(no subject)
I've been watching Firefly, and honestly, I love the show. Of course, to me, the medical mystery of River Tam is the real highlight of the show, and while I recognize that perhaps River's history is best left uncovered at short spurts, a faster progression to the show would have really helped it.
Firefly's greatest strength is definitely character relationships. The characters themselves, to me, seem minimalist. Now, there's a good chance that's due to the actors. Zoey's portrayal, for example, is genius. The characters I tend to be most interested in are stoic women. They are fairly rare in television today, perhaps because many actors don't understand the power that silence has (or their directors, I suppose). I'm pretty certain that's the reason I was never interested in Gilmore Girls. Both Rory and Lorelai are, to me, fairly boring and unnuanced characters who don't have much to say, but talk incessantly.
Zoey is a nice change. Temperance Brennan on Bones is another example. In addition to watching stoic women, I like watching women who perform jobs generally done by men. The converse also follows. Brennan works as a forensic anthropologist (Uh, and she solves murders. Yeah.), and Zoey is a warrior and a pilot. I think part of the reason I respond to these roles and the women playing them is that in giving them quirky behavior makes them seem a bit more real; it's hard to imagine a woman going against her own nature when it differs so strongly from that of other women (gender roles playing a significant role in all of this).
I guess that the show that really doesn't exemplify this at the moment is Glee. The show's characters, particularly the female ones, have become excessively trite. In fact, the one character who has any significance to me is Coach Bieste, but by making the football coach into a stereotypically "ugly female" character, they've made a potentially interesting character choice into one that actually falls within the limits of normalcy.
I guess, then, that the message here is that I'm tired of seeing women in roles in which I've seen hundreds of women before. Yay.
Firefly's greatest strength is definitely character relationships. The characters themselves, to me, seem minimalist. Now, there's a good chance that's due to the actors. Zoey's portrayal, for example, is genius. The characters I tend to be most interested in are stoic women. They are fairly rare in television today, perhaps because many actors don't understand the power that silence has (or their directors, I suppose). I'm pretty certain that's the reason I was never interested in Gilmore Girls. Both Rory and Lorelai are, to me, fairly boring and unnuanced characters who don't have much to say, but talk incessantly.
Zoey is a nice change. Temperance Brennan on Bones is another example. In addition to watching stoic women, I like watching women who perform jobs generally done by men. The converse also follows. Brennan works as a forensic anthropologist (Uh, and she solves murders. Yeah.), and Zoey is a warrior and a pilot. I think part of the reason I respond to these roles and the women playing them is that in giving them quirky behavior makes them seem a bit more real; it's hard to imagine a woman going against her own nature when it differs so strongly from that of other women (gender roles playing a significant role in all of this).
I guess that the show that really doesn't exemplify this at the moment is Glee. The show's characters, particularly the female ones, have become excessively trite. In fact, the one character who has any significance to me is Coach Bieste, but by making the football coach into a stereotypically "ugly female" character, they've made a potentially interesting character choice into one that actually falls within the limits of normalcy.
I guess, then, that the message here is that I'm tired of seeing women in roles in which I've seen hundreds of women before. Yay.