United States of Tara and gay characters

What I find so surprising about Toni Collette’s new hit TV show about a woman living with multiple personalities, United States of Tara, is that despite being the creation of indie hit Juno writer Diablo Cody, consisting of a few recognisable stars and having the backing of none other than Stephen Spielberg, the ABC is the only station in Australian to pick the show up. And they’ve relegated it to the 9:30pm Wednesday night time slot.

I spent a bit of time on the weekend catching up with Tara, her many alters, and her family and I’ve found it very addictive. The half-hour format rather than the hour long traditional Showtime length means we only really get snapshots of Tara’s life but at the same time we’re not getting too much of a good thing. The nature of the format of the show means it’s probably  only got a small shelf-life because there’s only so far they can go with each of Tara’s alters. But at only 12 episodes, and with a second season on the way in 2010, the show could be around for quite a while.

Marshall, Tara’s 14 year-old son, is probably one of the most well-developed characters on TV. One of the things that always bugged me about the way most TV shows handle gay characters is that their sexuality always has to be an issue for the character. The best part of Tara is that her son’s sexuality is never outright discussed or even mentioned in the series until he develops a crush on a boy in his school. Even then his parents both seem rather non-chalant about it all.

This is a great step in characterisation for the US, where up until now gays tend to either be cliche camp queens who only help with interior design or fashion advice, or the gay character has to go through a long journey of self-discovery and then battle for acceptance. Even on gay-themed shows like Queer As Folk this cliche is somewhat true.  But in Tara, as Diablo Cody states, Marshall’s sexuality is just a “matter-of-fact”. His family accept him without hesitation (with the exception of Tara’s redneck alter Buck) and only question the object of his affection being the son of an evangelical reverend.

In an age where same-sex marriage is all but a reality in a number of western nations including the US, I just hope this paves the way for more matter-of-fact gay characters, where there’s no need to fight for acceptance because they already are accepted. And then please, life imitate art?

GO! for digital

Nine’s digital-only Gen Y style TV channel GO! is set to launch tonight at 6:30pm but those keen observers who have scanned the digital airwaves would know the station’s been up for about a week already (albeit with just 5 minute promos on loop).

The channel looks to be a mix between Foxtel’s TV1 and Channel V, combining various ‘classic’ sitcoms like Seinfeld and The Nanny with a few contemporary shows they’re obviously not giving enough airtime on their regular channel, such as Big Bang Theory. Mixed in with these there are a few drama shows like Gossip Girl and at night the channel airs celeb gossip shows like TMZ and plays music clips overnight. Thankfully, it appears we’ve been mercilessly spared endless reruns of Two and a Half Men, Nine has left that to their regular channel.

While this all might not look that earth-shattering to people already subscribed to Foxtel, it’s an exciting time for free-to-air television. Apart from what wonderful work the ABC is doing with ABC2 and the upcoming kids channel ABC3, there hasn’t been much in the digital stations for those of us who don’t give a toss about sport. As Ten launched their One sports channel earlier this year and SBS have some form of cycling pretty much on a continuous cycle on their own digital channel.

It’s also an interesting time for Nine. Their old slogan  ‘Still the one’ has come to bite them on the arse in recent times as they’ve been consistently runners up in the ratings to Seven. They even dropped to third during the incredible rise of Ten’s reality cook-off MasterChef (which, as Crikey revealed, Nine programming directors passed on). Mostly through unsuccessful reality shows (Perfect Couple is bound to be the next casualty) and their habit of often cancelling shows very early in their run (This Afternoon anyone?). So despite all their current woes, it’s good to see they’re at least trying something different to Seven and Ten by not just making yet another digital sports channel to plug repeats of The Footy Show.

Ultimately, GO! doesn’t seem to be a channel about new content It’s the channel you flick over to watch when there’s nothing on TV. And that’s a good place to start for digital, as it slowly gains momentum in Australia. If anything, maybe in the future Nine will put the cult status shows that rate badly straight onto digital at a reasonable hour rather than the 11pm waits for shows like The West Wing that we’re so accustomed to from Nine. And that would pay for the channel itself. So tune in tonight to see what the fuss is all about, if you can get past the kinks Nine is working out, that is.

Making vampires not suck

Vampires are back in. Well sort of. Since the end of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 2003, vampires haven’t really had much of a successful run in film or TV. Until Stephanie Meyer got teens hot and bothered with the so-called vampire romance novel series Twilight, where the vampires didn’t burst into flames but glittered in the light. Aw.

Those of us who had grown up in the age of Joss Whedon’s vampires as ‘really quite evil but ultimately boinkable’ creatures or Anne Rice’s uber goth vampires from the Interview with the Vampire series gasped in horror at this new generation of fang-lovers. But thankfully Alan Ball came to the rescue, as the man to make vampires interesting again to those of us over the age of 12, with his HBO adaptation of the Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris, aptly titled True Blood.

The best way to get a snap-shot (and not spoiling it) is through the opening credits

As was the case with Ball’s previous series, Six Feet Under, the opening credits to True Blood really don’t give much of a direct idea of what is the core of the show. It shows much of the southern US lifestyle – the traditional conservative church lifestyle, the swamps, and dead crocodiles.

Due to the release of a synthesized blood meaning they no longer need to kill humans, Vampires have come out of the coffin and are living amongst regular folk. They’re even running in politics. Needless to say not everyone is happy about it.

True Blood is ultimately a deliciously camp show. It doesn’t take itself seriously as a drama while still leaving you on the edge of your seat at the end of each episode.

What I find most amusing about the show is that, Sookie, the title character of the book series, is essentially the most annoying in the series and tends to live up to her name by spending most of the series whining about her relationship problems with goodie vampire Bill. The key is the ensemble cast of essentric characters; hunky-but-daft brother Jason Stackhouse, best friends Tara and Lafayette and Bill’s maker the ancient nordic Eric.

With the second season currently underway in the US, much of the show now focuses on the anti-vamp cult Fellowship of the Sun, who are fighting against any vampire rights, often with violent results.

At times, the vampire struggle as a metaphor for gay rights is extremely over the top, best noted in the sign in the opening credits ‘God hate fangs’ – a play on the ‘God Hates Fags’ slogan used by the Westboro Baptist Church. While it easy to compare the cult to the loony right-wing anti-gay groups (and there are a lot of comparisons) there’s  also the underlying sexual nature of which Ball approaches the human-vampire relationships that’s much more metaphorical for sexuality. The ‘vampire lifestyle’ is often viewed by humans with envy. As The Daily Beast’s Michelle Goldberg notes,

Underlying much antigay literature is the unspoken assumption that homosexuality, while disgusting, is also unbearably tempting.

Ultimately True Blood is dirty. It’s not Twilight’s shiny glimmery view of vampires who are nice boyfriends and love you forever, kind of thing. It’s all about the grey areas, and lots and lots of sex. Vampires, most importantly, aren’t perfect – if they’re stalking you, it’s probably a bad thing.

With most other US network shows on their summer hiatus, True Blood also has something of a captive audience. But we’ll trust it’ll play nice.

TV Tropes

It’s worth giving the TV wiki site TV Tropes their very own blog entry.  It’s very not Wikipedia, as they state so on their front page, the language is much more informal and often defamatory but it’s a great website to discuss different sorts of conventions that appear in TV and film.

The nature of the site means once you start reading one article, it will link to another, and another and you’ll be on there all day, as represented in this comic:

Today, for example, I was reading up about Star Trek: The Next Generation because I am currently making my way through that series again for the first time since it finished back when I was roughly 10 years old. After landing on the Star Trek page, I was passed onto what they call the Patrick Stewart Speech page, which lists examples of characters giving long speeches about why humans are great, named after Stewart’s tendancy to launch into such speeches as both Picard from TNG and Xavier from the X-Men series.

The examples listed on the page include a number of my favourite TV shows like Buffy, Doctor Who, and Torchwood. And if I go click from there onto one of those pages and then onto another page, and so on and so on.

The best part of TV Tropes is that if you can’t find the answer to the Trope for your particular show, you can add it in yourself. And unlike the Nazi editors at Wikipedia, everyone at TV Tropes is laid back, so you won’t have to worry about having your content deleted all that much. Of course, if they disagree with what you’ve said, they’ll rip your argument to pieces publicly for all to see.

TV Tropes will inevitably be my most sourced website for this blog mainly because it’s a good way of explaining character conventions but also because it’s so thorough for a TV website.

Hello world!

I am a journalism student at UTS and I’m dedicating this blog to the best television both seen and never seen.

For as long as I can remember I’ve been a hopeless addict to TV; from my father’s influence having me sitting squarely in front of Star Trek: The Next Generation as a small child, to Buffy the Vampire Slayer in my teens to shows such as True Blood, Doctor Who, Dollhouse, Mad Men and Dexter now. Now with the Internet and mass-produced relatively cheap DVDs at my disposal, they might as well hook it up to my veins (hence the name Intravenous Television).

With this blog I aim to keep up with what’s keeping me interested in the latest TV both here and overseas plus those that slipped under the rader and I’ll also look at the classics that are worth taking a second (or sometimes first) look at.