Media for adults
Apr. 30th, 2022 09:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livI'm starting to formulate an idea of what I look for in media (TV, films, shows) is, essentially the opposite of superhero franchises. Basically I want media that's unambiguously targeted at adults, with well-realized characters, that covers complex themes including dark and serious stuff, but that isn't primarily about showing lots of sex, violence and especially sexy violence as the main visual theme.
I don't want to harsh the squee of anyone who is really into superhero shows, and it's not that superheroes themselves are the problem. It's the ubiquity of major investment of production budget, promotion and everything else flowing towards stuff that doesn't really appeal to me. Or into media aimed at children, according to a theory of childhood that says that children's media should be morally simple and wholesome and uplifting.
So what do I want out of not-superheroes, apart from less on-screen, explicit violence and explosions and T&A? Shows that establish their own world and premise, that I can just drop into without first becoming an expert in decades of lore and mythos. New faces, not the same big-name actors who already have a huge following. And actors, whether new or established, who aren't all pretty, young and white with idealized-according-to-Hollywood bodies and faces to the point where I can barely tell them apart. I want gender and racially and regionally and internationally diverse casts, not smurfette ensembles of five white guys with personalities and 'the girl one' or 'the Black one'.
I want characters with human motivations and minor imperfections, not archetypes with a designated Tragic Flaw. I want sex to be part of human experience but not the ultimate goal or reward. I want everybody to be agents in their own sexuality (or absence of it), not objects or prizes to be pursued, or simply for the gratification of a stereotyped idea of what is assumed to be sexually valued by young adult men.
Moral complexity, definitely. Not necessarily characters having lots of onscreen angst about whether it is Right to cause harm in the name of a grand cause, and not villains who are at the extreme end of the range of human cruelty but are ineffectually portrayed as sympathetic when that's little more than a codeword for 'hot'. But something more nuanced than a grand battle between Good and Evil where if someone is defined as Good that automatically justifies behaviour that in the real world would not actually be Good.
Focus on character interactions and development. People who seem like real, multidimensionally complex people. I don't mind about the setting, it can be speculative and completely distanced from the real world. When I was a kid I gravitated towards books that have believable-to-me people in outrageous fantasy settings; my favourite example of the genre was probably Gillian Cross' The demon headmaster. The problem now as an adult, both with books and with TV, is that things that are character focused tend to also be 'literary' which often means they're about middle-class white north Americans living completely uninteresting suburban or minor academic lives. That's not a genre I inherently hate, but if it's the only way I'm going to character focused storytelling that isn't full of explosions and other flashy action sequences, I'm probably going to get bored of it.
So far I have found two shows that actually fit these not-superhero desiderata. They are both on annoying streaming services where we had to subscribe for just the one thing, but at least they exist. One is Ted Lasso S2; I was not at all interested in the premise, and I was worried it might be cringey, but it's actually a really good, definitely adult, definitely complex and interesting character piece. Like a lot of viewers I thought it went downhill from 2.9, because suddenly it's about various kinds of trauma rather than about characters repairing their lives after background trauma. In my opinion the show is just not on a solid enough foundation to deal directly with parental abuse, suicide, adultery and various kinds of violence. And it just doesn't pull off the sudden swerve from comedy with a dark edge to full-on drama.
And right now we're watching Station Eleven. It's an unlikely sort of show altogether, a mini-series about a book set in the aftermath of a devastating pandemic, that was itself made during the real-world pandemic. We have watched up to episode 6 'Survival is insufficient'; we're not exactly bingeing it because it's really dark and also requires a lot of concentration because it's all told non-linearly and full of unreliable viewpoints. What has really impressed me about it is that most of the cast look like real people. Nobody looks like a film star, most people even if they're young and fit are not particularly pretty, and there's a whole range of body types, and it actually feels credible that these people have lived through 20 years since the collapse of civilization. Definitely a show for adults, it has more than earned its 18 rating, but while it contains violence, it's not about lingering shots of people brutally attacking each other, it's about the people who live in a world which, like this one, sometimes contains extreme violence, but contains other elements of human experience too.
I don't want to harsh the squee of anyone who is really into superhero shows, and it's not that superheroes themselves are the problem. It's the ubiquity of major investment of production budget, promotion and everything else flowing towards stuff that doesn't really appeal to me. Or into media aimed at children, according to a theory of childhood that says that children's media should be morally simple and wholesome and uplifting.
So what do I want out of not-superheroes, apart from less on-screen, explicit violence and explosions and T&A? Shows that establish their own world and premise, that I can just drop into without first becoming an expert in decades of lore and mythos. New faces, not the same big-name actors who already have a huge following. And actors, whether new or established, who aren't all pretty, young and white with idealized-according-to-Hollywood bodies and faces to the point where I can barely tell them apart. I want gender and racially and regionally and internationally diverse casts, not smurfette ensembles of five white guys with personalities and 'the girl one' or 'the Black one'.
I want characters with human motivations and minor imperfections, not archetypes with a designated Tragic Flaw. I want sex to be part of human experience but not the ultimate goal or reward. I want everybody to be agents in their own sexuality (or absence of it), not objects or prizes to be pursued, or simply for the gratification of a stereotyped idea of what is assumed to be sexually valued by young adult men.
Moral complexity, definitely. Not necessarily characters having lots of onscreen angst about whether it is Right to cause harm in the name of a grand cause, and not villains who are at the extreme end of the range of human cruelty but are ineffectually portrayed as sympathetic when that's little more than a codeword for 'hot'. But something more nuanced than a grand battle between Good and Evil where if someone is defined as Good that automatically justifies behaviour that in the real world would not actually be Good.
Focus on character interactions and development. People who seem like real, multidimensionally complex people. I don't mind about the setting, it can be speculative and completely distanced from the real world. When I was a kid I gravitated towards books that have believable-to-me people in outrageous fantasy settings; my favourite example of the genre was probably Gillian Cross' The demon headmaster. The problem now as an adult, both with books and with TV, is that things that are character focused tend to also be 'literary' which often means they're about middle-class white north Americans living completely uninteresting suburban or minor academic lives. That's not a genre I inherently hate, but if it's the only way I'm going to character focused storytelling that isn't full of explosions and other flashy action sequences, I'm probably going to get bored of it.
So far I have found two shows that actually fit these not-superhero desiderata. They are both on annoying streaming services where we had to subscribe for just the one thing, but at least they exist. One is Ted Lasso S2; I was not at all interested in the premise, and I was worried it might be cringey, but it's actually a really good, definitely adult, definitely complex and interesting character piece. Like a lot of viewers I thought it went downhill from 2.9, because suddenly it's about various kinds of trauma rather than about characters repairing their lives after background trauma. In my opinion the show is just not on a solid enough foundation to deal directly with parental abuse, suicide, adultery and various kinds of violence. And it just doesn't pull off the sudden swerve from comedy with a dark edge to full-on drama.
And right now we're watching Station Eleven. It's an unlikely sort of show altogether, a mini-series about a book set in the aftermath of a devastating pandemic, that was itself made during the real-world pandemic. We have watched up to episode 6 'Survival is insufficient'; we're not exactly bingeing it because it's really dark and also requires a lot of concentration because it's all told non-linearly and full of unreliable viewpoints. What has really impressed me about it is that most of the cast look like real people. Nobody looks like a film star, most people even if they're young and fit are not particularly pretty, and there's a whole range of body types, and it actually feels credible that these people have lived through 20 years since the collapse of civilization. Definitely a show for adults, it has more than earned its 18 rating, but while it contains violence, it's not about lingering shots of people brutally attacking each other, it's about the people who live in a world which, like this one, sometimes contains extreme violence, but contains other elements of human experience too.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-05-02 01:30 pm (UTC)I have been primarily avoiding Station Eleven because of reports on aspects of it that may well be spoilery for how far you have got in it, so may come back to that when you are finished.
As shows that fit your criteria go, the strongest recommendation I would have from what's on my shelves is Slings and Arrows, though I have no idea how findable that might be from there; it is set at a names-barely-filed-off version of the Stratford, Ontario Shakespeare festival and centred on a troupe of smart, dedicated, and distinctly eccentric people attempting to produce plays despite various forms of adversity including internecine disagreement. There are three six-episode seasons, centred around Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear respectively, and their exploration of the themes of these plays certainly felt to me like mature handling of adult complexity. It's a 2003-2006 show, and the cast diversity is better on some axes than others, I can only recall a couple of non-Caucasian characters but it has many excellent women; I'd also note that (IMO in keeping with the source plays) the second season is quite good but does not hit the heights of the first and third. Also, there is a huge twist at the end of the first episode that is fundamental to defining most of what comes afterward, and is the sort of thing that almost all discussion I have seen online spoils, but if at all possible it's worth coming to unspoiled; I have had much better results watching at least the first two episodes together than stopping after the first episode, as introducing people to this goes.