shadowkat | (no subject)

(no subject)

If you want to know why I loved Brian Lynch's writing and Urru's art on Spike Shadow Puppets and Asylum, and why I'm looking forward to Angel: After the Fall, go read

elsie marvelous review which can be found here: http://elisi.livejournal.com/297149.html?style=mine#cutid1

Am avoiding the Heroes debates, mostly because I think people are ignoring the fact that what we see on tv reflects what is going on in our world. Like it or not, we live in a misogynistic, chauvinistic, racist society. Heck, name one show on TV that doesn't reflect that in some way. I can't think of one. Better yet, name one advertisement.

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Oh I agree with you: that if people are concerned about violence against women then they should do something pro-active about it, and not just complain about some of the instances of it on TV (because invariably they pick on some shows but not others).

There are shows that I find too violent/negative to watch, but interestingly they are NOT the horror/Sci-fi action shows. I cannot tolerate 'Law & Order: SVU' because they spend 45 minutes of each show depicting in graphic detail violence against women and children, and then they spend 10 minutes at the end arresting the bad guy (it seems to me that that arouses more prurient interest than seeing a vampire beheaded).

Exactly.

I wish people would be more pro-active than re-active about this. Not that I'm much better - I keep hunting ways to help and admit it is not easy. Several years back when I lived in KC (it was oddly easier to do this in KC than NYC) - I volunteered for battered women's shelter and for a group that aided women in obtaining "orders of protection" against their abusers. Haven't been able to do much in NYC unfortunately, outside of send letters via the internet and ACLU to congress on assorted human rights issues - which is at least something.

Really agree with you on the procedurals - which I find far more violent and far more disturbing than the supernatural/horror/sci-fi tv shows. CSI - spends a lot of time depicting in graphic detail how a woman has been raped and murdered or kept hostage. As does the Law & Orders. Criminal Minds is amongst the worst in this arena - it's basically about serial killers and spends a lot of time showing us what the serial killer does - again in graphic detail (that was one of the reasons Mandy Pantikan left the series - he found it exploitive with little to no value.). Without A Trace - the victim will sometimes survive and we don't always see everything that happens. The Closer - we seldom see what happens to the victim - the concentration is on the detectives solving it.
Cold Case - does go through what happened to the person and again in graphic detail.

I used to whine about Supernatural - until I actually sat down and gave it a chance. I realized once I did what they were doing and that the show wasn't as misogynistic or violent as a lot of other shows I'd watched. I can't for example watch 24 any more. The torture scenes began to get to me. Nor can I watch most of the procedurals without cringing. The violence feels more real in those shows, more exploitive and more graphic for some reason than it does in the fantasy shows. Not sure why.

I never could watch '24'.
I always preferred old fashioned detective novels, where they open w/a murder (so that was out of the way right off the bat) and you spent your time just thinking about clues with the detective, who was not a coroner and wasn't looking at the corpse for his clues.... Preferably ones like Lord Peter Wimsey who were charming and funny and kept his hands clean.

Now days they try to get us to feel like we are really there at the autopsy, which isn't really any place where I'm dying to be (except on 'Heroes' because the Cheerleader's autopsy was really very funny). I think I just prefer the fantasy, I like my fiction to be fictional.... I can't stand 'true crime', or anything that is trying to be terribly realistic.

I watched 24 intermittently. The only season I think I stuck with all the way through was the third one - with Tony and his wife, and Paul Blackthorn as the villian.

When the procedurals started - I sort of liked them - with Prime Suspect, Murder One, Law and Order, Homicide: Life on the Streets, the Profiler, and in book form - Patricia Cornwall's Kay Scarpetta series. The problem was like any hot new trend - the networks went overboard and soon all I saw were procedurals. And...here's the thing the hyper-real wasn't that real to me after a while - CSI is eye-rollingly wrong at times. Forensic pathologists do not, I repeat, do not interview, interrogate, or arrest suspects. That's what cops and homicide detectives do. The pathologists just assist them. Bones - is laughingly off at times - because there is no way in hell that a pathologist would be allowed to go interview a suspect. She stays in the lab. She might get to do some leg-work but nothing like what that show depicts.

Prime Suspect, Murder One, Hill Street Blues, Homicide Life on the Streets and Law & Order were actually fairly realistic and did stretch the boundaries of belief. You could not in those shows convict someone based on a fingerprint impression from a wall or a hair fiber. CSI makes me laugh - whenever they do fingerprinting - I know for a fact that you can't get a fingerprint off most of the surfaces they manage to.

At least with fantasy or science fiction - the suspension of disbelief is more or less up front, you know what the lies are and just want them to be consistent in their universe. In procedurals - the universe is ours and if you know anything about criminal procedures or forensic pathology, you'll find what appears on screen to be funny. Criminal Minds - sigh, it makes the Profiler look like Shakespeare and I wasn't that in to the Profiler.

I do miss the old style mysteries - Moonlighting, Remington Steele, Scarecrow and Mrs King, Murder She Wrote - even though I admittedly got bored of them after awhile too. The problem is the networks discover a tv format that works then go crazy copying it - the publishing industry does the same thing with books - to the point that it loses it's uniqueness and allure and finally goes out of fashion once the next trend takes off.

Also agree on "true crime" - I liked it for a while, when I was much younger, but the older I get the less I tend to like the true crime stories - they feel less interesting and more exploitive and make me cringe. Again it might be another symptom of market saturation or overdose - the true crime trend started in the 70's with Helter Skelter and Patty Hearst and went into hyperdrive in the 90's with the OJ Simpson fiasco and all its off-shoots. It's not doing as well now. People have finally begun to lose interest or maybe with the War in Iraq and the constant reports of terrorism - people just want to escape from all of that when they watch movies or books or tv shows.

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