A Sort of a TV Series Review
by LB
Current cultural revolution got you down? Not getting what everyone younger than, oh, 40ish, is bitching about this time around?
Despair about what appears to be the destruction of a perfectly fine civilization is par for the course for people of a certain age. I know this because I’ve experienced it myself, from just about every angle. But I’m here to tell you, my friends, that understanding is just a click away. On Netflix, believe it or not.
I’m talking about the best, most mature (my definition of mature anyway) series I’ve seen in a verry long time. It’s called The Chair, and it’s filled with quirky, intelligent, sometimes funny yet most of the time very realistic characters representing various generations that we all know and, um, love…and that some may hate as well.
There’s problems on campus, and they’re getting bigger and bigger, and everyone portrayed on The Chair is trying to deal with them, and by the end of the sixth and final episode of this miniseries some of them finally do.
What I’m trying to say is that thanks to the efforts of the brilliantly written and played human beings on the screen, I’m not only finally starting to understand what all the shouting’s about, I’m rooting for this revolution even more than I did for the changes my decrepit old generation took to the streets for back in the 1960’s and ’70’s.
I know I’m still beating around the bush, but that’s because Nancy Wang Yuen handles the details so much better than I ever could in her excellent LATimes article, “I’m an Asian American woman in academia. Here’s what ‘The Chair’ gets right,” and the reason I’m writing this post is that I’m hoping you’ll all read it HERE
Oh, wait, before you click yourselves to this Most Excellent Higher Truth, I need to alert TVWriter™’s TV and film writer visitors that Ms. Yuen seems to have a blind spot of her own. She spends several otherwise insightful paragraphs praising Sandra Oh’s performance for having “so much verisimilitude that I squirmed and laughed in recognition,” citing various bits of the star’s dialog as the reason, as if the actress herself had made it up.
But here’s the thing. Writers wrote those words. Starting with co-creators Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman.
TV and film writers. Part of a group of people who in addition to doing their jobs for the past century or so have been fighting for the same kind of recognition the diverse characters in The Chair are fighting for.
So it goes.
#tvwriting #screenwriting #writingtips #writerslife
