I’ll admit some of my reasons for writing this post are rather selfish. Parks & Recreation has quickly become my new favorite comedy (I’m sorry Community. I still love you), and I want others to understand its awesomeness (or at least give it a fair shot). Regardless, the show has a lot of good traits that I think are worth talking about. So here I give a few thoughts on what makes this show so fantastic.

Leslie Knope is Awesome!

I am not the first to fall in love with the charming, good-hearted, optimistic Deputy Parks Director. I could tell you what makes her so amazing, but others have said it so much better. Sady, over at Feministe.com, wrote a list of why she loves Leslie and it included things such as “You invented Galentine’s Day” (an annual celebration during which Leslie tells all the women in her life how much she loves and appreciates them), “you love your job without shame or reservation,” “you have a best friend, and she’s a GIRL!” and “you care.” Sady expands on all these ideas in her post, and she also takes some time to explore the differences between Leslie Knope and Liz Lemon.

Liz Lemon, the oft-discussed lead on 30 Rock has been the subject of much debate. Is she a feminist icon or not? What do we do with her? Sady suggests Leslie Knope may be a less frustrating alternative to serve as fictional feminist role model, and she offers a lot of convincing support. I recommend you read it if you haven’t. But then I recommend you read an article written by Kate Dailey on Newsweek.com. She echoes a lot of the same sentiments Sady expresses and offers some her own reasons for admiring Leslie. Dailey points out that Leslie is competent, and admired and supported by her colleagues. Leslie is also concerned with more than weddings and babies and the relationships she has are mature and genuine and they end just because they’re not right for each other, not because either party is crazy or neurotic. Many of these things are brought up specifically because they are the opposite of what we see from Liz Lemon, so Dailey takes things a step further and asks the question, “So what would Leslie Knope think about Liz Lemon?” and I think her answer is awesome;

That’s the best part, and the most telling: Leslie would be proud of Liz’s accomplishments. She would respect her desire for a husband and baby, and admire her career achievements. She’d encourage her efforts to get more respect as a female executive, while encouraging Lemon to reach out to the other women in her office. Leslie Knope understands that women’s advancement is about the advancement of all women, and that women need support from one another just as much—in fact, much more—than they need approval and access from the men that surround them. She might get frustrated with Liz; they may butt heads or disagree on certain points. But at the end of the day, Leslie realizes that she doesn’t need to compete with “Liz Lemonism,” and she’s not interested in besting Liz, shaming Liz, or proving Liz wrong. Instead, Leslie wants for Liz exactly what Liz wants for Liz: the freedom and confidence [to] make choices, the ability to command respect, and the opportunity to achieve all her goals.

Because Leslie Knope, overambitious dreamer that she is, believes that all women deserve those same advantages.

The other characters rock too Read the rest of this entry »

Back in high school I occasionally watched the first couple of seasons of Everwood on the WB. I found it enjoyable but when I moved away to college my tepid devotion to the show got lost in the transition. Due to a summer without work or school I’ve recently rediscovered the series, and I’ve found particular enjoyment in watching the relationship between bumbling but well-intentioned womanizer Bright Abbott and sweet, unassuming book worm Hannah Rogers. And lately with all the talk of body image on the site, I thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at an episode that deals specifically with that topic; the season 4 episode “Getting to Know You.”

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California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has recently appointed actress Geena Davis to a state commission aiming to promote women’s equality.  Sweet!

According to Wikipedia:

In 2004, while watching children’s television programs and videos with her daughter, Davis noticed what she thought was an imbalance in the ratio of male to female characters. From that starting point, Davis went on to sponsor the largest research project ever undertaken on gender in children’s entertainment (resulting in 4 discrete studies, including one on children’s television) at the Annenberg School for Communication of University of Southern California. The study, directed by Dr. Stacy Smith, shows that there are nearly 3 males to every 1 female character in the nearly 400 G, PG, PG-13, and R-Rated movies the undergraduate team of Annenberg students coded.

In 2005, Davis teamed up with the non-profit group Dads and Daughters to launch a venture dedicated to balancing the number of male and female characters in children’s TV and movie programming.

It’s nice to see someone with power, and with a background in the entertainment/film industry no less, acknowledging that this is a problem worthy of attention and taking steps towards change.  Let’s hope that Geena is able to really get the ball rolling and that change starts to happen!

(Check out Alethea Joy’s post on research inspired by Ms. Davis.)

It’s been discussed to death, and I haven’t read everything that’s been written (I don’t have that kind of time), but I want to make a few comments about the Daily Show/Jezebel/Olivia Munn situation.

I take that back. I have nothing to say about Olivia Munn. I’ve never seen her perform and while I’ve read some quotes attributed to her that rub me the wrong way, I also realize I read those quotes in a very negatively biased context and thus I’m slow to make any sort of judgement based solely on them.

What I would like to respond to is the original Jezebel post written by Irin Carmon, and the response by the women of The Daily Show.

I’m a big fan of questioning what part of the story I’m missing, and there were many times while reading the Jezebel piece that I wondered what part of the story was being left out. For one it seemed as though no one who has worked there within the last seven years was involved in the piece. Not to excuse any negative behavior or experiences of the past, but seven years is a long time, and there may have been some important changes in attitudes or how things are run.

Another thing that struck me was the connections that were made. One person interviewed said that the real Jon Stewart is nothing like the guy on TV. The guy in reality “runs the show with joyless rage.” Also included in the piece is an anecdote about Mr. Stewart throwing a script in the face of an executive producer. While I don’t want to condone any such behavior, I am left wondering if that type of behavior is directed solely at women. If he really runs the show with joyless rage where is our evidence that every writer hasn’t at some point had something hurled in their direction? And was there perhaps something that instigated the script-throwing behind the fact the victim was a woman? It is not good behavior, certainly, but it is also not necessarily sexist.

Read the rest of this entry »

LOST has reached its end, and whether it was a fond or a furious farewell for you, here are some other perspectives on the show and its treatment of (in particular) its female and POC characters.  As I (unfortunately) have not yet seen the 2.5 hour finale, none of these links have any finale spoilers, but other season 6 spoilers abound, so be warned if you were waiting until you could binge on the whole season at once now that it’s over.

TelevIsm: The Numbers–Lost and Race and Death Off the Island [bitch]

Portraying marginalized people in the face of a mostly white slate of network television shows is great, but it’s only a start. Painting these lives comes with responsibility: to not play into racist stereotypes, to create new and interesting portrayals and stories, and to build on the promise of a main cast that is only a little over half white.

LOST Has A Mommy Track [the sexist]

Claire’s most interesting story line was having a baby and a boyfriend. Sun’s most interesting storyline is having a husband and a baby. Kate’s most interesting story line is having two potential boyfriends, between whom she cannot choose, and also a baby eventually. Juliet’s most important storyline was that her boyfriend might have thought for 1.5 seconds about liking another girl so she had to fall down a mine shaft and explode three times on screen.

TelevIsm: The Disappointing Case of Kate Austen [bitch]

I really loved her at the beginning of the show. She was so capable yet so compelling, and she totally seemed to have an inner life. And now she’s just useless. She does whatever the dudes do, or quite frequently, whatever they tell her to do. Whenever she manages to form a unique opinion of her own, it pretty much always ends up not really mattering in the end and being overruled.

Farewell, Kate Austen: We Won’t Miss You, And That’s Too Bad [jezebel]

Austen isn’t the only problematic female character on the show; the fates of the majority of the women on the show are tied directly to the male leads, and women who have been left on their own (Ilana, Claire, Danielle, Jacob’s mother) tend to end up either dead or crazy… Penny’s fate is always tied to both Desmond and her father, Alex’s fate is always tied to Ben, Sun’s fate is always tied to Jin’s, and motherhood is always presented in an odd and frightening way and never seems to end well for anyone.

Friday Night Lights is an amazing TV show, and if you’re not watching it, you should be.

I’ve been in love with the show since about halfway through the first season. I, like many fans, grew a little concerned as the early part of second season brought in some elements that seemed out-of-place, but I chock that up to the network getting involved and since those few missteps the show has returned to being one of the most sweet, gut-wrenching, beautiful, raw, poignant and genuinely optimistic shows on television. While I can try to articulate its awesomeness, however, I know others have already said it so much better…

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m struggling with what to think of Lipstick Jungle, NBC’s failed primetime soap chronicling the lives of three of New York’s wealthiest women.

The show was based on a book by Candace Bushnell, the same author behind the book that inspired Sex and the City. The show is different from SATC, however, if only in the fact that it was produced for network television, limiting some of the content and requiring constant breaks for commercials.

The three women in the show are Wendy Healy, President of Parador Pictures; Nico Reilly, editor-in-chief of Bonfire magazine; and Victory Ford, fashion designer. Each of the women struggle with running their own companies, maintaining their friendships, and dealing with the men in their lives.

Where Sex and the City had a more revolving cast of love interests, each of the women of Lipstick Jungle has more-or-less one man. Shane is Wendy’s musician husband who was essentially a house-husband until Wendy’s professional situation changed. Joe Bennett is an incredibly wealthy businessman that pursues and financially invests in Victory Ford. And Kirby Atwood is Nico’s younger, poorer, flame who, despite being featured prominently in every episode, only joins the main cast in season 2 (methinks they weren’t expecting him to stick around so long).

Only 20 episodes were produced, so it didn’t take me too long to make it through the entire series, but I don’t know that I ever fell in love with it. I never outright hated it either. Read the rest of this entry »

Lately I’ve developed an affection for TV shows that aired on ABC between 1989 and 1993. Doogie Howser, and the Wonder Years have been faves for some time, and nostalgia has led me to add thirtysomething and Life Goes On to my Netflix queue. Most recently, however, I’ve fell in love with a show I’ve actually been hunting down for years: Homefront.

Homefront aired on ABC from 1991-1993. Its short run means it was rarely syndicated and no one has gone through the trouble to release it on DVD, so creative googling and luck are necessary to hunt down VHS recordings. It was rather critically acclaimed during its initial run but failed to pull in the ratings necessary to guarantee renewal. It seems a very similar story to my favorite show on TV these days, Friday Night Lights. Kyle Chandler stars in both, but whereas Homefront died due to lack of viewership, Friday Night Lights had the advantage of being produced in a more flexible era of television, allowing it to live 5 (short) seasons–for which I am eternally grateful.

But back to Homefront. It’s an evening soap that revolves around a town, River Run, Ohio, at the end of WWII. The first episode begins with the young soldiers returning home from overseas and begins to explore the early post-war era.

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Star Trek: Enterprise – the final episode “These are the Voyages…”

Original Airdate: May 13, 2005

The final episode of Enterprise doesn’t quite seem as epic as it could have. TNG and Voyager both ended with a look ahead to the future as well as a nod to the past. DS9 left everyone parting ways with a farewell that served the characters and audience equally well. Enterprise, however, falls flat.

The episode takes us 6 years into the future (from the perspective of the last episode, 10 years after the pilot). The Enterprise is returning to earth where it will be decommissioned as the new, faster fleet comes to take its place. Captain Archer will give a speech honoring a new charter between humans and a handful other alien races. A hitch in the trip home comes when a former acquaintance, Shran, shows up. Apparently Archer owes this guy a favor, so the Enterprise helps him get his kidnapped daughter back.

(Click the link to check out the rest of the entry, but I’m putting SPOILER ALERT on this post. If you ever plan on watching Enterprise you might want elements of this episode to remain a surprise. The episode itself actually spoils those moments early on, but, well… I’m warning you anyway.)

Read the rest of this entry »

CBS doesn’t want America to think about Choice, so we have to do it virally.  Here are some awesome counterpoints to the anti-choice rhetoric that is being crammed down our throats with Doritos and beer this SuperBowl Sunday, starting with Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards explanation of the meaning of Choice:

For a multitude of reasons I will not be watching the SuperBowl today, but welcome any tips on who the winners and losers in advertising are this year.