{"id":7722,"date":"2012-07-05T21:50:11","date_gmt":"2012-07-05T11:50:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=7722"},"modified":"2014-06-02T14:18:27","modified_gmt":"2014-06-02T04:18:27","slug":"tv-show-round-up-dumb-drunk-racist-the-newsroom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=7722","title":{"rendered":"TV Show Round Up: Dumb, Drunk & Racist, The Newsroom"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"tagtelevision\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/h4>\n

Dumb, Drunk & Racist
\n<\/strong><\/h4>\n

“Initially the show was called “Dumb, Drunk or Racist” and you only had to be one or the other. We changed the name to all three after visiting Queensland.”
\n– Joe Hildebrand<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\nT<\/span>his ABC2 program opens with a narration from host Joe Hildebrand who explains that in Indian call centres, staff are taught that the average Australian who they will speak to will most likely be ‘dumb, drunk and racist.’\u00a0 Depending on the Australian you talk to, this can be either confronting or not entirely unexpected.\u00a0 Whats interesting to learn in the opening minutes of the show is that international students are big business for Australia.\u00a0 It’s our third largest form of revenue in the export sector but that number is in decline.\u00a0 And thats partly due to the rapidly dropping volume of Indian students.\u00a0 After a spate of attacks on Indian students in Melbourne in 2008, a huge media backlash in India stoked fears that Indians were being targeted by a broadly racist Australia that was violently attacking them en masse.\u00a0 It becomes apparent when Joe talks to everyday Indians that most of them think that if they visit Australia, there is a very high likelihood that they would be victims of either verbal or physical abuse.<\/p>\n

Hildebrand take four ordinary Indians to experience Australia for themselves.\u00a0 The show was originally conceived to show Australia in a more positive light.\u00a0 Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite work out as planned.\u00a0 Although the Indians meet plenty of friendly and accomodating locals in Australia, they are also cop plenty of racial abuse while doing nothing more than standing on a street corner.\u00a0 One drunken local in Melbourne simply walks up and screams ‘White Pride, motherfuckers!’ at their face and tells them to go home.\u00a0 In Alice Springs, they are physically attacked by aboriginals who throw rocks at them.<\/p>\n

The show debuted to record viewing figures for ABC2 and is an excellent talking point for race relations in Australia.\u00a0 I thought the show was pretty even-handed in its presentation.\u00a0 After all, Joe Hildebrand doesn’t really do much more than take the four Indians around varying locales and stand there.\u00a0 He doesn’t have to bait people into a reaction, it just happens naturally.\u00a0 There are some friendly people but there are also some super racist jerks also.\u00a0 It’s interesting to see the varying reactions from the four Indians to their reception from the Australian public.\u00a0 The guys seem a tad more relaxed and forgiving, the women much less so.<\/p>\n

At the end of the third episode, Jen and I concluded that the four visitors seemed like lovely people and we’d like to invite them over for tea.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Newsroom – Pilot<\/strong> – “We Just Decided To”<\/strong><\/h3>\n

I can recall few shows that have had such a rollercoaster reaction from tv critics as the reception that Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom<\/em> has had.\u00a0 And this is after just two episodes have aired!\u00a0 The initial feedback to the teaser that was released months ago was one of giddy anticipation.\u00a0 Here was the return to television for Aaron Sorkin, creator of the much loved series The West Wing<\/em> and fresh from writing the screenplay for the award winning film The Social Network<\/em>.\u00a0 Now Sorkin would be taking on cable news and offering up some social commentary on the low hanging fruit that is contemporary news media.\u00a0 But after just two episodes, critics are panning the show and fans aren’t very happy either.\u00a0 Why?<\/p>\n

I’ve only seen the pilot so far which I thought was pretty good, but the cracks are certainly there.\u00a0 Sorkin has a very distinctive style of presentation with his shows (talk fast, plenty of quips, walk long corridors) and what seemed fresh with The West Wing<\/em> in 1999 is going to have diminishing returns and a sense of staleness in 2012.\u00a0 What’s most notably different from The West Wing<\/em> however is the genial idealism that permeated that show nearly fifteen years ago is replaced with some heavy-handed soap boxing in the script that projects Sorkin’s inner cranky old man shaking his fist at the state of the world through the mouth of news anchorman Will McAvoy.\u00a0 The target of his bile in the opening episode is the youth of today.\u00a0 From the opening scene where McAvoy takes a sorority girl to task for asking what makes America great to the general portrayal of the young workers in his office, McAvoy is portrayed as a throwback to The Good Old Days when Wise Old Men were trusted and valued for their sacred, ethical delivery of broadcast journalism.\u00a0 McAvoy’s ‘character flaws’ are that he is brash, outspoken and prefers an accurate and incisive news story over a popular puff piece.\u00a0 It’s the equivalent of answering that job interview question about your own shortcomings by answering that you ‘work too hard.’\u00a0 McAvoy is clearly going to be the centrepiece of The Newsroom<\/em> and right now he barely seems to exist as anything more than an idealistic manifestation of what Sorkin perceives is missing in news anchors today.<\/p>\n

Curiously, the show also undercooks the female roles with both Mackenzie McHale and Maggie Jordan being defined almostly exclusively by their relationships with male counterparts.\u00a0 Considering the type of roles that Sorkin has created in the past, such as Mrs Cunningham and CJ in The West Wing<\/em>, this is probably one of the biggest sources of disappointment in The Newsroom<\/em>.<\/p>\n

But I said I mostly enjoyed the pilot and I stand by that.\u00a0 I still enjoy the banter that Sorkin serves up and even though the shitty standard of modern day cable television is an easy mark, I like the idea of a show that has the wide eyed optimism to imagine an alternative.\u00a0 While its disappointing that there isn’t a better developed cast of characters out of the blocks, its still early days and the most number of episodes that any critics have seen is the first four.\u00a0 The first season has nine episodes so there is still time for the show to find its feet.<\/p>\n

Let’s see if I’m still saying the same thing after episode two.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dumb, Drunk & Racist “Initially the show was called “Dumb, Drunk or Racist” and you only had to be one or the other. We changed the name to all three after visiting Queensland.” – Joe Hildebrand This ABC2 program opens with a narration from host Joe Hildebrand who explains that in Indian call centres, staff …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,4],"tags":[1307,1308],"class_list":["post-7722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-tv","tag-dumb-drunk-racist","tag-the-newsroom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7722"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15496,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7722\/revisions\/15496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}