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I don't have a problem with Dunham getting naked or the whiteness of the show or the vacuousness self-indulgence of the characters. I guess that makes me a terrible person.
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Jan 11, 2014 12:49
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Josh Lyman posted:I don't have a problem with Dunham getting naked or the whiteness of the show or the vacuousness self-indulgence of the characters. I guess that makes me a terrible person.  Misogyny!
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Jan 11, 2014 13:14
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The only problem I have with Girls is that it's a comedy but it's not funny 
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Jan 11, 2014 13:25
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Rarity posted:The only problem I have with Girls is that it's a comedy but it's not funny It's a comedy?
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Jan 11, 2014 13:29
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Rarity posted:The only problem I have with Girls is that it's a comedy but it's not funny Yes it is
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Jan 11, 2014 13:55
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soapgish posted:Utterly obtuse. Speaking of, I have just started watching Season 1 of the The Genius. It's amazing. Even though it's all edited for the most impact, I knew I was in for a good time after the twist in the first episode.
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Jan 11, 2014 15:05
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Great, now I want to watch Girls to satisfy my curiosity about it... because of this conversation. Lena Dunham 
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Jan 11, 2014 15:07
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Critics asking questions and having opinions are what they paid to do; even if they are lovely questions and lovely opinions. People are disappointed in the Girls team because they took a chance to give viewers further insight into the show and to defend against lovely questions eloquently (something they clearly believe themselves capable of) and instead turned it into a high school pissing match. People keep asking them the same questions because they have yet to actually answer the question without any hostility. I'm mainly talking here about any of the questions not regarding nudity; I don't care about that one bit, though I am interested in what Lena thinks her show is about.
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Jan 11, 2014 16:07
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scary ghost dog posted:That's weird. I though Dunham got naked on the show because it's supposed to be a realistic look at a character's life, and real people very often get naked. For the record, it is utterly unrealistic for someone to live in a version of New York City that is as white as Girls' version of New York City.
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Jan 11, 2014 16:10
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BrooklynBruiser posted:For the record, it is utterly unrealistic for someone to live in a version of New York City that is as white as Girls' version of New York City. Apatow's response to the two controversial questions was exactly the same as well. "Why is Lena naked all the time?" Because it's realistic to be naked some times. "Why are their no black people in the cast?" Because diversity isn't realistic some times. Presumably because the answer to both is a less flattering; Lena likes it that way.
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Jan 11, 2014 16:13
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PriorMarcus posted:Apatow's response to the two controversial questions was exactly the same as well. How the gently caress did he justify that? New York is a majority-minority city, iirc.
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Jan 11, 2014 16:16
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BrooklynBruiser posted:How the gently caress did he justify that? New York is a majority-minority city, iirc. Judd Apatow posted:"I don’t think that there’s any reason why any show should feel an obligation to do that. I think there might be some obligation to have shows about all sorts of different people, but if it’s organic to the show, then we should do it, and if we don’t have story lines which serve it naturally, I don’t think that we should do it. I mean, in the history of television, you could look at every show on TV and say, “How come there’s not an American Indian on this show?” “How come there’s not an Asian person on this show?” It really has to come from the story and the stories that we are trying to tell. We want to accurately portray New York and groups of people. So we are going to do it where it feels honest to these characters in this world."
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Jan 11, 2014 16:20
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PriorMarcus posted:
  "We want to accurately portray New York and groups of people." The whole POINT is that their version of New York City is inaccurately white!
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Jan 11, 2014 16:29
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Honestly the Girls race criticism STILL reads to me like people think every show should fill some sort of quota. I know that might make me a bad person in some way but why should it HAVE to to that? I don't expect the viewpoint of anyone other than a 20-something white girl when I watch a relatively autobiographical show about 20-something white girls. The bit of that quote BB focused on is really dumb though
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Jan 11, 2014 16:31
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I apologize, I know we're moving on and I hate to pull us back into this morass, but something needs to be made clear.lelandjs posted:I think it's honestly near impossible to know why exactly she gets naked in Girls, but I'd be willing to bet that Division Post is pretty drat close. It's to create discussions. I like you, and I know you mean well, but don't twist my words. When I talk about "creating discussions," I mean it in a general sense; race on TV, society's views of women, the "plight" of the millennial, our expectations of writers with non-traditional viewpoints, etc. These are all good discussions to have, if we can manage to breathe through them and not get so angry and/or sarcastic with each other. However, there's no reason -- none -- for anyone outside of her family or her closest circle of friends to speculate on why Lena Dunham herself is willing to act without any clothes on, and even then the reasons are very few and personal. If you want to talk about what artistic effect this has on the show -- and this is what you probably meant but you just phrased it poorly -- that's fair game. But the things that actors and artists are or are not willing to do for their work are rooted deep in their personality, and as such, belong to them.
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Jan 11, 2014 16:34
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Bown posted:Honestly the Girls race criticism STILL reads to me like people think every show should fill some sort of quota. I know that might make me a bad person in some way but why should it HAVE to to that? I don't expect the viewpoint of anyone other than a 20-something white girl when I watch a relatively autobiographical show about 20-something white girls. If New York is even close to the level of multicultural that I see in London it would be impossible for a 20-something white girl's autobiography to only include white people.
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Jan 11, 2014 16:35
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Bown posted:Honestly the Girls race criticism STILL reads to me like people think every show should fill some sort of quota. I know that might make me a bad person in some way but why should it HAVE to to that? I don't expect the viewpoint of anyone other than a 20-something white girl when I watch a relatively autobiographical show about 20-something white girls. I wouldn't care nearly as much if they didn't go on and on about wanting to portray a real and accurate New York. I don't think shows should have to fill quotas, but claiming that accuracy to reality is important to the show and then having it be as white as it is... That's some bullshit right there.
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Jan 11, 2014 16:36
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I'm not saying it isn't a bit weird but people just jump on it as another example of Lena Dunham being a horrible and/or stupid person. She doesn't want black people in her show! She gets naked all the time because she wants attention! There are perfectly legitimate versions of the criticism for both - god knows it's one of the most imperfect of all the shows I enjoy - but the vast majority of what I see basically boils down to "someone who has a point of view I find annoying is getting critical acclaim that I can't comprehend, so I need to make her out to be an awful bitch!"
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Jan 11, 2014 16:44
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DivisionPost posted:I apologize, I know we're moving on and I hate to pull us back into this morass, but something needs to be made clear. This is why I shouldn't post at 2:30 in the morning. I'm bad enough at conveying what I'm trying to say in general; insomnia does not help. You're absolutely correct of course. It's not any of our place or evaluate or discuss (or, to stop mincing words, judge, because that is ultimately what we are doing, judging) Lena Dunham for choosing to be naked. Even to discuss it from an artistic sense is very difficult, because what it means to be naked--and see others naked--is a unique and different situation for everybody, and we all end up bringing the worst of our fears and hangups and perversions to the table with the discussion. The only way out of that is to, well, make nudity less taboo, and perhaps that's what Lena's artistic intent is.
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Jan 11, 2014 16:45
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Isn't the point of art to evaluate, critique and judge it? She isn't getting naked in a vacuum because she's a woman and in the entire one and a half seasons of the show I watched I never felt a scene was added to by her being naked in it. Now, judging Lena Dunham the person is wrong; but Lena Dunham the artist? I'm honestly curious what she thinks it brings to the show or Hannah; a character who doesn't seem particularly comfortable with anything but is often naked. Being naked is personal to everyone, and everyone has differing reactions to seeing someone naked, which is why it's a legitimate question to ask the creator of the show what the nudity means to her and how she'd hope her viewers read it.
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Jan 11, 2014 16:55
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I would respect it more if Lena Dunham just came out and said "the character I am playing is from a small town in Wisconsin, a place not known for its diversity and her reality would be that she is unconsciously uncomfortable being friends with people who don't look like herself or people she grew up with, still being as young and stupid as she obviously is, so her life reflects her unconscious choices, good and bad, just like all of ours do" because that would be incredibly realistic. But obviously that would probably make her as the creator sound like a horrible person in a way that she is not comfortable with, even though it makes a lot of sense if you know any people from the Midwest and especially if you know people from the Midwest who move to big cities to pretend to be sophisticates, so instead they just dance around it and make it all worse. Edit: The nakedness is an interesting question, I totally agree with Prior Marcus, but no one seems to be able to ask it without framing it as "because you are ugly, what does it mean to you?"
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Jan 11, 2014 16:58
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BrooklynBruiser posted:
quote:"We want to accurately portray New York and groups of peoples."
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Jan 11, 2014 17:03
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PriorMarcus posted:Isn't the point of art to evaluate, critique and judge it? She isn't getting naked in a vacuum because she's a woman and in the entire one and a half seasons of the show I watched I never felt a scene was added to by her being naked in it. Of course, that would probably be the right question to ask. However, the question that was asked was phrased in an insulting manner, somehow implying that nudity that wasn't there to titillate has no place in entertainment. And you know what? That understandably pissed off Dunham, Konner, and especially Apatow. As a mentor to Dunham and Konner, Judd would feel a kind of paternal responsibility toward those two and attack accordingly when they appear threatened. It's a shame that anger carried over and prevented any GOOD questions from getting answered sufficiently, but personally, I can't pretend that a question like that wouldn't ruin my day, so I'm not about to judge. DivisionPost fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Jan 11, 2014 |
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Jan 11, 2014 17:08
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Ultimately, what it comes down to with me for Girls is that the lack of not-white people undercuts the core idea of authenticity. I'm a white 20-something living in NYC. I know people like the characters in Girls. I know a lot of them. I stopped watching Girls because I realized that I simultaneously identified with and utterly loathed the characters. It is a simple fact of living in New York City that your life will regularly include a lot of interaction with people of basically every conceivable background. You can't be a show that is about an authentic New York City experience and not have people of color in it. You just can't.
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Jan 11, 2014 17:09
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PriorMarcus posted:She isn't getting naked in a vacuum because she's a woman and in the entire one and a half seasons of the show I watched I never felt a scene was added to by her being naked in it. This is just my personal thought but I always appreciate when a show does something like that without the 'TV language'. Thinking of the scenes where she's appeared naked and imagining them with bra/panties instead, I wouldn't have been like "man this seems soooooooo fake" but when they aren't used it does help it feel more like how someone would actually be in real life. Almost all of the girls I've lived with or dated have been comfortable being topless around their closest friends and, crazily enough, have sex naked.
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Jan 11, 2014 17:24
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I don't think the lack of black characters in GIRLS is any more of a problem than it is in any other show. It's a criticism you could level at some of the best shows of all time, yet people act like GIRLS is the first to do it. You force a black character in there and it becomes a token thing. I feel like IT'S ALWAYS SUNNY addressed it with their meta 'Emmy' episode when Dennis says "If we had just one black friend I feel like we'd talk about it all the time.". I don't find it out of the realm of possibilities that those characters wouldn't have a black friend, or latino, or asian. It just happens sometimes. As for the nudity thing it was a lovely and offensive question. First of all by stating that nudity that's there to titilate is ok, and then asking Dunham specifically why she feels the need to get naked. No one asked the cast of TRUE BLOOD that question. Truth is I haven't seen a criticism of the nudity in girls that's not rooted in some form of misogyny because it immediately becomes "I'm not against someone getting naked, but I'm against this person I find unattractive getting naked.". Anyway, in other news ENLISTED was great.
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Jan 11, 2014 17:33
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Practically every show on The CW is whiter than Girls.
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Jan 11, 2014 17:39
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Mu Zeta posted:Practically every show on The CW is whiter than Girls. Diversity is an issue all over television, but I can't think of any other show that has had so much said about it being an authentic showing of an experience. If Lena Dunham and Judd Apatow had never said anything about it being about an authentic New York City experience, then it would be just another too-white-but-not-worth-making-a-fuss-over show. But they're claiming to be super-authentic and then not having a simple fact of life in NYC.
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Jan 11, 2014 17:43
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DrVenkman posted:I don't think the lack of black characters in GIRLS is any more of a problem than it is in any other show. It's a criticism you could level at some of the best shows of all time, yet people act like GIRLS is the first to do it. You force a black character in there and it becomes a token thing. Which is exactly what happened when they brought Donald Glover in for the first two episodes of season two and then dropped him. It was a really clumsy way to address the criticisms.
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Jan 11, 2014 18:15
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I have trouble getting too upset about the race issue just because there's so many ways in which Girls is quietly revolutionary in its content - that is, having four young female main characters and being deeply invested in each of them + the relationships between them, and not only in the context of their relationships to men. (That wasn't meant to be a comment on quality incidentally - I'm a big fan of the show but I think you could agree with that last sentence and still despise it) Hell, even just having a female showrunner (two, actually) is sadly pretty goddamn rare in TV at the moment - a stat going round Twitter this week was that all 31/31 new network shows this season have a (white) man as their lead writer (and 29/31 were created by white men, with the other 2 having a female co-credit).
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Jan 11, 2014 19:48
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DrVenkman posted:No one asked the cast of TRUE BLOOD that question. The cast of True Blood don't write True Blood, so their only answer would be "because we're paid to".
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Jan 11, 2014 20:01
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Diversity in showrunners is what led us to Veena Sud, therefore I am firmly against anything but old white men leading shows
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Jan 11, 2014 20:08
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GraPar posted:Hell, even just having a female showrunner (two, actually) is sadly pretty goddamn rare in TV at the moment - a stat going round Twitter this week was that all 31/31 new network shows this season have a (white) man as their lead writer (and 29/31 were created by white men, with the other 2 having a female co-credit). That's incorrect; Rebel Wilson has sole Created By credit on Super Fun Night.
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Jan 11, 2014 20:17
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Apologies, I misquoted, it's this year, not this season - source. There's some discussion of the exact breakdown in the replies to that tweet but whatever way you look at it it's still way over 90% male.
GraPar fucked around with this message at 20:40 on Jan 11, 2014 |
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Jan 11, 2014 20:30
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I just saw something really weird, I'm watching Law & Order on WGN and they had a commercial for syndicated How I Met Your Mother and one scene was a shot from the show with NPH talking at a bar and in the background were some extras, who had their faces blurred out.
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Jan 11, 2014 22:27
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I just wanted to let you guys know that I'm still alive. I've been very ill for about two weeks now and I'm starting to finally feel a bit better but I imagine I'll be down for a bit longer. I know some people have sent me PMs and I promise I'm not ignoring you. I just feel like poo poo. OSG has been doing the stickies and stuff so he's been taking care of things. If you have any pressing issues it would probably be best to contact him for the next little while still. Hopefully I'll be back around as much as usual within at least another week.
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Jan 11, 2014 23:40
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Ouch, sorry to hear that, dude. Glad you're on the mend, though. Just stay away from here we don't want anything to stress you out
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Jan 11, 2014 23:41
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Midnight City posted:Diversity in showrunners is what led us to Veena Sud, therefore I am firmly against anything but old white men leading shows nope. diversity in showrunners allowed the brief, but beautiful glory of Don't Trust the B- in Apt. 23, and the batshit insanity of Scandal. And had homophobia not diminished to the point an out gay man could run not just one, but many tv series, we wouldn't have the perfect bizarre art of American Horror Story: Asylum. finished the first season of Arrow only because I have a bloody minded dedication to finishing things when I've already invested a lot of time in them. A few mostly good episodes at the end, but the family drama fell flat, plastic-face had only one good episode OF ALL TWENTY THREE IN THE SEASON, and the Roy plot was pretty boring and super-predictable at every turn. OTOH, the island scenes made me wish the whole show was just Oliver, Slade, and Yao Fei's daughter's adventures on Prison Island. Actually, what they really need to do is spin off Slade into his own show. Would watch that show. 
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Jan 12, 2014 00:04
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GraPar posted:Girls is quietly revolutionary in its content - that is, having four young female main characters and being deeply invested in each of them + the relationships between them, and not only in the context of their relationships to men. (That wasn't meant to be a comment on quality incidentally - I'm a big fan of the show but I think you could agree with that last sentence and still despise it) Pretty Little Liars does this as well and does it much better
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Jan 12, 2014 00:08
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Side-stepping the hell out of this conversation, but what good shows are back from the winter break. Other than New Girl?
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Jan 12, 2014 00:11
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