I’ve made it
clear countless times in my TV criticism that I don’t care about the
racial or sexual reinvention of fictional characters as long as it doesn’t affect
the story. I realize this has made almost every other project from Hollywood a
polarizing issue for the last twenty years and frankly it’s made my job
infinitely harder.
My attitude, I should be frank, has to do with viewing
it on its merits. But also because I never view any in pop culture sacred and only
capable of an originalist interpretation. Also and most importantly, I don’t
think that eighty to ninety percent of so many of the projects that fanboys
considered sacred were ever that good.
Go ahead, burn me in effigy, call me a philistine but
I never saw anything that remarkable in Star Wars or Star Trek and
I went my entire childhood not knowing that it was a crime against humanity to
know whether a comic book character came from DC or Marvel. You want to argue
that Stan Lee was a national treasure or that Batman deserves to have his own
great book series, I’d say these people really need to read more and watch
more.
So in my humble opinion, it doesn’t make a difference
if Brie Larson plays Captain Marvel, if Nora West and Jimmy Olsen are African-American,
if there are black storm troopers or
female Jedis, if the Ghostbusters are female, male or holograms who identify as
pansexual. I’m more upset Greta Gerwig wasn’t nominated for Best Director for Little
Women then directing a glorified product placement ad and I’m irritated
that shows like The Mandalorian get nominated for Best Drama because it
means I have to watch series for a franchise I’ve done everything in my power
to ignore for a quarter of a century. My job is hard enough; whether or not there
were African-American elves is not something I want to spend time debating the
merits of. If this is what our society is fighting battles over, maybe the
zombie apocalypse needs to come. Though apparently, according to The Last of
Us, representation of the LGBTQ+ will
apparently still be important after the world ends. (I’m speaking in hyperbole
in the latter subject; I’m actually planning to watch the series before Season
2.)
Again I can’t bring myself to care about this. Where I
do think I have to draw a line in the sand is the way that, in the name
of multiculturalism Hollywood, after decades of whitewashing the past, has no
ridiculously overcorrected to the point of complete illogic. Dev Patel has
played both Gawain and David Copperfield. There are many blacks who are part of
1920s Communist Russia and in one case a member of the upper class in A
Gentleman in Moscow. And don’t even get me starting on the alternate
universe Ryan Murphy has created in limited series such as Hollywood where
Jim Crow is apparently not taking place in 1930s Los Angeles.
I get that the history of the world has been unkind to
minorities in every respect. And I’m more than open to series that tell this
side of our nation’s past. I was in awe of Lovecraft Country and Watchmen
and I thought that Showtime’s Fellow Travelers tried to tell the story
that not even most members of the LGBTQ+ people were unaware of. I think we need to
tell more stories of the past. But there’s a big difference from telling untold
stories and basically turning the entire history of the world into glorified
fanfiction. This has been done by several filmmakers and showrunners, but it
should come as a shock to no one that the biggest abuser of this has been
Shonda Rhimes and the world she built with Bridgerton.
I’ve made it clear on multiple occasions that I’ve
never liked Rhimes’ work and that Bridgerton is no different. At the
time I just thought it was yet another example of Rhimes being Rhimes. I now
realize that she was actually doing something far more sinister and kind of
unsettling.
It’s been clear to me, at least in theory, that Bridgerton
takes place in a Regency England where, somehow Anglo-Africans enjoy in
some place the full equality of white ones. They have vast amounts of wealth, have
been born to families of immense privilege and are free to marry white women.
It’s very hard to imagine a Europe, much less an England, where this kind of
society could be allowed to exist, particularly considering that women don’t
have any equality at all, but what the hell, it was Rhimes being Rhimes.
Then I heard about Queen Charlotte. To be clear
Charlotte has been betrothed against her will to marry George IV. Again, the
idea that any of the crown heads of Europe would marry a woman who is clearly
of darker skin passed the bonds of incredulity. But apparently while the rules
of integration exist in England, slavery still exists everywhere else. This is
true of the British Empire. (On a side note, if the entire first season of Queen
Charlotte doesn’t have at least one character says: “England ruled by an
African Queen?” it is a betrayal of everything I hold dear. Back to my point.)
I’ll be honest the world I would like to explore in Bridgerton
has a storyline far more compelling then who Lady Whistledown is. If blacks
somehow have full equality in England, how is slavery still exists throughout
the world? If they are nobles, do they hold seats in Parliament? Are there
members of the House of Commons or Lords who want to end the slave trade? Hell,
that’s the storyline for Queen Charlotte: Charlotte scheming to
use her power to end the slave trade throughout the world.
That would
be brilliant television and I’d instantly watch every episode. But it is not
the kind of story that Rhimes is capable of writing, even if she were interested
in the subject. And anyone who is a watcher of her work knows that, for all
Rhimes’ claims of being groundbreaking with African-American woman in positions
of power, when push comes to shove, her characters have no more interest in
disruption than Tyler Perry’s. If we learned anything from watching Scandal,
it was that Olivia Pope might have the power to make the most powerful men
in America quake, but she was not interested in doing good with it, certainly
not for people of her gender or race any more than her father was. Rhimes’
shows might be all about breaking the glass ceiling when it comes to the races,
genders and sexuality of her characters, but all that usually means is that
they get to have sex with whoever they want with no consequences or attachment.
Rhimes has created an alternate England where black men have more power than
they ever will in America – and they seem to have no more interest in doing
anything with it than their white counterparts.
If you’re going to commit to this kind of alternate
history, you have to truly commit to it and Rhimes has no interest in it. Neither
to be sure, do any of the alterations I’ve listed before. There is an Agatha
Christie adaptation playing on BBC where the white male protagonist was swapped
out for a Nigerian emigrant. The wokeness police were outraged but for the
wrong reasons. The time and place were the same - a rural village in 1950s England – but there
was no acknowledgement by either the lead or any other character of how a man
of African descent could proceed in 1950s England when the sun had not yet set
on the British Empire and somehow no one mentioned it. That’s honestly more
disturbing that the last couple of regenerations of Doctor Who.
Fans of my writing might remember that I have raved over
the past several years about HBO’s reimagining of Perry Mason. They could
argue that in this version Della Street is not only a lesbian but the power
behind Perry, Hamilton Burger is gay, and Paul Drake is black and all of this
takes place in 1930s Los Angeles. Isn’t this unrealistic?
No, because in Perry Mason the leads have changed
but America hasn’t. And the writers never let the characters or the viewer
forget it. Della Street and Hamilton Burger have to be seen together as a couple
in order to make sure Burger, who wants a life as a District Attorney, can not
be seen as a single individual. Della wants power as a woman, but she knows all
too well she can not be open with her sexuality even to her landlady. And Paul
is very aware of the racist world he lives in and knows all too well
that even if he steps rightly in LA, he might very well not come home to his
family.
Aside from
that, we know of all the bigotry that exists in this America and its clear that
in this world, the rich and powerful can and will always get away with murder.
All Perry and his band can do is try to get their clients, who are being
railroaded by the justice system, acquitted by it. What happens in the
aftermath is beyond their control – and in some cases, they might not survive
even if they don’t get executed.
Perhaps it shouldn’t shock me that while Perry Mason
struggled to survive to a second season before being canceled, Bridgerton
is now scheduled for a third season and another spinoff may be in the
works. It fits into the general mindset of so many niche audiences who want representation
in film and television but don’t really care if its realistic or even logical. The
regency England of Bridgerton is as utterly impossible and unbelievable as
the Middle-Earth and space operas where representation is a battle of ideology.
More to the point, Perry Mason is the world we
actually lived in. Bridgerton is the one people wanted to be real. And I
know that in so much of what I read – and the entertainment stuff is by far the
least of it – what so many of these groups want to see. That rewriting
the past is the kind of thing that they argue against when other people do it –
well, that’s an inconsistency that they never see in themselves.
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