The Fall, Antifeminist

I'm only up to Season 2 Epsode 4 of The Fall so far.

I've written before about how certain people view The Fall's Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson) as some kind of exemplar of feminism. She plays a high ranking cop who, among other things, tells her driver to stop the car when she sees a fellow officer she wants to bed. As soon as she meets him, she invites him to her hotel room. He visits her, and she beds him. He gets murdered later and she doesn't give a damn.

Some would argue that she's acting like any man would, and why would a woman be held to different standards? I'm not sure a male cop would try to bed any random subordinate who catches his eye, but that isn't really the point. The point is this: is that praiseworthy? No, actually. Such a man should be fired. And so should Stella Gibson.

Now in this episode it looks like she's on the prowl again. She oh-so-casually mentions wanting to add a new guy to her task force—a man her assistant describes as charismatic and good-looking. To that, she defensively counters that when she met him he was wearing a full forensic mask. Trolling for ass again, and using her position and authority to do it. Hoorray for feminism.

When Good TV Shows Disappear Forever

I remember so many wonderful shows that you just can't see anywhere except maybe by downloading them illegally if you're lucky.

What happened to Murphy Brown? Sure Candice Bergen has been making guest appearances everywhere and basically just playing Murphy Brown—and those of us who were alive in the 80s and early 90s will always think of her as Murphy Brown because the show was iconic and unforgettable.

Murphy Brown was a newswoman. She was crass and tough-as-nails and she was often mean-spirited and petty. It was fun to watch her. She was the kind of woman who would send hookers and mariachi bands to the houses of her enemies at night. If you ever see Candice Bergen on anything, it's because Candice Bergen IS Murphy Brown and we all loved Murphy Brown.

So why can't you get the show on DVD? Well, that's what I was asking 5 years ago. Now I'm asking, “Why isn't it on Netflix?”

It's the same with The Practice. I loved that show back when it was on. Unfortunately, if you weren't alive and watching TV at the time, then you have missed out on The Practice. It's nearly impossible to find now. It was a legal drama, and one of the best of its kind I've ever seen. It was high drama through and through. It was riveting. The stakes were high. The actors were good. The show made you really care about the jury's verdict.

What happened? The Practice ran for 8 seasons—a very solid run for a TV show. Shows don't run that long without an audience. Even if you ignore the last season, and you should, that's still 7 seasons, which is still a great run.

The Practice, much like Roseanne, had a very bizarre last season. In Season 8 of The Practice, the show fired most of the main cast, and they completely changed the show. It was literally an entirely new show with, like, two of the cheapest actors from before remaining. For the historical record of The Practice, I'd recommend just throwing away Season 8 because it is not even part of the same show.

Like Murphy Brown, most of the seasons of The Practice are not available for purchase on DVD or online. The only way to get them is to find someone who recorded them from TV and copy those recordings. If you know something about pirating TV shows online, then you know that that is exactly what pirating is all about. But it's not even easy to pirate these shows because so few people have copies.

It's so sad when good TV shows disappear forever.

As of this writing, Hulu has season 1-3 of The Practice. Why not all of them?

Quantico Terrorist

Spoilers regarding the most recent episode: Season 1, Ep 20. So, Spoiler Alert!

We're supposed to believe that Drew was “voice”—or even that Drew is the terrorist. I don't buy it at all. He's a patsy. I think Senator Haas is involved in this. I can't guess her motive yet, but think about it. What was the deal with that power outage at Columbia? It's like they have all completely forgotten about that during this episode, but Haas chose to speak at Columbia, and then something was stolen from one of their labs during the confusion.

Plus she just seems like an evil bitch.

Quantico

I caught up on Quantico quickly by watching it on Hulu. The show focuses on a class of new students at the FBI Academy at Quantico—thus the name. They are all beautiful people with exaggerated credentials of excellence. Most have some kind of painful past that haunts them.

The show isn't really about FBI training. When the do show the trainees in a classroom, the instructor is always, always delivering some grandiose speech about being an FBI agent rather than offering actual education. Every day of class feels like the first day introduction. I'm not sure when they learn things like lawful arrest and chain-of-custody.

The show is really about some terrorist attack that happened some months later after the trainees have either washed out or become special agents. The evidence seems to point to our protagonist, Alex Parrish, the strong, sexy female lead.

Most of the fun of watching this show is trying to figure out who the real terrorist is. The show strongly suggests that the terrorist is someone Alex knows in the FBI.

It's entertaining. I'd recommend it do a friend. I have some thoughts on who the terrorist is.

The Fall, with Robotic Gillian Anderson

I think the British TV show The Fall came to my attention because it stars Gillian Anderson. I've been somewhat smitten with her since her appearance in Hannibal. In the brilliant TV series based on Thomas Harris's books, Anderson plays a character not created by Harris as far as I can recall, and I've read the books. She plays Hannibal Lecter's psychiatrist, a woman named Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier.

Anderson plays this character with a kind of stiff, halting, affectless demeanor. She looks like she had some botched botox that left her permanently incapable of making facial expressions. It would not be terribly surprising to learn that such a thing had in fact happened to actress Gillian Anderson who looks more beautiful now than she did in her 20s on The X-Files. She looks more gaunt now, and yet somehow more feminine.

I began watching previous episodes of The Fall on Amazon, buying them one at a time. It's a cop-and-serial-killer show. I don't care how many shows there are about serial killers, I think I'll always find them fascinating so long as they are well written. And this one is.

In The Fall, Gillian Anderson plays the cop. Actually, she's some kind of high-ranking English police investigator, and she arrives on the scene to take charge of searching for a serial murderer. Anderson speaks plausibly enough with an English accent to my ears, but I'm an American after all. The really jarring thing here is that Anderson plays her cop character, Stella Gibson, with the same kind of affectless, robotic monotone she used in Hannibal. Granted, it's not quite the same. Stella Gibson doesn't speak in exactly the same halting cadence of Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier—and that's an impressive feat—but she never displays any emotion at all until Season 2, Episode 3 (I think) when she discovers that the killer has been in her home and written a note to her in her own personal journal. For just a moment, she displays something that looks like surprise and fear.

Why has Gillian Anderson taken to playing these robotic, emotionless women? And why do feminists call this a “strong” woman? I came upon this article while reading about Anderson and her character: The Fall: feminist, anti-men and sadly accurate. It seems to support my idea that would-be feminists view her unyielding lack of humanity as some kind of vanguard of feminism into television. She displays characteristics that aren't exactly “feminine” (nor exactly human), and that's some kind of win for females everywhere.

I think what is interesting about The Fall is that both the serial murdered and the cop who is chasing him (Anderson) are sociopaths. That is the thing nobody else seems to have put to words just yet. Gillian Anderson isn't playing a strong female lead. She's playing a person devoid of all emotion, empathy, and restraint. She's playing a sociopath. She's playing a very high-functioning sociopath who has been very successful in climbing the ladder of her choice and gaining power over men. If you want to see a strong female lead who isn't a sociopath, watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Murphy Brown or Mary Tyler Moore. Being a strong woman doesn't mean being an affectless sociopath.

None of that is an indictment of the TV show—only a disagreement with some of the idiots who have commented on it before me. It's an interesting show: sociopath versus sociopath. Very watchable.

Adam's TV Blog

Updated: May 12, 2016

This marks my first time ever blogging about TV. I don't know why I never did it before. I'm a huge fan of TV, and I have much to say Of the things I know about, TV ranks up there. Here are some of the TV shows of which I've seen literally every episode—several of them more than once. I'm only counting shows that are completed, not shows that are still running.

• 30 Rock
• Angel
• Breaking Bad
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• Damages
• Daria
• Dead Like Me
• Dexter
• Dilbert
• Dollhouse
• Don't Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23
• Firefly
• Futurama
• Hannibal
• House
• Newsradio
• Nurse Jackie
• Parks and Recreation
• Reba
• Roseanne
• Seinfeld
• Star Trek: The Next Generation
• Star Trek: Voyager
• Tru Calling
• The West Wing
• Will & Grace

I don't even know if that list is complete.

Here are some of the current shows I'm up-to-date on (meaning I have watched all released episodes to date) and plan to watch every episode in the future.

• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
• American Dad
• The Americans
• Bob's Burgers
• Family Guy
• New Girl
• Once Upon a Time
• Orange is the New Black
• Quantico
• South Park
• Squidbillies
• The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

Here are some shows where I've seen a substantial number of the episodes, but not quite all of them. Perhaps more than 50%.

• Batman: the Animated Series
• Battlestar Galactica (new series)
• Bewitched
• Bones
• Boy Meets World
• Charmed
• The Drew Carey Show
• Frasier
• How I Met your Mother
• I Dream of Jeannie
• I love Lucy
• iZombie
• Law & Order SVU (I've seen hundreds of these, but there are so, so many.)
• Lost
• The Practice
• Sabrina the Teenage Witch
• Scrubs
• The Simpsons (I've definitely seen everything before Season 7 many times.)
• Smallville

Shows I'm familiar with but probably haven't seen 50%.

Cheers

Friends

Murphy Brown

I love TV. I love GOOD TV. I don't even think I'm that picky about it. I don't care too much about plot holes or other pedantic bullshit so long as I am entertained. (But I'm not entertained by crap like Big Bang Theory.) From the lists above you can see the kinds of shows I like.

This education in TV I've had informs my opinions on what I see. I'll be blogging about the things I watch as I watch them. This may include old things that I've never seen before.