Fall TV: 2011 Edition

So I'm a grad student now (preen, ponce, smug, big words). What I didn't know going in was that, unlike high school, undergrad, and being un- or underemployed, grad school involves rather a lot of hard graft. This means that my TV-watching time is drastically diminished. This fall I will only have time to follow The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, How I Met Your Mother, Raising Hope, Glee, Modern Family, Community, Parks & Recreation, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Archer, The Good Wife, Boardwalk Empire, and the last few episodes of Breaking Bad. Between reading approximately 487251 pages of academic articles per week, writing assignments, working in the campus kitchens, church, soccer, jam circle, game night, hiking group, and weekly karaoke, I just can't squeeze in any new shows.

Luckily, none of the new shows is worth the time it takes to type the title. I know this because my now legendary talent for judging the value of a new show has gotten so sensitive that I don't even need to see the pilot before evaluating it with pinpoint accuracy. Accordingly, I have not watched a single pilot this fall. (Well, except Up All Night, which seduced me with the wonderful Maya Rudolph. This time last year, Will Arnett would also have been a major draw, but I have not yet recovered from Running Wilde *shudder*).

So here it is: your handy, spectacularly ill-informed, print-out-and-keep guide to the Fall 2011 TV Season!

2 Broke Girls
Plot: Straight white people are boring
Letter Grade: Zzz

Pan Am
Plot: Straight white people are boring
Letter Grade: Zzz

The Playboy Club
Plot: Straight white people are boring
Letter Grade: Zzz

Ringer
Plot: Straight white people are boring
Letter Grade: Zzz

I Hate My Teenage Daughter
Plot: Straight white people are boring
Letter Grade: Zzz

Revenge
Plot: Straight white people are boring
Letter Grade: Zzz

Suburgatory
Plot: Straight white people are boring
Letter Grade: Zzz

Up All Night
Plot: Straight white people are boring
Letter Grade: Zzz

Person of Interest
Plot: Straight white people are boring
Letter Grade: Zzz

The Secret Circle
Plot: Straight white people are boring
Letter Grade: Zzz

Whitney
Plot: Straight white people are boring
Letter Grade: Zzz

New Girl
Plot: Straight white people are boring
Letter Grade: Zzz

A Gifted Man
Plot: Straight white people are boring
Letter Grade: Zzz

Last Man Standing / Man Up / How To Be A Gentleman
Plot: Are you fucking kidding me?

London Riots, Media Narratives, "Scum"

I used to trust the media to tell me the truth, tell us the truth

But now I see the payoffs everywhere I look

Who do you trust when everyone's a crook?

Revolution calling...

--Queensrÿche, “Revolution Calling”

First of all, that is an awesome song off a seriously awesome record. Second of all, it is some cold hard TRUTH.

One of the things I love about social media is its ability to tell us what's really going on. The more I engage with the blogosphere, the more I understand how mainstream news sources are all skewed to a certain framework. It's not a great conspiracy; it's not even necessarily a bad thing – it's just that every part of the media has an agenda. Value-neutral example: earlier this year, when all the US news sources I follow were glued to the protests in Wisconsin, the only US-related item in the BBC evening news was coverage of Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark. That's because the BBC's agenda is to be the British Broadcasting Corporation, so it skews Britain-centric. What's important is to be aware of the skews and biases in the media you consume – and, ideally, to vary your news media diet enough that you can piece together a picture of the world by seeing it from different angles.

What's astonishing to me is how many people I know are uncritically consuming the mainstream media narrative of the London riots.

David Cameron has called them “criminality, pure and simple” and promised a tough response. An awful lot of people are being very vocal about their agreement with his rhetoric and his tactics.

For days now my Facebook feed has been flooded with snarling, reactionary calls for the protestors' blood. When I posted a request for people not to use the nasty, dehumanizing, highly prevalent term “scum”, I got a wealth of “but they ARE scum!” responses.

Now, I joined Facebook when I started university, so my Facebook friends are primarily people who are attending or have recently attended one of the world's highest-ranked universities – which is a nice way of saying that my friends are predominantly white and middle-class. And, as much as it sickens but doesn't really surprise me to see the awful violence spreading across England, I'm sickened but unsurprised to the same degree to see my Facebook friends spew hatred and violent rhetoric about the rioters.

I don't condone the violence. Obviously. But the braying self-righteousness of these responses is indicative of people who don't want to try to understand. They're not prepared to engage with the complexities at hand. They're not willing to examine the socioeconomic and political contributing factors. It seems to me that they just want to point the finger at looters and arsonists, declare their moral outrage, and sit back feeling smug that they would never act like those scum.

Well, how the fuck do you know that?

Youth unemployment is over 20%. Not everyone can get into a top university and rely on the mater and pater to support them financially (speaking, I hasten to add, as one who did and is doing exactly that). Not everyone can broadly trust the police to not kill them. Not everyone is white and middle-class. Who the hell are you to judge people “scum” when you haven't even tried to understand where they're coming from?

To you, it's just teenage hooligans embracing their greed and lust for violence. To you, it's just mindless criminality. Why not consider the decades of disenfranchisement and poverty, the long-term unemployment and feelings of hopelessness? Do those not factor in at all?

Read this article. Read the comments on this Shakesville piece. Try thinking critically about the narrative spoonfed you by the media-political complex. And chew on this for a second:

Though I'm a peace-loving, Jesus-loving, violence-condemning hippie radical of the far left, it's not the riots that are making me despair for humankind. It's you.

Women in entertainment

In the past year, I’ve read 85 books (give or take academic books and rereads). Ten were to do with Christianity; six were secular non-fiction; the rest were novels. Twenty-four of the books were written by women.

This is actually an improvement on the previous year, where the count was nine out of 60. The improvement is partly to do with a conscious effort on my part to read some classic female and feminist authors like Virginia Woolf, Jeanette Winterson, and Ursula Le Guin, though the fact that it wasn’t a very noteworthy effort is clear. For the most part, I just read books I’m interested in, and often that means sci-fi or fantasy (at least 37 of the 69 novels, though genre categorization is frequently debatable). Twenty-five of the 69 had a female protagonist or (if there was no clear protagonist) a female character among the major ensemble players. Seventeen had major queer characters or queer themes, as did five of the non-fiction books.

These statistics may not be terribly meaningful on their own, but I think they’re interesting. Compare the 41 films I’ve seen at the cinema over the same time period. Exactly four were directed by women. Those four and two others had female protagonists, with a further four featuring a female as one of two or three main characters. Half of these 10 were from outside the US, and only one – Alice in Wonderland, whose popularity probably stemmed from its special effects, ensemble, and director – made it to every multiplex. That’s poor, even for Hollywood.

It’s absolutely astonishing that women – who constitute more than 50% of the population – should be so absurdly underrepresented in entertainment. The absence of queer people and non-white people is frustrating, but the lack of women is really astounding because women are literally more than half your potential audience.

On an individual basis, I love good books and films regardless of the main characters’ genders. I don’t read books thinking, “This is great, but it sure would be better if the protagonist was female instead.” It’s the trend that’s so maddening. I want action and thrillers and sci-fi and everything to exist with a female protagonist as often as a male. The way things are at the moment, I’d settle for half as often.

But that’s how the kyriarchy operates: in systems so huge that fighting it seems like a lost cause.