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Mar. 15th, 2014 06:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
opusculasedferaI watched all the Brooklyn Nine-Nine that exists so far in about two days, so it's that kind of good. I am interested in the fact that it doesn't hit my giant embarrassment squick anything like as badly as it could have, despite being the story of a bunch of people who are very, very interested in embarrassing each other. This confuses me! Even Benton Fraser's refusal to be embarrassed by anything he did didn't always prevent me from cringing on his behalf! But everyone is so good at taking on the embarrassment, clearly hating it, and then moving the fuck on while actively demonstrating that there aren't consequences beyond people being a pain in the ass.
On a more general note, as everyone has already said, the show does a good job having a decently diverse bunch of cops who generally don't get to do horrifically illegal things on a whim. Being too cool for paperwork is an issue that fucks you over, even if paperwork is boring. You have to do just as many extremely boring cases as you do exciting ones, and it's all important work.
I could do with less Peralta, it's definitely not deconstructing the white cisdude=protagonist trope anything like as well as Community does, but at least there's a reasonable amount of screentime for all the other characters, who I mostly adore. I still think he wins just a smidge too often to get away with the shit he pulls, but at least he does get called out sometimes. Everyone else is pretty delightful (or if they're awful, usually the writers clearly agree), which does make up for it some.
I don't know if I could be fannish about it, but I could do with a regular 20mins of fluffy tv that generally doesn't make me angry.
Finished Dawn French's memoir, Dear Fatty*. Not a surprise that she's funny and charming and delightful, but I was particularly struck by her ability to tell funny stories about inexperienced sex had with entirely the wrong person in a way that was both humourous and not so caught up in making it funny that it sounds like she's never had mutually enjoyable sex in her life, which is an astonishingly rare skill in published autobiographical writing, for reasons I've never been able to fathom. Of course, there are also lots of fantastic showbiz stories and amusing family ones (and some sad family ones, told affectingly), and in general, recommended.
*Fatty=Jennifer Saunders, her comedy partner, and is an affectionate and consensual nickname. Not a book at all about weight issues, if that's a concern for you!
On a more general note, as everyone has already said, the show does a good job having a decently diverse bunch of cops who generally don't get to do horrifically illegal things on a whim. Being too cool for paperwork is an issue that fucks you over, even if paperwork is boring. You have to do just as many extremely boring cases as you do exciting ones, and it's all important work.
I could do with less Peralta, it's definitely not deconstructing the white cisdude=protagonist trope anything like as well as Community does, but at least there's a reasonable amount of screentime for all the other characters, who I mostly adore. I still think he wins just a smidge too often to get away with the shit he pulls, but at least he does get called out sometimes. Everyone else is pretty delightful (or if they're awful, usually the writers clearly agree), which does make up for it some.
I don't know if I could be fannish about it, but I could do with a regular 20mins of fluffy tv that generally doesn't make me angry.
Finished Dawn French's memoir, Dear Fatty*. Not a surprise that she's funny and charming and delightful, but I was particularly struck by her ability to tell funny stories about inexperienced sex had with entirely the wrong person in a way that was both humourous and not so caught up in making it funny that it sounds like she's never had mutually enjoyable sex in her life, which is an astonishingly rare skill in published autobiographical writing, for reasons I've never been able to fathom. Of course, there are also lots of fantastic showbiz stories and amusing family ones (and some sad family ones, told affectingly), and in general, recommended.
*Fatty=Jennifer Saunders, her comedy partner, and is an affectionate and consensual nickname. Not a book at all about weight issues, if that's a concern for you!
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Date: 2014-03-16 04:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-03-17 02:29 am (UTC)I think one of my favourite things might be how everyone on the squad absolutely knows all the buddy-cop tropes and is fairly into them, and the show silently undercuts the intensity of the trope by constantly reassigning partners the way it would happen in reality and showing us all these different close working relationships because you don't need to be that codependent to be good together. It could still go farther in this direction, true, but I like what it's doing so far!
Tell me of your microscopic character issues?
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Date: 2014-03-17 05:59 am (UTC)My issues - they really aren't anything, just me kinda going "huh" - is mostly around the way the show sometimes uses approval of Holt's gayness as a shorthand for characterizing Peralta as a good guy, (which is part of a kind of liberalism that it has that I find too sentimental, preaching to the choir. The multicultural thanksgiving dinner elicited a lot of eyerolls in particular. But that's assuming the show is trying to get across any kind of politics consciously, which it's possible it actually thinks it isn't - I'm just weird about these things.)
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Date: 2014-03-17 09:21 pm (UTC)I definitely see what you mean. I feel sometimes like the writers think that Peralta being a white dude with accepting and liberal opinions is the same level of diversity as having Holt and Terry and Diaz and Santiago and it just isn't true! He is achieving the bare minimum of acceptability and just because your average real life police force probably doesn't, doesn't make him amazing. I don't think it's a consciously political show, but it's definitely doing some self-congratulating on how progressive it is. (...aaaaand, I'm not surprised that when I look it up, most of the writers are white guys. :P)
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Date: 2014-03-18 05:28 pm (UTC)It also really bugs me that Santiago is constantly left out in the cold, re all the mentoring and father-figuring and all that that she's looking for. There is something funny there, but there's also an insidious political truth that that kind of subtle, often genuinely unintentional boy's club stuff where men will get that little bit extra attention, extra push, extra criticism, even, is still part of the glass ceiling, so the fact that this particular humor is falling on her makes me a little uncomfortable.
If I suspected that the show was actually going somewhere with it, that I was supposed to feel uncomfortable for Santiago here, that would be different, but that doesn't seem to be the case. It's just funny that she really wants something...and doesn't get it, there just doesn't seem to be an extra layer of pathos there, the way a more biting comedy might be able to pull off and twist that around into something subversive rather than just awkward.
...that was probably too much about B99.
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Date: 2014-03-18 06:58 pm (UTC)Ugh, right? I definitely thought we were being set up at the start for Santiago to low-key bond with Holt over the fact that they are both very dedicated, detail-oriented types, for the purpose of humourously undermining all of Peralta's mockery of her too-earnestness, but nope, it's just supposed to be funny that she tries too hard. I definitely read awareness of the fact that a latina woman would have a harder time in the force and a mentor would make it easier into Santiago's little speech early on about wanting Holt to be that for her, but I think I was projecting too much of my own knowledge into that and the writers only wanted us to be gently amused by her brown-nosing. Which is a crying shame because, as you said, it is a real problem that bosses give people a subtle leg up all the time based on who they like best and it often corresponds an awful lot with who already has privilege. I think we're supposed to see Peralta's extra attention as the result of fuck ups on his part, but you can't both do that and then do all the jokes that make their relationship mutually positive.
I hope we do get more Santiago and Holt interaction soon because I think if we don't, it doesn't say promising things about the writing staff's ability to carry on with the diversity they've established once they've covered all the obvious issues, such as how Holt was first treated on the force.
...so uh, don't apologise for having many words and opinions about this show, because clearly we share that!
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Date: 2014-03-18 07:27 pm (UTC)I do quite like the kind of meta-narrative aspect of Santiago's view of Holt. Just like Peralta, she's kind of projecting a narrative onto him. For Peralta, he's the tough boss who will teach him much even as he learns to appreciate Peralt's unorthodox ways, and for Santiago, he's this idealized figure who'll finally validate her and the seriousness she brings to the job, spot the diamond in the rough that she is and help her grow into herself and all that.
The problem is that Santiago's tropey narrative keeps getting undercut, but Peralta's doesn't. Every time it seems like the show will go there, it pulls back and Peralta does get to be lovably roughish (or at least that's the way it's meant to seem, I guess. Usually he's made some basic not-homophobic statement and that's that,) while Santiago just keeps getting deconstructed and deconstructed, and that's not fair.
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Date: 2014-03-18 08:18 pm (UTC)I feel like the writers don't want to give him flaws with consequences we actually explore on the show, so we get the apartment thing and supposedly he swaps with Gina, but a) the show has never really taken place in his apartment anyway and b) aside from the break in, Gina's place seemed kind of great to me. Large, clean, nothing broken.... A downgrade, but not a tragedy except by tv standards.
Also, the show wants us to see Santiago as the kid who just wants the A because As. But it's not a pointless desire to want to be better at your job and advance in your career, and having the help of someone agreed to be good at his job isn't an odd way to go about that! I agree that a little bit of humour at the expense of the idealised Holt-mentor she has in her head would be perfect, ditto some suggestion that Holt can't just mold her into perfection. But instead we get the explicit contrast between her asking for Holt's help and Peralta sulking about Holt's interference and Holt liking the latter better and making decisions based on that, and it's kind of unpleasant. Hopefully we actually get some plots in the future where Santiago and Holt have to work together and she's too busy working to fret over what he thinks or something to balance it out.
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Date: 2014-03-19 07:36 am (UTC)What it says about them that she's gravitated to her particular narrative, what it says about the kind of person they are, but also what kind of background they're coming from and what expectations they have, and why a white guy easily casts himself in one type of story but a Latina woman into another and so on...It's frustrating, because it looks like it's right on the show's tongue, so to speak. The setup is there, but they keep backing off from being genuinely progressive in favour of a tepid bubble-universe liberalism. This is perfectly ripe comedy stuff, and it doesn't need much. One or two jokes that point out that race and gender do matter rather than revelling in the fact that in B99-land, they don't...grrr.
I was talking to someone about the show Mom, and oddly enough they also brought up B99 as a countepoint. Mom is a weird, bitter, often flat out ugly show, nothing like B99, but it also wears class and gender politics on a giant flashing neon sign on its head, and it's all the more effective for being willing to be ugly and bitter. It gives it a bite - with much less stylishness and sophistication (phenomenal acting though. Someone knew exactly what they were doing when they cast Allison Janney in a sitcom) - that makes B99 look like "a hipster fantasy."
...and I'm off to watch the new episode now. :-) I swear I do really like this show. I wouldn't want to talk about it if I didn't.
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Date: 2014-03-19 11:31 am (UTC)The sad thing is that even if they were too squeamish to go there, it would actually be incredibly easy to undercut the tropes they're setting up with one 30 second scene where Holt and Peralta are working on something together, Peralta says something that implies he's getting special attention, and Holt saying super flatly that he's "here to assist one of his detectives....as he assists all of his detectives *eyebrow raise*" and then a quick montage of moments where Holt+other detective are clearly wrapping up a case together in the bullpen, and Peralta deflating awkwardly and going "haha, yeahhhh, totally what I meant!"
Requires no actually addressing the fucked up shit, but also makes him less of a special snowflake! Of course, I'd still prefer if the show was actually willing to go there, but I'd rather have the faux-progressivism with significant screentime for minorities than another bunch of white dudes.
Tell me about Mom? I don't know anything about it and that sounds interesting.
Haha, of course! Poking holes in narrative is an expression of love! :)
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Date: 2014-03-19 04:34 pm (UTC)Mom...is an odd duck. It's a Chuck Lorre show (of Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men) and it's very conspicuously unsophisticated and unprogressive in the way B99 very conspicuously is - loud laugh track, multi-cam, very traditional sitcom look and setting...bus it's also really startlingly very political and really, really dark.
It's got Anna Faris as a recovering alcoholic single mom, and her relationship with Allison Janney as her also recovering alcoholic mother. Both of them were teenage moms, both of them have deeply damaged relationships with their daughters that they're all grudgingly trying to fix. Both the show and the characters are very conscious of the cycles they're in, but breaking them is a huge struggle that they've all almost given up on.
Sometimes it looks just wildly schizophrenic, bouncing back and forth between crude, cringey physical humor and bathroom and sex jokes, to totally heartbreaking moments when it tackles one of the serious issues, but I think there's a method to the madness there (that admittedly hasn't quite gelled yet.) I think it's subversive precisely it allows itself to have this layer of bitterness and ugliness, and it lets them stand there and get the egg on their face, indignity after indignity piling on and reveling in how uncomfortable its own laughter becomes.
(I honestly think sometimes it's a deliberate tactic on the writer's part, using the laugh track against the viewer, trying to generate not laughter at pain but the awareness that laughter at pain is possible, for good and bad. It definitely used it deliberately in the last episode, where the rhythm of joke-laugh-joke-laugh suddenly broke with a missing laugh and gave a real punch to one line.)
And there's also a lot of class/work/money stuff and it's light on the shippiness, and it's almost entirely female.
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Date: 2014-03-19 09:05 pm (UTC)That's interesting! It sounds like something that would profoundly set off my embarrassment squick, because I am entirely a wuss about these things, but I'm glad someone is trying to deal with those issues, and I hope it does live up to all that promise.
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Date: 2014-03-19 09:47 pm (UTC)It seems very possible that even with the best intentions this is just an inappropriate mismatch and nothing of political or emotional interest can come of it. However, Big Bang Theory (which never seems to have had that sort of ambition to start with) really did build to some very intimate, very subversive stories that I love, so I'm willing to see where Mom goes even if it's still fumbling to figure out exactly how it's getting there. Plus, I just like the weirdness of the attempt. There's something quixotic to it.
And, yeah, it is about as embarrassing as anything ever (I think BBT kind of blew all my embarrassment fuses, because I identify more with those characters, so the more abstract embarrassment of Mom is effortless at this point) but I feel it uses it to good effect. Anything that can make me uncomfortable is...well, I admire that. And it has toned a lot of the broadest stuff, or pushed it out in favour of more plot and characterization.
Sorry to switch topics like this - it's a very strange little show, with a total, utter, complete lack of coolness, and that seems to mean not a lot of people are talking about it. At least TBBT gets a solid bit of hate :-)
Back to B99 - fiction vs. law making hits the nail on the head here, I think. B99 is coming with the sort of hopeful, aggressively forward, politically correct, can-do attitude I want from my actual politicians and laws. I want the opposite from my fiction - I want it to strip things back and make me feel something about what's wrong, especially when it's me - not to make me feel good about the ways that I'm right. It reminds me of a this interview with a (really liberal) politician I read once, where she proudly said she never read fiction, just non-fiction. It was a waste of time. What could some made up story possibly teach her about anything that matters? And that just sounds...utterly insane to me, and completely wrong. Fiction shows why anything matters.
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Date: 2014-03-19 10:23 pm (UTC)The thing about B99 is that I would happily accept the sitcom with the can-do attitude if it was actually doing the thing! I also want fiction that strips the world back and looks at the difficult things, but I wouldn't mind the cop show that was pretty much this one, but where Peralta's screentime was cut dramatically. There's still little enough tv that shows these things that I'd love to watch e.g. Diaz and Santiago solve a bunch of humourous cases together under Holt's supervision, even if it didn't manage to go very deeply into the serious issues that might affect Latina cops and their gay, black captains.
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Date: 2014-03-19 10:58 pm (UTC)I think that's why B99 is really at it's funniest when it's more of a workplace/environment thing, and focusing on the satire and the procedural elements and funny cases and characters of the precinct. It's like Community that way, I think, which is a very warm and very funny show, but I think sometimes gets a little glassy eyed around the edges when it tries to have deeper character moments, because it's invested too much in surreal shenanigans and it's completely unbelievable that these are real people any more. B99 can do it - scenes like Diaz and Santiago at that suburban police department at one point was great. It doesn't have to be Bertolt Brecht, just think your characters through like they exist in the real world just a little.
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Date: 2014-03-20 12:25 am (UTC)Yeah, if there's one thing I do mostly trust these writers to write, it's the amusing cop bits, or even the tiny snippets of friendship, though I think they get a bit lost when it's a longer sideplot. I don't actually mind the way Community does it, where it's sort of accepted that no one reacts properly to a teacher constructing a weapon in class and demonstrating it on a student, but when it comes to other things, like friends leaving, they're realistically human again? Not that B99 goes quite so far into surrealism, which I honestly appreciate because I'm not sure that the writers are careful enough to not have their "over the top" cop work do more than make me uncomfortable about unexamined police violence.
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Date: 2014-03-20 06:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-03-20 12:12 pm (UTC)