My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist, and in case you don’t click the SYTYCD Youtube links embedded therein, just fucking watch this:

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

On Monday SilverHammerMan asked (while I was busy photoshopping horrible things and so am only getting to it now):

Since some other people have mentioned the next Doctor now, I was wondering how you felt about the possibility of a female or non-white Doctor? It seems like every time we enter that stage between Doctors the internet gets whipped into a lather either declaring it a great idea or a terrible one, and I wondered where you stand.

I’m very much on board the train of thought that the next Doctor shouldn’t be just another white dude, yes.

I’m all in for a Doctor of colour – last time around I remember Andrew Wheeler suggested Chiwetel Ejiofor and I thought that was a splendid idea. Paterson Joseph wouldn’t be bad either, although I suspect he might be too manic as the Doctor. Adrian Lester would work, I think, as would Ashley Walters (although I am personally of the opinion that the next Doctor should not be Matt Smith-level young, we need a bit of a change-up and Walters is accordingly not the right fit at this time). Lennie James would be awesome. I don’t think Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje would be right for the role. Idris Elba is probably not attainable unless he really really wants to be the Doctor; the people who said Richard Ayoade are amusing trolls. Getting away from black men, I would love to see Alexander Siddig or Jimi Mistry or Naveen Andrews take a crack at the role, and I would break my “no young Doctor” rule for Dev Patel (although I think he would be better suited as a companion for a female Doctor).

I’m a little more leery about a female Doctor, but I have to admit that this is mostly because as a dude I identify with the Doctor on a gender basis. My way for dealing with this is to say “what if Helen Mirren played the Doctor” and then I have to admit “holy shit that would be balls-out amazing” even though she’s not going to do it because come on, she has better things to do with her time both in terms of art and money because she is Helen Mirren. Joanna Lumley is an interesting idea but would be getting into William Hartnell levels of Doctor age and I think is therefore unlikely. (Helen Mirren is ageless and therefore gets around this rule.) Kelly MacDonald is interesting, assuming people can tolerate the Doctor suddenly being Scottish (which I think would be more controversial than the Doctor being female, honestly). Emma Thompson would be amazing. Julie Walters would likely add an interesting “the Doctor is your kooky but tough grandmother” vibe to the character that I think would work really well. I think a lot of people would balk at Elizabeth Hurley but I’ve always thought she’s a great dramedy actress and would surprise people. Joely Richardson would be a badass Doctor, I think. And if we want to go full-diversity and have a female Doctor of color, there’s always Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who in addition to being lovely and awesome has a fantastic name.

Of course, practically all of these people are Names, which is why they are unlikely to be cast; they command bigger salaries and the BBC is still the BBC, even if it is one of their flagship shows. Unless they’re willing to take a pay cut, the next Doctor will probably be like Tennant or Smith – a relative unknown. Eccleston was an outlier in that regard.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Spoilers, obviously.

continue reading "Eleven thoughts about the new season of Arrested Development"

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

I’ve thought for a long while that any long-running series eventually stops being about anything other than itself. Each individual story might be about something; “Let This Be Your Last Battlefield”, for example, is about the absurdity of racial prejudice. But that’s not what ‘Star Trek’ is about. Other episodes of the series were about friendship, or about sexism, or about obsession…until eventually, all you could really say about the series was that it was about the Enterprise crew and the things that happened to them. Each episode was like a color transparency, laid over each other episode until all you could see was a character-shaped hole.

You could say the same thing about ‘Buffy’, about ‘Highlander’, about just about every long-running series…in the end, the changes forced on them by circumstance and the need to keep the show creatively fresh made them less about high school or the Gathering or the alien conspiracy or the fall of the Greek gods and more, eventually, about a person to whom things happen. A season might have an arc, an episode might have a point, but ‘Buffy’ is about a young woman named Buffy.

I’ve come to the conclusion, recently, that ‘Doctor Who’ is (as always, it seems, among science-ficton/fantasy series) an exception. ‘Doctor Who’ is about something, all the way through its fifty-year history, and it’s not the Doctor. In fact, the key to realizing what it’s about is to realize that the Doctor isn’t really what the series is about at all. It’s about the people around him. The Doctor is a catalyst, an agent of change, and the show ‘Doctor Who’ is about the way that people deal with him (and by extension, the monsters he fights and the strangeness of his universe) being thrust into their worldview.

Because everyone has a worldview, a collection of concepts and information that forms the underpinning to their mental existence. Things fall down, cars take you places, jobs pay you money, and the world works the way you’ve come to expect it to each day. We all form an opinion about the Way Things Are…and crucially, we all deal in different ways when that worldview is disrupted.

Some people become angry. Obama becoming President, for example, created a kind of hysterical rage in a certain type of person, because in their world black people did not become President. Obama wasn’t just a man who disagreed with them, he was a sign that their entire existence had come to an end, to be replaced by a strange new world where all their old certainties had dissolved. These people have to believe that he somehow cheated his way into the Oval Office, because they can’t accept the fundamental idea of his legitimacy.

Other people become elated by the change. The unexpected fills them with delight, tells them that there are still surprises left in a boring and predictable world. Seeing a paralyzed woman pick up a cup with a robot arm controlled entirely by her mind elicits a sort of giddiness, a sense that you’re taking a step into a bigger and stranger and more wonderful universe than you previously knew existed.

And many people, to quote the ‘Doctor Who’ story “The Face of Evil”, “rework the facts to fit their views.” Information that changes their worldview too much becomes false, even if the logic required to fit the lie into their head becomes strained to the point of absurdity. People are willing to imagine vast and shadowy conspiracies of government coups and secret shadow agencies if the alternative is accepting that a President can get his head blown clean off by a stranger with a rifle and a grudge.

This is what ‘Doctor Who’ is about. It’s about the ways that people deal with situations that challenge their worldviews. Each story establishes a world, whether it be 1960s London or an alien planet thousands of years in the future, and then it drops the Doctor–a tiny piece of impossibility–into that world. Just to see what happens. (This is one reason why the series can run for so long on such a premise…it’s inherently new-viewer friendly. Since you have to establish the world before you can change it, you’re constantly creating entry points for people who’ve never seen the show before.)

Sometimes people cope with the changes. The first two seasons of the series were about Ian and Barbara, two normal 60s schoolteachers, dealing with situation after situation that was entirely outside of their experience. Rose gleefully embraces the strangeness, Dodo freaks out and leaves the second she gets the chance, and Tegan treats it like a package tour until the point where it all gets to be too much for her.

Other people try to slot the Doctor into their worldview. The new show makes it explicit with the psychic paper–when the Doctor shows it to you, you see what you expect him to be reflected back at you–but even in the old series, the Doctor was always treated like what he was expected to be. Authoritarians saw him as a rebel, police slotted him in as a criminal, scientists expected him to be a kindred spirit. People have tried, desperately and endlessly, to make him fit. Only to find, to their frustration, that’s he’s exactly what he says he is, and nothing else.

The people who can’t accept that, in ‘Doctor Who’, tend to come to unpleasant ends. If you can’t accept that a Dalek or an Ice Warrior isn’t something familiar and acceptable, something you can fit into your worldview by negotiating with them or threatening them or ignoring them, they will probably kill you. The only chance you have to survive in ‘Doctor Who’ is to keep an open mind, to accept that the universe is bigger and stranger and more wonderful than you previously imagined, and to believe the facts when they’re right in front of your face, even if they’re not pleasant. And that’s a premise big enough to last fifty years and then some.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Energy-Puking Boy (and others): Community Alignment Chart?

I’m not going to do what somebody else already did perfectly well just for the sake of doing it with my particular chart design. You can quibble if Abed and the Dean should be switched or if Britta and Troy should be, but it’s reasonably accurate. (If you want to see an awful Community alignment chart that rips off my design, here you go.)

Unstoppable Gravy Express: So is that Brad Paisley / LL Cool J song racist or not?

Ta-Nehisi Coates answered that better than I ever could.

Rbx5: re there any Big Two/Image titles you are, in fact, following, and why?

A fair amount of Marvel, actually. Avengers, New Avengers, Uncanny Avengers, Wolverine and the X-Men, All New X-Men and Uncanny X-Men. The current F4 stuff isn’t bad at all but it doesn’t really grab me, mostly because after the Jonathan Hickman run on that franchise it just sort of pales in comparison, and Hickman is the reason I’m reading his two Avengers books – he’s currently my “I will read any comic he writes” writer, much in the way that Grant Morrison was such ten years ago.

I’m not buying anything DC prints new; given their current treatment of creators (this is not to say that Marvel is great shakes, they aren’t, but DC these days seems determined to actively fuck creators over in every possible respect) I try to avoid giving them money. I bought a copy of The New Deadwardians used and it was really good, and I am glad DC didn’t get any of my money for it.

Image… I picked up Sex, which is Joe Casey’s book about a Batman analogue post-Bat-life sort of a thing. It was okay-to-decent but the lettering was so distracting I gave up on it after two issues. I’m reading Saga in trades (it is very good) and The Manhattan Projects because Hickman, and I tried out Prophet which fell into the “it’s good, but not my thing” category.

switchnode: How long do you expect/intend Al’Rashad to run? Are we a significant way into a fast, hard-hitting story about a particular flashpoint, or still in the setup phase of something much longer and more sprawling? On a related note, do you think of it more as a webcomic, or as a comic book that happens to be on the web?

It’s going to run eight “issues,” with issue eight planned to be oversized (e.g. more than 28 pages, less than a full ninth issue). Currently we’re midway through book six, so you do the math.

And it’s a comic book that happens to be on the web. The fact that people keep complaining about things which get revealed 1-2 pages later probably should have been a big tip-off there. Davinder and I wanted to do a comic, and I don’t actually like the episodic/strip format of many webcomics for the purpose of a larger narrative. So there you go.

Murc: Any chance of maps at any point for Al-Rashad?

They’re definitely in the queue, although they might end up being bonuses for the print edition.