potentiality_26

King Lear is one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, and I approached the Amazon prime adaptation gingerly, and it was definitely... a mixed bag.

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I will carry on waiting for a good King Lear.
  

I never liked it, I want to say that at the outset.  I mean, what's the point of making a historical series from the point of view of the women if you're only going to underscore how ultimately powerless they are?  Even the "magical" subplot was annoying because it was so obviously a ploy to make the series' passive heroine look slightly less passive, but that too ultimately failed.  If the closest she comes to taking charge of her life is basically wishing someone dead, that is not power.  The way this series was advertised, I honestly can't tell if the writers legitimately thought it was feminist and empowering, or if they were just lying, and I'm not sure which is worse.

So anyway, given that I never liked it, I probably have no right to be as annoyed as I am about how completely off the goddamn rails it went in the last episode.

( But seriously )

See, all of this happened a long time ago.  We know who married who, who had which kid, who died in what battlefield and who didn't, but we don't know the meaning behind a lot of it.  What I like about historical fiction (when I like it) is when the writers take what we do know and make an interesting backstory, weaving the facts together to create a reading I haven't thought of before.  This was a poor one, and it handwaved plenty of what we do know to serve itself, which to my mind defeats the purpose.

At the end of the day, I'm sticking to Shakespeare, guys.  They're equally fictional, but Shakespeare was just better at it.
 

I liked it, in as much as I can like "Much Ado About Nothing" (it's just not a fun story, is it?  I love almost all of the comedies, but Much Ado just leaves me with a lot of "Wait... WTF, Will?"  I saw it in London with Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones; if I wasn't sold then, I don't think I ever will be).  I thought it was very well done, especially given the amount of time it was filmed in, and everyone in it was very good.

But I look at Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof together and all I can think is- "I'm still mad."  I'm still mad that Wes and Fred were together for like five minutes and then everything when to hell.  Why, Joss?  Why?

Excuse me while I go rewatch "Smile Time" and weep unattractively.
 

Your favorite show

I'd really love to call The Wild Wild West my guilty pleasure show and have done with it.  I mean, the plots are bizarre, it's generally really campy, and a lot of the time I finish with an episode and I'm not a 100% percent sure why most of it happened.  (misssunbeam said it best: "One bad thing about WWW: the plots are impossible to coherently describe.  One good thing about WWW: while you’re watching the eps, they’re so entertaining that you’re okay with the incoherence.")  If there's better candidate for a guilty pleasure show, I can't think of one, especially since it's a really problematic show for me both generally and personally.  Failing that, I'd call it my latest TV show obsession, because this really all happened because I saw it and my brain decided that I needed to write all the fanfiction.  My WWW to non-WWW fic ratio: 8 to 3.  And I haven't finished the really long ones yet.  Sniff.

But it really is my favorite.  It's crazy and funny and action-y, and it's very possibly the slashiest damn show on God's green earth.  It's full of eccentric side characters, bizarre locales (like a clown themed bar instead of regular bar, apparently so they could use a trained seal act), fight scenes with continuity goofs that let you know you're a perv (Jim falls down.  Jim gets up.  Jim's butt is dusty.  Next cut- it's not dusty anymore.  Trust me, guys, it was the first place I looked), and hot men in ridiculously tight pants.  More importantly (if there is anything more important than hot men in tight pants), days six and seven are favorite and least favorite episodes of a favorite show, and I want to answer with WWW- so there.

To briefly redeem myself, however, I'd like to say that the best and most loveable show I think I've seen- even though I never felt with the teeniest urge to connect with it fannishly and thus don't love it in the same way I do WWW- is probably Slings and Arrows.  It's a wonderfully acted and scripted show, with great characters and a consistent build over its three seasons.  I love the development of Geoffrey Tennant (an actor and director of questionable sanity) over the course of the three years, and I love the struggles we see each season as a play is painstakingly put on.  As a Shakespeare fangirl, I love the riffs on what makes his works timeless (and what makes them such a source of obsession for the people who love them).  As a Shakespearean actress, I love how familiar to me the characters and situations are.  But I also love the touches of magic, the way the show never gets entirely bogged down by realism, and the fact that at its heart it's a show about a director struggling with the ghost of his predecessor both literally and metaphorically (and the fact that said predecessor, Oliver, is in love with him, even if Geoffrey never quite figures that out).     

( The rest of the meme )