It's our final week with this lineup of NBC comedies, and each one rose to the challenge by providing enjoyable holiday-themed episodes. For the last time in 2011 (sniff), let's get recapping.
Welcome back to Pop Pedestal, the blog series about pop culture personalities we admire. Today’s tribute goes to Toph Bei Fong, earthbender extraordinaire from the Nickelodeon cartoon series Avatar: The Last Airbender.
The Crunk Feminist Collective, an amazing community and blog "where crunk meets conscious and feminism meets cool" (who should promptly be added to your blogroll, RSS reader, Twitter/Tumblr dash, what have you, if they're not already there), recently posted an open letter on their Tumblr page from some of its contributors to the writers of the web series Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl asking for accountability regarding transmisogyny, ableism, and homophobia that have popped up in recent episodes:
We have seen your responsiveness to the fans of ABG and we hope that by raising this concern you will respond accordingly by not using such language in future episodes. There are so many awkward queer, trans, and disabled folks who love the show and it hurts to see and hear our lives used as punchlines.
Take a look at the photo on the left. Starting in January, Jeff Winger will be replaced by Liz Lemon. No wonder he looks so dismayed in the picture!
In case you haven't heard, Community is being pulled off the schedule indefinitely (boo) and being replaced by 30 Rock (yay for that, at least). Whitney is swapping places with Up All Night, and in celebration I've decided to pretend the show is already off the Thursday night schedule and not bother to recap it anymore. Hope you're cool with that. Let's get started!
Patty Chase (Betty Armstrong) puts up with a lot of shit. Not only does she have to put up with playing the bad cop to good cop dad, Graham Chase (Tom Irwin), but she also gave birth to teenage drama lightning rod Angela Chase (Claire Danes) and has to work for her own dad (Paul Dooley), whose staggering immaturity puts any Liberty High student to shame. Nobody gave Patty enough credit for enduring record levels of angst and ennui once every week when the show was on the air, and that's why I'm dedicating this week's Pop Pedestal to My So-Called Life's Patricia Chase.
Today, new methods have replaced DeLee’s, and yet popular obstetric interventions (cesareans, amniotomies, labor-inducing drugs, episiotomies, epidurals) are still designed to transfer control from the woman to her labor assistant. 33% of births in the United States are by cesarean, a rate that has grown significantly during the previous decade, in tandem with increasing rates of maternal injury and death. Yet representations of childbirth in television and film rarely show cesareans. Which is why I was so grateful for Reagan’s recent childbirth episode on Up All Night.
I’m having a bad day. Last night, I had a nightmare about the Bella Swan birth scene from Breaking Dawn. (To summarize: I was Bella.) I’m suffering from BSO, birth scene overload. It all seems so hopeless. The woman is always suffering. She lacks control and agency; surrounded by men, she’s told what's best for her and then chastised for making supposedly irrational demands. I just can't watch.
So I took a break from birth scenes to follow a lead (thanks @kristinrawls!) about last week’s episode of AMC’s The Walking Dead, a post-apocalyptic series about a group of survivors trying to avoid zombie bites. This proved to be terrible therapy for my BSO.
So I guess that’s why the characters in the film keep talking about Bella’s choice, huh? Weird stuff happens when you superimpose choice language into an anti-choice plotline. (Because of how it’s only a "choice" when abortion is an option, too.) It's true that while the books create an anti-choice moral universe, nothing in the film itself suggests that Bella's options would have been limited even if her life wasn't in danger. But regardless of all that, everyone can agree that Bella’s choices weren’t appealing. Or, as Alex Cranz at fempop.com puts it—"‘So women should choose eh? 'WELL HOW DO YOU LIKE THIS CHOICE?’ was the feeling I was getting from the movie."
Which brings me to Game of Thrones, in which Daenerys "Dany" Targaryen experiences a birth situation that is (no joke!) eerily similar to—and just as bad as—Bella’s.
As you've no doubt heard by now, Community is being taken off NBC's schedule indefinitely as of January. So I've decided to use this week's episode to talk about why this series, as beloved by the Internet as it ignored by Nieslen families, deserves to stay on TV.
It's our final week with this lineup of NBC comedies, and each one rose to the challenge by providing enjoyable holiday-themed episodes. For the last time in 2011 (sniff), let's get recapping.
This is my final post for Bringing Up Baby! I want to thank you wonderful readers for making this experience so enriching and enlightening.
As you've no doubt heard by now, Community is being taken off NBC's schedule indefinitely as of January. So I've decided to use this week's episode to talk about why this series, as beloved by the Internet as it ignored by Nieslen families, deserves to stay on TV.
.gif)
.gif)
