Stuff I've been watching with my workouts

[mrissa]

1. I have finished watching S2 of Bones, and I will keep watching, though I don't have S3 yet. The writers continue to do that thing I talked about before, where they feel the need to put their thumb on the scales to make absolutely absolutely sure that you know that they totally believe in every supernatural thing to come down the pike and do not endorse Brennan's worldview or even refrain from using cheesy ghost special effects to directly contradict it even though it always works for solving murders. It annoys me rather a lot.

This time they also bugged me with it in the other direction, bad writing of religious characters: in one of the episodes featuring a Catholic priest, Booth was jumping all over Brennan to treat every tiny detail of the Catholic church a) as if she was knowledgeable about it and b) with complete reverence. And if I'd been writing it, the priests would have been looking at Booth like, Dude, chill, God is not damaged by this woman not knowing whose picture is in that stained glass window. God can handle it. And he wasn't telling her anything. He was just acting like everybody should automatically know all of Catholic doctrine and culture just because. I ran into this a lot in school in Omaha, but those people were, y'know, pre-adolescent. Which, physically, Booth is not.

2. You could tell I was getting antsy for S4 of Criminal Minds (due out yesterday! should have shipped to me already!) because for about the last third of S2 of Bones I kept muttering, "Criminal Minds would never do this to me." I think one of the things that bothered me most is that the Bones team is very good at telling each other how they suck or where they're ignorant and not at all good at fixing it, or even trying to fix it. When you have characters like Brennan and Zack, you have people with very specialized skills and also more generalized gaps in knowledge/skill set. But everybody is always telling them how socially clueless they are and nobody is ever giving useful information to follow. "You can't say that to people!" is never followed by, "Here is how they are interpreting it that it goes awry. You will be more successful if you appeal to ______ instead." It's not hard. I should know; I spent much of my late adolescence and young adulthood dealing with hard-core geeks who needed to hear social stuff spelled out, and often taking the time to do the spelling will be rewarded in the next situation. But I suppose having characters grow as people and learn new things means that the writers have to keep track of that instead of just inserting an obligatory awkward social situation per episode, har de har. (Also, for awhile in S1 I was hoping that they had noticed that the more socially "normal" characters were not actually being kinder or more perceptive regarding their less socialized colleagues, just more conformist. Alas, that notice--if it existed--was fleeting.)

2a. Giving a character with a floppy haircut a very bad non-floppy haircut and buying him a suit that looks like he raided his older brother's closet does not lend graviatas. Seriously, what? What? Now he looks like a 12-year-old who is very uncomfortable, instead of looking like a 12-year-old who is reasonably comfortable. In what universe this is an improvement I cannot imagine.

3. Also, if you're going to set a character up as not following or even really being aware of social conventions, why do you do that? You do it so she can beat idiocy to death with her shoe in hilarious ways! At least that's why I'd do it. This show: not often enough. When Angela is defensive about weighing something like 130 or 135 pounds at 5'8", saying, "But it's all muscle," Brennan should give her the you-are-stupid look and say, "And bones and internal organs, jeez, Angela." Instead, they let the comment stand as reasonable/normal. Bah. Bah, I say! It's not like our culture is short on cultural idiocy to skewer and/or undermine. So get to it already.

4. Not on the Bones front at all: I have been watching Leverage, and I find it meta-hilarious. The show itself is mildly entertaining (I will keep Hardison and the rest of them can go do whatever), but they are so dead set that we should not feel the slightest bit guilty about watching people steal things and beat up on people that the justifications go way over the top. It's not just an evil developer trying to bulldoze a church! It's an evil developer who hires thugs to beat up a priest trying to bulldoze a church! And the priest is a personal friend of one of the team members! It's not just a corrupt politician they're going to take down, it's a corrupt politician in league with corrupt mercenaries! Who have injured veterans of the war in Iraq! I am starting to expect that the next people they go up against will be shown kicking bunny rabbits just to make sure the point is clear: these are the bad guys. Not the violent thieves, so don't you worry about that. It's the bunny-kickers all the way.

I'm just saying, I find myself able to tolerate grey areas and moral ambiguity, and I thought that that was what heist shows were all about.

Comments

[kizmet-42.livejournal.com]

I had a long discussion with a friend over the weekend about how much I love Leverage but acknowledging that the team is not composed of nice people and they do a lot of not-nice things that would have repercussions. Innocents deal a lot of collateral damage that the team never fixes. Bugs me. But it's like Mission Impossible and that's good enough for me.

Bones so completely and totally jumped the shark at the end of the last season that I can't decide if I want to watch it again.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I am watching Leverage for Hardison and Elliot, who are love and I might turn into a slasher if I'm not careful. Also, the wonderful dialogue, and the bizarrely clair treatment of horrible things. (Parker blowing up her parents' home, done Dennis The Menace style. Yeah, she's a sociopath. Here's her bunny.)

[thoughtdancer.livejournal.com]

By the way, do you have a work-out filter? One of my friends does, and watching his numbers improve has been ... interesting and sometimes even inspirational. ;-)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Nope. I am accountable to myself and actively do not want other people's commentary.

Here is how it works for me so far: I ride the bike for an hour and a half every day. If that starts getting to be 17 or more miles consistently (it's at least 15), I move the resistance up another notch again. So you wouldn't be seeing much of a change in numbers anyway because of how I do things.

And it's every single day unless I'm really really sick or have something extremely unusual to do.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, I enjoyed the bunny as well.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I watched one Mission Impossible movie once. That's it for my MI experience.

[columbina.livejournal.com]

When you have characters like Brennan and Zack, you have people with very specialized skills and also more generalized gaps in knowledge/skill set. But everybody is always telling them how socially clueless they are and nobody is ever giving useful information to follow.

This. I'm okay with the idea that Brennan lives in her own mental space and doesn't really understand the rest of the humans very well, but unless she really were socially ISOLATED - which she is not - some of those other humans would be telling her, "Look, out here on our planet, we do it like this." Sometimes well-meaning and friendly, sometimes annoyed, sometimes busybody, but they'd be telling her. And of course she could feel free to disregard them, but they'd be telling her. I don't think it is a reluctance to have the character evolve, because she does; I don't think it is a reluctance to soften the character, because she could always say, "No, that custom of yours is stupid, I won't do it" and carry on. I am force to conclude it's just lazy writing.

Strangely, the heavy pushing of the religion and spooky aspects in the show don't bother me on Brennan's end, because she will just let all that bounce off her - but it does bother me about the Booth character. For a hot-shot FBI agent, I find he is far too credulous.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

For more gray area and clever plotting, check out HUSTLE, the British version of Levage (now starting its sixth season--there are only six eps a year.)

I love Leverage for the characters, not the stories.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think it's because the writers are too credulous themselves. But possibly I am just grumpy with them about Certain Late S2 Events.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This definitely has to go on the list, since you are the third person to recommend it and the three of you don't seem to be in cahoots.

Not that I am against cahoots per se, just that sometimes the dynamic of watching a show socially changes how people react to it, so having three people say, "We're all watching x together and it's really good," is very different from having three people separately say so.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

This is true.

Just for gauging purposes, I was bored by Mission Impossible because it all seemed techwizardry with minimal emotional content. Hustle gets you into the characters' personal lives, and also has them discussing the morals of what they do. One ep in the first season I don't think is convincing but A for effort.

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

The old Mission Impossible TELEVISION program was a whole different phylum than the Movies are. I enjoyed the show (they might be available from NetFlix, I don't know.) Everything you say about Bones is true and it's gotten more and more outrageous as the seasons have gone on as far as her atheism.

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

I am forced to believe that there are (at least) two writers on Bones. One writes her as paying attention to corrections and making efforts to get along better. (I am caught up in Bones, and thus can not remember when this started.) The other one writes her EXACTLY the same every time. Also, I call shenanigans: she dates smart nice guys that she meets SOMEHOW, and has actual relationships with them (albeit not universally successful relationships). She is not as socially crippled as writer 2 wants us to believe.

I want to find writer 2 and kick him repeatedly in the shins.

Also, I think heist shows are about amusing capers. The moral ambiguity would be nice, but really: it's the caper.

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

I think they do a bit better writing Zak's character, because he a) doesn't have the same level of seniority as she does, so it's more believable he could get where he is while being as clueless as he is, and b) people do often tell Zack how to behave, and he rejects the advice as not making sense.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And then--the person "explaining" it to him stops. They never say, "It doesn't make sense if you think of it from this direction, but what these other people are considering is that factor instead." And they never say, "Yes it does, and here's what you're missing." And they never say, "No, but your way is hurting people [sometimes yourself] and the other way is not hurting anything." They act like telling him, "you can't" or "you have to" should be enough. Which might be sensible for someone who had never met Zack or anyone like him, but come on.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I suspect that at least one of the writers believes that if you are hot enough, smart nice people of your preferred sex/gender will come out of the woodwork and take you out and treat you well.

I call bullshit on that, too.

[kizmet-42.livejournal.com]

Never watched any of the movies; my tomcruise-hate is too strong.

[thoughtdancer.livejournal.com]

*nods* We don't have a stationary bike, but I do have a set of freeweights. My friends uses weights as well. That's how the numbers can get interesting.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am not a serious weightlifter. By which I mean I lift small weights most days of the week but as an augmentation to the bike rather than as its own concerted program.

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

Yes. That makes 2 of us. I cannot STAND the man. Good to know there is someone else out there who remembers IM the SERIES.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

suspect that at least one of the writers believes that if you are hot enough, smart nice people of your preferred sex/gender will come out of the woodwork and take you out and treat you well.

This belief was taught, more or less explicitly, by every girls' or women's social organization I encountered during the 1980s. (The exceptions were a girls' soccer team in my high school, where it was assumed but not explicitly stated, and Take Back the Night, which is more political than social.) I'm not a bit surprised writers believe it.

[snickelish.livejournal.com]

Which, physically, Booth is not.

This made me giggle. Several times.

After all that, it really is quite impressive that you're still watching Bones at all.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I enjoy the blog of one of Leverage's producer sorts (http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/).

Here is a relevant bit from one of his question-and-answer posts:

@Bryan-Mitchell: Will there ever be an episode where the issue isn't so black and white? Where maybe it isn't as obvious that the bad guy is "bad" or that maybe the team members are split on if the issue warrants their involvement?

Eh. We'll probably do that at some point (one could argue the Hurley story was one), but as I've mentioned before, we're a pulp show. People tune in to watch banter and evil-smiting. We're pretty happy living in that world.

@catchester: I think the isues of good and evil and the team being split have already been dealt with a lot, considering there has only been 17 episodes. Like in the nigerian job, where the good guy client turned into the bad guy. Or the 12 step job where the bad guy was just mixed up and had good intentions. Or the wedding and beantown bailout jobs that Nate didnt want anything to do with. Then there's the stork job where Eliot thinks kidnapping a child isnt what they do and Parker later goes against the team decision and tries to rescue all the children. Or the fairy godparent job where Sophie and Eliot both object to using a child in their con. Most of Leverage seems to be a gray area to me. Thats one of the things i like about it.

Or ... that. (I honestly answer these questions one at a time, without reading them first, so there you go)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm a picker. (Also a grinner. But that's not relevant right now.) I can only rewatch Veronica Mars so many times before I ruin it for myself, and I go through a lot of DVD time for my workouts. And there is a lot to enjoy in Bones as well. But for me one of the things to enjoy is picking it apart.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think including jobs the team didn't want or didn't universally want is just plain silly. It looks clear to me in The Wedding Job, for example, that Nate is not saying, "It's perfectly fine to ruin family businesses and jail innocent people!" and the rest of the team is saying, "No, dude, that's bad." And The Nigerian Job where they don't do their homework for someone who might as well have worn a sign around his neck reading, "BAD GUY HERE!" is not the equivalent of someone good turning bad.

So yah: stick with the banter and evil-smiting, is my theory.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

For Brennan, I always assumed she was trying to understand why someone thought she was being socially inept--in the same way she tries to understand societies which accept human sacrifice. But she's not going to not ask an awkward question any more than she's going to sacrifice people. She wants to understand it, but not do it.

Mostly I watch for Angela anyway, though. Because she's the engineer.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Apparently we live on completely different Angela-related planets, because my perception of Angela is that she is the one who pats people's hands and says, "Oh, honey, you're incompetent in a way I won't help you fix. Why don't you do something dumb?"

[moiread]

I will also recommend Hustle. It's also campy, but I find it better quality overall than Leverage. :D

[laurel]

I hate that thing they do on Bones and various other shows where a character is shown to be oh-so-clueless about basic social interactions in one episode, then they seem to have a handle on rather more advanced interactions in another. It's the inconsistency that drives me nuts. Well, and the assumption that someone who is very smart must also be socially awkward.

And sometimes the things they have Brennan clueless about just make no sense given past episodes. Gah!

As for Leverage, I'm right there with you on being amused by that stuff.

For a while there were so many shows on TV that were all about the shades of grey and dark characters who did bad things and were conflicted. Shows where the lead character actually was a bad guy. And now there are a bunch of shows that are clearly of the fluffy black & white school with as little nuance or shades of grey as possible.