Finally got around to watching the Ms. Marvel series on Disney+ and I'm SUPER impressed with the cinematography.  It's clever and creative and quirky and both subtle and outrageously cartoonish and it's seamless to the live-action happening.

Really, just these opening scenes is ushering in a new era of YA television, honestly.  It's told in a similarly serious tone to any adult TV show I would love but it's so fun and colorful and engaging that I think it probably appeals to a much younger audience.  I think it's a great way to bridge the generation gap, actually.

The pace of the effects slowed down and got more subtle after the first episode or two, so that we could focus more on the story and not get distracted by the visual onslaught of creativity but the effects remained throughout, maintaining its young style.

And the story was, in Disney fashion, heavily pro-family.  Other reviews have covered the cultural accuracy and since it’s not my culture, I’ll just say that I both recognized some cultural aspects from my time on the Bollywood circuit with Indian clientele and also recognized more universal elements of love and family and being a teenager and generation gaps that it seems we all go through in our own ways.

The series is really quite impressive, technically speaking.  It is more “comic booky” than some of the other Marvel series, or rather more YA comic booky because there are darker and more subtle and sophisticated ways to still be comic booky (see Netflix Marvel and M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable), which makes sense as it features teenagers but it’s fun even for adults and has plenty for everyone.

I found this show utterly charming the whole way through, and the cinematography especially is impressive.  I think this is a good one for GenX and older Millennial geeks to watch with the kids.  If you have kids who are old enough to sit through a series with a multi-episode story arc, I recommend giving this one a go with them.

I am frequently asked for TV recommendations. My parents just asked me to write down all the shows I was recommending to them because I apparently blurted out too many titles to remember. So I started writing out a list, and then also a short description so that she would know what they were about and why I recommended them.

Then I got the idea to archive this list somewhere and add to it as I go so that I don't have to keep writing it out every time. I watch a shitload of television (and movies), across just about all genres, and it's hard to remember them all, or to remember which movies to recommend to which people, who might have different tastes.

So I'm going to attempt to start a list. We'll see how well I keep up with it. I'm starting with a list of TV shows that I think my parents would like including my own description, and I'll be adding titles of shows that I recommend for other people, along with descriptions of those at a later time. For right now, if it has a description, it's because I'm recommending it to my parents. If it doesn't, then I recommend it, but for people who have different tastes than my parents. Later, when I update this post, I'll also update the explanation here.  It's late, so I'm just trying to get through my parents' list right now and I'll come back to this later for the others.

I am also going to list what network the show is on, but if the networks keep changing their inventory to make it too difficult to keep up, I'll abandon that. I may make a Listal list, but I can't include commentary on individual entries, just the groups within a list (apparently I can: https://www.listal.com/list/my-tv-show-recommendations).

I may also consider an airtable database, but you have to create an account (apparently) to see my databases and I know my parents are not going to do that, so that's a project for later down the road. I really like the Listal service, but I also really want to have my commentary on each listing.

So, for now, my TV show recommendations:

Netflix

• Grace & Frankie - hilarious comedy. 2 very different women in their '70s who don't like each other get dumped by their husbands so they can marry each other and the two women end up supporting each other. Hijinks ensue.


• iZombie - cop drama with an undead twist. A promising young doctor gets attacked at a party on a boat, falls overboard, washes ashore, and wakes up dead with a craving for brains. Unable to tell anyone that she's a zombie now, she gets a job at the city morgue so that she can steal brains without anyone noticing. She discovers that she takes on the personalities of the brains she eats and also accesses some of their memories. When a murder victim comes in, she tells the investigating police officer that she's "psychic" and starts teaming up with him to solve crimes.


• Cobra Kai - surprisingly good drama. Bad guy from the Karate Kid movie, Johnny Lawrence, is all grown up now and re-opens his old dojo and starts teaching karate. But he's still a jerk. Daniel LaRusso is now a successful car salesman with a beautiful wife and kids who tries to stop Johnny from imposing the abusive values of Cobra Kai dojo on the next generation.


• The Good Place - absurd comedy. Eleanor wakes up in an office waiting room, where she is told by an administrator (played by Ted Dansen) that she is dead and in the good place. But the description of Eleanor's life on earth in her file is not true. Now Eleanor has to figure out how to prevent anyone from finding out that she was actually a terrible human being so that they don't kick her out of the Good Place and send her to the Bad Place.


• Lucifer - supernatural cop drama. Lucifer, God's favorite son and angel who was cast out of heaven to rule hell, decides that he's done taking orders from an absentee father and abandons his underworldly administrative position for a life of luxury up on Earth. Where he meets Detective Chloe Decker and discovers that he rather enjoys helping her solve crimes even though she seems to be the only human on the entire planet who is immune to his charms.


• Crazy Ex-Girlfriend - musical comedy. Rebecca Bunch is a successful New York City lawyer with a ton of anxiety problems who spontaneously decides one day to quit her lucrative position and move across the country to California, where her old middle school boyfriend lives, because dating him one summer is the last time she remembers being happy. The question is, can she convince him to love her and get back together, or is she just a psychotic stalker with a penchant for sappy musical numbers?


• Dead To Me - thriller / mystery. Recently widowed when her husband was killed by a hit and run vehicle, Jen struggles to cope with single motherhood and latent anger issues. Until Judy appears in her life. The exact opposite of foul-mouthed, angry Jen, Judy is sweet and kind and a little bit hippie-dippy. But who is she? Where did she come from? And who killed her husband?


• Dexter - cop drama with a murderous twist. Dexter is a forensic scientist with the Miami police department. He investigates murders by studying the methods by which people kill, including a specialty in blood spatter patterns. All the better to hide his own serial murders. But it's OK because he only kills other bad guys!


• Fuller House


• Sense8


• Altered Carbon


• One Day At A Time


• Black Mirror


• Sex Education

Hulu

• Elementary - Sherlock Holmes cop drama. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never liked the character he created and deeply resented his popularity. Consequently, the character of Sherlock Holmes is kind of a jerk. Doyle was trying to tell us that the sort of person who relies on "logic" is someone we should dislike, but for some reason, everyone loved his stories anyway. Over a century later, dozens of remakes have been made but they all have to work with this unlikable character. This imagining takes the Sherlock character into new realms, with Lucy Liu as Dr. Watson, not his sidekick and chronicler but a partner who can hold her own against the legendary Sherlock Holmes. Holmes and Watson team up together to solve crimes while we get a very different perspective on who they both are.


• Lie To Me - Sherlock Holmes-like cop drama. Cranky, abrasive Dr. Cal Lightman develops the theory of "micro-expressions" - tiny, quick, involuntary expressions that pass over people's faces that give away what they're thinking. Very loosely based on a real (but debunked) theory where Paul Ekman would analyze expressions from video, one frame at a time, whereas Lightman is able to read these expressions in real life as they happen with almost magical accuracy. The Lightman Group is a private business for hire that will detect people's lies and solve mysteries, sometimes even partnering with the police to solve crime.


• Bones - odd couple crime drama. Forensic anthropologist Dr. Temperance Brennan teams up with FBI agent Booth to investigate crime, loosely based on the real life and novels of a forensic anthropologist named Kathy Reichs. Agent Booth brings human remains to a federal science lab where Dr. Brennan "Bones" studies them to help solve their deaths.


• Numb3rs - odd couple crime drama. Two brothers, one a decorated and successful FBI agent and the other a brilliant math genius and professor, who don't get along with each other because they don't understand each other. Until one of Don's FBI cases needs Charlie's mathematical expertise and brings them together.


• Full House


• Family Matters


• Perfect Strangers


• Designing Women


• Wonder Years


• Golden Girls


• MASH


• Cheers


• Married With Children


• Firefly


• Doogie Howser

Disney+

• Agent Carter - historical cop drama. Agent Peggy Carter was a secret British agent who worked on the Captain America project in World War II. After Captain America went Missing In Action and the war ended, she moved to the United States to work with the super secret organization called the Strategic Scientific Reserve in New York City, where she tries to solve crimes while battling her coworkers' and superiors' disbelief that women are capable of doing anything other than serving coffee and filing paperwork.


• The Mandalorian

Other Networks

• Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries

I just hosted a Brat Pack drama marathon. It was 3 of the movies that literally define the Brat Pack. David Blum, a reporter for the New Yorker, started out writing an article about Emilio Estevez shortly after St. Elmo's Fire. One night, Estevez invited Blum out to hang out with most of the cast, as they often did. Blum changed the focus of the article to the whole group and called it Hollywood's Brat Pack.

I grew up in the '80s with the Brat Pack as my role models. I watched a lot of movies in the '80s. If it hadn't been for my love of books and music, I very much could have been Xavier Cross from Scrooged with how much television I watched as a kid. Those Brat Pack movies, though ... Most of what I enjoyed in the '80s did not age well. I go back to watch the classics now as an adult and I'm really kind of horrified, if I'm being honest. I still love my old movies, though, because nostalgia is one helluva drug - forget about beer goggles, you oughta try on rosy nostalgia glasses sometime!

Anyway, the media I consumed as a kid was ... well ... rough. It was hard. It was deep. Frankly, it's no wonder that GenXers are pretty fucked up. The Outsiders, Stand By Me, Old Yeller, Neverending Story ... I'm still not over Artax's death. We grappled with some shit back then.

I also read a lot, as I mentioned. One of my favorite authors back then was one of the most popular authors of the time - Judy Blum. She tackled some pretty hard stuff too. Her coming of age novels were grounding. I remember the controversy over her 1975 novel, Forever. That book examined both suicidal depression and teen sex. Talk about heavy topics. In the story, the main character has premarital sex at the end of high school, believing she will be with her partner "forever", but in the end [spoiler alert] discovers that one's first love rarely lasts forever and she will move on from him.

The fact that the characters have sex as teenagers and do not end up married, and the main character uses birth control, makes this book come in a whopping #7 out of the top 100 "most challenged books" in the US, for how often it gets censored and banned.

I bring all of this up to talk about Cuties.

I finally watched the movie Cuties. I've been defending it and haven't even watched it yet. So I decided that if I must watch something before I criticize it, then I must also watch something in order to defend it. So I did. To be totally honest, absolutely nothing I have read, both pro and con, accurately explained to me what Cuties was about.

[SPOILER ALERT - The entire plot of the film follows]

Amy is an 11 year old Muslim girl growing up in France. Her family is, by my standards, extremely repressive. She is required to cover her body and hair, and pray for piety and modesty. She is moved into a new apartment and, presumably, a new school, where she meets the Cuties - 4 girls who have formed a dance team of that name.

These girls show their skin and defy authority. They are rebellious and obnoxious, but really not any worse than all the kids I knew at that age. Their first act of rebellion is to convince the entire schoolyard to pose and freeze one day when the bell rings to summon them back to class. I mean, that's hardly dangerous or scandalous. Just irritating to the authority figures.

After some routine bullying, Amy eventually gets accepted by their group and starts hanging out with them. She starts wearing less modest clothing, but again, nothing worse than anything I did at her age. She shows her legs and her midriff. I probably still have some of my old crop tops from the '80s. I have always been proud of my stomach and I liked showing it off.

As for legs ... well, I grew up in an era of knee-length shorts and I am still uncomfortable in anything shorter (although I have no problem with *skirts* that short, but shorts have to be to my knees). So let me tell you sometime of the nearly impossible task of finding shorts for women or girls that don't have half my ass hanging out. I literally have to wear men's shorts in order to find any long enough to make me comfortable. Girls wear short shorts because that's what's readily available.

Anyway, so the girls are dressing less modestly than Amy's Muslim family would like. But not any less modestly than any tweens I have seen since ... oh, probably the '60s. In fact, the tight mini skirts we see the Cuties in when we are introduced to them look suspiciously like the skirts I had back in the '80s. In the '90s, one of those mini skirts literally got me my first mall job when I was 16 - my boss liked my ass in that skirt and wanted to watch me reach up and straighten the suit jackets in that skirt all shift.

So, the Cuties have heard of some dance competition and they want to enter. So they rehearse all the time. All of their routines that we see are pretty standard hip hop routines - nothing particularly special or controversial. No twerking or crotch-splits or anything.

Amy wants to join their dance troupe, but she has never danced before. So she steals her older cousin's mobile phone to watch the practice videos the Cuties have uploaded so far and searches the internet for music videos to learn by. Unfortunately, she finds videos of voluptuous women in thongs twerking. So, guess what kind of moves she learns?

Here's the thing ... the right-wing propaganda of this film is totally wrong of course. It has nothing to do with pedophilia or sex trafficking or child prostitution. It is, of course, a criticism of the oversexualization of young girls, just as the producers and directors say it is.

But the defenses of the film led me to believe that it was a criticism of *the dance industry* and how *it* oversexualizes girls. But that's not true either.

The Cuties are not part of any dance studio or dance industry. They're 4 tweens (and Amy) who want to be famous dancers who emulate what they see in pop media. With, as far as I can tell, absolutely no adult supervision or guidance. Certainly no *pressure* to dance this way.

Amy's mother has no idea what she is getting up to. She has 2 small children to care for and a husband who is off somewhere courting a second wife (without telling her about it until it's a done deal). I'll get back to this in a minute. The only time we see Angelica's family is when she and her brother get into a fight and her dad yells that he's trying to sleep ... in the afternoon. We see Yasmine's mom, who seems nice enough, but clearly has no clue what the girls are getting into. None of the other girls' parents ever enter the picture.

So Amy, desperately trying to fit in, learns these very adult dance moves on her own. Then, when Yasmine gets kicked out of the group, and the group freaks out because the preliminaries for the dance competition are too soon to teach another girl the routine, Amy jumps in, proves that she's been studying their home videos and already knows the routine, and also introduces the other girls to the very adult dance moves she has also been studying.

These moves get incorporated into their routine. This routine wins the girls a spot in the competition during the primaries. When they get caught sneaking into a laser tag facility, Amy gets the girls out of trouble by explaining that they are dancers and celebrating their acceptance to the competition. To prove that they are really dancers, she starts doing the adult dance moves, making the two male employees so uncomfortable that they just let the girls go. The girls don't realize that the men were uncomfortable and trying to get out of watching tweens twerking, they think Amy just convinced the guards that they are legitimate dancers which, for some reason, gave them a free pass.

As they practice for the competition, Amy becomes more and more self-confident. She starts wearing even more revealing clothing and moves through her school with the same arrogant attitude as the other Cuties. Later, she picks a fight with a rival dance team, who manage to pants her and take pictures of her in her underwear to post on social media, mocking her for her childish undergarments.

Amy, filled with lots of really big emotions at this stage in her development and with her oppressive home life and her humiliation on behalf of her mother for her father bringing home a new wife, starts making really bad choices. She steals lots of money from her mom's purse and takes her friends and her brother on a shopping spree for more adult underwear and clothing.

Amy's mom eventually learns of the theft and freaks out, yelling and hitting Amy for getting out of hand. She even calls in a priest to do an exorcism, but the priest says there are no demons there. So Amy's mom and grandmother strip her and splash her with water, having earlier established that water washes away sins. Amy goes into a kind of trance-like convulsion partially consisting of some of her booty-shaking new dance moves.

Later, when her cousin discovers that she still has his phone and tries to take it back - her one connection to this grown-up, outside world of music videos and social media - Amy locks herself in the bathroom and takes a picture of genitals. I am unclear on if the picture includes her new adult underwear or not. The film shows her taking the picture but does not show us the picture (thankfully). She then posts this picture on social media.

Now her new friends hate her because she went too far. They call her a whore and say that they are receiving harassing messages to show off their private parts like Amy. So they kick her out of the group and bring back Yasmin. As her father's wedding day approaches and her grandmother continues to push her into being a dutiful, subservient, Muslim Senegalese young woman, and her period begins, all of Amy's really big feelings take over.

Amy sabotages Yasmine and shows up to the dance competition. With no time to wait for Yasmin, they accept Amy and run on stage. This is the one scene where we see the routine in full. And it's ... discomforting. The girls look like strippers. And I don't mean they look like some of these hip hop dancers who have some sexualized moves in their routine. I mean that I don't recall any hip hop in their new routine at all. The entire routine consisted of them humping the floor and putting their finger in their mouths and grabbing their crotches.

And the audience is having none of it. Except one dude, apparently. He seemed to think the routine was fine. But everyone else in the audience was shaking their heads, one mother covering her young daughter's eyes, some booing, lots of mumbling. The judges, however, all seemed to think it was fantastic, if their smiles and nods were anything to go by. That's disturbing.

While dancing, Amy seems to have some kind of emotional breakdown. Everything that has happened up to this point seems to have all come crashing in on her mind as she realizes what she's doing. She starts crying and flees the stage in the middle of the performance.

She runs home, where her grandmother sees her competition costume and calls her a whore, and then attacks her mother for having raised a whore daughter. Amy's mom finally stands up to her mother and tells her to back the fuck off and takes Amy into her room to comfort her. They seem to reach an understanding. Her mom tells her that she doesn't have to attend her father's wedding if she doesn't want to, which is about to start. So Amy changes out of her dance costume into a reasonably modest pair of jeans and a sweater, skips the wedding, and goes outside to play jump rope with the neighborhood kids.

And that's where it ends.

There was no "dance industry" in this film. It was mostly just 4 girls with too much unsupervised, unguided exposure to grown-up media. Had they been a part of a studio, it's quite possible that they would have been discouraged from the dance routine they choreographed.

This movie was far more like a Judy Blume novel, or a John Hughes film. It showed young kids under immense pressure with either not enough parental guidance or the wrong kind of parental oversight. Then, left to their own devices, their very large, overwhelming feelings drown the hormonal tweens and leads them to make very poor choices while they try to figure themselves out.

In the end, Amy figures out that she made some poor choices. But she can make other choices, and life will go on.

A few days ago, I just spent several hours watching teenagers kill other teenagers, get into large-scale fist fights with each other, learn how to use machine guns and grenades and kill enemy soldiers, and then barely-out-of-teens having lots of sex and snorting lots of cocaine and drinking obscene amounts of alcohol. These movies were also about young people figuring out that they made some poor choices, but that they can make other choices and life will go on (maybe not for the ones who died, but the rest will go on).

A whole bunch of years ago I read books with girls getting their periods, having sex, dealing with death, feeling lots of feelings, and also figuring out that they made some poor choices, but that they can make other choices and life will go on.

This is what it means to have a "coming of age" drama.

There is a country song that says "I believe that youth is spent well on the young / 'Cause wisdom in your teens would be a lot less fun". I don't happen to agree that youth is spent well on the young, but I definitely agree that wisdom in your teens would be a lot less "fun", for some value of "fun". I am frankly amazed some days that I lived to see adulthood. Between racing my car and rolling it down a hill and running from and waiting out a mountain lion from atop a water tower and sneaking out at night to party with kids doing way to many fucking drugs, it's really only luck that allowed me to live to see "wisdom". I'm not sure that my middle aged wisdom would have resulted in less fun, so much as different fun.  I'm having lots of fun as an adult too, only with much less risk.

My point is that the teen years are a pretty fucking foolish age. It's when bodies change and emotions get really large but the brains are not yet developed enough to know what to do with with it all. Everything is confusing, everything is humongous, everything is immediate, everything is absolute.

And that's what we see in "coming of age" stories. These stories are uncomfortable. These stories are challenging. These stories are difficult. These stories are often a little bit ugly. Because that's what the teen and pre-teen years are - uncomfortable, challenging, difficult, and often a little bit ugly.

Which makes Cuties a pretty damn good representative of the "coming of age" genre.

The movie does not draw any hard conclusions, as a good "coming of age" drama ought not. But what lesson it does impart is that the oversexualization of these young girls was definitely not for their own good. Amy was caught between too repressive and far too unfettered at a time in her life when her emotions were also too big whilst her knowledge and reason was far too inexperienced.

This led her to ping-pong between extremes, both being wrong. She needs to stop bouncing back and forth off the opposite walls and find a path between them that she can walk at a more reasonable pace without banging herself up on both walls. Which is, I feel, a common dilemma for many young girls. It certainly was for me.

Telling an uncomfortable story about an uncomfortable situation does not necessarily condone or support that situation or that action. It depends on how the story is told. For instance, 50 Shades very clearly romanticizes abuse by not recognizing what the character does as abusive and perpetuating the trope that a man can be "saved" by a good woman.

Flowers In The Attic wasn't romanticizing parental abuse or incest, although both were the vehicles for the tension in that novel. It was telling a story intended to make the reader feel off-kilter because of the horrific things happening to the characters. It was definitely never defended as some sort of introduction to a world people were clamoring to get into. Not a single person read Flowers and said "sure, it's not totally accurate about incest, but at least it got people talking about it, and maybe we can guide them to the correct way to do it!" You were supposed to feel uncomfortable when you read Flowers, even if you could empathize with the characters.

Cuties told an uncomfortable story. It showed a girl chafing at her repressive upbringing, flinging the chains off and jumping head-first without the benefit of a parachute, and only then realizing that she actually just jumped out of a frying pan and into a fire. To mix my metafores, which I have a tendency to do.

The movie seemed to imply that it was the influence of the media (social media, pop media, etc.) that was responsible for Amy's decent into hypersexualization. And, yeah, there is a lot of it out there for children to stumble across. But I also think that this is the inevitable outcome when children aren't given any guidance for how to navigate that media and what it means. I saw little to no adult mentorship in this film, other than Amy's occasional lessons to pray for a life of subservience to a man and no respect for her agency in any form.

What I definitely saw absolutely none of was pedophilia, btw. Pedophilia is a mental health condition where adults are sexually attracted to pre-pubescent children. Most pedophiles do not harm children. Most are aware that they have a dangerous condition. Sexual assault tends to be perpetrated by people who are not pedophiles. I know this is difficult to understand, but assault and abuse (in all their forms) are not about *attraction*, they're about *power*.

There was absolutely no pedophilia anywhere in this film. There was nothing about adults being attracted to pre-pubescent children. In fact, everyone (but one older teen in the audience of the competition) was repulsed by the sexualization of the girls.

There was also no *system* or *industry-wide* hypersexualization of children. This was not Toddlers & Tiaras or Dance Moms, where the industry itself is so competitive that it keeps falling into more and more adult requirements of children for the sake of competition.

But there *was* children exhibiting sexualized dance moves that they learned from pop media. And the tone of the film clearly disapproved.

We can possibly have a conversation about the ethics of a director teaching children how to play these kinds of roles where their characters are doing adult dance moves, but if we're going to have that conversation, then we need to talk about children in horror movies for the last 50 years, and docudramas showing young guerrilla soldiers, and every movie from the '80s showing teen violence and bullying. There better not be a single person complaining about Cuties who also thinks Lolita or The Professional are good films.

Child actors are still actors. They are required to play roles to tell the story. Sometimes their characters are bad people and sometimes they do bad things and sometimes bad things happen to them. This is unavoidable if we are going to tell stories about the experience of children. It's challenging to protect a child from the experience of playing a role, and that's an ongoing conversation that needs to continue. But children in real life go through some shit, and if we're going to tell stories about the lives and experiences of children, we're going to have to see that shit they go through. We have to be able to share our stories as children.

And that's what this film is, by the way. It's the dramatized experience of the creator - a Black Muslim Senegalese-French woman. This is her story. She needs to be able to tell her story, and we need to be able to see it. And this story very clearly tells a tale of a young girl who lived through some shit and made some poor choices, as children do, and life went on.

Just like every good "coming of age" story ever.

Now, having watched the movie, I would not say this is a film critiquing the dance industry's use of children's bodies. I would say that this is a film telling the story of a young girl experiencing things that some young girls experience, many of which are harmful and cause hardship to the child. That makes it a "coming of age" film. And one that has an opinion of some of those experiences, and that opinion is pretty solidly against them.

For all that I complain about Bewitched, there is one episode that I really like.

Of course, I still have to watch it in the context of the era, because it does some things that, today, I would not find acceptable.  But the message really does have good intentions.  This episode is actually so important that it was prefaced with a personal message from Elizabeth Montgomery.  She addressed the camera directly at the top of the episode about the importance of the message and how strongly she (and the advertiser) feels about it.

In this episode, Tabitha has a best friend stay the night.  She wishes her best friend was really her sister because she doesn't much care for having a little brother.  So Samantha tells her that having her friend sleep over is like having a temporary sister.  The little girl arrives.  She's black, and her father works with Darrin at the advertising company.  Tabitha gets into it with another girl at the park over whether or not she can be sisters with someone of a different color.

Darrin's company is wooing a new client, who believes in making sure anyone he hires for anything has the type of home-life that he approves of before hiring them.  So this guy shows up at the Stephens' house unannounced and Lisa opens the door.  The client misunderstands who Lisa is, with some help from a child's way of not quite explaining things.  He gets the impression that Darrin is married to a black woman and this is their other daughter (he already knows about Tabitha and Adam).

Later, the two girls talk about how they wish they could be really sisters.  Tabitha accidentally changes Lisa's skin and hair color.  She changes her back, but then changes herself to match Lisa.  So we have literal blackface on this show, which made me very uncomfortable.  But Lisa points out that their parents would be upset if their children are the wrong color, so Tabitha goes back to her own color.  Then both girls are sad that they don't look alike anymore, and therefore can't be sisters.  So Tabitha accidentally gives them contrasting spots - she has black-skin-color spots and Lisa has white-skin-color spots.  And then she can't take them off because, subconsciously, both girls really want to be sisters.

The rules of this universe are that one witch cannot undo any spell that another witch casts (otherwise that would solve all of the show's plot devices before they start).  So Samantha can't get rid of the spots as long as Tabitha really doesn't want to.  So she has to do some digging to find out why Tabitha doesn't want to.

The girls talk about the racism they experienced from the other girl in the park and how they really want to be sisters.  So Samantha tells them:

"Sisters are girls who share something.  Usually the same parents but if you share other things - good feelings, friendship, love, well that makes you sisters in another way."  She insists that they can be sisters if they want to, no matter what skin color they have.

This convinces Tabitha that they can safely get rid of the spots and still have the connection they want.

Meanwhile, the Stephens are hosting the office Christmas party downstairs and Lisa's parents arrive to pick her up from her slumber party the night before (the father had to go out of town to secure another client, so the Stephens were basically babysitting for a couple of days).

Earlier in the day, the client fired the advertising agency because of Darrin's "mixed marriage", but he didn't put it clearly enough for anyone to understand that this was the reason.  Just that he didn't approve of Darrin, and since nobody knew that he had come over and spoke to Lisa, nobody knew what it was he didn't approve of.

In an attempt to woo him back, Darrin's boss invited the client to the Christmas Party at the Stephens' house.  Apparently (this all happened off-screen), the client was "curious" enough to accept.  So he shows up immediately after Lisa's parents do, while Lisa's dad stepped away with their boss to talk about the new contract he just acquired for the company, leaving Lisa's mom standing in the hall with Darrin, when the client rings the doorbell.

Mistaking Lisa's mom for Darrin's wife, he opens his big ol' bigoted mouth to say how brave he thinks they are and how maybe someday what they're doing will become acceptable.  And yes, he phrased it like that, implying not only that it wasn't currently acceptable, but that he didn't think it ought to be, only that maybe someday in the future it might be.

He offers Lisa's mom a little black baby doll for her daughter for Christmas, and Darrin is handed a white baby doll for Tabitha, and then says he didn't know which side of the family that Adam took after so he decided to play it safe with a stuffed ... panda bear.  Yeah, picture that for a moment, if you don't immediately get it.

Then he runs off for eggnog before either parent can react.  Lisa's mom has no idea what just happened, but Darrin (having just been taken off the account at this client's insistence because of being "unsuitable" or whatever) figures out that the client must think that they're married and this is why he was fired from the account.

Meanwhile, Samantha gets the kids straightened out and Darrin's boss, Larry, has a chat with the client.  Now that who is married to whom and which child belongs to whom is understood, the client wants Darrin back on the team.  As it finally dawns on Larry the reason for the client's decisions, he steps back for a moment, while the client puffs up with pride at being such an understanding, forgiving sort of man.

Larry steps back into the conversation and tells him, in no uncertain terms, that he doesn't want his account because he doesn't want to work with a man like this.  Overhearing this conversation, and shocked and pleased at Larry's character, Darrin tells Samantha that, in the spirit of Christmas and given the circumstances, if she sees an opening where her witchcraft would help, she has free reign.

Shocked, the client goes on the defensive and even says "but some of my best friends are Negroes!"  So Samantha wiggles her nose, and suddenly the client is seeing everyone at the party with black skin.

So, again, literal blackface that made me uncomfortable, but for a purpose they felt was helpful back in the '60s.

The client freaks out because, well, regardless of anyone's racist beliefs, if everyone around you suddenly changed skin color in front of your eyes, you'd probably freak out too.  So he leaves.

The next morning, the Stephens' and Lisa's family are all opening Christmas presents together around the tree.  The doorbell rings and it's the client.  He asks Darrin to take his account and offers an apology:

"I found out I'm a racist.  Not the obvious, out in the open kind of a racist, not me, no, I was a sneaky racist.  I was so sneaky, I didn't even know it myself."

Usually, particularly in older shows, when they cover the topic of racism, there's only one kind of racist - the mean ones who actively discriminate, but never any real violence.  It's like, on these shows, racists don't lynch people because "we're past that now", but they're visibly angry and say mean things, and usually have some kind of power to prevent people from doing something, like entering a building or patronizing an establishment.

These shows offer a caricature of a racist, to make them easy to identify as racist but not *actually* truly offensive.  And I kinda get it - they have 23 minutes to make a point, so they're going to do it in as clear a way as possible that will get past the very conservative censors.

This is the only episode of any TV show that I can personally recall seeing where they addressed the fact that racism comes in other forms.  They showed a man who believes he is a "good guy" whose racism is more subtle and uses more microaggressions rather than outright violence or hatred.  And they showed him humbled and ashamed as he struggled with the realization that he was not as good a guy as he thought he was.

And the producers and actors thought this was such an important message that they took the time to break the 4th wall and tell the audience how strongly they felt about this message.  Even the advertiser got in on it.  Which is a pretty big deal.  Had they simply showed the episode, boycotts would have been called for whichever commercials were aired at the time, and the producers would have had to do some kind of damage control to keep advertising clients and soothe viewers.

But, instead, Oscar-Meyer put their logo right behind Elizabeth Montgomery in her preface, and her speech included their name among those who felt the subject of their episode was important and who stands behind it.  I'm sure boycotts were probably still called for, but the producers, the network, and the advertiser all got out in front of it and took responsibility for their stance.

So, as someone with light brown skin, which has lightened enough with my years out of the sun that nobody can even tell my chicana heritage by looking, I can't say that the blackface in this episode is justified under the "it was the era" excuse or not.

I will instead say that *if* the blackface can be excused for the era, and *if* the viewer can sit through the discomfort of modern sensibilities seeing it, I am rather proud of the show for making the attempt they did to address racism, and in particular that there are different types of racism and that all types are unacceptable.

I have a love-hate relationship with this show.  I have seen most of the episodes before over the years, but I am watching the entire series now as part of my experiment to compare and contrast TV romantic couples over the decades and moral lessons of their relationships.

Watching this show now, after having developed the particular viewpoint I have on feminism and romantic relationship ethics, I am sitting in a strange place where I still manage to enjoy the show while simultaneously hating every character in it.  As a character-driven media consumer, this is a weird place for me to be in.  But I will say that the show is giving me lots of fodder for rants.

So far, this show is at the bottom of the list for me in ethical romantic partnerships.  I somehow manage to still enjoy watching it, but I don't recommend it.  I think everyone in this show is a terrible example of a person and the lessons learned at the end of each episode are not the lessons I feel should be the takeaways.  People are punished for bad behaviour, but not for the reasons I think they should be.

This episode is the exception.  Darrin doesn't go on any of his anti-witchcraft rants and doesn't try to hamstring Samantha and none of the other relatives jump in to interfere in their relationship and remove anyone's agency.  In this one instance, Darrin is right to be concerned about the effect of witchcraft - namely getting found out and doing harm to someone else with the inexperienced child's wish-craft.

This episode focused entirely on an actual, real harm to society, and both the botched and corrective witchcraft was the solution.  And the harm it highlighted was a subtle, insidious form that is not easily recognized because of the lies and misdirections we are taught about said harm, intended to confuse us and muddy the issue.

So, for once, I applaud Bewitched for going in the right direction.  It could be done so much better today, with a more sophisticated touch on the subject, but given the era, I'm actually kind of surprised at how well it *did* do.

 

 

As far as I'm concerned, the Terminator franchise is a trilogy, with T1, T2, and this latest one, T6, finishing it up. If you haven't yet, don't bother seeing any of the others.

Even if you're one of those who needs to "finish a story" or "hear the whole thing", don't bother. It keeps getting retconned and rebooted, so you're really not losing any of the story by not seeing the others.

I would also recommend the TV show the Sarah Connor Chronicles, but I don't think it's necessary either, because this latest film is also a soft reboot that makes that show ... I'm going to say "a different timeline", because the whole franchise is about time travel, so I can rationalize away any incongruities that way.

So, yeah, in my personal headcannon, the story is a trilogy right now with T1, T2, and T6. And I say this as someone who is fine with all 3 sets of trilogies being part of the Star Wars canon, so that ought to tell you something about how little I care about T3-5.

So here's what I think about the Terminator trilogy...

#Irony: The original Terminator movie is about Sarah Connor - a woman who eventually gives birth to the leader of the resistance who is supposed to save the world. It has male action characters, but it's ultimately about Sarah and her relationship with Kyle Reese. It's basically a romance story set in a pre-apocalyptic action film.

The second Terminator movie is about Sarah Connor again, now a fucking badass guerrilla warfare soldier. And, again, it has some male action characters, but it's still about Sarah and her psychological journey from "normal girl" to Mother Of The Saviour And Terrorist. She does her own ass-kicking in this film, keeping up with literally super-human characters in the protection of her son, John.

The rest of the films I won't mention because they're terrible and not the point. The original two films, that set the story and the standard for the Terminator franchise, are a WOMAN'S TALE.

Here's the irony ... people are pissed off because of the strong woman-heavy cast of the latest Terminator film, and accusing it (as they always do of anything that doesn't subjugate minorities in the plot or in the telling of the story) of "pandering" to the new "identity politics" of the feminist cult and younger generations.

It's like people complaining about sci-fi, or Star Trek in particular, getting political. Like, have you ever SEEN the original shit before? That's what IT IS.

Terminator is a chick flick. That's why it's so good. It's a woman's story. It's just that the woman in question, and her story, doesn't involve flowers or wedding dresses. I mean, for fuck's sake, it even includes her getting pregnant and raising a child as an integral part of the plot!

Women have a lot of different stories to tell. Some of them are action stories. Some of them involve fights and fast cars and war and blood and death. When you tell a woman's story, not just what men *think* about women, but her actual story, you get diversity; you get adversity; you get pain; you get pleasure; you get redemption; you get vindication, you get action; you get adventure; you get hardship; you get conflict.

Whether her story takes place in the home or on the battlefield, those are still what you get when you tell women's stories.

Telling these stories isn't "pandering" any more than literally telling *any* story for a commercial enterprise is "pandering" because the producers want to make money from the sale of that story. It's not "identity politics". People want to make money, and they don't make money if they refuse to sell to literally half the population of the planet.

Women have stories to tell.

And in the case of many of these amazing stories finally being told, it's often the same story that they have *been* telling. You just weren't paying attention.

I wrote all of that before seeing the latest film. This was completely my reaction to seeing online criticisms from whiny boys about "too many women" in the new movie. I hadn't seen the movie and I didn't read any reviews, I just saw some complaints about "pandering" and "identity politics" and all the usual bullshit that comes every time women play any kind of role in an action film that isn't the sexy villain, the refrigerator'd girlfriend, or the current love interest.

Now that I've seen the latest Terminator, and realizing that I like it and reflecting on why I like it and the first two but not the rest, I think my claim of this being a woman's story is consistent.

I think one of the main reasons I didn't like the rest of the films (and there are several reasons not to like them) is because they stop being a woman's story, not just because they were poorly told or executed.

The rest of the movies, if I recall correctly because it's been a long time since I've seen them and I only saw them once because they were terrible, unlike the first two - the rest of the movies stop being about Sarah Connor, and start being about man vs. machine, using the term "man" in this context as deliberately gendered and not a shortened form or stand-in term for "humanity".

Linda Hamilton wasn't even in all of the other sequels. Those movies were not about her journey. They became about John Connor, or about Arnold, or about continuing to bleed a franchise. But since the story ultimately is about Sarah, taking her out of the story led to the storytellers losing focus.

Hence reboots and direction changes. They lost sight of what made the story interesting in the first place. I mean, sure, the special effects of both were groundbreaking, so from a technical point of view, T1 & 2 were interesting on production quality alone. But even if we can appreciate a pretty movie, if the story isn't at least as good as the effects, it won't become a classic, iconic, a genre-setting game-changing film (I'm looking at you, Avatar, where even Sigourney Weaver couldn't save that movie).

T1 & 2 were that kind of film because the story telling gave the special effects a purpose. The effects were a *vehicle* to tell the story, not the other way around. T6 brought us back to the story, back to the premise, back to its roots, even with the use of a soft reboot plot device, which, incidentally, basically implies agreement with my assessment that the other 3 movies pretty much don't count.

What makes the Terminator movies interesting is the woman's story. Once you remove that, no amount of action or special effects save the film. Because women's stories are still just people's stories, it *could have been* possible to move on from Sarah and start telling the story of another person in the saga, even if the next person's story was a man. It *could* have been done.

But the next 3 producers / writers / directors didn't treat it as someone's story, they treated it as men's eye candy, and, apparently (by implication), men don't care about the story, they only care about the action.

I mean, I suppose that explains why porn written for het cis men (and a lot of gay cis men) is all "fuck the plot, it doesn't matter why these two people are screwing, as long as we get to the screwing!" People just assume that men don't care about the story, only the action.

But I would propose that the success of the films and TV shows that are successful and/or popular in the last several years suggests that men *do* care about the story too, they'll just take pointless explosions if that's what's available. And if you can marry a good story with a well-produced film in a genre that is favored by men as a group (whether you personally *liked* the story or not), that movie will do very well at the box office, or at least it will do well in popularity over time.

The trick, apparently, is to get enough men to relate to a good story that happens to feature a woman (or several). But that doesn't seem to be a problem with storytelling, that seems to be a problem with the collective male bias and expectations.

Anyway, it's late and I'm rambling. Point is, now that I've seen the latest Terminator in the franchise, realized that I like it, and thought a little about *why* I like it, I think that the reason why I dislike the previous 3 movies is because they stopped being a woman's story.

As I keep pointing out in my Poly-ish Movie Reviews, and to people who keep trying to recommend movies and books to me, I am very character driven. I need to either identify with a character or want to know a character - like, date them or have them in my social circle - in order to enjoy a film or book. If a writer can get me to connect to a character, the story doesn't even have to be all that well-written or produced for me to like it.

When Terminator stopped being a woman's story, it stopped being a people's story. It became fluff. It was all action with no real purpose. I suppose there might have been some themes in some of the sequels somewhere, but really, the story ended with Sarah leaving the focus. Without a focus or a purpose, the story just kept getting lost. And the movies sucked.

So when the saga became once again a woman's story, I enjoyed it, and I think it was a fitting chapter in the longer tale.

And if there's anything I can ever say good about reboots, it's that it gives me the opportunity to pretend that the chapters the reboot scratches over don't exist. I mean, that's also why reboots suck - they overwrite previous chapters, and if you like those previous chapters, then that's a bad thing.

But now I can safely reconcile "Terminator is a trilogy made of T1, T2, and T6 and let's pretend the other 3 don't even exist" in my head, because even the franchise seems to be saying "yep, those other 3 don't exist, here watch this reboot that erases them!"

Those are the 3 that are telling a woman's story and that story is what makes Terminator interesting. The others lose sight of this, and consequently are just not as interesting to those of us who are story-dependent.

Women have stories to tell. And our stories are interesting.

I originally wrote all of this in 3 Facebook posts. In the comments of one of them, somebody asked me how I felt about "the big reveal".

Spoiler alert!!!

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( Here's the long answer to that question )

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My bottom line is that even the reveal, with all its legitimate criticisms, is still part of Sarah's story, which makes it fit into the woman's story trilogy that makes these 3 chapters in the saga such excellent films and the other 3 chapters suck because they are not Sarah's story, not a woman's tale.

T6 is Terminator's redemption film. We are back to telling Sarah's story, and that's why it works. Women have stories to tell. And when you allow us to tell them, the films are engaging, interesting, and they work.

The Mentalist (2008)

www.warnerbros.com/tv/mentalist-season-1 - Warner Bros
www.imdb.com/title/tt1196946/ - IMDB
https://amzn.to/2HsaqqC - Amazon
https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/70155590 - Netflix

I posted about individual episodes from The Mentalist that highlight what I really like about the show. I've finally finished the whole series and am ready to talk about it as a whole. I will try my best to avoid specific spoilers.

I've been watching this show for years. I still get Netflix DVD, and the reason I signed up for Netflix in the first place, back when it first came out, was I felt a monthly subscription fee was cheaper than all the late fees I wrack up from rentals. I get a DVD and then forget to watch it for MONTHS. Or I get it, watch it, and forget to send it back. If I like what I see, I'll obtain a copy to own.

My Netflix DVD subscription is also now used to help me archive movies for library collections, so I've had to bump shows for pleasure down the queue in favor of movies that I review and archive. So I've been making my way through the show for years. I had to put off getting new discs of the show for a long time, so I can only re-watch the seasons I've already acquired.

So I've loved the show forever, but I haven't finished it until now.

The premise is that a "psychic" who knows he is a fraud and a conman tries to increase his brand by going on TV to say that he's helping the police solve a serial killer case and he ends up insulting the serial killer, who kills his wife and daughter to teach him a lesson in humility. The show starts out with Patrick Jane as a relatively new consultant with the fictional California Bureau of Investigation on the day that the very newest agent joins the team.

The show is mostly episodic in a traditional Sherlock Holmes-style cop drama with one super genius of observation and a team of people who can't hope to match his prowess ranging from those who accept his methods to those who disbelieve his methods to those who resent his unorthodox methods. With the serial killer case weaving in and out throughout the show.

If you don't like cop dramas, with their police procedural format, their "cops are almost always the good guys and their prey are always the bad guys" tone, and their "sometimes the good guys have to bend the rules for the greater good" justifications, you won't like this show. I grew up on cop dramas in the '80s, so I love them.

If you don't like Sherlock Holmes-style shows with one character with nearly magical powers of whatever it is he does (investigate, diagnose, whatever) and, as a result, a personality that is very off-putting to most people, then you won't like this show. Jane is not quite the Dr. House grumpy, unlikable cynic because he is very charismatic and energetic and charming when it suits his needs. But he is cynical and brash and he doesn't quite see other people as real people, he often sees them as tools to achieve his own ends.

Patrick Jane is an out atheist, and pretty confident in the assertion that there is no God or supernatural of any kind. He shows us how many things that people think are supernatural are tricks that some people exploit because our brains are exploitable. He is arrogant and confident and fiercely loyal to those who have earned his respect. But still not above a practical joke here and there. I enjoyed seeing an atheist protagonist who actively pulls the curtain aside so the audience can see what's behind it.

As I've stated before, the show also routinely adds powerful women characters without stereotyping them; it has close to 50% female supporting cast; when the bad guys are women, they're almost always very intelligent women who get away with what they do for as long as they do because they are both very intelligent and because everyone underestimates them (although Jane does not underestimate them for being women, he knows how capable women are); and the main female lead does not have a romantic or sexual relationship with the main male character.

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Now the criticisms.

Eventually, we have to wrap up the serial killer storyline. The killer takes on epic proportions, becoming Villain Sue, almost a God Mode Sue foil for our hero. He starts to get too big. So I feel that the writers wrote themselves into a corner and decided to take a left-turn to get themselves out. The killer becomes, in my opinion, too powerful and the plot becomes too convoluted, and then the character they choose to finally reveal as the killer is ... unbelievable, in my opinion. I don't buy it. It feels like they were running out of time and needed to pull someone in as the killer in a hurry.

But it's weird, because they wrap this arc up in the middle of season 6. The rush job that this feels like seems more like when a show gets a surprise cancellation notice so they have to finish up a story arc that they expected to have more seasons to finish. But in the middle of a season, that's not very likely.

So I don't like who they finally revealed as the killer. I feel that this choice doesn't account for so many of the, frankly, unbelievable details they used to set up the character of the killer. And I don't like how it feels rushed. So now, with half a season left to go and the main driving force behind our protagonist's motivation gone, the show takes another turn.

Now we have a cast change and a location change in addition to a plot change. The show needs to justify why Jane continues to work as a consultant with law enforcement now that the only reason he has for wanting to work with them is gone. He joined the task force originally because he wanted to take down the killer himself, and he needed to know all the details of the investigation to find him. Now he has no reason to continue doing what he does.

So the show invents a reason, having the FBI invite him to work with them doing the same job he did with the CBI. As part of his negotiations, Jane insists that his former CBI boss work on the team too. But now everyone is in a different role. His former boss is now not his boss, she's the newest member of the team and has the least seniority and the least authority. The senior agent under her at CBI started working with the FBI before her so he is now the senior agent, somehow, outranking all the other agents who we see only as extras because it's not very believable that the FBI has a task force made up of only 3 people. The new lead agent for the team is another woman who Jane has to start over from scratch to convince that he's so good at what he does that the rules don't apply to him. And, of course, there is a new Department Head who has to clean up after Jane's messes to justify having hired him in the first place.

Two of the characters from the old CBI unit leave the show and only give guest appearances. That's not so bothersome, I think they wrapped that story arc up pretty well. They had a sexual tension from day 1, so they finally concluded that relationship arc satisfactorily, IMO.

Now Jane works in Texas with a new team and a contrived reason for 2 returning characters but in different roles. These roles change their characters. The senior agent from the old team who is now the senior agent in the new team is not terribly different, but he used to be totally emotionless with only brief glimpses into an inner emotional landscape, and we see more emotion from him now. The new agent who used to be the boss agent, and who previously had no romantic relationship with Jane (which was a point that I liked), apparently stops being a hardass and lets her guard down now that she's not in charge, and the writers turn them into a romantic couple.

I don't buy it. They have no romantic chemistry on screen and they spent 5 years building a deeply intimate but platonic relationship. Suddenly, it's all "I love you" and jealousy shit and I think it's a terrible arc. I would much rather have seen both of them meet someone else in their new roles with the FBI and fall in love that way, because both of them *do* have emotional damage that ought to start healing by 5 years into the story. Just not with each other.

So, my final thoughts are that if you are OK with letting a story go unfinished, watch until the final episode of Season 5. In the final episode of Season 5, they reveal a list of names that Jane has narrowed down the serial killer suspects to. That list is where I lost my suspension of disbelief. If you can let go of a story, then stop watching before you get the unbelievable list.

*I* need to finish a story, no matter how terrible it is (and, to be fair, this was not terrible). Midway through Season 6, everything about the story changes and it becomes, in effect, a different cop drama. It was ... OK. I didn't hate it. If the show had been like that from the beginning, I might have still enjoyed it, if a little less. I just didn't like the changes that were made. I became invested in the characters and the story as it was, and I don't think the changes were an improvement on what had come before.

Season 7 was very short, about half as long as any other season. Combined with the fact that the change all happens midway through season 6, and it felt as though Season 6 and 7 were two independent seasons of a different show. Or, perhaps a spin-off show that didn't do as well. In my experience, very few spin-off shows ever have that magic of the original. I felt that this was the same - a watered down version trying to capitalize on the popularity of the original, but missing that magic that made the original work.

Season 6 (post midpoint climax) and 7 were just OK. It didn't quite grab me. Jane had already established his Holmesian powers so all the episodes just took his skill as a given. We didn't have any build up for him, he was just running on steam from his earlier establishment. Same with his boss-turned-coworker-turned-romantic partner - she was just kind of there because we already knew her. But she was also different, and there were no really intimate moments in the script to reveal where those differences came from, so they were just kinda there too.

I might have found the last 2 seasons as a stand-alone show mildly entertaining and unique for revealing the whole supernatural facade, but it all seemed so ... soft. All the sharp and rough edges were rounded off and there was just nothing really there to grip onto. Frankly, it felt like the writers were just phoning it in. Which is a shame, because I think the new Head of Department character could have become really interesting.

I kinda wish I wasn't the type who needed to finish a story and I could have let it go before the big reveal at the end of Season 5. When I re-watch the show in the future, I will probably stop there from now on. But prior to that point, I think it was an excellent show in its genre and I highly recommend the first 5 seasons.

Just finished The Punisher [on November 27th]. I really liked it. Maybe not Luke Cage caliber but better than Daredevil and I really liked Daredevil. I think I'd put it in the same category, for me, as Jessica Jones. Both characters are just so fucking broken.

I thought that Luke Cage was possibly a better quality of script and story, but I liked the tragic damage of Jessica Jones better. Punisher had that same tragic damage. Where Jessica Jones explored the woman's experience of abuse and PTSD through domestic violence, and *finally* showed us a dimensional female character who is messy and complex, Punisher showed us a man's experience of toxic masculinity and addressing violent trauma from within a violent worldview.

"How do you live in the silence between gunshots?"

So basically any Netflix Marvel story that doesn't involve Danny Rand is worth watching.

Huh, here's an interesting thought: in a surprising turn of events, the woman, black man, blind man, and working class man all have depth and nuance while the rich white guy is flat, sullen, whiny, foolish, boorish, and manages to make even the group dynamic all about him.

So, like real life then.

Gaten Matarazzo, who plays Dustin on “Stranger Things”, says that he couldn't get any acting jobs for 2 years because of his condition. He says that "they couldn’t write in a disability into the show because they had already written the script.”

Hey, writers! You don't actually have to write in a disability into a show. People with disabilities have lives. They have adventures. They have friends and families and enemies. They do things and they know things.

If Stranger Things had never added that one tiny scene where one of the friends teases Dustin about his lisp, and Dustin says "I told you a million times, my teeth are coming in, it's called cleidocranial dysplasia", the show would have been EXACTLY THE SAME.

You don't have to give people with disabilities a "reason" for existing in the story. You don't have to give women a "reason" for existing in the story. You don't have to give people of color a "reason" for existing in the story. You don't have to give trans people a "reason" for existing in the story. You don't have to give not-straight people a reason for existing in the story.

A story happens, people are part of it, and lots of times, those people happen to be people with disabilities, or women, or POC, or trans, or gay, or bi, or anything other than white straight cismen.  Just write the fucking story, and then cast someone who can deliver the lines convincingly in it. Or, if it's a text-based medium, just write the fucking story and then change around some of the pronouns or descriptors just because.

Like, the terrible Tom Cruise version of War of the Worlds could have been the exact same fucking movie if you had cast a woman in the role, or a person of color, or someone with a hearing challenge. Especially since the character didn't survive by some amazing abilities that he magically had exactly the right ones at the right time (like most of Tom Cruise's movies), but he survived pretty much on pure, blind luck (which is one of the many reasons I hated the film).

Straight white men don't need any particular "reason" to be in stories. Nobody writes a story and then says "wait a minute, we need a reason why he's straight and white for him to be doing this... I know! Let's write in a series of awkward flashbacks showing his struggle growing up where he likes girls or he doesn't experience racism, and how that leads him on his path to where he is today!"

We don't need to create a romantic subplot to give the women a reason to be in the story. We don't need to set a movie in the "ghetto" to give the character a reason to be black (which is different from setting a movie in the "ghetto" because we want to tell the experience of being in the "ghetto"). We don't need to explain away a character's disability if the story isn't actually about their disability.

Stories don't need to be rewritten to accommodate disabled people, or women, or POC, or anyone else. Only if the story itself is about the experience of being that particular kind of person. But an action film? A drama? A comedy? Just talking about people's lives and adventures? We all have them.

If their disability literally prevents them from doing the thing (like, probably a deaf character couldn't be one of those safe-crackers who listens to the tumblers to open safes), then, OK.  But, like, this one actor with cerebral palsy talked about auditioning for a character *who had cerebral palsy*. She wasn't hired because the director was afraid her disability would prevent her from being able to physically handle the role.

As she pointed out, SHE HAS CEREBRAL PALSY. If SHE can't do those things, then the CHARACTER CAN'T EITHER.

So, just write your fucking stories and then cast people in them who can deliver the lines. You don't need to "write into the script" something to explain away your casting choice unless you are directly contradicting something in the script. "The character existed and had relationships and adventures" is not directly contradicting things like "the character also has a disability" or "the character also has a vagina" or "the character also has brown skin".