meganbmoore: (covert affairs: gimme tv)
1. The new anime season is...not dire, but nothing new jumps out at me? There are a couple series I'll check out later as long as friends keep liking them, but it looks like I'm mostly just sticking with Akatsuki no Yona and Shirobako, both of which are carryovers from last season, and then the new season of Kamisama Kiss (which has been very good so far).
 
2. I have watched all the available episodes of BBC's The Musketeers. When I first read the book as a kid, I was convinced that having sex with/being in love with D'Artagnan meant women died. Not convinced I was wrong about that, but I never have liked the book, though I watch most adaptations that I come across. I like the show? I have problems with some things in it, but when I compare it to the book and my problems with it (particularly the treatment of Milady and Constance) it pretty much comes out golden. I have very mixed feelings about not hating D'Artagnan and Athos, but I can deal with that. i'm also apparently very susceptible to the narrative wanting me to ship things. it goes "you should ship this" and I go "ok" without really thinking it out, and I think I'm ok with it, though I do keep getting distracted by the fact that D'Artagnan's head is almost literally twice the size of Constance's. (That "ok with it" bit might be reconsidered if they start wanting me to ship de Rochefort/Anne.)I also kind of miss the bit in the first season where Constance is the most long suffering woman in existence.
 
3. On the flipside, I haven't talked about it much here, but I've been watching Queen Seon Deok off and on since April. The first 51 episodes are great and largely consistently improve until the plotline that drove the series comes to it's natural conclusion. And then there's a timeskip, and a lot of characters get personality transplants that rob them of the bulk of their intelligence along the way, and the whole thing is like some horribly OOC fanfic that completely loses everything that gave its OTP any appeal in the first place. I actually put off watching the series for years because, even though a lot of fandom seemed to love the final arc, I could tell from the way they were talking about it that I wouldn't like it, and I was right. Anyway, great series and reaches a natural conclusion with episode 51. Skip the rest and avoid ending up like me, with the last 4 episodes waiting for you for weeks, but unable to force yourself to finish it.
 
4. Jane the Virgin and The 100 and Madam Secretary were renewed, and Gina Rodriguez rightly won the Golden Globe for Best Actress. Her acceptance speech and its implied criticism of Hollywood and its treatment of latin@s was great.
 
5. Other celebrities making boobs jokes, rape jokes, North Korea jokes and whatnot were not great.
 
6. Happyland was cancelled, which makes me very sad, even though I'm still a bit amazed that it ever got made in the first place.
 
7. State of Affairs really needs to be cancelled, because that's the only thing that will save me from watching it. I keep watching it. It's awful. I can't stop. Help.
 
8. Galavant and Empire started. Galavant is...I enjoying it, but there's also so much wrong with it, starting with "awareness that something isn't acceptable and assuming your audience knows it does NOT make doing it acceptable, thankyouverymuch" but the latest episode gives me hope that the second half will live up to my expectations. Empire is also good, but I'm watching it almost entirely for Taraji Henson, and with the assumption that the narrative realizes that the only natural conclusion is that her character wins, so I'm not really engaging with it yet in a way where I can formulate thoughts.
 
9. The 100 comes back next week. I should try to finally post on it? (I talk about it so much on other journals and on twitter that I just...keep not getting to it. It doesn't help that I have a bunch of other posts written that I keep forgetting to actually post.)
10. The Librarians has almost wrapped up its first season (For whatever reason, they're airing the last 4 episodes with 2 episode per Sunday night. I hope the reason doesn't have to do with cancelation.) which has been pretty good. The episodes aired out of order, and while that's made some character arcs inconsistent (but very consistent IN THE RIGHT ORDER) it hasn't affected the quality of the show that much overall. It's very much the Leverage people making a show for people who like things like Warehouse 13, but that's certainly not a bad thing.
meganbmoore: (Default)
Jane the Virgin and Happyland are two shows that I hadn't really intended to check out, neither sounding very appealing to me, but I watched the pilots out of boredom and really liked them. The main protagonists of both series-Jane in Jane the Virgin and Lucy in Happyland-are very goal-oriented young Latina women raised by their single mothers, who they are generally more mature and together than. Both mothers-Xiomara in Jane the Virgin ans Elena in Happyland-have lied to their daughters about the identities of their fathers, neither mother wanting to tell her daughter that the last contact they had with the fathers was the fathers telling them to get abortions after learning about the pregnancy, but the real identities of the fathers are revealed in the final moments of both pilots.

But that's mostly where the similarities end.

Jane the Virgin
is a case of everything wrong in concept and everything right in concentration. The show is about a 23-year-old waitress named Jane who live with her mother and grandmother. She works at a hotel owned by Rafael and "jerk" (according to both) who she had a crush on when she worked at his country club several years pre-series. Since she was young, her grandmother (who only speaks Spanish, but seems to understand English fairly well) has drilled into her the importance of not having sex until marriage. While there's certainly a religious aspect to this, Jane's grandmother's primary concern seems to be that Jane not also end up a single teenaged mother, and Jane's take on it seems to be that the best way to make sure nothing like that upsets your plans for your life is just to not give it a chance to happen. (I suspect that, to some degree, Jane also sees herself as having ruined Xiomara's life, though Xiomara doesn't seem to have that view at all.) Jane has her life planned out in incredible detail, and her boyfriend, Michael, a police officer, loves her enough to go along with it.

Things get off track when her gynecologist, Luisa, having just had a very soap opera shock the night before, gets her patients mixed up and accidentally artificially inseminates Jane. The woman who was supposed to be artificially inseminated is Rafael's wife, Petra, and Rafael is Luisa's brother. Rafael is a cancer survivor, and because of chemotherapy, he's now sterile. The sperm sample Jane was inseminated with is his only sperm sample, and Petra decided to have herself inseminated to keep Rafael from divorcing her before their 5th anniversary, after which, she gets a much larger divorce settlement. Petra is also having an affair with Rafael's best friend, Roman. Michael is investigating Roman for possible connections to a major drug dealer. Jane initially seems to be leaning towards getting an abortion, but on learning that Rafael wants to have a child and being (falsely) reassured that Rafael and Petra's marriage is happy and stable, she decides to carry the baby to term, and then give it to them to raise. (Because, I mean, Rafael could apparently never consider adoption? The "BIOLOGY ONLY" thing there is my only real beef with the show so far). Jane's father, Rogelio, is the star of the telenovela the whole family is addicted to, and now that he's a moderately mature adult instead of a scared teenager, he wants to get to know his daughter. Xiomara has mixed feelings about this, but not about possibly jumping his bones again.

There's a "Sexy Latin Narrator" to help us keep track of all of this, and more. A lot more. A part of the "lot more" is Bridget Regan running around as a bisexual lawyer in excellent suits and fabulous hair. I know there are some here who will consider that to be very important information.

lengthy-ish, but only really spoilery for the pilot )

Then we have Happyland. Happyland is about workers in a Disneyland-style theme park. The main character, Lucy, grew up in Happyland because her mother, Elena, has played Princess Adriana in the park before Lucy was born, and Lucy works at the park too. Initially, Lucy is the backstage manager for the shows, but she gets forcibly promoted to "character work" early in the series. Her best friends, Will and Harper, are also Happyland employees, and are dating, though Will sometimes forgets which girl he's supposed to be in love with. (Harper rightly interprets this as a problem with Will's priorities that he needs to figure out, and not as something to blame on Lucy, or hold against Lucy.) Lucy Has Plans for her life and doesn't intend to spend her life at Happyland like her mother, Elena. It's hard not to compare Happyland and Jane the Virgin because of the similarities in the heroine's lives and backgrounds, and because Happyland wants to do some of the same things as Jane the Virgin, but doesn't do them as well, though it's still a good-and addicting-show with plenty of soap opera elements.

shorter, but with more spoilers for both shows )

Happyland
is scheduled to have an 8 episode season, leaving 3 left to air, and 4 for me to watch. CW picked up Jane the Virgin for a full season, so it'll probably be 20-22 episodes. I'm not to sure about it as an ongoing series as opposed to a miniseries, but I have high hopes.

I also watched this week's Sleepy Hollow and greatly enjoyed it, despite the fact that the show is in danger of having a White Dudes problem. I don't have much to say about it, but suspect I'll be much more opinionated about the next episode. I need to catch up with How to Get Away With Murder and Madam Secretary, but they both take themselves more seriously than my current frame of mind wants. (I'll get over it.)

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meganbmoore

July 2020

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