What Are You Watching?

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Thu Oct 06, 2022 8:19 am

Weirdly obsessed with Bar Rescue. The guy who rescues the bars, Jon, has his own version of the white whale: a horrifyingly bad bar in council bluffs Iowa. Apparently it is the resistant nut he has never been able to crack, and it would be better perhaps to raze the whole thing to the Earth and start over afresh with entirely new people in a new building. Unfortunately I fell asleep - my unbridled capacity for this is close to actual narcolepsy and I have to wonder if I should seek help. So I'll have to finish finding out what happens tomorrow. Oh ha ha by tomorrow I mean tonight as if it's a whole another day away because that's how it feels.

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Tue Oct 11, 2022 10:30 am

I have no idea how I even came upon this thing, but it might be entertaining. It is a short heist/getaway film? Not sure:

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Fri Oct 14, 2022 3:09 am

Vara: a blessing

In English but set in India, I think, and made by a Bhutanese filmmaker. This is the story of a young woman who does religious dance, who gets involved in a love triangle of sorts. This is a lot more interesting and original than it sounds. I had no idea what to expect and was on the edge of seat, except the movie also has a smooth and gentle touch so it isn't scary or bothersome to see how things play out. Very beautiful movie, very subtle and profound.

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Fri Oct 28, 2022 10:37 pm

OH MY GOD the show on Netflix about Manti Te'o. It's called UNTOLD. It helps if you know nothing going in so I will say nothing. I lost inner organs, my leg fell off and my left eyeball fell clean out from watching this show. Popped the eye out. I was screaming.

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Fri Oct 28, 2022 11:11 pm

NOTE: the series on Netflix is called UNTOLD.
The Australian sailing cup winners show was a segment of Untold, but there are other segments, and this Manti Te'o story is one of them.
It has More Than One Episode.
My leg fell off during the first one so I am afraid to go into episode two.
I thought the WHOLE story had been told in episode one and had no idea. The fact that there is even an episode two is Deeply Disturbing. I am so unhappy. Please let me keep it together!

Mando · Post by **Mando** » Thu Nov 03, 2022 6:45 pm

Finished Rings of Power. Season 1 I am now re-watching it now that I know some spoilery factoids.

Also watching House season 8 th final season....I hate me for being too much like him at times.

Supernatural Season 12 is my 1AM-230AM show. 2 eps a day if I can stay awake that long...been tired...I watch them when I get home.

Also watching The Boys on AMazon when I get breaks at work.

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Mon Nov 14, 2022 8:56 pm

I have a lot of terrible, shameful things to report. I've been watching so much of that Bar rescue show and I can't understand how it remains fresh and interesting after this much of it. The man is clearly somewhat deranged and the show has issues, but it is deeply fascinating. It's a classic narrative of conflict, crisis, catharsis, and redemption.

And speaking of redemption narratives, the entire world is excited to see Lindsay Lohan acting in a cheesy comedy Christmas romance on Netflix. This is the comeback we have been waiting for. The world is somehow made whole and fresh again because Lindsay Lohan is functional and has arrived in exactly the proper vehicle for her art.

I have watched a movie called Phantom Thread, which is the last movie apparently that Daniel Day-Lewis ever acted in. It's an incredibly weird and creepy movie, that's all I can say, no spoilers can be given. He's a fashion designer character inspired supposedly by the real life Balenciaga. He finds... romance? The profound, fabulous soundtrack is done by some guitarist from Radiohead, Johnny ---. ? I wish I could discuss it in a way that allows spoilers to be given, because after watching this movie I was quite eager to hear what other people were saying about it and how they interpreted the ending. To my dismay I discovered that nobody seems to understand what happened in the movie even though it was pretty damn obvious. How could people possibly fail to understand?! Alas, I can say no more. It's as clear as it is disturbing. I feel like the key to the whole thing is his mother, and that's all I can say about that too! 9 out of 10 stars though!

I watched a terrible movie on Amazon, "The Inheritance", that was supposed to give me my period piece fix but instead was like a sleeping pill. Inexcusable for a normally riveting genre. I felt like the main objective of the filmmakers was to allow us to observe the main character's nose, and I was not interested in her nose.

I watched a terrible movie on Netflix, "Wedding Season", about two people who pretend to be dating to get their marriage obsessed Indian parents off their asses, and very predictably end up falling in love and getting married themselves. Yawn. It was redeemed by the general attractiveness and successfully empowered woman status of our heroine. But... yawn.

The important point is, we all want Lindsay Lohan to be successful again and we want to see her hamming it up in a ridiculous comedy. I will report back but it's already a huge success because she's wearing a hot pink ski suit topped by a hot pink faux fur ushanka. How could it possibly go wrong? Oh LOL she turns out to have amnesia! Even better. It's like a Christmas version remake of that Goldie Hawn movie where she's an heiress who falls overboard and has to become the housewife for Kurt Russell and his unruly children. Except here she gets the amnesia in a different way but it's the same thing... Looks like the guy doesn't have any unruly children.

poorpete · Post by **poorpete** » Mon Nov 14, 2022 9:24 pm

Johnny Greenwood

Phantom Thread is on Netflix? I guess I have no excuse, will try to watch this week and we can talk

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Tue Nov 15, 2022 8:24 am

Yes, watch this but if people watch it with a spouse or significant other, be cautious about the types of jokes you make!

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Sun Dec 04, 2022 4:44 am

Three divergent options:
Indian matchmaking - normally my kind of thing but it's so scattered and meandering! Boo! By the time you start caring about one of the people, they abandon the story and you never find out what happened. Unforgiven in a supposedly cute show about matchmaking! Plus the degree of emphasis on astrology makes me sweaty.

Drink Masters -
Surprisingly fascinating show due to the appealing drinks and personalities. It's a little frustrating to watch these shows where people compete to cook/concoct something and you don't get to taste it yourself, but they do at least tell you how the incredibly fancy drinks are being made. You do not have the equipment or ingredients and never will but it is interesting in theory. It does inspire a little creative investigation of what is possible.

Finally, watched the new Lady Chatterley's lover on Netflix. I watch the full gamut of literary and period pieces so I wasn't going to miss it for that reason, and I figured that buoyed by the success of shows like Bridgerton, they were going to give us a mildly spicy version of an already spicy novel.

Well! I was wrong: it's a super spicy version! I felt conflicted while watching the spicy parts because this is about as close to obscene material as I ever view - yes, really, I don't believe in poisoning my mind with other people's bad vision - and expectations were low, but it was very artfully presented and there was a lot of outdoors and grass and etc. Approved! They seemed very genuine. However, the unfortunate downside was that the man had facial hair and the woman's ribcage was vaguely evocative of one of the aliens in the Alien series, and that put a damper on the fun. (Note: there's a legit reason they emphasize how thin she is, because in the book she is unhealthily thin, literally wasting away and, well, hungry I guess. I think they accentuated the visible bones, etc of the very thin actor for this reason.) Still, I expect a lot of people will like this and that it will be a big hit for Netflix. The scenery is great, but I think the fact that I found it (and the DOG!) the best part of the movie only says more about me, and most people would like the whole thing. Lots of literary themes if you need to write an essay about the impact of labor practices on miners, the horrors of WWI, social class issues, women's autonomy, etc.

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Sun Dec 11, 2022 4:23 pm

Manifest - show on Netflix about people on a flight that glitches or something and it appears they have time traveled. I'm 99% sure the rule for the rest of my life is going to be that we don't watch shows about time travel at all besides the singular exception of old Star Trek and its variants. I'm just so f****** done with time travel. It's such a lazy and horrible mechanism and the people who are inflicting it on us in these substandard forms deserve some type of light punishment, not sure exactly what... Maybe they deserve a little bit of time travel.

Tahlvin · Post by **Tahlvin** » Thu Feb 09, 2023 5:13 am

As a parent of a trans son, may I say that Monday's episode of Quantum Leap hit very close to home. Loved it.

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Thu Feb 09, 2023 10:22 pm

Manifest: it's SO bad. Starts off like a potentially intriguing mystery, a little Lost like without the bs, you're hoping. Turns out it's merely stupid. The people have powers, visions, God is involved yet in heretical ways. Slipshod, tiresome, bad. When others turn it on I go to sleeeeep.

"The Interest of Love"
Starts off as cute but heart-crushing k-drama about people in an office who seem to like each other but cannot get the timing right. They are finally going to have a date but miscommunication occurs. They *cannot get past* this one incident of miscommunication and nervous hesitation and decide instead to torture each other and/or themselves. Dumbasses, you think. Y'all could just talk that shit out instead of being idiots, and maybe you'd get what you want. Nope. They can't, they won't. Then they date others - the others Seem Perfect but are not. By the time the show meanders around to revisiting the early attraction, you're so exhausted that it no longer matters. How about doing this in episode 2 instead of 12?! You have a headache. The show goes on being sad; it saps your energies. You give up on it to protect yourself from sappage but there is no other show to watch. Bleaghh.

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Sat Feb 11, 2023 11:41 am

Found another show to watch: It is on Netflix and called Cunk on Earth, and apparently it comes from some other British show. Anyway, when I started watching I did not find it funny for quite some time. I said to myself, this is mildly funny but not really? There are jokes but they're not good jokes. She has her little schtick going on, okay. I wasn't that amused. But I kept watching just to see what sort of story she was going to tell about the beginnings of civilization, and different experts appeared and attempted to play straight man while she questioned them. Some of them did not seem to need to play, which was in fact funny. Others did seem to be playing. I became distracted by watching these experts. That's when it got me... At some point in there, she started asking questions that became increasingly hilarious, until we reached a kind of fever pitch that broke me. I was rolling on the bed and sobbing out tears and my kids came to investigate why. I could not breathe; I could not explain. The hilarity involved my entire lifetime on earth. Maybe that's the hidden layer of meaning in the title? The kids did not find it funny. It's just one of those things you might have to let creep up slowly.

Post by **Mike** » Sat Feb 11, 2023 11:47 am

Ted Lasso. It's been a week, and we're already in season 2. Love it.

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Sat Feb 25, 2023 8:28 am

Whatever the most recent unit of Picard is, I have seen it. This is the one with Seven? I want to like it and I do like many things about it, but the writing is so disappointing. I feel like a committee of all the people who post on this particular site could sit down for 2 hours and come up with an entire plan for the series that would be about 6,000% better than what we were given. Perhaps on Netflix or prime or wherever this thing happened there was a extra tidbit of interviews with the actors and Wil Wheaton as interviewer. I do not dislike Wil Wheaton as some others do - He seems like a nice guy with whom you would enjoy having lunch. The tone of the interview is basically worshipful adoration, however. More challenging questions would have been welcomed.

The complaint I can't get past is that each of the main characters has some type of conflict developed in this season (Is it a season? Was it a movie? Don't know), and for pretty much every one of them the conflict was uninteresting and unworthy of what we have seen in total from that character up to this point. And what is the point of bringing back certain characters if you don't allow them to do anything interesting at all? That was annoying. So maybe I disliked it more than the general appreciation of a Star Trek show is allowing me to admit. I want one of you here to write it or I want to write it and get this s*** solved. Let's present them with something new as a discovery or challenge... Something that requires diplomacy, compassion, speculative technological know-how, and ethical reasoning that goes much further than "save more numbers or act on principle or nah just f*** it all and save the person I feel most personally attached to".

Kyle · Post by **Kyle** » Sat Feb 25, 2023 11:22 am

If y'all aren't watching Severance on Apple+... holy cow. Go watch it. I don't even want to say anything about it. Just go watch it.

Also- The Last of Us is amazing. But I think everyone who might want to watch it already knows that.

poorpete · Post by **poorpete** » Sat Feb 25, 2023 12:25 pm

Poker Face is immensely enjoyable. If you like Knives Out and/or Colombo it'll do the trick

Post by **Mike** » Sat Feb 25, 2023 4:54 pm

Ted Lasso. It is a joy.

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Wed Mar 08, 2023 3:50 pm

Netflix: NEXT IN FASHION

The first season of this show, hosted by the Fashion guy from Queer Eye, was PHENOMENAL. I was absolutely in love with the genius woman who won that show - her designs were out of this world unique and gorgeous. This season is just as good if not better, because the designers themselves happen to be such admirable, lovable, great people. You would love to have dinner with any of them - just sweet, charming, humble, driven, creative, awesome people. So watching them MAKE cool things is riveting! Sometimes literally, with rivets.

I won't give spoilers but as it happened, they removed people from the competition pretty much exactly in the order I would have, with is satisfying when watching a competition reality show. It annoys when you watch one that gets it all wrong. This one did NOT DISAPPOINT! The winner is especially pleasing to me because I have used very similar techniques in fabricating garments myself (hidden fact: my granny was a seamstress so I have some osmosed skills in this region), and often when I think about "how would I design, like, the most fabulous gown or outfit?" (sometimes I try to think about this when falling asleep, though my sleep-falling time is about two microns of a second these days), I think of EXACTLY the kinds of techniques and combinations this person showed. Amazing! Love it. If anyone in your household likes clothing and design and textiles, this is such a fun watch. And you can have it on while doing other work, as it has a predictable, repetitive structure.

poorpete · Post by **poorpete** » Sat Mar 11, 2023 10:36 pm

Some Peacock watching

1. Full season of Poker Face is up now, good stuff!

2. Finished my slow six-month rewatch of 30 Rock, still up there as some of the best TV ever. Got choked up over the last few episodes just like I did 5 and 10 years ago. 10 years omg.

3. Tár - tarrific!

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Sun Mar 12, 2023 1:13 pm

Oooh, I want to see Tár!

poorpete · Post by **poorpete** » Sun Mar 12, 2023 8:47 pm

Check it out. Then we can start a Tár Talk thread because it's deep

Watching The Oscars, rooting for tar, ladies, poc, and for RRR to win it's only award

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Sun Mar 12, 2023 10:06 pm

Coincidence: I finished washing dishes and flipped on the Oscars just in time to see RRR win and hear a little adapted verse from the Carpenters!
Off to the youtubes, I must hear the whole thing!

The reason I turned it on in the first place: seeing THIS DRESS worn by the divine Shohreh Aghdashloo, which includes the slogan of the Iranian freedom fighters and names of three women who were murdered: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifes ... 235349158/

Mando · Post by **Mando** » Wed Mar 15, 2023 4:34 pm

I finally finished Supernatural...all 15 seasons.

Started Castle and Doc martin as fillers with my wife until I find another show to start.

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Wed Mar 15, 2023 5:24 pm

Oh myeeeeee have you ever watched Doc Martin before?? I absolutely adore that show. My cousin recommended it to me, in one of those situations where your cousin is in a position to really know what you would like. We both love it!! The only part I don't like is after a couple seasons, they get to a point where... I don't know, I start to dislike how they're handling the main plot. First couple seasons are just golden. Perfect TV.

Mando · Post by **Mando** » Wed Mar 15, 2023 8:32 pm

We have watched the firs 5 seasons before, but the library now has 6-9 so we are trying it again...the baby story-arc is hard to watch.

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Wed Mar 15, 2023 11:14 pm

Ya, any of that, any of the breaking up once they are togethertogether, I don't like any of that part. That's when I stopped. It was sad to me - I didn't want to let it go but it was hurting me. Aiee. No TV here so I was trying to watch a video online. Well, I have an issue with the new practice of websites showing you these short videos of puppies or babies or people dancing and it turns out, well, they do it for a reason! I am unable to look away from "viral dance to fun pop song!" or "grandma caught dancing!" or "cute puppy attacks broom" or whatever it is next. I cannot look away. It's like a mental condition - I feel like I'm being exploited, it's harmful to me, and I have to figure out how it happens and arm myself against it. I'm not joking!

So in the midst of this kind of thing I ran across a video of women fighting in what i took to be a chuck e cheese but could have been somewhere else. I thought, well, I'll google it and see if I can figure out what happened there. Turns out women fighting in a chuck e cheese is a whole genre. A whole, fully explored genre. What is this American life? I tend to be glass half-full, people are just as weird anywhere, but lately I'm beginning to wonder. What does a person do when the whole culture seems pretty messed up? Where can you go? Like George Carlin - I really like people, for about a minute and a half! They're great in those small doses.

Mando · Post by **Mando** » Mon Mar 20, 2023 5:04 pm

I have been watching youtube shorts..odd mix of failures, a mechanic deconstructing ads for tool hacks and wonder tools, Uncle Roger, and Stephen He (emotional damage) videos.

trying to watch the Expanse.

poorpete · Post by **poorpete** » Sun Mar 26, 2023 9:19 pm

Brooklyn 99 (Peacock)

Enjoyed this well but starting season 3 now love it. Just so much fun. Tonight I reached season 4 episode "Moo Moo" and realized how much I care for these characters. I wept during most of it. Terry Crews masterclass

Post by **Mike** » Sun Mar 26, 2023 9:24 pm

poorpete wrote: ↑Sun Mar 26, 2023 9:19 pm Brooklyn 99 (Peacock)

Enjoyed this well but starting season 3 now love it. Just so much fun. Tonight I reached season 4 episode "Moo Moo" and realized how much I care for these characters. I wept during most of it. Terry Crews masterclass

100%. The balance between borderline farcical and sincere and earned emotion is masterful. I love it!

Schur manages the same trick in The Good Place. Which I also love.

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Tue Mar 28, 2023 1:36 am

Mando wrote: ↑Mon Mar 20, 2023 5:04 pm trying to watch the Expanse.

I liked this, with some caveats. Mainly I LOVE Shoreh Aghdashloo. Can't see to spell it.

I watched Leap Year for maybe the 19th time. Why?

I watched Love is Blind Season 4, first half. I don't have words for how awful "those two" are. Ugbhbbbdjejek. But the show wants us to respond this way. It's suspicious. Still, seldom have we seen such reality show villainy.

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Mon Apr 10, 2023 7:02 pm

Watched the previous season of Succession so that the spoilers of the current season that flash by on my phone can be meaningful and destructive for me, as I lack HBO or whatever you'd need to watch it now.

Have been watching various documentaries about the "wild years" of Group B rally races in Europe. I remember watching these on occasion with my granddad. Various people were killed because they had minimal rules and let people wander right out into the roadway. Unbelievable.

Watching the current season (4?) of Love is Blind. These people are terrifying. Two of them make sense to me (the older ones, I believe Brett and Teresa or Tiffany or Tammy or someone with a T). The rest of them are... terrifying, with a T! Like watching aliens communicate.

Very excited to watch the next season of Fauda but have no time. Yet!

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Wed Apr 19, 2023 8:13 am

Note to the world:
If you alone possess the secret knowledge of who Cleopatra's mother and grandmothers and great grandmothers were, you alone can object to whatever Jada Pinkett is doing with her Black Cleopatra show.
Meanwhile everybody else should shut up and make it possible for me to watch this because I don't even know where to find it. That's the real outrage.
Same people mad about this are mad about the Little mermaid so... I'm so tired of irritating dumb people.

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Sat Apr 22, 2023 5:51 am

It's on Netflix or WILL be but it's not on mine? Maybe not released yet. Example of the problem: https://www.themarysue.com/netflixs-cle ... red-flags/
Person explains the obvious reasons why it's completely fine to cast a Black Cleopatra but somehow still objects as if those reasons are vapor.
Also demands expertise from historians; is not an expert historian and does not engage with those who challenge the earlier false White Cleopatra narrative.

Update: well this "debate" is all over the media now. Many academics will assure you C. was Macedonian Greek. That doesn't map onto today's racial category of whiteness, at all. Within the paternal ancestry we *know* about are a few women from groups in what is now Iraq/Turkey that had migrated north and were also not "white" or "Arab" in any way. But that's the ancestry we know about, which is - 25 % - of her known ancestry *at most*. Just unbelievable to me that smart people including expert academics think that we will determine a racial identity in modern terms for a woman in the ancient Mediterranean, based on knowing most but not all of her paternal grandfather's ancestry.
It's so silly, I have a hard time believing this happens, but it's interesting evidence of how incredibly committed people are, sometimes even without consciously attending to it, to certain narratives about history. Despite millennia - millenia!!! - of engagement between civilizations up and down the Nile River, and absence of most info much less a 23 and me profile for this woman, people are sure she has no Blackness. Wacky.

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Wed Apr 26, 2023 8:39 am

I don't know this is happening simply because people who produce media content needs something that sounds vaguely controversial to write about, or if it's actually being driven by audience concerns or widespread interest. Either way, this anti Black Cleopatra stuff keeps popping up due to new show and causing me great irritation. For the benefit of people here I say:
We know one of Cleopatra's four grandparents. We know this person has a Macedonian Greek ancestry admixed with other groups from what is today Iran. We do not know who three of her grandparents are except that they were from Egypt, which is a pretty wide sweep as far as what people might have looked like or what their ancestry might have been. We know that her paternal grandfather produced an illegitimate child (dad!), so the usual claims that Ptolemaic rulers stuck to sibling marriage in Egypt, or stuck very close to their families, are already straight out the window. We have no idea who these mothers and grandmothers were, except they too were in Egypt. Ancient Egypt is different from modern Egypt. Cleopatra was the first ruler to make it her business to speak the common language of her people. The most proximate ancient depictions of Cleopatra make it clear she has a lot more phenotypically in common with the average African American than with the average white American, let's put it that way. The idea that she was white as we think of that today is completely and utterly false, and that doesn't mean she was black as we think of it today, but it does mean she could be played by a range of actors who are also not white. And that's really all anybody needs to know about why directors may cast a black Cleopatra in 2023 and it's not even a slight problem at all.

Kyle · Post by **Kyle** » Wed Apr 26, 2023 9:49 am

I know none of y'all watch Doom Patrol- but it is hands down the best superhero show ever made. I love it so much. Me and my two oldest just finished watching the first half of the last season (the final six episodes come out later this year). It's completely irreverant and funny, but still sincere when it needs to be without ever taking itself seriously. It achieves the perfect balance that seems to always be just a little out of reach for The Boys.

poorpete · Post by **poorpete** » Wed Apr 26, 2023 1:55 pm

Blank Check Podcast's patreon is going through the old Planet of the Apes series. Been a long time since I've seen the first, even longer since seeing the third. The first one holds up very well, especially when they run the Scopes Monkey Trial in reverse, scoring a lot of points. The second one, "Beneath" is WILD. A standard "let's do everything like before" sequel turns into a random Star Trek episode, then goes absolutely CRAZY in the final minute.

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Sun Apr 30, 2023 9:21 am

The Diplomat on Netflix

I was listening and not really watching and the script was wretched beyond belief. Just so stupid, as if normal middle-aged humans talk this way. They try to use all these witty phrases as if they think they're writing for Billions or as if it shows the main character (played by Keri Russell) is more serious and manly and badass. Anyway, other people are watching here, so it will continue and I will see what happens. I'm just not ready to see Keri Russell as anything but a secret Russian spy, so one difficulty in making her play an American diplomat who supposedly is in training and audition to become the vice president (which is idiotic anyway) is that you assume she is really a Russian spy. They also want to establish that she's not a girl like the other girls - again stupid on its face, and established by having her be scornful about dresses and public facing interviews and the difficulty of wearing shoes. You know us wacky tomboys who should become girl president bosses, we just don't like shoes even though we can clean up like a princess. Nauseating.

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Sun Apr 30, 2023 9:34 am

"Ready"

I'm assuming an Indian movie but I have no experience with Bollywood movies to judge what variety there of it might be.
I was intrigued by this promising caption: a man is going to help his friend by kidnapping a bride but ends up stealing the wrong woman! Just a normal sort of mishap, as we know. Surely a situation ripe for romance.

Well, It turns out indeed, romance developed because sometimes you need your kidnapper to rescue you from even worse people. But it turns out that the worse people are your relatives! There's a lot of action and violence - fantasy level violence where physically impossible things are done to leap out of trees and smash ladders onto the opponents. The women are in bad shape in this world, where you basically are hoping for a semi-decent but still sexist kidnapper to come along and replace whatever horrible man you were going to be forced into marriage to. Wholesome ideas.

However, in the midst of all the rape threats and circus-style assaults, they frequently take a dance break. Sometimes the romantic couple is gazing at each other from across a room filled with family members, and it is understood by the audience that we are now popping out into their minds where they're going to travel to Switzerland and don the local costumes and perform a dance routine in the snow or at a resort hotel patio, suddenly accompanied by forty other dancers. As a novelty this was fascinating, yet I don't think I can keep this up long-term as a genre.

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Sun May 14, 2023 8:16 am

Queen Charlotte

On Netflix, the latest spinoff of Shonda Rhimes' Bridgerton series. I actually like Queen Charlotte a lot better and I think I'm about halfway through? Bridgerton is more fluff and fancy and romance and sex-approximate scenes. It has a clever "mystery identity" plot to keep viewers hooked in.

Queen Charlotte is for people who want to run a little further with the world and these characters. It's more psychological and introspective and sad. And I was amazed to discover: much of it is indeed based on real historical events and situations! Much more than I had realized. I had to read a whole history book to address my curiosity. I knew only about this time for British Royalty through the lens of George III, and controversies about his illnesses, ending slavery, the American revolution, and forming the UK. But I knew so little about Charlotte or the German royalty, or the changes happening in the British aristocracy.

I love what Shonda Rhimes has done in recreating this world: hey, there's controversy about Queen Charlotte being Moorish and having African features... We're not going to tangle it out with these historians but let's just decide to imagine a world in which she's Black and various members of court are also black. Let's really dig into the reality that royals and traders from different parts of the world could and did, in a few interesting real life examples, end up in London playing a part in all this. Why not reimagine that whole world and play with it, whether or not it's precisely "historically accurate", and make it fun and intriguing?
She did just that and it's a much better show because of this - glorious and delightful fiction with historical examples behind it.

In Queen Charlotte we are immediately forced to grapple with how wild it would have been for her to arrive a complete stranger to English society, and find herself with a husband who had some serious mental illness problems, all of which were being concealed from her, at least for the first years! In real life she apparently did not speak any English at this time, and was far more suspicious because they didn't know whether she would use information about the king against him.

Then imagine yourself having 15 children with this person - fifteen! And it's true that most of them weren't producing any useful legitimate heirs! And then the one who has done so dies in childbirth... You really can imagine this would have been a crisis of epic proportions for her, mother to 15.

The great experiment of changing the rules and procedures of the court and the aristocracy is also fascinating. At the part of the show I'm in, they haven't discussed the issue of slavery generally, but it's impossible not to imagine whether King George's stance on this was influenced by the possible fact that his wife favored her Moorish and African ancestors. There are also a number of African intellectuals who would have appeared at court and would have been famous at the time but have been been largely forgotten. And George was an interesting man who not only was dealing with his physical and mental afflictions, but preferred to engage in all kinds of activities that had nothing to do with being King. What was he thinking, and what was she thinking?

I also found it fascinating to see the history of the various houses that become Royal palaces or residences later. The names are still familiar to us and in use, but the way they were living in the at this time was different. Queen Charlotte also had some special residences constructed. If this aspect of it is interesting then it is really fascinating indeed. Her decorating taste was apparently revolutionary and so different. It's fun to allow the imagination to roam with a show like this, without having to worry about the tidbits of historical accuracy... But at the same time allowing yourself to think of these things makes you wonder why historians don't think of them more often. So many obvious questions and issues are raised by simply dropping yourself into the shoes of this person and asking what it would have been like to live the sequence of events in her life at that time.

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Sun May 14, 2023 8:39 am

Oh and, update on Queen Cleopatra: because this one takes the approach of historical drama, rather than a fictionalized but illuminating reimagining of a world the way that Queen Charlotte accomplishes, It has been relentlessly attacked. Apparently on rating sites like rotten tomatoes it gets about 1% and not much better anywhere. That's pretty crazy. It just makes me wonder why people are so damn emotionally attached to a particular, false vision of this historical figure? But consider - Charlotte is imagined as Moorish despite pretty distant African ancestry, and Cleopatra is imagined as white or pale-skinned despite most of her closest relatives probably NOT being Greek, as well as the much later advent of Arab and European invaders and immigrants. So what gives here, people? There is no white or Arab Cleopatra. That's not real. Why u like this?

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Sun May 14, 2023 11:13 am

Counterpoint to my praise for Queen Charlotte, this writer thinks the show is guilty of colorism and reminiscent of minstral character tropes: https://www.themarysue.com/bridgerton-s ... st-season/

I don't see it the same way because I think the show is telling an important story about women with experiences like Lady Danbury (Agatha). She is motivated to act in various ways, including some things we might otherwise judge negatively, because she wants to be freed from her husband. Her character is important because it echoes a real life figure who might also have had African ancestry and apparently came from Germany to be part of Queen Charlotte's court as her confidant. So although this character has a different backstory and situation - she is English before meeting the Queen, and doing a little double dealing with the current Queen Dowager - It's important to explain why she's under serious pressures and the two of these women are able to form an important bond. Their friendship is one of the coolest things about the show. At first you're surprised that someone has that much influence or ability to speak freely to the queen - even contradicting her at times. Or you don't understand how they can both be manipulative yet completely trusting in their friendship. And the backstory explains a lot of that! I like it.

There are also lots of s***** and abusive men in this show, so I don't think it's true that we can single out only characters with darker skin tone as villains. Most of the men are villains! Half of the ladies are conflicted partial villains! Most of them do some silly things for comic relief, but against that backdrop I didn't really see Lord Danbury's efforts to fit into the new "experiment" of integrated-but-racist aristocratic society as a comic failure. He seeks validation from and through his wife's qualities that he doesn't get elsewhere.
The other thing that might trouble people, as it does this author, is the amount of sexual assault (and specifically, sex I consent to as a spouse because I have to treat it as a duty, even though I don't really want to). It's treated as a matter of fact in a way that prevents treating it as a horrifying trauma, but that's because all kinds of horrifying traumas are treated as a matter of fact in this show. The show takes the same tone with everything like that, and frankly it would have been a matter of fact reality for so many people. The show is definitely making clear that some women have not *ever* consented to sex, so imo it's not ignoring that reality or diminishing it. But I found the other perspective from the article interesting.

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Sat May 20, 2023 12:20 pm

Cleopatra on Netflix

Started watching. Have no complaints so far. It's clearly made for a popular audience, designed to attract that click as you're browsing Netflix, and combines imaginary drama (which they are completely upfront about being imagined) with scholarly commentary. Some new insight has come along with it, however:

Articles critiquing the show, which complain ONLY about the casting of Cleopatra and the credentials of the BLACK WOMAN SCHOLAR who is interviewed the most, but NOT THE MANY OTHER SCHOLARS, and don't discuss anything else about the show, now invariably include the info that the show is a disaster or failure for Netflix. It's not. It appears regularly in the most-popular streaming. That's how I finally found it - showed up on the list of currently popular!

Why should this failure narrative be out there in articles and headlines when it's not happening? Finally figured that one out: PARAMOUNT is going to have its own Cleopatra starring Gal Gadot come out in future (some ads are already out, and the ad itself is stupid). They've already dealt with criticism of casting a white Jewish actress as Cleopatra. It's not good for their movie if this Netflix series is well received or viewed by enough people to capture the imagination about who Cleopatra was. African Cleopatra puts Gal Gadot Cleopatra in an odd light that might hurt the $$$.

I'll keep watching this Netflix one and try to keep an open critical eye out for misrepresentations or flaws. So far I just do not see the problem and it's a lot better than previous depictions of Cleopatra on screen. The complaints are ringing very hollow and suspect now, even more than before. The other thing worth noting is, LOTS of people in this version are played by Black actors, and although their hairstyles and range of skin tones and facial features seem pretty accurate to portraiture and even contemporary Egypt, the whole ancient Egyptian context may strike some viewers as more "Black Africa" rather than the imagined light-skinned or Arabic ancient Egypt, and other false notions we have about what that world was like. Pinning the complaint on Cleopatra, even if that's ahistorical, probably is easier than making a generalized objection to how African the show's imagined world feels. I'm certain it bothers some people way too much. Everyone can relax. We have had white British Egypt; let's try something else now.

Post by **Mike** » Thu Jun 01, 2023 9:18 am

Silo on Apple TV
The Silo is 10,000 people living in an underground silo that extends downward for 144 levels. 200 years ago, there was a revolution of sorts, and knowledge of history has since been lost (or intentionally suppressed). They don't know who built the silo or why they are here, but they can see on their giant view screens that the outside world is a dead landscape, and anyone who leaves dies within minutes.

It's five episodes in right now, and so far, I'm hooked. It's got mystery and some political intrigue and Rebecca Ferguson who becomes the main character by episode 3 or so is a fantastic actress.

Kyle · Post by **Kyle** » Thu Jun 01, 2023 10:29 am

I've watched four episodes (?) and I agree with everything you're saying.

Post by **Mike** » Thu Jun 01, 2023 4:24 pm

I just really respect what Rebecca Ferguson does. I first noticed her in that sequel to The Shining where she was quirky and kinda ominous (and a little sexy). Then I saw her in Greatest Showman playing Barnum's demure but glamorous mistress. Then I saw her opposite Hugh Jackman again in this near future dystopia noir thing where she was a femme fatale knockoff of Jessica Rabbit. And now Silo, where she's this dusty laconic mechanic. She reminds me of Gary Oldman in the way that for a long time, I didn't really recognize the actor on sight, but I remember the roles.

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Fri Jun 02, 2023 11:02 am

Do they all start as red level troubleshooters? I really hope that's how it turns out lol! I don't think we get this type of channel but it sounds intriguing.

Phoebe · Post by **Phoebe** » Sun Jun 04, 2023 3:23 pm

Have been watching Community and some of the writing is so, so very good.

Post by **Mike** » Sun Jun 04, 2023 5:07 pm

Community is a fantastic show overall.