Three things
Aug. 22nd, 2020 02:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessFirst: signal boost: Pitch Perfect’s Barden Bellas have reunited with a version of ‘Love On Top’ for UNICEF h/t musesfool.
Secondly: it’s fandom, Jim, but not as I know it
I got around to catching up with Quiz, which aired months ago and was generally praised. I get the sense that, after crime dramas, an easy way of gettin a drama commissioned by ITV is to pitch one about the channel’s history or stars. (Something the show admitted. Heh.)
Nonetheless, this was big and bold, and went in interesting and slightly unexpected directions over its three parts, doing more than telling the story that made the news. I vaguely remember the headlines, although I’d lost interest in ‘Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?’ by this point.
In the first ep, the criminal case of the major accused of cheating via helpfully placed coughs was dangled before us, before telling the story of the genesis of WWTBAM? at ITV. As the show became a massive success, its self-described fans built a community, only their aim was to get on the show and win it, and with greed among other motivations driving them, they wanted to outwit the programme makers – a different attitude to media fandom as I know it!
It seemed an enormous blindspot that it was only in the middle of the case that someone from Celador looked at online forums about the show, that they didn’t think harder about putting safeguards and then more safeguards in place for a show with a record-breaking pot of prize money.
Although I remember the build-up for Quiz making it seem like a two-hander between almost perfectly cast McFayden’s Charles Ingram and Sheen’s Tarrant (because of course Michael Sheen was cast) other people got as much airtime throughout the show. There was almost more of Ingram’s brother-in-law and his involvement with the Syndicate, the most organised bunch of these obsessives in the first ep, which ended with a return to the theatrical prosecution’s argument, just as we’d seen how Ingram had ended up on the show himself.
The second episode mainly focused on the filming of the episodes Ingram was on, with everyone writing Ingram off as nice but dim at first, and then the coughing and the answer-changing of the second episode he was on, with an increasing number of the quiz show’s crew sensing something was off, leading to frenzied discussions between Celador, ITV and the police and an eventual arrest. The stranger-than-fiction fact is that all this was happening on the eve of September 11th. The episode ended in court, with the defence QC saying ‘Well, that’s the prosecution’s version’. (Cue a ‘Is it all going to get a bit ‘Slumdog Millionaire?’ joke.)
Diana Ingram had come off unsympathetically e.g. her outrage that people like them (this came off as more class related than the armed forces connection, and this was not a context where middle-class whining came off well) don’t get arrested, they get to publish books of hints on how to game quiz shows. (Though ‘listen to the audience’ is a good tip.)
The third episode genuinely surprised me. For one thing, I hadn’t expected a musical dream sequence (oldskool, not Bollywoodesque). The popculture training montage was one of the funnier of its kind. Although he had a lesser role here, Michael Sheen had a tougher job, playing Chris Tarrant off the show.
And Helen McCrory was commanding as the defence barrister. I didn’t expect to be agreeing there might be reasonable doubt after she’d made her case, but, er… I thought the point about the unreliability of opinion was dodgy when it was first introduced, but more palatable when woven int the argument about editing a narrative (META!) and confirmation bias. There were pertinent points about the relationship between the police and the media in the noughties, the erosion of truth and the threat to the presumption of innocence.
Apart from the other attacks on the Ingram family, all the fake coughing or sympathetic coughing landed differently in the era of COVID, and we, along with the creator of the show were left wondering as to the truth of what had happened.
Thirdly: Mrs. America 1.7 Bella
Bella in focus: having lost her seat, she was given the job of chairing the resurrected women’s commission (aww, they called it Jill’s) because she was ruthless. We saw her extreme pragmatism balanced against her regret that she’d lost her radicalism. As she and Gloria journeyed towards deciding that it should be a chance for all women’s voices to be heard on all subjects, which was more idealistic than anything…well, it was quite a journey, involving lesbians I wasn’t convinced I’d noticed before, and Phyllis and co. waking up to the fact that they could just as easily get elected to be representatives to the commission as the libbers, and stop the ERA, which had got ratified by yet another state.
Loved the scene where Bella skewered the Phyllisettes. The argument of feminist!Phyllis made you working girls was provocative and about as straight as what Phyllis did with the quotes on the tape, but it pierced, because these ‘homemakers’ were equipped with all these skills and experiences now, and driving it all was Phyllis’s ambition.
But Phyllis had to battle ageing in the form of the menopause – interesting that she’d cited fertility in her book promotion speech, which was about as sensitive from the mother of six as her comments about abused women were around her friend and colleague who was suffering it. But even as the physical and mental effects of the menopause, something she could not accept or discuss, debilitated her, there was also the fact that her eldest daughter was now a young woman, an university student under the influence of liberal mixtapes!, arguing with her, embarrassed by her (and Phyllis couldn’t quite see that what her mother had done and what she was doing were not the same things) and, potently, rejecting her name.
So, there was all that as well as the fear of losing – because Bella would have made a formidable opponent, different to Betty, oh an another lawyer. But in being afraid to lose to the enemy, Phyllis lost power within the movement. It was her colleagues who turned up who would go to Houston. She was left scrabbling to go and rally, outside, with the anti who was equally willing to turn a blind eye to racists.
In that context, it was notable that all the women who we saw opening their agendas for the commission at Houston were white and Jewish.
We still haven’t seen Phyllis and Goria onscreen together.
The weight of the years of fighting alongside each other (and with each other a bit) could be felt in Bella’s conversations with Gloria and Betty. There was atrocious treatment of her assistants, though the viciousness came from Phyllis to her sister-in-law, who was possibly usurping her as the mother figure the growing-into-adults children trusted, while tension kept Phyllis from the younger generation Though if she’s going to be working on a rally before Thanksgiving, she may regret disinviting her S-i-l from it.
musesfool.Secondly: it’s fandom, Jim, but not as I know it
I got around to catching up with Quiz, which aired months ago and was generally praised. I get the sense that, after crime dramas, an easy way of gettin a drama commissioned by ITV is to pitch one about the channel’s history or stars. (Something the show admitted. Heh.)
Nonetheless, this was big and bold, and went in interesting and slightly unexpected directions over its three parts, doing more than telling the story that made the news. I vaguely remember the headlines, although I’d lost interest in ‘Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?’ by this point.
In the first ep, the criminal case of the major accused of cheating via helpfully placed coughs was dangled before us, before telling the story of the genesis of WWTBAM? at ITV. As the show became a massive success, its self-described fans built a community, only their aim was to get on the show and win it, and with greed among other motivations driving them, they wanted to outwit the programme makers – a different attitude to media fandom as I know it!
It seemed an enormous blindspot that it was only in the middle of the case that someone from Celador looked at online forums about the show, that they didn’t think harder about putting safeguards and then more safeguards in place for a show with a record-breaking pot of prize money.
Although I remember the build-up for Quiz making it seem like a two-hander between almost perfectly cast McFayden’s Charles Ingram and Sheen’s Tarrant (because of course Michael Sheen was cast) other people got as much airtime throughout the show. There was almost more of Ingram’s brother-in-law and his involvement with the Syndicate, the most organised bunch of these obsessives in the first ep, which ended with a return to the theatrical prosecution’s argument, just as we’d seen how Ingram had ended up on the show himself.
The second episode mainly focused on the filming of the episodes Ingram was on, with everyone writing Ingram off as nice but dim at first, and then the coughing and the answer-changing of the second episode he was on, with an increasing number of the quiz show’s crew sensing something was off, leading to frenzied discussions between Celador, ITV and the police and an eventual arrest. The stranger-than-fiction fact is that all this was happening on the eve of September 11th. The episode ended in court, with the defence QC saying ‘Well, that’s the prosecution’s version’. (Cue a ‘Is it all going to get a bit ‘Slumdog Millionaire?’ joke.)
Diana Ingram had come off unsympathetically e.g. her outrage that people like them (this came off as more class related than the armed forces connection, and this was not a context where middle-class whining came off well) don’t get arrested, they get to publish books of hints on how to game quiz shows. (Though ‘listen to the audience’ is a good tip.)
The third episode genuinely surprised me. For one thing, I hadn’t expected a musical dream sequence (oldskool, not Bollywoodesque). The popculture training montage was one of the funnier of its kind. Although he had a lesser role here, Michael Sheen had a tougher job, playing Chris Tarrant off the show.
And Helen McCrory was commanding as the defence barrister. I didn’t expect to be agreeing there might be reasonable doubt after she’d made her case, but, er… I thought the point about the unreliability of opinion was dodgy when it was first introduced, but more palatable when woven int the argument about editing a narrative (META!) and confirmation bias. There were pertinent points about the relationship between the police and the media in the noughties, the erosion of truth and the threat to the presumption of innocence.
Apart from the other attacks on the Ingram family, all the fake coughing or sympathetic coughing landed differently in the era of COVID, and we, along with the creator of the show were left wondering as to the truth of what had happened.
Thirdly: Mrs. America 1.7 Bella
Bella in focus: having lost her seat, she was given the job of chairing the resurrected women’s commission (aww, they called it Jill’s) because she was ruthless. We saw her extreme pragmatism balanced against her regret that she’d lost her radicalism. As she and Gloria journeyed towards deciding that it should be a chance for all women’s voices to be heard on all subjects, which was more idealistic than anything…well, it was quite a journey, involving lesbians I wasn’t convinced I’d noticed before, and Phyllis and co. waking up to the fact that they could just as easily get elected to be representatives to the commission as the libbers, and stop the ERA, which had got ratified by yet another state.
Loved the scene where Bella skewered the Phyllisettes. The argument of feminist!Phyllis made you working girls was provocative and about as straight as what Phyllis did with the quotes on the tape, but it pierced, because these ‘homemakers’ were equipped with all these skills and experiences now, and driving it all was Phyllis’s ambition.
But Phyllis had to battle ageing in the form of the menopause – interesting that she’d cited fertility in her book promotion speech, which was about as sensitive from the mother of six as her comments about abused women were around her friend and colleague who was suffering it. But even as the physical and mental effects of the menopause, something she could not accept or discuss, debilitated her, there was also the fact that her eldest daughter was now a young woman, an university student under the influence of liberal mixtapes!, arguing with her, embarrassed by her (and Phyllis couldn’t quite see that what her mother had done and what she was doing were not the same things) and, potently, rejecting her name.
So, there was all that as well as the fear of losing – because Bella would have made a formidable opponent, different to Betty, oh an another lawyer. But in being afraid to lose to the enemy, Phyllis lost power within the movement. It was her colleagues who turned up who would go to Houston. She was left scrabbling to go and rally, outside, with the anti who was equally willing to turn a blind eye to racists.
In that context, it was notable that all the women who we saw opening their agendas for the commission at Houston were white and Jewish.
We still haven’t seen Phyllis and Goria onscreen together.
The weight of the years of fighting alongside each other (and with each other a bit) could be felt in Bella’s conversations with Gloria and Betty. There was atrocious treatment of her assistants, though the viciousness came from Phyllis to her sister-in-law, who was possibly usurping her as the mother figure the growing-into-adults children trusted, while tension kept Phyllis from the younger generation Though if she’s going to be working on a rally before Thanksgiving, she may regret disinviting her S-i-l from it.
