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30 Days of TV - Day 11
( The Days )
Day 11 - A show that disappointed you
I hate to say it, but what other show can I choose here? Supernatural.
There are other shows I could say disappointed me. Shows that started off promising and just lost me somewhere along the way. But none of them have I loved as much as I did Supernatural in the beginning, and "disappointed" hardly seems an adequate word for the way I feel about the show now. Yet I'm still watching. I don't know if I'll watch next season...I'm not sure I can bear to get hopeful and be stomped on again.
I didn't watch the first season of Supernatural until after the finale. So I knew a little about what was to come, and I surely knew that the fandom was, shall we say, a little obsessive about slashing these two brothers. That's partly why I didn't watch earlier - not the incest thing (I cut my genre teeth on Robert Heinlein) - but the obsessive part. I didn't want to be stuck in another fandom with Danielites.
Anyhow, watch I did and I instantly fell in love with the show. Okay, it was a bit too testosterone-fuelled for my usual taste and I'm not a big fan of "kill it" being the solution to every problem. But still...I loved it. The show supplied a horror movie every week, it had an ongoing plot with actual layers and complexity, the characters too were many-layered and sure, the onscreen chemistry between the leads didn't hurt. I could certainly see where the incest was coming from in a way I never could in, say, Heroes.
I could go on for a long time about my love affair with Supernatural, but it's all there in my fanfic. I adored Sam. I liked Dean a lot. It took me a while to get a handle on John, but once it clicked, I was completely in love with him. So much so, that it didn't bother me when he died; the character may not have been present but he was still so essential to the story that for me he was still there.
I don't mean to say that the first two seasons were perfect - far from it. But the imperfections didn't matter to me because the stuff I loved was so much more present.
When did it change? In season three. There were a few episodes that troubled me. 3.08 A Very Supernatural Christmas bugged the hell out of me, because the monster-of-the-week was a couple of pagan deities. As a Pagan, yes, I took insult. The more so because Yule was a Pagan festival long before Christmas came along. This was followed by 3.09 Malleus Maleficarum. Others have written far more eloquently than I can about everything wrong with that episode. Even without my beliefs and identity again being showcased as evil, this was a horrifically misogynistic 42 minutes. It made me more sensitive to the way Dean was being changed by the writers. Given Dean's storyline in the third season, it made sense that he'd undergo some changes. But the tough-guy, guy's-guy, testosterone-overdosed Dean in seasons one and two came across as a front, a conscious projection of an image. As season three progressed, it seemed the front was more and more the real Dean. And I loathed him for it. I am not kidding when I say by the end of the season, I was convinced he deserved to go to Hell.
Then the season got interrupted by the Writers' Strike. I do not hold the writers to blame for that, nor am I saying it's bad that they had only four episodes left to wrap up the season. Four eps, that should have been ten. But when life hands you lemons like that, y'all are supposed to make lemonade. Not lemon goop. Just look at the last four episodes of the season: one, the finale, was up to Supernatural's usual high standard. One (Long Distance Call) was pretty good. One (Time Is On My Side) badly needed at least one previous episode focussed on Sam to give it context; as it was it felt completely out of character for him. And the fourth episode was Ghostfacers. I cannot put into words how much respect I lost for the show runners who thought it was a good idea, when they had an intense story arc going, when they had only four eps to wrap up that arc, to waste one of them on that steaming pile of unfunny, irrelevant bullshit.
And then came seasons four and five. Angels is where my ability to suspend disbelief ends. But that aside, I could have gone with that whole storyline if the rest of the problems hadn't been there. What truly broke my love for the show was the way Dean, who had already become everything I dislike about men, suddenly became the whole focus of the show. I know there had been some complaints from Dean-fans that Sam was too central in the early seasons, and I guess there was some truth in that. But the show began in Sam's POV. The initial quest, the initial motivation was his. But the show was still about both brothers. We still saw as much of Dean, still learned as much about him, as we were learning about Sam. And we still got episodes that showed us Dean's place and perspective in all this: Skin, Home, Faith, The Benders, Something Wicked, Devil's Trap, In My Time of Dying, Bloodlust, No Exit, Crossroad Blues... Want me to go on? I can. By contrast, in season four, Sam all but disappeared. The entire narrative became about Dean: Dean's pain, Dean's destiny, Dean's fears, Dean's fucking pet angel. Sam existed only insofar as he stood in relation to Dean. In season four we get a sympathetic look at Sam's POV only in After School Special - and that was childhood flashbacks. In every other episode where we get Sam's perspective, it's overshadowed by The Dean Show...except at the end where Sam is being evil (and therefore, I guess, there was no danger of the audience being sympathetic to the wrong brother). Not once did the writers try to show us how Sam went so completely off the rails. Not once did they show, instead of tell, what was going on with him. It was all about Dean. And Dean was no longer a hero to me. And what gets me is how easily the writers could have fixed that. Just one episode is all it would have taken. Just quit telling and show where Sam is coming from! But they never did.
It reminds me a lot of the "Macho Sue" that I first came across reading![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mecurtin's LJ. Here, take a look. What Supernatural has become doesn't match perfectly, but it's darn close.
Season five...gods, what do I say? If I was tired of The Dean Show in season four, by halfway through season five I wanted to toss Dean back into the pit and go fishing for a real hero. You know, one who might pull his head out of his ass for long enough to notice there was a slight apocalypse going on. Sam could have been that hero, but again and again Sam's role was sidelined in favour of the super-showcase of Dean's pain and heartache. I'd have more sympathy if Dean didn't bring it all on himself in the first place.
And that's before I get into the sheer misogyny of the season. In fact, I don't think I'll bother. I'll say only that I'm quite certain the show runners are aware that their audience is largely female, and their choice, over and over again, has been to portray women as whores, to portray fans as caricatures without agency (except when they're male), to delight in violence toward women, to kill every decent woman character they've managed to create, to disrespect women at every possible turn...and I no longer believe that any of that is unconscious.
And yet I'm still watching. Someone tell me why?
Wow, that was cathartic. I feel better now :)
Day 11 - A show that disappointed you
I hate to say it, but what other show can I choose here? Supernatural.
There are other shows I could say disappointed me. Shows that started off promising and just lost me somewhere along the way. But none of them have I loved as much as I did Supernatural in the beginning, and "disappointed" hardly seems an adequate word for the way I feel about the show now. Yet I'm still watching. I don't know if I'll watch next season...I'm not sure I can bear to get hopeful and be stomped on again.
I didn't watch the first season of Supernatural until after the finale. So I knew a little about what was to come, and I surely knew that the fandom was, shall we say, a little obsessive about slashing these two brothers. That's partly why I didn't watch earlier - not the incest thing (I cut my genre teeth on Robert Heinlein) - but the obsessive part. I didn't want to be stuck in another fandom with Danielites.
Anyhow, watch I did and I instantly fell in love with the show. Okay, it was a bit too testosterone-fuelled for my usual taste and I'm not a big fan of "kill it" being the solution to every problem. But still...I loved it. The show supplied a horror movie every week, it had an ongoing plot with actual layers and complexity, the characters too were many-layered and sure, the onscreen chemistry between the leads didn't hurt. I could certainly see where the incest was coming from in a way I never could in, say, Heroes.
I could go on for a long time about my love affair with Supernatural, but it's all there in my fanfic. I adored Sam. I liked Dean a lot. It took me a while to get a handle on John, but once it clicked, I was completely in love with him. So much so, that it didn't bother me when he died; the character may not have been present but he was still so essential to the story that for me he was still there.
I don't mean to say that the first two seasons were perfect - far from it. But the imperfections didn't matter to me because the stuff I loved was so much more present.
When did it change? In season three. There were a few episodes that troubled me. 3.08 A Very Supernatural Christmas bugged the hell out of me, because the monster-of-the-week was a couple of pagan deities. As a Pagan, yes, I took insult. The more so because Yule was a Pagan festival long before Christmas came along. This was followed by 3.09 Malleus Maleficarum. Others have written far more eloquently than I can about everything wrong with that episode. Even without my beliefs and identity again being showcased as evil, this was a horrifically misogynistic 42 minutes. It made me more sensitive to the way Dean was being changed by the writers. Given Dean's storyline in the third season, it made sense that he'd undergo some changes. But the tough-guy, guy's-guy, testosterone-overdosed Dean in seasons one and two came across as a front, a conscious projection of an image. As season three progressed, it seemed the front was more and more the real Dean. And I loathed him for it. I am not kidding when I say by the end of the season, I was convinced he deserved to go to Hell.
Then the season got interrupted by the Writers' Strike. I do not hold the writers to blame for that, nor am I saying it's bad that they had only four episodes left to wrap up the season. Four eps, that should have been ten. But when life hands you lemons like that, y'all are supposed to make lemonade. Not lemon goop. Just look at the last four episodes of the season: one, the finale, was up to Supernatural's usual high standard. One (Long Distance Call) was pretty good. One (Time Is On My Side) badly needed at least one previous episode focussed on Sam to give it context; as it was it felt completely out of character for him. And the fourth episode was Ghostfacers. I cannot put into words how much respect I lost for the show runners who thought it was a good idea, when they had an intense story arc going, when they had only four eps to wrap up that arc, to waste one of them on that steaming pile of unfunny, irrelevant bullshit.
And then came seasons four and five. Angels is where my ability to suspend disbelief ends. But that aside, I could have gone with that whole storyline if the rest of the problems hadn't been there. What truly broke my love for the show was the way Dean, who had already become everything I dislike about men, suddenly became the whole focus of the show. I know there had been some complaints from Dean-fans that Sam was too central in the early seasons, and I guess there was some truth in that. But the show began in Sam's POV. The initial quest, the initial motivation was his. But the show was still about both brothers. We still saw as much of Dean, still learned as much about him, as we were learning about Sam. And we still got episodes that showed us Dean's place and perspective in all this: Skin, Home, Faith, The Benders, Something Wicked, Devil's Trap, In My Time of Dying, Bloodlust, No Exit, Crossroad Blues... Want me to go on? I can. By contrast, in season four, Sam all but disappeared. The entire narrative became about Dean: Dean's pain, Dean's destiny, Dean's fears, Dean's fucking pet angel. Sam existed only insofar as he stood in relation to Dean. In season four we get a sympathetic look at Sam's POV only in After School Special - and that was childhood flashbacks. In every other episode where we get Sam's perspective, it's overshadowed by The Dean Show...except at the end where Sam is being evil (and therefore, I guess, there was no danger of the audience being sympathetic to the wrong brother). Not once did the writers try to show us how Sam went so completely off the rails. Not once did they show, instead of tell, what was going on with him. It was all about Dean. And Dean was no longer a hero to me. And what gets me is how easily the writers could have fixed that. Just one episode is all it would have taken. Just quit telling and show where Sam is coming from! But they never did.
It reminds me a lot of the "Macho Sue" that I first came across reading
mecurtin's LJ. Here, take a look. What Supernatural has become doesn't match perfectly, but it's darn close.Season five...gods, what do I say? If I was tired of The Dean Show in season four, by halfway through season five I wanted to toss Dean back into the pit and go fishing for a real hero. You know, one who might pull his head out of his ass for long enough to notice there was a slight apocalypse going on. Sam could have been that hero, but again and again Sam's role was sidelined in favour of the super-showcase of Dean's pain and heartache. I'd have more sympathy if Dean didn't bring it all on himself in the first place.
And that's before I get into the sheer misogyny of the season. In fact, I don't think I'll bother. I'll say only that I'm quite certain the show runners are aware that their audience is largely female, and their choice, over and over again, has been to portray women as whores, to portray fans as caricatures without agency (except when they're male), to delight in violence toward women, to kill every decent woman character they've managed to create, to disrespect women at every possible turn...and I no longer believe that any of that is unconscious.
And yet I'm still watching. Someone tell me why?
Wow, that was cathartic. I feel better now :)
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You could be right - it's the potential more than the reality.
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Yes to all of it, although I never manage to delve that deeply into analysis. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. And many thanks for the "Macho Sue" link. I see so much of that in movie previews, which is why I rarely watch movies anymore.
But also, I can't help flashing on my favorite shows. Many of them are written with a big dose of Macho Sue, it seems -- Jethro Gibbs and John Sheppard come to mind. But they're not total Macho Sues, which I guess is the saving grace. It could become quite a question -- how or where does one draw the line between competent, informed leadership and Macho Sueism? I guess that's another area of suspension of disbelief we have to employ to like many shows.
.
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I only saw two seasons of SGA, but from those I wouldn't call John Sheppard a Macho Sue. A macho character, surely. But not a Sue in the sense I understand it. I don't know who Jethro Gibbs is.
If I've got the concept right, Macho Sue is the hero who can do anything, no matter how heinous, and it's portrayed as an heroic act simply because he's the one doing it.
This perfectly describes Dean, and to a lesser extent Sam, in the last two seasons of Supernatural: they can murder as many people as they deem necessary, for example, and it's okay because those people were possessed, and killing the demons is heroic. The human lives lost are less than collatoral damage - they're not even noticed in the narrative.
Any "typically masculine" hero will have elements of the type (and there's nothing wrong with that - Macho is an archetype); it's when (as with a Mary Sue) the whole narrative and morality turns about him that he becomes Macho Sue.
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I was really hoping that the promised “back–to-basics” approach for S6 might lead to an AngelS5-like phoenix from the flames but the abrupt turn the SPN S5 arc took in its latter episodes, presumably in order to get Sera Gamble’s ducks in a row, does not precisely encourage me. Oh well, we shall see.
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For me, the show is too deeply locked into its mythology now. The season ender does give them an opportunity to sweep away the Angels and Lucifer and "destiny" crap...but I doubt they'll have the courage to do it because that would mean no more Castiel. Much as I like Misha, I'd be thrilled if he never again appeared on SPN.
The thing is, I don't want to be hopeful. Not now. I don't want to get re-invested and have my hopes stomped on again.
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As for the Angels – well, I ever wanted them to jettison Urban Legends for Catholicism in the first place and I’d be more than happy to see them go. Whilst I find Misha good value, I’ve never been that interested in Castiel so it would be a small price to pay.
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I loved Supernatural, I love the MotW aspect, and I loved the family aspect, and the story arch... I love it so, so much!
But now? Now I'm seriously doubting I'll watch Season 6. I'm just a little bit sick of Dean's manpain, I hate they killed Ellen and Jo. I hate their breaking-the-fourth-wall approach, too.
Their misogyny didn't help, either, but, as a fan of sci-fi horror shows and books I'm kind of used to that.
And I really, really don't like how the season ended. I don't like where they are, apparently, going.
So, yes, they disappoint me big time. And it's such a shame, because it had a great potential *sigh*
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I want to say I won't watch any more but...I started saying that with Stargate at S5. Took me three years to actually quit. So I don't know what I'll do when the time comes.