Several of my previous blogs have dealt with female villains on television, and have mentioned the phenomena (by no means exclusive to TV) of ‘evil cleavage’. For some time I have promised myself I will write on this topic at more length, and was prompted to finally do so by some recent work I’ve been doing on older female characters and actors, and by several news items in the last few months about aging female actors.
Episode 4 of the Icelandic drama Trapped (2015), currently showing on BBC 4, finished with a spectacular avalanche. The avalanche had been predicted by one of the characters who then triggered it in the hope of diverting it away from the town. But the event itself generated hardly any suspense about the fate of characters who might be caught in its path.
Jenji Kohan’s Orange is the New Black (OITNB) (2013 –) has gained a reputation for unabashedly screening female faces and body-types that centric media often overlooks. From its opening sequence, OITNB spotlights a vast array of female bodies.
In our ‘post-television’ age when the appearance of television drama and film, both shot on digital camera, is increasingly homogenous, ‘old’ multi-camera studio drama must seem like more of an oddity than ever before.
At some point during the first episode of Judd Apatow’s new Netflix series Love – co-written and co-produced with Paul Rust and Lesley Arfin – the show lost me: or rather, to be more precise, it irritated me, because in fact, it didn’t lose me at all.
When it comes to television, I have always been a ‘glancer’ rather than a ‘gazer’. Born somewhere between Generation X and Generation Y, I grew up with what is now commonly referred to as ‘traditional’ television. As a child, much of my television consumption served as accompaniment: I remember drawing pictures or setting up my toys in the living room, so I could enjoy the pleasant flow of television programmes.
Channel 4’s recent foray into foreign-language television drama, Deutschland 83 , highlights a preoccupation of contemporary culture, and of contemporary television, with identity. The mediation of this theme/meme through popular television in particular has taken many dramatic and representational forms.
I feel I should start this blog with an admission: I am a lifelong X-Files fan. I first watched it at the age of 12, and over 20 years later I’m as obsessed with Mulder and Scully as I was then. The news last year that the series was coming back for a 6 episode event season was met with a combination of excitement and consternation by fans (me included). Would Season 10 pick up where I Want to Believe (2008) left off?
Cast your minds back, if you will, to the year 2010, when the BBC was poised to launch a brand new detective on our screens. Dark and tousle-haired, his deductive powers would prove a constant source of amazement to his more grounded partner (and the viewing audience), while causing the local constabulary no small amount of irritation.
At the moment I’m editing a book on Music in Comedy Television. As part of the project I decided to go back to iconic pieces of comedy television I remember having had a musical impact, starting with 80s sitcoms (judge me, go on). I was expecting that some of the bits would have aged badly – comedy often does, particularly as standards for social and political correctness develops.
