Month: May 2021

I remember seeing Amazon Prime’s Them (2021) trending on Twitter the day the first official trailer came out in March 2021, and after watching the 2-minute preview, I was immediately turned off and decided that I would never watch the show. IMDB describes the plot summary as “A Black family moves to an all-white Los Angeles neighborhood where malevolent forces, next door and otherworldly, threaten to taunt, ravage and destroy them.”¹ The torture alluded to in this summary is very overt in the trailer. This includes depictions of white children howling like a monkey at the daughter character (Shahadi Wright Joseph), several anti-black caricatures known as Golliwogs² hung by mini-nooses and littered outside of the family’s home, a “Sambo-Esque” character known as the “Da Tap Dance Man” that is meant to act as the supernatural force plaguing the family, and flashes of scenes in which the family appears to be tortured physically and psychologically throughout the series. This anthology series continues to develop the “race-horror” genre and the direction that projects within this genre could be headed. 

I am defining “race-horror” as a subset of the horror genre, which frames racism as the source of the horror that torments the protagonists who are people of color. When applying this definition to the show, I want to know how this visceral, horrific imagery functions as a message or theme other than the fact that black people have been physically and psychologically tortured by these devices and more for centuries in the United States? Or, in its most oversimplified form: racism is a horror story in itself that people should continue to be mindful of. I think that this intention is good by using this genre to inform and remind the general public of the horrific manifestations of racism, but using the horror genre to convey the message could go wrong at the same time.

I fear that future projects within the genre will grossly depict the most extreme methods of violent torture against their black characters to communicate the same message but offer nothing else. I find that the most provocative and compelling horror films are creative and create a unique circumstance in which well-known ideas or prevalent tropes are present, which results in a fresh, new addition to the genre. For example, I would argue a film like Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) meets the traits specific to this genre in which racism acts as a prevailing, evil torture device that enables white characters to kidnap, lobotomize, manipulate, and exploit black people for their gain. 

Many people assumed that Them was created by Jordan Peele because of his 2019 horror film Us (2019), which has a similar aesthetic in marketing and a black family as the protagonists. The danger of comparing these two pieces of media that fall within this “race-horror” genre is that Us is mainly a psychological thriller, in which the race of the black family is not pertinent to the subject of the film. Peele has even stated that the film “is not about race” despite the plot of his previous film, Get Out (2017), where the victims’ race was a focal point.³ On the topic of Jordan Peele, I believe that the popularity and discussion generated by Get Out contributed to the increasing recognition of this subsection of “black horror” within the horror genre. Racism was a prevalent idea that drove the plot forward, while the narrative was an inventive and clever new way to address these issues within the genre.

Them does not appear to be anything that I have not seen before, which makes me concerned for future projects within the genre. The broadest generalization of the plot seems to be a 50s white neighborhood tormenting their new black neighbors but taken to the absolute extreme. I have seen this era before in television and film, which shows the intertextuality between this piece of media and other historical texts/depictions about racism within this era of the country. Even these supernatural elements presented by “Da Tap Dance Man” is not compelling enough to subvert these ideas and tropes that are already a recognizable part of the cultural forum regarding the United State’s history of racism and the manifestations of that prejudice against black people. 

The reviews for the show have been mixed, with some reducing the show to being 10 hours of glorified “torture-porn” against the black characters and some arguing that the show is insightful and offers more psychological evaluations of the black family and white antagonists than it appears. There may be truth in both arguments, but I am fearful that future projects within this genre could reduce and overgeneralize these ideas to further torment black characters without adding anything new other than the message of “racism is a horror story.” Horror as a genre can torment the characters and terrify the viewers while also revealing some insight about the human psyche or present an inventive narrative. I think that is what the show is trying to accomplish, but I’ll determine that myself once I watch it.

Citations

¹ IMDB. “Them.” IMDb. IMDb.com, April 8, 2021. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9064858/. 

² Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. “The Golliwog Caricature.” The Golliwog Caricature – Anti-black Imagery – Jim Crow Museum – Ferris State University. Ferris State University, 2021. https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/golliwog/homepage.htm.

³ Obenson, Tambay. “’Us’ Makes a Radical Argument for Black Identity By Ignoring It.” IndieWire. IndieWire, March 22, 2019. https://www.indiewire.com/2019/03/us-movie-jordan-peele-lupita-nyongo-1202051703/. 

This might seem like a strange question to ask, but definitions are incredibly important in analyzing a medium, particularly when it comes to edge cases and the introduction of new information or technologies that fundamentally change our understanding of the original definition. 

I know this is cliche, but bear with me. Merriam-Webster defines “Television” as:

“an electronic system of transmitting transient images of fixed or moving objects together with sound over a wire or through space by apparatus that converts light and sound into electrical waves and reconverts them into visible light rays and audible sound”

With that working definition, our understanding of “television” is quite broad. Netflix fits the bill, but so does Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram. However, we don’t generally consider Snapchat TikTok or Instagram to be “television” which leaves us searching for a more cultural definition / understanding of the medium. I’ll shelve Netflix for now, but we’ll get back to that.

While this rigid technical definition of “Television” exists, it is certainly not the metric most people use to describe their viewing habits and media engagement. For now at least, most people still consider “television” to involve a TV set, a cable box, a viewing guide, etc. Just like the rigid textual definition, the more nuanced cultural definition of television revolves around the technology that enables such viewing. For a while, the technological evolution was in step with the cultural understanding of the medium. Yes, increasing access and new technologies like DVR changed our interaction with the content, but the form remained largely unchanged. Television was still premised on the presence of a TV, and the cultural experience – our cultural understanding of “television” – was still rooted in vestigial viewing patterns from the early days of the medium. Recently, however, technology has uncoupled itself from these vestigial patterns and understandings, allowing us to consume much the same content in an entirely different form.

This finally brings us to the question: Is Netflix Television? From the technical definition, it certainly is, however we need to look at the cultural elements, the nuanced empirical understanding of the medium. For starters, Netflix has a large technological overlap with traditional television – many people still watch Netflix on a smart TV or a Roku-like device that piggybacks on the traditional form. It’s very much still an “event,” friends still have “watch parties” and look forward to new releases on the platform. Finally, the content is largely identical to the content of “traditional” television, which begs the question “what’s really so different?” Is it possible to be consuming TV shows, without “watching television?”

Netflix is fundamentally different from traditional television in three respects. Firstly, Agency on the platform is unparalleled in comparison to any other medium. Not only can you search for a specific show and watch it any time you like, you also get to enjoy it uninterrupted by ads. Second, while primarily a consumption platform, Netflix has also begun producing original content in a way that questions the longstanding roles established in the industry. It’s the equivalent of a Samsung starting a studio, or Kitchen-Aide starting a meal prep service. Even writing these examples, they seem frankly quite probable, where even 10 years ago it would be absurd. You see this breakdown of established roles in the music industry as well, where another streaming platform – Spotify – is also beginning to produce original work and alter the content → consumption pipeline. Finally, the last major difference between traditional TV and Netflix can be found in temporal limitations. Despite all these notable achievements of the platform, it does lack one thing that traditional television still provides: live coverage.

News coverage and sporting events are two niches that Netflix – for now at least – can’t accommodate. There are other streaming platforms, largely network-provided, that do provide these services, but network news and sporting events are the final holdouts for traditional television as we understand it. However, as more streaming platforms emerge, it will only be a matter of time before these content niches are absorbed in a similar fashion as network television. We’re still in a state of flux, navigating much of the same content through an entirely new form, but using perhaps antiquated terminology from that historic form to describe our experience. With the rate of technological innovation, it won’t be long before Television refers simply to the technology – a physical TV screen – rather than the experience of the medium.

So this is just me going to be talking about an episode from a show I particularly like called Tales from the Crypt. It was a rather crude, raunchy anthology series in the late 1980s and early 1990s that was also a send up to pulp horror comics from the 50s, specifically of a magazine originally called The Vault of Horror which later was retitled – you guessed it – Tales From the Crypt. You’ll see why I bring up this bit of background knowledge later. As for the tv show, like I said it’s an anthology so the stories follow no continuity, but the one element that links them all together is that they are hosted by a Gollum looking fella with an appetite for horror related puns called the Crypt Keeper. What is interesting is that there is an episode called Lower Berth in which two circus attractions (a boy with literally two faces and an undead mummy) give birth to a child at the end and that child is the Crypt Keeper. This I can’t figure out which type but I do believe is some form of narrative complexity but by breaking the standards of the show’s own narrative, rather than the show’s general narrative breaking standards of television. You see, this is the only episode where the Crypt Keeper’s existence is acknowledge within the stories he presents to us. And at first I was going to say isn’t it crazy that they had this kind of narrative complexity from a comic book back in the 50s? But then it hit me. Wait a minute, the original comics did not have a host. But the Crypt Keeper shows the cover of the corresponding comic just like always at the beginning of Lower Berth, so this is based on an existing comic, but how random would it be for the writers of the comic to make up some character called the Crypt Keeper for this one issue and have that, a character no one’s ever heard of before, be the big twist at the end. So I did a little research and what I found was 1) No, the original comics had no host, let alone the Crypt Keeper 2) Yes, the original comic did end with baby Crypt Keeper (my new baby yoda btw) as the big twist HOWEVER 3) The Crypt Keeper was in fact around before this issue so die hard fans would have known who he was. Apparently he was not as strongly associated with the Tales from the Crypt comic series, but he did make occasional appearances and his first appearance was in a eerily similar named issue of a comic series called Crime Patrol: The Crypt of Terror. It’s interesting isn’t it how such a little change in an adaptation, an otherwise faithful one no less, of some preexisting work can lead to such drastic shifts in the nature of something like the narrative?

The sitcom format is one of the longest standing television formats ever. Popularized in the mid 1900s by shows like I Love Lucy, The Adams Family, and All in the Family, this format is made up of predictable characters, relatively stagnant relationships between characters, and a return to normality at the end of each episode. This return to normality is the idea that there is: 1. a base starting point of each character at the beginning of the episode, 2. a moderate conflict introduced to the world of the show, and 3. a resolution of this problem at the end of the episode with the characters returning to their original starting point of normality. This allows for audiences to pickup on whatever episode they please without any plot confusion.

While Bojack Horseman adheres to certain elements of this sitcom format (length, character driven plot, and general episodic format), the show strays from this traditional sitcom mold by eliminating this return to normality. Over the course of the show, characters make many mistakes (sometimes drastic ones), but these mistakes rarely get resolved at the end of the episode. We even see the consequences of Bojack’s actions in season 1 come back to bite him in the final season of the show. This theme of actions having consequences also takes form by altering the relationships between the show’s central characters, something that rarely happens in traditional sitcoms. Another key difference from traditional sitcom characters is that the characters actually WANT to change and be better.

The show becomes very meta with this sitcom comparison through the use of the fictional 90’s sitcom Horsin’ Around that Bojack starred in, giving his acting career life. We often see Bojack rewatching his old sitcom at some of his darkest moments in the show, giving him this happy escape from reality that sitcoms are supposed to create. This juxtaposition between the happy Horsin’ Around’ sitcom world and the often dark and depressing world of Bojack Horseman shines a light on the unrealistic reality of almost all sitcoms. Through this, despite being an animated world full of talking animals, Bojack Horseman is able to create possibly the most realistic picture of reality of any sitcom ever.

Before the start of the Unprecedented Times, I was never much of a reality TV gal. My friends in high school would talk about what happened on the Bachelor, and I’d sit there and smirk. I placed in the top 5 of a game of Survivor in my hometown that one of my fanatic friends put on to use as leverage for a Survivor casting call–I still have yet to watch an episode. 

In early 2020, I started watching Love is Blind, and that show really carried me through the initial stages of “oh shit something bad is about to happen but nobody knows what.” Fast forward to April 2020–a month I don’t remember at all, other than the shows I started watching: The Bachelor (Listen to Your Heart spinoff), Too Hot to Handle, The Circle, Love Island (Australia!). 

The thing these shows have in common is their ability to lower my brain function to zero so I can be ready to interact with the world’s 100. But I’d argue that the premise of all these shows are vastly different, and that’s why I jumped from one to the next. 

In thinking about Mittell’s “genre studies should negotiate between specificity and generality” principle, it’s clear that reality TV is a genre that has 1) recently emerged 2) rapidly changed in the short time it has existed. Back in the day, it seemed like Survivor/Big Brother, Jersey Shore, Cake Boss (and other TLC shows) were the objects of interest, and today? There are so many options that fit under the “reality TV” umbrella. Now, we are seeing a reality TV universe: think about the overlap between previous and present Bachelor (franchise) contestants; this new season of The Circle features the winner from Too Hot to Handle–completely different shows, with the same loud and obnoxious contestants. 

It goes to show a paradox in Mittell’s diagnosis that genre surpasses the bounds of any singular text. On one hand, Love Island is undoubtedly a reality TV show, but can it be categorized with Survivor? I guess both incorporate islands…but then what about Love is Blind? Or even Bachelor with singers and artists as opposed to “normies?” Should we start to further specify reality TV categories, or is the unbounded potential for different show premises precisely what makes it “reality?” Will people really do anything for a little clout? These are questions I’ll ponder as I start a show called Dating Around.

Having just blown through all of Criminal Minds and Law and Order: SVU, my fifteen-year-old self was hungry for a new crime tv show to binge. A quick Google search led me to Twin Peaks, marketed as a crime drama show about an FBI agent who goes to a small town in Washington to investigate the death of a teenage girl. This sounded right up my alley and so I began to watch the show, expecting something similar to the crime shows I was familiar with.

The show starts off with a fairly typical setup; a small, quirky town with more than a few secrets, some standard teenage melodrama, and an odd, but charming lead character. In the first few episodes of the show, you could certainly describe it as a crime drama, as the focus of the show is centered around Laura Palmer’s death, taking a “whodunnit” approach in unraveling the mystery. As the show progresses, it veers heavily from this course. The show takes on a dreamlike, abstract quality, with surreal, oftentimes disturbing visuals.

Trying to fit a show that sheds its aesthetic skin every couple of episodes into one genre is extremely difficult. In Mittel’s “Cultural Approach to TV Genre Theory”, he states that genres are not defined by one specific, uniform aspect of the show, and that it can be defined quite differently depending on the audience, and what criteria it is being judged on. Is Twin Peaks a teen drama, as many of the main characters are teenagers, and much of the plot revolves around their lives? Is it a thriller, with its intense chase scenes and suspenseful moments? Is it a horror show, as many of the later episodes deal with disturbing and uncomfortable imagery? Is it in fact, a crime show, as I once thought, as the show does in fact revolve around the murder of a young girl and the investigation surrounding it?

After viewing this show many times since I was fifteen, I have never been able to come up with a solid answer, and I think that is the point. Twin Peaks was and is unlike anything else on television, and it truly pushes the limits of what a television show can be. It contains elements of a plethora of genres and merges them in truly unpredictable ways. Should a show with themes and imagery as surreal and avant-garde as this be grouped into the same category as Law and Order? Some might object, but I for one, am forever thankful that David Lynch baited me in with a simple murder mystery and then exposed me to some of the most groundbreaking and genre-defying television out there.

I have finally joined the Doctor Who bandwagon. I watched, and enjoyed, the first few seasons in high school, but once the show was taken off Netflix, I quickly fell out of touch with it. Despite the “accessibility” of streaming services, it wasn’t until I was aimlessly scrolling through HBO Max the other night that I found Doctor Who listed and decided to jump back in. I first started watching Doctor Who because I love all things fantasy and sci-fi, and throughout the first few seasons (referring to the 2005 reboot), I received exactly that: a man travels through space and time facing new and exciting obstacles in each episode, all with his love interest by his side. 

Doctor Who, however, has one of the largest television fandoms and the opinions and desires of these fans have had a large impact on the show since its release 16 years ago. Within the past few seasons, the attempts by the show’s producers to adapt to their audience’s growing size and diversity has become more than apparent. Though there is still some work to be done in introducing minority characters in a natural way, there is undoubtedly more representation – both with gender and race – than there was in the earlier seasons.

This shift, as Jason Mittell discusses in “A Cultural Approach to Television Genre Theory”, represents the shift in genre characteristics due to cultural changes. Fans play a major role in this process, as fan accounts and social media threads give them platforms to transform shows, rather than continue to affirm current storylines. Ultimately, these shifts result in a general genre hybridization, where all of the cultural elements fans express interest in merge into one.

The most recent episode of Doctor Who that I watched exemplifies this convergence. The episode has sci-fi, horror, humor, and romantic components all within the hour runtime, but the most modern message lies in Amy Pond’s agency. The Doctor refers to both Amy and her husband as Pond, which is her maiden name, putting Amy in the dominant position in their relationship. This is directly juxtaposed by Queen Nefertiti’s treatment by the episode’s antagonist. He constantly refers to her as a “possession” that “needs breaking in”. The Doctor and his companions ultimately rescue Nefertiti, but the overall female prominence in this episode defies the previously dominant masculine subculture of Doctor Who. Instead, the show’s female audience is acknowledged, an audience that comprises a large portion of the evolving culture surrounding the traditional sci-fi genre.

An ongoing story that I have been following quite closely as an independent animator trying to make it on the internet (you can see my stuff here if you wanna see lol: https://www.keanimation.com) is the success of an animator that goes by Vivziepop online. Though she had a few viral shorts that made their way around youtube (like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PKNuZovuSw), today she is most known for her two shows, Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss.

Both projects are animated adult comedies set in hell. In Hazbin Hotel the princess of hell sets up a hotel to rehabilitate the souls in her father’s kingdom. Helluva Boss is about a group of demons who offer the service of murdering people in the living world for a small fee. Both are raunchy stories that probably couldn’t have come to fruition under different circumstances.

After a failed partnership with an exploitative production company, Vivziepop decided to take her future projects into her own hands. So, she crowdfunded a 30 minute pilot for Hazbin Hotel, spent 2 years producing and animating it and released it on youtube. Soon after, she produced Helluva Boss and released it on youtube as well.

Both shows quickly developed a massive fanbase, but have since gone down different paths. Hazbin Hotel was picked up in 2020 by A24 for tv release, and episodes of Helluva Boss continue to be released every month or so.

It is easy to see how choosing youtube as the primary distributing platform for Helluva Boss has clear implications. It is easy to see how many views each episode gets, and the comments give a sense of how the audience receives it. Some dialogue is cleverly written to get around the strict guidelines (“commit die” is a phrase that comes to mind). The links in the description make it clear that Patreon and merch are the main ways the episodes make money. When Hazbin Hotel airs, it will be interesting to see the differences that the distribution method creates between the shows. Will the add breaks work differently? Will the raunchy nature of the show shift to make it more appropriate for tv? Whatever the case, the fact that two projects from the same creator, of the same genre, operating in the same universe, produced around the same time will each be distributed in different ways provides a rare opportunity to compare the flows of two popular methods of storytelling: traditional television, and self-directed youtube.

David Morley conducted a study on audiences to investigate different decodings and interpretations of television texts and how different interpretations of the same text relate to cultural factors. If given the opportunity, I would conduct a similar experiment with an episode from The Golden Girls called “72 Hours.”

In this episode, Rose gets a letter from the hospital where she received a blood transfusion that the blood given to her could possibly be infected by HIV/AIDS, and she needs to be tested. She gets tested, but has to wait 72 hours for the results. The audience watched Rose go through a series of emotions as her friends try to comfort and support her during this difficult time. The episode aired in 1990 during the AIDS crisis, and The Golden Girls producers took a huge risk to air this episode during such a sensitive time. Reviews praised the progressiveness of the episode, and how it taught us how AIDS can be transmitted, that it can happen to anyone, and understanding the disease is important. They quote Blanche’s infamous line, “AIDS is not a bad person’s disease, Rose. It is not God punishing people for their sins.”

Nevertheless, the episode was not perfect. One of the women, Sophia, refused to drink from the same mug as Rose and to use the bathroom after her. In the end, she learns how wrong she is and that she needs to support Rose during her time of fear and not add to it. She even drinks from Rose’s mug. Despite learning her lesson in the end, Sophia’s behavior is unacceptable and would not pass if the episode was made today.

If I conducted an experiment similar to Morley’s, I would investigate TV audiences of different age demographics and how they interpreted the message of the episode. Possibly, young adults who did not grow up with the show and only found it on Hulu recently, may understand how the show is progressive for its time, but thought the episode could have went with a different storyline for Sophia. They may have more of a negotiated or oppositional decoding. People who grew up with the show, like my parents, may see the dominant message of the episode, remember The Golden Girls for being ahead of its time, and see no faults with the episode. I would be interested to investigate how television episodes labeled as “progressive” and “ahead of their time” hold up today.