Studio 60, episode two
"They write conservative Christians as if they've never really met one, . . ."
Another good episode. The Christian character was a little more human and a little less a caricature. A little. More sympathetic, less cardboard. Really an intriguing character, able to be serious about her faith without taking herself too seriously. I liked that. Well written and acted.
The actress (Sarah Paulson) playing the conservative Christian is openly gay. Maybe that insulates the writers from criticism that the character is being too Christian? "Well, yes, her character said that, but we saw her at the GLAAD dinner the other night, so we know she doesn't really mean it."
Rapture magazine was a featured player in last night's episode, a fundamentalist Christian magazine that was trying to get people to boycott the fictional show within a show. One character mentioned that Rapture had four times the circulation of Vanity Fair. The only Christian magazine I know of that has that type of circulation is Christianity Today, which is NOT a fundamentalist magazine.
And not all conservative Christians believe in the rapture, nor do all think that everyone who isn't a conservative Christian is going to hell, automatically or otherwise. Nor do most Christians support boycotts--that's more a publicity thing than anything else, and most Christians know it. Most Christians don't support censorship.
(Nor is attempted censorship a conservative Christian phenomenon. It wasn't Christians who tried to force the producers of Basic Instinct to change the end of the movie, was it? It was gay activists, who didn't want the villain to be gay, I believe. And what of the censorship of political speech--Michelle Malkin, Anne Coulter, etc.--on college campuses?)
One of my friends pointed out how Christians sometimes make themselves targets for caricature. It's true, many Christians are a little bit nuts. And some are more than a little bit nuts, and a few are darn frightening. But I'd bet that you'd find similar proportions of normal people to wackos in most groups--gay, atheist, Muslim, Hindu, surfers, stoners, etc.
My problem with the way the first episode of Studio 60 treated Christianity: they treated it as if the only thing they knew about it was the caricature. They write conservative Christians as if they've never really met one, they've just heard about them and found a few sites on wikipedia and beliefnet.com, and picked and chosen whatever fit their template.
Can you imagine how black people would feel about a show which featured black culture prominently, sometimes negatively, and the writers of the show knew nothing about black culture other than what they'd gathered third hand?
On any given weekend, 40 percent of the people in America are in some kind of house of worship--church, synagogue, cathedral. I guess it's nice to see a well-written, superstar driven show that's trying to acknowledge how religious Americans are.
And of course, Matthew Perry and Brad Whitford are great. I'll keep watching, I guess.
Another good episode. The Christian character was a little more human and a little less a caricature. A little. More sympathetic, less cardboard. Really an intriguing character, able to be serious about her faith without taking herself too seriously. I liked that. Well written and acted.
The actress (Sarah Paulson) playing the conservative Christian is openly gay. Maybe that insulates the writers from criticism that the character is being too Christian? "Well, yes, her character said that, but we saw her at the GLAAD dinner the other night, so we know she doesn't really mean it."
Rapture magazine was a featured player in last night's episode, a fundamentalist Christian magazine that was trying to get people to boycott the fictional show within a show. One character mentioned that Rapture had four times the circulation of Vanity Fair. The only Christian magazine I know of that has that type of circulation is Christianity Today, which is NOT a fundamentalist magazine.
And not all conservative Christians believe in the rapture, nor do all think that everyone who isn't a conservative Christian is going to hell, automatically or otherwise. Nor do most Christians support boycotts--that's more a publicity thing than anything else, and most Christians know it. Most Christians don't support censorship.
(Nor is attempted censorship a conservative Christian phenomenon. It wasn't Christians who tried to force the producers of Basic Instinct to change the end of the movie, was it? It was gay activists, who didn't want the villain to be gay, I believe. And what of the censorship of political speech--Michelle Malkin, Anne Coulter, etc.--on college campuses?)
One of my friends pointed out how Christians sometimes make themselves targets for caricature. It's true, many Christians are a little bit nuts. And some are more than a little bit nuts, and a few are darn frightening. But I'd bet that you'd find similar proportions of normal people to wackos in most groups--gay, atheist, Muslim, Hindu, surfers, stoners, etc.
My problem with the way the first episode of Studio 60 treated Christianity: they treated it as if the only thing they knew about it was the caricature. They write conservative Christians as if they've never really met one, they've just heard about them and found a few sites on wikipedia and beliefnet.com, and picked and chosen whatever fit their template.
Can you imagine how black people would feel about a show which featured black culture prominently, sometimes negatively, and the writers of the show knew nothing about black culture other than what they'd gathered third hand?
On any given weekend, 40 percent of the people in America are in some kind of house of worship--church, synagogue, cathedral. I guess it's nice to see a well-written, superstar driven show that's trying to acknowledge how religious Americans are.
And of course, Matthew Perry and Brad Whitford are great. I'll keep watching, I guess.
posted by Theophilus Punk (PLStepp) at
8:56 AM
1 Comments:
I've gotten hooked on this show, too. Very well-written. If anything, the writers seem to be bending over backwards to avoid stereotyping the Christian character: they have her swearing, drinking, making out with a baseball player backstage, etc. She doesn't act like any of the fundamentalists I know.
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