warning--extremely fed-up rant ahead, because enough of this mess is past enough.
)
Argh!!!!!!!! Please, for the love of all that is frickin' holy, can folks stop blaming a show's decline on "wokeness?" Father Brown is a disaster because of _bad writing_--the utterly inability of scripters to write _anyone_ convincingly. FB has had multicultural characters before that were credible and entertaining. But Devine and Brenda are lousy because they are throwbacks to "pre-wokeness'--the time when media wasn't diverse and stereotypes of "cutesy adorably silly wimmen" and "comic relief POC" were the order of the day. They haven't been developed as credible people from the start.
People really need to stop acting like POC and women were utterly absent from history--or were just submissive servants and wives. Geez, there are plenty of history books out there about POC/women who had interesting lives and did things society said they could not. (And POC had their own communities in which a lot of dramatic things happened--but those things were never written about--or heard of--thanks to predominantly-white male media gatekeepers.) Complaining that such potential characters are "unrealistic" or "there are too many of them" is not only insulting as all get-out, it shows a real lack of knowledge--or the willingness to look beyond the lens conventional society wants everything to be seen through.
I'm a POC, and I know from experience and family history that my ancestors did a helluva lot more than what typical history would swear they did. My grandfather was a coal miner who became a successful building contractor in West Virginia. My step-grandmother was the principal of _two W. Va high schools from the 40s-50s. My uncle helped build the Alcan Highway in Alaska--a prime supply road during WWII. All of my grandmother's six kids graduated from college and established successful middle-class lives. So to hear that their experiences would be seen as made-up, too much, or unrealistic if written about ... I say it's bullshit, and I say the hell with it.
If an actor doesn't bring anything to a role or its not in his/her wheelhouse--fair game. (And I haven't seen Murder Is Easy, but the lead in the current version doesn't seem as interesting in himself as previous ones. As well, it's time for other Christie stories to be thrown in the mix, no?) But this "only so far, but no farther" attitude towards diverse casting and stories is the same old racism, but in a more "palatable" guise. Movies/TV even trying for diversity is a correction long, long, long overdue. A lot of brilliant talents were snuffed out or never heard of under the old rules--talents that could have made things better for _everyone._ So to hear that non-white, non-males should be shut out again because of "unreality" is crap, pure and simple. And entertainment never just entertains--it never has. People take conscious/unconscious attitudes towards other folks from it--as well as ideas and philosophy.
Incidentally, Brian True-May deserved exactly what he got for being racist and ignorant. Guys like him wreck a lot of careers and withhold opportunities from talents who have done nothing but not look like his idea of what England is supposed to look like. (And Midsomer Murders is still right good--not as demented as it once was, but it still delivers entertaining, twisty mysteries.
) And yep--there should be a show runner intelligence test--to see if they know the basics of good writing, care about the material, and can create believable/engaging characters and plots. Lord knows the new Father Brown writing crew would certainly fail that.