Sam Downing

I’m super-mega-psyched about the return of Glee next month (and desperately hoping the four-month hiatus won’t have killed the show somehow). However, this spoiler bothers me:

Kurt will concoct a Parent Trap-like plan by setting up his dad with Finn’s mother. But true love isn’t actually on his agenda – Kurt just wants to bunk up with his beloved jock.

This isn’t the first time Kurt has attempted to seduce Finn, and the storyline is just as annoying as it was the first go around. The “gay dude tricks his way into straight dude’s pants, hur hur” plot is lazy at best, and dangerous at worst, if you’ll pardon the hysteria. Straight guys get uncomfortable if they think gay guys are plotting to get hold of their junk, while gays get irritated at straights who assume they’re homo-catnip simply by virtue of having a penis.

It staggers me that Glee, a popular show with a strong gay sensibility and a large gay fanbase, would stoop to a plot like this – especially since series co-creator Ryan Murphy is a proudly gay man who says he was a proudly gay teen. I want the show to do better than this, because I know it can. Maybe, fingers crossed, there’s more to this story than that one-line spoiler indicates. I hope so.

(Not that I blame Kurt for wanting to get it awn with Finn. Cory Monteith is way cute.)

Hungry Beast, an Australian TV show featuring a bunch of smug undergraduate types waxing lyrical about current affairs, ran a report in its most recent episode titled “Things we think might be bullshit: Adults reading kids’ books”:

Harry Potter, Twilight and other novels are deemed books for “children”, and adults (so the reasoning goes) need to grow up and presumably start reading “adult books” lest they develop a creepy Peter Pan vibe akin to Michael Jackson’s. Why, if adults continue reading “kids’” books, one day Spot Goes to School might be taught in universities – because after all, there’s no difference whatsoever between a book for preschoolers and a book for older teens!

Adults reading children’s books, we’re informed, is like owning golliwogs: “a bit wrong, but mostly just embarrassing”.

STFU, Hungry Beast. First of all, do your research: children’s books are very different from the genre known an “young adult” (note the use of “adult“). And guess what? There are loads and loads of YA books that aren’t Harry Potter or Twilight! (Shock!)

Why is it weird when adults read books about teenagers, given that adults were all once (another shock!) teenagers too? Is it also “weird” for senior citizens to read books about twenty- or thirtysomething characters?

Lastly, and most importantly, why are stories about young people automatically “childish”, and/or valued below stories about adults?

I’ve known a lot of boys who are obsessive Simpsons fans – and “obsessive” usually manifests itself as “able to drop a random Simpsons line into pretty much any conversation¹”. These boys have seen every episode of The Simpsons a million times, or at least season every episode from The Simpsons‘ golden age (which roughly encompasses seasons three to nine) a million times. And will happily watch these episodes again and again and again and again, probably until they are very old men. I count myself among these girls.

I haven’t met many girls like this.

That’s not to say they don’t exist. I’ve known obsessive female fans of The Simpsons, and I’m sure there’s plenty of them out there. Just not as many as there are male fans.

I wonder why this is. Is there something about The Simpsons that appeals more to male psyches than to female ones? Its irreverence, its mix of the high and lowbrow? The fact that the focus has always been more on Homer and Bart than Marge, Lisa and Maggie? The fact that it’s a cartoon?

Theories? Refutations?

1. Thus proving the maxim that there really is a Simpsons quote for every occasion [↩]

Lost fans, you gotta watch this:

Is is February 2 yet?

I watch a lot of television, the bulk of it reruns of classic American sitcoms on pay TV. I’m noticing a pattern here: pretty much every American sitcom character is a jerk.

And I’m not just talking about Seinfeld, where the lead foursome are acknowledged as jerks and you love them for it anyway. I’m referring specifically to Friends (though there’s plenty of other examples out there. See: pretty much every other sitcom ever to come out of the US), which on the surface is often held up as a shining example of the closeness that every modern clique should aspire to.

But even a cursory examination of the show (which I’m generally a fan of, by the way, lest you think I’m just dumping on it here) reveals that Monica, Ross, Chandler, Rachel, Joey and Phoebe are pretty much huge jerks. Like, no wonder they don’t have any friends outside their immediate social circle.

In the episode that inspired this post, Rachel steals Phoebe’s answers when they go to a book club together, Joey shoves Ross (who flies off the handle because of a vile-sounding sandwich) in Central Perk, and Chandler makes disparaging comments throughout.

So if the characters are such jerks, why was Friends so phenomenally successful?

TV Tropes (which, by the way, is one of the greatest sites on the internet¹) offers one answer: the Friends get away with being jerks because they’re funny. They are. The scripts are snappy. The cast has fantastic chemistry. So you forgive the characters their jerkiness.

I propose another answer: the Friends are, as already shown, jerks. Yet they remain friends for 10 years. And isn’t that everyone’s fantasy? To have people in your life you can constantly snark at and speak down to, yet still remain close to?

1. Warning: you will end up spending more time than you have to spare browsing TV Tropes [↩]

World's dumbest genius serial killer, pictured with family

Anyone who consumes fiction must have some very high hooks on which to suspend their disbelief. This is especially true for fantasy and sci-fi aficionados – you can’t buy into that malarkey about magic and spaceships unless you’re willing to accept the impossible.

However. Suspension of disbelief only stretches so far.

I pondered this during the week while catching up on the fourth season of Dexter, which was pretty excellent (and horrifyingly bleak) – except for some sloppy writing which pulled me out of the world. Mildly spoilery examples follow.

So in one instalment, Dexter sets up a kill room in a hotel bathroom. Because cheap hotels, as we all know, are bastions of privacy. Later in the episode, Dex stalks his victim to a construction site and prepares to attack. Suddenly, the victim attempts suicide! But Dexter rescues him at the last second, aided by onlookers who rush in to help. Onlookers who Dexter apparently didn’t notice while he tracked his victim; onlookers who apparently would’ve done nothing had Dexter attacked the victim before the suicide attempt.

Contrast this with Avatar (WHICH I LOVED), a film populated with blue-skinned cat-eared aliens who live on a planet overhung by huge floating mountains. How did the aliens, who evolved on a world light years from Earth, evolved to be (for all intents and purposes) exactly the same as Homo sapiens? How do those rocks float in the air? You might ask a billion questions like these – but ultimately the answers don’t matter, because the little details serve the story. They aren’t its sloppy byproducts.

It goes back to that old saying: audiences will believe the impossible, but not the implausible. I can believe blue cat people live on floating rocks. But I can’t believe a so-called genius serial killer would make such dumb mistakes.

I love Glee. Love love love. I download every episode as soon as I can wait patiently for each episode to air on Australian TV. I listen to the soundtrack so much it’s worn out my iPhone. I have a picture of the cast next to my desk at work. Et cetera.

However.

Something about Glee bothers me. This:

No, not by Chris Colfer. Chris Colfer is rad. I interviewed him when he and the rest of the cast were in Australia in September, and he seems like a lovely, sweet kid. (People have asked me if he talks the same way in real life that he does on TV. Yes, he does.)

I’m bothered by his Glee alter ego (his alter Gleego?), Kurt, the only (openly) gay character on the show. I don’t mind that he’s sensitive and soft-spoken. Plenty of guys are like that, gay or straight. I guess I can swallow the fact that Kurt is way into fashion. There are guys, gay and straight, who are way into fashion. But almost everything else about him is so screamingly stereotypically gay that I have a hard time resisting a full-body cringe when he prances onscreen.

In one episode where the Gleeks were split into male and female teams, Kurt tried to join the girls’ team (and later sided with them to sabotage the boys’ team). And in the latest episode, Kurt helped Finn (Cory Monteith) out solely in the hope of seducing him – as if gays only befriend straights as a shortcut to getting them into bed. (That’s only true some of the time!)

It’s a blot on an otherwise wonderful series – one which should be busting gay stereotypes, not wheeling them out dressed in fancy new outfits. Glee ought to do better, both as a show co-created by a gay man and as a show with such a strong gay following. More Kurt teaching the football team ‘Single Ladies’ and bonding with his macho dad, and less Kurt prancing about in two dimensions, please.

Rhiannon Hart has posted about the amazingness of The Trap Door and Count Duckula and T-bag (hee, “T-bag”), three serials I inhaled as a child. Remember how Trap Door’s Bert had the unseen master known only as “The Thing Upstairs”? In one episode there was a teensy tiny glimpse of the Thing – which revealed him to be a sort of Lovecraftian horror – and my childhood self thought that was the raddest thing ever.

As a kid I was also partial to SuperTed, though even back then I knew it was kinda lame. So SuperTed is a defective teddy bear, who is brought to life by a spotty alien man (how Spotty achieved this was never, to my recollection, explained), then taken to a magic cloud, where Mother Nature gives him special powers? Huh? How does that make even a lick of sense? Talk about your convoluted backstories.

My mum had a theory that SuperTed’s magic word was, in fact, “magic word”. I reckon she was on to something.

I LOVE THIS. I even love Finn’s creepy OTT pseudoephedrine face. (I especially love the dancing Asian dude. Can he have more airtime, please? Or some actual lines in the show?)