So THAT'S what a kerfuffle looks like
Jan. 26th, 2005 02:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thedeadlyhookGorgeous day outside. First really nice, sunny day we've had in awhile. Went for a nice long bike ride, which makes me feel all virtuous. (We'll see how long that lasts.) In fandom news...
I see from my flist that fandom seems to be blowing up about Veronica Mars (see![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rusty_halo for a link). Or rather, flinging nasties at each other about various impressions of the accuracy of depiction of SoCal life and the female high school experience, yadda yadda within VM. I have nothing to add to that argument, since I don't watch VM - sadly, because I would really like to support a show with a spunky female lead, but I have a short temper for high school-based shows, to which I've only made exceptions for Buffy, Smallville, and... well, Power Rangers, I guess, to go farther back. High school I hated. Passionately. Revisiting it is about as enticing to me as having teeth pulled, so unless there are werewolves, vampires, crypto-freaks, or transforming kung-fu monsters, I can't even bring myself to think about caring. No offense to VM fans, because plenty of people I read on LJ really seem to like it, so I'm pretty sure it's a solid show.
But I do remain puzzled about the regional aspect of the kerfuffle, the is-this-what-SoCal life is really like question. I'm not sure why anyone should care either way. Either you connect to a situation or you don't, and you know, I didn't go to school in SoCal. And unfortuately, just about every high school drama is set there, which sometimes makes for head-scratching on my part. I mean, I liked Donnie Darko but didn't completely "get" a lot of it - I'm from hicksville, and we didn't do things that way. Was it good art? Sure. Should I be blamed for not getting it? Huh-uh. If the work isn't speaking to me, it doesn't say anything in particular about the artist's integrity, just that it's not speaking to me. I think this is a connection that keeps getting missed when discussing TV. The audience's only responsibilty is to be entertained and/or engaged, or not. If that ain't happenin', well, there's a lot of reasons that could be. Blaming the audience isn't probably the right one.
For the most part, I've stopped wondering why TV and film don't bother to depict much of American life outside of its own sort of navel-gazing creative centers, New York and L.A. It's a function of the producers and creators, no question - they're doing what they more or less "know." I don't mind it, for the most part, because life in the heartlands can be kinda boring, and New York and L.A. are glamorous - that's why celebrities et al live there. But the flipside is that sometimes I wonder how out-of-touch the industry really is, and can see why conservatives get uptight about "values" sometimes, since even the fantasy versions of "small town America" seldom match anything recognizeable about small town life. I remember laughing really hard at the name of Lana's original boyfriend in Smallville (can't remember it now) as the sort of male-model name that would get one laughed at fairly consistently in a real small-town setting, and also that show's high school cliche thang of sexy!cheerleaders and school politics. And I will never be able to get past that school newspaper. Sweeties, I remember three things about high school: 1) being bored 2) being neurotic about what everyone thought of me and 3) being hormonal and hysterical. High school on TV is too well adjusted for starters, too pretty for seconds (believable, maybe, in Beverly Hills, not Kansas), and where are all the classes? The greasy junk food runs? The hanging-around-parking-lots because there's nowhere else to go? Only in fiction could this be an attractive setting.
But then again, I'm probably oversensitive. I used to get teeth-grindingly annoyed at Twin Peaks for what I perceived to be its viewpoint that people from small towns are all knuckle-dragging hicks running off at the gums about weasels and lumber and cherry pie. I've since been told that I was just seeing the wrong episodes (by some freak of circumstance, every time I tuned in I seemed to get the Log Lady or the Pine Weasel, nothing that anyone ever told me was "cool") and plan to give the series an actual fair watch-through... but still. The whole NY/LA-centric thing that Hollywood has... sometimes it feels like we haven't escaped that high school cliquery thing at all. Whatever.
Now I'm wondering how long it's been since there's been a show about high schoolers set in New York? Do we have to go all the way back to Welcome Back Kotter? Or Fame, maybe? Just wondering. Isn't it about time to reverse the trend started by 90210?
I see from my flist that fandom seems to be blowing up about Veronica Mars (see
rusty_halo for a link). Or rather, flinging nasties at each other about various impressions of the accuracy of depiction of SoCal life and the female high school experience, yadda yadda within VM. I have nothing to add to that argument, since I don't watch VM - sadly, because I would really like to support a show with a spunky female lead, but I have a short temper for high school-based shows, to which I've only made exceptions for Buffy, Smallville, and... well, Power Rangers, I guess, to go farther back. High school I hated. Passionately. Revisiting it is about as enticing to me as having teeth pulled, so unless there are werewolves, vampires, crypto-freaks, or transforming kung-fu monsters, I can't even bring myself to think about caring. No offense to VM fans, because plenty of people I read on LJ really seem to like it, so I'm pretty sure it's a solid show. But I do remain puzzled about the regional aspect of the kerfuffle, the is-this-what-SoCal life is really like question. I'm not sure why anyone should care either way. Either you connect to a situation or you don't, and you know, I didn't go to school in SoCal. And unfortuately, just about every high school drama is set there, which sometimes makes for head-scratching on my part. I mean, I liked Donnie Darko but didn't completely "get" a lot of it - I'm from hicksville, and we didn't do things that way. Was it good art? Sure. Should I be blamed for not getting it? Huh-uh. If the work isn't speaking to me, it doesn't say anything in particular about the artist's integrity, just that it's not speaking to me. I think this is a connection that keeps getting missed when discussing TV. The audience's only responsibilty is to be entertained and/or engaged, or not. If that ain't happenin', well, there's a lot of reasons that could be. Blaming the audience isn't probably the right one.
For the most part, I've stopped wondering why TV and film don't bother to depict much of American life outside of its own sort of navel-gazing creative centers, New York and L.A. It's a function of the producers and creators, no question - they're doing what they more or less "know." I don't mind it, for the most part, because life in the heartlands can be kinda boring, and New York and L.A. are glamorous - that's why celebrities et al live there. But the flipside is that sometimes I wonder how out-of-touch the industry really is, and can see why conservatives get uptight about "values" sometimes, since even the fantasy versions of "small town America" seldom match anything recognizeable about small town life. I remember laughing really hard at the name of Lana's original boyfriend in Smallville (can't remember it now) as the sort of male-model name that would get one laughed at fairly consistently in a real small-town setting, and also that show's high school cliche thang of sexy!cheerleaders and school politics. And I will never be able to get past that school newspaper. Sweeties, I remember three things about high school: 1) being bored 2) being neurotic about what everyone thought of me and 3) being hormonal and hysterical. High school on TV is too well adjusted for starters, too pretty for seconds (believable, maybe, in Beverly Hills, not Kansas), and where are all the classes? The greasy junk food runs? The hanging-around-parking-lots because there's nowhere else to go? Only in fiction could this be an attractive setting.
But then again, I'm probably oversensitive. I used to get teeth-grindingly annoyed at Twin Peaks for what I perceived to be its viewpoint that people from small towns are all knuckle-dragging hicks running off at the gums about weasels and lumber and cherry pie. I've since been told that I was just seeing the wrong episodes (by some freak of circumstance, every time I tuned in I seemed to get the Log Lady or the Pine Weasel, nothing that anyone ever told me was "cool") and plan to give the series an actual fair watch-through... but still. The whole NY/LA-centric thing that Hollywood has... sometimes it feels like we haven't escaped that high school cliquery thing at all. Whatever.
Now I'm wondering how long it's been since there's been a show about high schoolers set in New York? Do we have to go all the way back to Welcome Back Kotter? Or Fame, maybe? Just wondering. Isn't it about time to reverse the trend started by 90210?
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-28 11:21 pm (UTC)Maybe it's just TV's infamous conservatism when it comes to new ideas that stifles anything that doesn't come off like a rehash of something else. I think it's only the launch of new networks in the last decade or so, of Fox and WB and made-for-cable series such as those on HBO, that finally kick-started any innovation. And now even those outlets are getting a bit lazy, I think...