I love a Christmas special.  They are always absurd and are often game-changers for an entire series — even though they are not part of a season, so not all viewers will end up watching them.  Some prime examples from years past:

• Voyage of the Damned, Doctor Who (I have never made it all the way through this episode.  I just… I don’t even know.)
• That Misfits special from last year (Nathan randomly commits to a pregnant girl, there is a gross afterbirth-stomping scene, Nicki dies, and OH YEAH THEY ALL GET NEW POWERS)
• okay I really just wanted to mention those two.

This year, both Doctor Who and Downton Abbey indulged us.  I’ll avoid spoilers for the latter, but not the former because it’s become so formulaic that there Are No Spoilers.  In “The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe,” Who offered a forgettable Narnia knockoff (but with spaceships) that I thought was focused on a mother’s love by defining it as strength; however, it actually reduced motherhood to a biological function and then some trees were sentient.  Also Bill Bailey and Dawn French (underused).  Madge (Claire Skinner) was a superb, fierce mother, though, which I did appreciate.   

Doctor Who always grants Christmas this semi-cosmic significance without quite considering why.  Oh, it’s Christmas, so there will be aliens and a derivative story line.  Last year’s “A Christmas Carol” took on Scrooge-lite in analyzing generosity and love at Christmastime, but this year’s special didn’t do much for me.  And yet the episode nearly saved itself in the last few minutes with a surprise happy ending and the Doctor understanding what it was to cry with happiness.  Amy and Rory returned.  Amy continues to have beautiful hair.  I continued not to give a shit.

Because Christmas specials are all about ~feelings~, Downton Abbey nearly gave everyone a heart attack with the unraveling of scandals both upstairs and downstairs.  I imagine people will get upset about spoilers, so I won’t get into them.  The tension felt real, but then I remembered what show I was watching. On Downton Abbey there are rarely any consequences for any characters.  Obviously the denouement of this special was amazing and perfect and YAY, but I’m a bit tired of the same problems being rehashed as if they were new plot points and hope the show can finally move forward.  I’m at the point where I don’t much care about Bates anymore, and was relieved not to have to deal with Branson being a domineering d-bag making Sibyl feel bad about class issues for 90 minutes.  

That said, Dame Maggie Smith was on point, as always, and of course the ending was a cause for joy, celebration, parades in the streets etc.

In the midst of all of this, I wasn’t really into Christmas this year after a long semester and a week of intense holiday admin.  So it was a relief that the triumphant return of Absolutely Fabulous had nothing to do with the holidays.  How this show manages to stay relevant is beyond me; it’s a work of genius, ageing with its characters through a variety of social contexts.  And for all the feel-good warm-and-fuzzy feelings the previous shows doled out, nothing inspired me more than the handshake between Patsy and Saffy.  That, friends, is a true statement of peace for mankind.

[DW and DA screencaps from rawr-caps.net; AbFab image from The Telegraph.  Font is ChocolateBox.  I’ve forgotten how to use Photoshop with any dignity.]

I’m going to start this review of the first two episodes of AMC’s Hell On Wheels by flat out stating that the writing needs to improve. The editing could use some work as well. Given the decent production values, and the seemingly capable cast of actors, it seems a shame that the writing relies so heavily on failed attempts to be clever and listless dialogue. Plot-wise I think there have been a few missteps as well. I’m hoping that things improve, because the cast is fairly diverse and I am very interested to see how the storylines involving the freedman Elam Ferguson and the Cheyenne preacher Joseph evolve. I mean, obviously I need to keep my expectations realistic - an interesting, nuanced picture of two men of color on one tv show is a lot to ask for in this day and age~

Anyway, writing aside, Hell On Wheels is basically a Western with a revenge plot thrown in (which I suppose is a pretty standard combination). Former Confederate solder and plantation owner Cullen Bohannon*, played by Anson Mount, is out to get revenge on the Union soldiers who raped and murdered his beloved wife sometime during Sherman’s March South. In the process of tracking down these men, Bohannon joins up with the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad, which is industriously moving right through Cheyenne territory in Oklahoma. Construction of the railway is carried out by a number of former soldiers from both sides of the Civil War, and a large contingent of former slaves, including Elam Ferguson, played by Common. Elam is clearly being set up as Cullen’s confidant/right-hand-man on the railroad work crew. They’re even already conspired to kill a man together! Bonding!

Leading the push to create the railroad and milk the federal government for everything it’s got in the process is Thomas Durant, played with seeming relish by Colm Meany. Durant is predictably an avaricious blowhard, bent on getting rich at the expense of everyone (one feels that being able to dick people over is the main reason Durant got in the money-making business to begin with). I thought the scene where Durant was sticking even more arrows into the dead bodies of his survey crew in order to generate more outrage against the Natives was very interesting - the show dabbles in making astute commentary on its historical subject matter. Another good moment was when Robert Bell (Robert Moloney) reminds his wife Lily (Dominique McElligott) that her perceptions of the West as uninhabited are wrong - he rightfully tells her that they are in the heart of Cheyenne territory, not some untouched, unclaimed land.

It has to be said that the show also dabbles in making some not so astute commentary, like the continual usage of racial slurs, on which Common has said, “Even if you try to think that they’re acting, it still just doesn’t feel right…You get that feeling like, ‘Man, this is not good.’” I agree that it is not good, and I am hoping that (however “historically accurate” some of these terms may be) they fall out of use in the show’s scripts. I also feel bad that Common has expressed discomfort about this part of his work environment and nothing has been done by the show’s producers to address it. They could very easily cut out certain terms they are using and the narrative would not be impacted at all.

This does bring out a point I want to address about the general conceit of the show - it feels like the writers are trying to go for an “ultra-realistic” take on historical events, and hope to justify their use of certain terms and tropes in this way. However, the writer’s also clearly want their protagonist, Cullen Bohannon to be sympathetic to the audience, and in an effort to achieve this they have made him into some sort of exceptional, enlightened hero-figure. what I mean is, when it is revealed that Bohannon owned slaves, in addition to fighting for the Confederate Army, it was a realistic and complicated part of that character’s past. When it was revealed that Bohannon has actually freed his slaves before the Civil War broke out, due to the saintly influence of his Northern wife who helped him see the evils of slavery, I was, frankly, offended. Because:

a) am I supposed to care that he saw the error of his ways? He owned slaves! He participated in one of the most egregious human rights violations in history. I don’t really commend people for realizing slavery is bad - we should all know that anyway! and

b) the writer’s clearly want to cash in on some sort of pre-Civil War southern glamor, where men like Bohannon are “noble” or “gentlemanly” or “well mannered” or whatever, irrespective of their participation in the slave economy. But, they realized that an outright, unrepentant slave-owning Confederate soldier would not be very sympathetic, so they decided to make him into an enlightened, error-of-his-way seeing slave owner and Confederate soldier. How clever! They get to have their Confederate cake and eat it too - except that this means their main character is completely unrealistic.

For a show that has no problem throwing around racial slurs, this magically relatable non-racist white savior protagonist is rather eye-roll-worthy. If the writers of Hell On Wheels were more capable, they might be able to navigate the complexities of a less idealized main character, and Hell On Wheels would be a stronger, more nuanced show.

*Seriously, did they find a Confederate soldier/southern gentleman name generator somewhere?

In 2007 I went through a hardcore Mighty Boosh phase, and have recently been re-watching old episodes because I need television that will not make me angry.  One of my favorite episodes of those halcyon days is “The Priest and the Beast,” which encounters Rudi van Disarzio (Julian Barratt) and Spider Dijon (Noel Fielding) in the desert searching for the New Sound.  And for the first time I paid attention to the fact that Barratt was playing a black man.

Everyone in this episode has weird accents for no reason, and I don’t think Barratt portrays Rudi specifically as a black man or as a stereotype of anything, but the face that he’s painted brown is a problem.  He has an Afro containing the Door of Kukundu, out of which various objects appear, because he is a psychedelic monk.  (If you’ve never seen The Mighty Boosh, know that the Door of Kukundu is one of the more normal things you will encounter.)  For me this raises a question of whether portraying someone of a different skin color can be separated from the culturally- and racially-charged “blackface,” because on a show as weird as The Mighty Boosh a lot of systems of meaning have broken down.  

Nevertheless, it made me uncomfortable to realize this, and I think the show should have been more cognizant of the issues it was raising in “The Priest and the Beast.”  In the first series, Rudi appeared in “Jungle” as a man with his face and hands painted sticking out of a wooden frame which depicted his body and Afro-framed door:

What do we take from this?  On the one hand, you have a small cast and low budget portraying people of other races as well as animals aliens.  On the other, you have a show oblivious to the history of blackface as part of racial oppression.  As innocently as they might have meant it, and as much as they tried to remove racial stereotypes from the depiction of Rudi, this is something that should not go without comment.