There are a lot of television shows and movies about teenagers, both comedies and dramas.There always have been. And yet, actual teenagers on television are extremely rare. Teens are typically played by twenty-something actors (or older). This is especially the case when it comes to teenagers in shows with a heavy sexual or romantic components…
Category: Television
Call For Comments: TV-Twentysomething-Teens
From Mav: A friend of mine posted a meme recently that made fun of the way teenagers are depicted on television. It shows a stock photo of a typical looking adolescent boy labeled “Teenagers in real life” next to a stock photo of a rugged looking model labeled “Teenagers on Netflix.” My first inclination was…
e120. Quarantine Comfort TV
Let me tell you a story, children. Way back in the before time, in the long long ago, before the plague came, we used to have this stuff we called content… media… shows. Back then, if we wanted entertainment, we would turn on our magic picture boxes and marvel at the wonders that displayed before…
e119. Copaganda II: Going Rogue
A few weeks ago, we released an episode about “copaganda.” On that show we started out talking about the TV show Paw Patrol and internet calls to have it and other cop shows cancelled in the wake of the #DefundThePolice movement and heightened scrutiny on law enforcement in the United States (Note from Mav: And…
Call For Comments: Quarantine Comfort TV
From Mav: This started out being a different kind of episode. A while back Katya pitched the idea to talk about “Feel Good TV.” She can give more details but the short side of it is that I think she wanted to talk about the kinds of shows you watch to make you feel good…
Call for Comments: Copaganda II: Going Rogue!
From Hannah: Our initial episode exploring copaganda (media that reinforces police-positive narratives) covered a lot of ground, but we majorly focused on media geared toward children and families — such as Paw Patrol, Zootopia, and Artemis Fowl — and shows whose underlying premise argue that the police should serve their communities (Brooklyn Nine-Nine is perhaps…
e117. Post-Release Censorship and the Disney Vault
There was a weird story that broke a few weeks ago when people discovered that episodes of the 2012 teen sitcom Wizards of Waverly Place had “censored” the cleavage of the mother on one episode by placing a blur over the actress’s chest on the Disney+ streaming service. After some investigation, it turned out that…
e116. Copaganda, Cartoons, and You
One of the most interesting side effects of the recent #BlackLivesMatter protests sparked off by the George Floyd murder has been the #DefundPolice movement gaining national attention. Obviously that’s a big complicated issue that goes beyond shouting hashtags online (or probably should). Some jurisdictions are beginning to take the call seriously, but in the meantime…
Call For Comments: Post-Release Censorship and Revisionism
From Mav: There was an article a few weeks ago that I wanted to address with a show… and then the world went to hell and we had to deal with other things (racism, sadly, is always topical). So now I want to get back to it… and sort of expand it with some other…
Call for Comments: Pop Culture Pet Peeves
September 1, 2020
From Hannah: A long time ago in a reality that now seems far far away, we did an episode on Media Addiction that discussed hate consuming media. We thought through why, exactly, fans continue to still engage with TV/book/comics/film franchises that disappoint them (Star Wars comes to mind). I’ve wondered, in the time since we’ve…