Short form TV diary.

I realized I haven't written in this blog for a whole year. A lot has happened. Well, not really. But I watched a lot of TV.

Lost Girl--a new season started. I was loving it so much I rewatched it from the beginning and luxuriated in what a great show it is and I was so happy. Towards the end of the season, they killed off a character in such a stupid way that it ruined the whole show for me, but I'll probably get over it.

I also found this amazing website, mehlsbells, that writes about the show. Melanie is a filmmaker so she doesn't just review the episodes and do meta, she also talks about the editing and camera angles and things like that, and she points out things the show does to save money. I'm making it sound boring but it is really interesting to learn about and see the show from that perspective.

Speaking of, and this is all out of order, but this summer I watched Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe. I love it so much that I already watched all the episodes two or three times. It is about 7 years old and British, and it always starts with the tagline, "I'm Charlie Brooker and you're watching Screenwipe, a program all about television."

Image description: a man fucking a TV. Image description: the way I feel 100% of the time.

I guess the show is known for Charlie's angry reviews and criticisms of famous people, but the best parts are the educational parts, like when he explains how much a TV show costs, who works on it, and why people who are making TV shows have to make a lot of compromises. It all has kind of a whiny tone, because that's the tone of the show, but it's not at all just a show about reviews or complaining. Also, there are a lot of guests on the show who talk about pretty much every subject, like why "science" on TV is not scientific, the best credit sequences of all time, kids' shows they ironically watch, and how TV reporters have changed.

Charlie's actual reviews are nothing to sneeze at, of course; they're some of the funniest reviews I've ever seen. He comes at the most inconsequentially bad shows with an attitude of frothing, inarticulate rage which is especially funny because it isn't very convincing. He usually starts smiling a little bit, and basically comes off as very nice when he isn't yelling.

I tried to watch some of his more recent shows, like Newswipe, and that particular brand of comedy just stopped. It was watchable, but I was really disappointed because I enjoyed the persona so much. I guess a lot of angry nerds are mad at him for not being angry anymore, but honestly he never seemed genuinely angry to me, just very committed and over the top in his humor? So I don't think it can really have to do with him mellowing out or becoming a less angry person. I don't know what happened, but at least I'll always have Screenwipe.

Anyway, back to the spring.

Dracula. I watched a tiny bit of this show. It was terrible, terrible, terrible. I also tried to watch Penny Dreadful, also at Clayton's suggestion. I liked when Frankenstein and the monster seemed like they were going to make out but I just couldn't stick around very long. I feel like Clayton has almost never recommended a good TV show to me. I think he's the person who originally got me to watch Grimm! And Clayton, if you are reading this, we were supposed to talk on the phone ONE WEEK AGO!

Dead Like Me. I marathoned this show while playing 2048. It's very good. I love all the characters, the style, acting, writing, blah blah. It's weird because it is older than Wonderfalls, I think, and you remember my complaints about Wonderfalls. Actually, I think Bryan Fuller had to leave this show in a really awful way only a few episodes in, so I should be mad and think that the rest of the show sucks and doesn't live up to the first few episodes, but I am just a philistine and I really like it. The movie is fucking horrible though. Don't do that to yourself, ever.

Sometimes I pretend that Mason and Daisy are Josh and me even though we aren't funny or attractive. ACCEPTABLE!

American Horror Story. I regret watching season three.

Adventure Time. I got really into this show! I love the art style, the music, the characters, and the humor. I love when the episodes end on a really strange beat--that might be my favorite thing about the show. I also got really sick and spent several days in a haze of Bubbline fanfiction on tumblr. I wrote meta, recorded a cover of "Oh Bubblegum" trying to sound like Olivia Olson, and then returned to my day to day life.

Aside from the Bubbline-related episodes, my favorite is "Dream of Love," where an elderly, tiny elephant and a pig fall in love with each other and everyone yells at them for holding hands and kissing in public--not because they are different species, but just because people think public displays of affection are gross. The couple start making out in different places like sandwiches, a baby carriage, and a projector. At the climax of the episode they are separated and start bellowing out a song that has lyrics like, "In my dreams, your love is just a dream to me, but in my heart it lives and breathes and grows!" while the pig is drinking at a bar and the elephant is baking a pie. Okay that summary pretty much contains why I love the show, although you might need to see the art and hear the performances to understand what's so awesome about it.


Sleepy Hollow. This show is wonderful. It sucks when I review something I watched such a long time ago, because it's not really fresh in my mind, and I wish I was able to write a lot about this show. It's about a cop named Abbie who lives in Sleepy Hollow and then Ichabod Crane comes to the present day and acts really angry about the fact that he has to pay $1.99 for donuts. He and Abbie are a delight. So is ORLANDO JONES, whose character name I forget, but he loves being on Sleepy Hollow so much that the background of his tumblr is a picture of him, Abbie, and Ichabod in front of an American flag.

The show is genuinely really scary sometimes and also funny, and has wonderful characters. When I complain about Nick being bland on Grimm and how he's not a real character...well, I am just thinking of characters like the ones in Sleepy Hollow. Abbie has been in way fewer episodes of TV than Nick Burkhardt, but I am so much more excited about her and could tell you so much more about her than I could about Nick. Same goes for every main character, except stupid Katrina--well, that's not true, she is dumb compared to the other characters, but she is still more interesting than Nick Burkhardt.

Also, Sleepy Hollow has a lot more female characters, and black and Asian characters, than most TV shows. That's another thing that makes it more interesting to watch and it is starting up again in ONLY TWO DAYS!!!

Teen Wolf. Never admirable, always watchable. Plus Shelley Hennig, who I used to have a crush on in The Secret Circle--the show I could never remember anything about except that it had hot girls in it?--has ambled over to here and is making out with Stiles and acting in a way that I can claim is crypto-disabled, which is good, because if she was canonically disabled, she'd be a villain.

Community. The REAL season four was great! Shame on you, other season four! (Just kidding, I barely even watched it, except like 3 episodes where the plot of EVERY episode was "Abed compares something to a TV show or movie! Look! This is exactly like Community actually is, except for being well written and doing a good job with the characters!")

Now, this is probably just about half the shows I watched, so I got to dig around in my brain a little.

Drunk History was as good as last year--maybe even more consistently good. It's a really fun show.

I watched Catherine, which isn't actually a real TV show--it's on YouTube--but I like it. Yet I am too lazy to even look up the link for you. You'll just have to do your own Googling. I am a monster.

Broad City. This is a comedy show with maybe 10 episodes about two friends, Abby and Ilana, who live in New York. Again, this is something I remember really liking but it's been such a long time that I don't remember that much about it. Fuck my life! Hannibal Buress is also in it, playing a dentist who is in love with Ilana. By the way, Ilana is one of the most attractive women I've ever seen. I think I might not have found it that funny in the first few episodes but it really picked up. Only quote I remember:

Hannibal Buress: I'm at the dog shelter.
Ilana: When are you going to get your own dog?
Hannibal Buress: I could never subject a dog to the crazy life of a dentist.

Now I am remembering a lot more great dentistry moments in the show. Cool! Maybe I should rewatch it.

Hannibal. I can't believe I was talking about Hannibal Buress but I forgot this show! Okay, I'm going to say the first season was AMAZING but then, like, something happened? Okay warning you should stop reading if you don't want me to post an awesome gory screencap from Hannibal.

First of all, what's kind of exciting about this show is that we have a mentally ill, crazy, crypto-Autistic main character who everyone sort of suspects is a serial killer, but he's not, he's actually super ethical--but all the doubts that other people have about him and all the doubts he has about himself contribute to him being the perfect patsy for an actual serial killer. I know I know, I'm about to say a Bryan Fuller show is realistic, but just shut up okay, I feel like it is a realistic portrayal of mental disability and violence, i.e. that mentally disabled people are seen as violent because of stereotypes, but meanwhile, we actually are disproportionately victims because we're more vulnerable and we're also taught to be more compliant and doubt ourselves and stuff. Good job Bryan Fuller!

I also like that he changed some of the male characters from the books to be female in the show so there would be more female characters.

And most of all (well, maybe not most of all) I love the gore and what Fuller calls "purpleness." We're supposed to believe that there are about one billion really artistic serial killers who do things like killing people and then taking their lungs out and putting their lungs on their back to look like wings:

Or killing people and then turning their bodies into a giant totem pole thing. Or taking diabetic people, putting them into comas, and planting them in a garden and growing plants in them. It is awesome. There was only one scene in the show that actually grossed me out, otherwise all the murders were so dreamlike and just super Bryan Fuller that they were nothing but cool.

The second season wasn't bad or anything but it just didn't appeal to me the same way. First of all, they had understandably moved on from the plot of the first season which, like I said, was very meaningful and exciting to me. So it got more boring. Also Caroline Dhavernas, who I've mentioned I love, was acting really DUMB in season two. No Caroline Dhavernas! Don't do it! Here's a screencap I took of her looking really wonderful though:

And she was walking some dogs too.

I liked it, but I DIDN'T like her being so stupid and also the show just got a lot less case of the week which made me sad because I really liked all the gory art murders so much! Oh well. It's not that I won't watch the show anymore or something but it was just crazy how fast it went from being something I absolutely ADORED and was obsessed with, to something that was just like "well it looks good, good actors, Bryan Fuller, okay."

Orange is the New Black. I'm not sure I reviewed this last year. I love it. It's a great show. I wish I had a husband so I could break up with him for Samira Wiley. But I'm getting tired of writing this post and how short form is it anyway?

Image description: the scrollbar. This post is really fucking long is what I'm trying to say.

Orphan Black. Holy shit am I forgetting a lot of shows! It just means I'm really lucky to have watched so many amazing things this year. Okay at this point I'm going to have to come back to some of these because I'm BURNED OUT.

The Michael J. Fox Show. YES did you know someone could have a disability and be on a TV show and make jokes about it?? YES!!!! But why didn't they do anything else in the show? Like there was literally an episode about how the mom and dad don't want their, like, 17-year-old daughter to take an art class where she draws pictures of nude men. Or maybe she was taking photos, I don't remember, but it just made it seem like the show was taking place in the 1920s and basically everything seems very unoriginal except for the concept. Even though I did really appreciate the concept.

Those are all the shows I can remember right now that I watched this year. I only watched like 18 of them, so I really need to step up my game. Gross.

Anita Blake Vampire Hunter: The Harlequin by Laurell K. Hamilton

I've never read any books in this series (I found this one by the side of the road) and I was expecting it to be a trashy fantasy/horror book or a trashy romance book or both.  What I wasn't expecting was that it would be the weirdest book I've ever read.

I have to say that I'm not including unpublished books written by teenagers.  If another kid handed me their book on the bus on a field trip in 9th grade, this would be EXACTLY what I was expecting.  It just makes no fucking sense as an actual published book written by an adult, and that has nothing to do with being cheesy or trashy--it's like when you're doing NaNoWriMo and you just write as much as possible about any random subject you can think of, just to take up space.

Most egregiously, The Harlequin is supposed to be about the Harlequin, which are some super scary secret vampires who have decided they want to hurt Anita Blake and all of her boyfriends, but for the first half of the book, LKH can barely bring herself to write a few sentences about the Harlequin even though Anita and her boyfriends are supposedly in great danger.

Anita Blake is this Mary Sue lady who is a human but not, also sort of a werewolf/werehyena/werelion/wereleopard but she never actually transforms because her body hasn't decided what kind of animal it's going to turn into.  She has a psychic link with a lot of her boyfriends, including Jean-Claude the vampire, Richard the werewolf, and Micah the wereleopard.  She also needs to have sex with several people a day or she will die and so will 2 of her boyfriends (Nathaniel the wereleopard and Damian the vampire).  There's also a part about how she has to eat food or she'll die but someone will have to inform Laurell K. Hamilton that this isn't a power.

Oops, I just found this half-finished review six months later, so I will have to try to remember what the book was about. I think Anita might have a house and a job, but in this book she was staying at Jean-Claude's giant mansion, which I think might be under his nightclub, but I can't remember. The plot of the first half of the book is something like this:

1)Anita finds out that the Harlequin are after her?? Whatever.

2)Anita goes to the movies with Nathaniel. They run into some people who saw them performing at a sex club. Anita has a really long conversation with Nathaniel about the fake name he gave those people. Then, Anita finds a mask in the bathroom which is a message from the Harlequin that they are spying on her, but that they won't use any magic on her.

3)Then, for about a billion chapters, Nathaniel, who is a masochist, wants Anita to top him and she doesn't want to. Nathaniel acts like he is going to break up with her if she doesn't do what he wants. He seems like a real asshole but the book doesn't even acknowledge what an asshole he is and just says he is an adorable woobie. Also, practically everyone keeps asking them about it so Nathaniel and Anita have to describe in painstaking detail about how Anita isn't being GGG.

4)Then for a long time the book is about Richard, the werewolf. He hates being a werewolf and he hates that Anita has other boyfriends! What in the world? How could you date someone who has 5+ boyfriends and do nothing but complain about how you want her to have only one boyfriend? Especially if she needs to have sex multiple times a day or she'll die. At this point if you care about being monogamous you need to date someone else.

5)Occasionally, the characters get unusually emotional. Like, Anita gets really attracted to her own boyfriend. Or Richard gets really mad. Then everyone is like, "IT'S THE HARLEQUIN! They said they wouldn't do anything to us but they are controlling our emotions!" But you guys, you are acting normal. Richard is always mad and Anita is always attracted to her boyfriends because there needs to be a lot of sex in the book because of the type of book it is.

6)Jean-Claude has a million bodyguards at his house and one of them was saying Anita was hot and she was mad about it--this whole thing took a fair amount of time--and then maybe he turned evil. Anita mentioned how this girl had kind of a grumpy expression, and later that girl randomly turned evil. I don't remember. Apparently this book is infamous because Anita has a guy killed for refusing to have sex with her, and I do remember that part, but like, it honestly wasn't that notable compared to the rest of the book.

7)When Anita was complaining about the bodyguard, she really wanted us to know that he was Asian. She said something like, "His mom was Chinese and his dad was Japanese. I wondered how they felt about his rude behavior."

8)There was a sex scene with the following line: "He smelled smoky, not like cigarettes, but wood smoke, and salt, like some food that had been smoked and salted, until the meat was flavored and tender and so ready to eat." Yes, he was sexy because he smelled like cooked meat. That is my jam as well.

9)Eventually they had a showdown with the Harlequin but who cares. The book was 30% Nathaniel wanted Anita to top him, 30% Richard was jealous, 30% a lot of dramatic stuff happened at a hospital and everyone almost died, and in the final 10% of the book the Harlequin stuff happened.

10)Also, there is this sexy werelion who Anita is drawn to even though he's evil. He is really into Cookie Monster so he dyes his hair the same color as Cookie Monster and he has a tattoo of him. I know this sounds like a manic pixie dream lion but I promise, it was supposed to be edgy and evil that this all powerful beast is sitting around watching Sesame Street.

And that's what you missed in The Harlequin.

Short form TV diary, part 3

I forgot to say I watched The Secret Circle for a while last year. I pretty much forgot everything about it. Was it that bad? Objectively, I'm sure it was better than Grimm.

*The girls on the show were good looking. They were playing teenagers so maybe I should feel bad but I'm sure they were all very old.

*There was this one girl Diana who was supposed to be sort of the nice responsible one but she was a lot more intimidating and interesting than you would expect from that character.

*One of the main characters died in the first few episodes.

*This guy came and tried to seduce all the girls on the show but secretly wanted to kill the main characters for being witches.

*The main plotline was about how all the kids were witches combined their powers to be more powerful and Diana kept saying that they shouldn't do it because it was bad but they did it anyway and pretty soon it didn't seem to matter very much and the plot was about something else.

*Some of their parents were evil and they were all witches. The most confusing thing about the show was that the 6 (?) main characters were all descended from 6 witches but it seemed like all the witches were married to each other or something, were they all related? It also seemed like this line of witches had existed for a long time and there had always been 6 witches and they usually all dated each other? I didn't understand.

*I also remember a part where this woman didn't move or talk for 15 years because of magic and the main girl used magic to try and save her, but it turned out that her parents had actually frozen her on purpose because she was possessed by a monster. The monster started taking over the main characters and it was okay.

From my description the show sounds watchable and maybe I'll try it again soon, but I can't help but think it means something that I can hardly remember anything about it.

True Blood. Clayton and I were watching the last season of True Blood but why. I just don't care anymore.

Mad Men. I tried to watch the last season of Mad Men but again I just didn't care anymore. I think it was mostly because of Pete, who I used to love. I liked how in the first season he was a jerk, in the second season he went through a lot, and by the third season he was still a jerk but sort of had a good relationship with his wife and was wanting to be a better person. I don't just mean I want everyone to become nice but I liked that his character was developing. This season I started to feel like Pete was just becoming a jerk again and all the characters were being put through the same arcs and loops and it didn't feel meaningful anymore. JUST LIKE LIFE. Is this what Matthew Weiner is trying to tell us? Probably and maybe I'll be interested again someday, but not soon.

Bedlam. I can't believe I forgot this! The second season of Bedlam was amazing. Jed, who you would expect to be alive, is dead. Molly, who you would expect to have been kidnapped and murdered, actually just went to another country to hang out. I forget what happened to Ryan and Kate briefly appears only to leave again. John Foster remains, and actually was a good character who I had feelings about. Some of the ghosts were actually scary. All the bad characters were replaced by good ones! SPOILERS (I decided it's worth warning for them because I respect the show now.)

*Ellie, the Jed replacement. Just better at everything.

*Max, a Nice Guy who is a bartender and is played by an actor who is really appealing. He Nice Guys all over Ellie, while writing a secret blog about her ghost hunting. She finds out and is mad.

*Keira, a young woman who is having an affair with John Foster and he is terrible to her.

*Dan, John Foster's secret son. For the first few episodes, Dan was just a guy who worked for John Foster and was hitting on girls. Then it turned out that he was John Foster's son and JF didn't even know.

Now, my feelings about this are that I like when actors of different races are cast as relatives. John Foster is white and Dan is brown. But the weird thing about this is that when Dan revealed that he was John Foster's son, Max actually YELLED at Dan and was like, "Dan that's not possible, you're not white," and Dan had to painstakingly explain that a person who's white can have a non-white child. Then when Dan told John Foster, John Foster ALSO yelled the same thing at him, even though he presumably remembered that he dated a brown woman. So we had a weird situation where the casting director knew that people can have a relative of a different race, but the characters didn't.

I would consider reviewing this season more in depth because I really enjoyed it. We'll see.

Dog With a Blog, Jessie, ANT Farm, Austin & Ally, Shake It Up, Wizards of Waverly Place, Good Luck Charlie. Not that there's anyone who reads this who doesn't know me, but for the past 8 months I've worked for a severely disabled girl who spends a lot of time resting in her bed and watching the Disney channel. I know all of these shows back to front and am planning on reviewing all of them, the short version is Austin & Ally is the best and Shake It Up is the worst.

American Horror Story

This show has a format I had never heard of before--an anthology where each story is a season long. Several of the season one actors returned for season two, playing totally different characters, which was something I liked. More than the anthology format or the actors playing different roles, American Horror Story is defined by the fact that it tries to combine too many things into one narrative, making a huge mess that can’t help but delight you.

The first season was written worse and it was obvious the writers were coming up with twists and revelations on the fly; on the other hand, there was only one source of mayhem. The Harmon family had moved into a house where a ridiculous number of people had died, and over time, a bunch of ghosts appeared and did different things. There were all kinds--gay ghosts, disabled ghosts, nurse ghosts, a baby ghost, and even a handsome ghost who shot up his high school and (in the most disturbing twist of all) amassed a tumblr fanbase of teenage girls who were angry that the ghost’s love interest wouldn’t forgive him for killing people. I’ve barely spoiled anything, as I only listed about 10% of the total ghosts in the house. Wherever you looked, there was a new ghost, and it was hard to make it five minutes without laughing.

The second season was less immediately appealing to me because it takes place in an “insane asylum.” I’ve written before about my frustration with this setting--it draws on the fear of crazy people to make itself more interesting, but invariably, the heroes and villains are not crazy and we only see crazy people tottering around in the background wearing straitjackets. (This season has pretty much done what I expected--although, as with last season, Ryan Murphy makes an admirable effort to portray and condemn discrimination against people with developmental disabilities.) Also, I just don’t personally find asylums as appealing as a haunted house.

I kept watching, though, and found that the second season was actually somewhat well written and not entirely ridiculous. This time around, the story seems like it’s actually been planned out a little, and all the point of view characters are interesting and likable (with an apparently villainous character coming around to be one of the heroes). On the other hand, there are way too many kinds of monsters. We get the spooky asylum with some “criminally insane” patients, demon possession, murderous mutants, a serial killer, and aliens, all introduced in the first few episodes. It’s too bad because the story would be perfectly fine with a few of these elements removed, and it seems like there aren’t even going to be any remaining tropes for Ryan Murphy to use in the third season. Is he afraid the show’s going to get canceled and he has to use everything now?

If he is afraid of that, I don’t know why he would be. As far as I can tell the show is pretty popular, and understandably so because it’s one of the most relentlessly entertaining things I’ve ever seen.

Wait Till Helen Comes--Mary Downing Hahn

When I was growing up there were certain books I would read constantly, and this was one of them.  I found it when I was visiting my parents and decided to reread it, since I probably hadn’t done so for at least ten years.

It might be because I remembered the plot twists, but the first 80% of the book is super slow and boring.  The protagonist is Molly, a supposed preteen who acts like an oversensitive 5-year-old.  Sample narration: “I was anxious to run away from the bones in the graveyard, but I couldn’t run away from the bones in my own skin!”  Molly likes nothing more than to write poems about rainbows and sunlight, collect unicorns, and listen to Emily Dickinson poems on tape to distract herself from her fear of death (I’m wondering if Mary Downing Hahn has read any of Emily Dickinson’s poems).

Molly’s brother Michael is the only semi likable character in the book.  He likes science and nature and his main role is to make fun of Molly for believing in ghosts--although amusingly, he thinks ESP and poltergeists are real.  At one point he tells Molly she’s stupid not for saying a poltergeist trashed their house, but for saying it looked like a person.  Real poltergeists are invisible.

Their spacey mom, Jean, is a painter who recently married Dave, a potter.  The whole family moves to the middle of nowhere for the summer so the selfish parents can work on their art.  They tell Molly and Michael that it’s their responsibility to take care of Dave’s traumatized 7-year-old daughter, Heather.

Unfortunately, Heather is an awful girl who hates Jean and likes to set up Michael and Molly so they look like they’re bullying her.  Soon she becomes friends with a little ghost named Helen who is trying to convince her to kill herself so they can “live together with unicorns eating roses in a crystal palace.”  Even though unicorns eating roses sounds disgusting, Heather is enthralled and totally wants to do it.

The majority of the book is the same incident over and over: Molly sees Heather talking to Helen/wearing the necklace Helen died in/generally being creepy, Molly tries to go to an authority figure, Heather denies the story and accuses Molly of bullying her, and all the other family members either get mad at Molly, or mercilessly tease her for being afraid of death and ghosts.  In several scenes, the entire family laughs at Molly for being a wuss.  Even though Molly is hysterically crying 90% of the time, Dave believes that she is a sadistic kid who’s making up ghost stories to scare his daughter.  He also refuses to consider that Heather might have problems even though she saw her mother die and is constantly clinging to him, crying, screaming, and having night terrors.

This was extremely frustrating, and I guess I must have found it rewarding to read about when I was a kid because it tapped into a universal sensitive-poetry-girl feeling of being teased and having no one understand you.  This time around, though, I was just bored.  I also thought that Dave and Jean were horrible people!  Maybe this is something Downing Hahn deserves to be commended for because she doesn’t put the parents on a pedestal, but by the end of the book I couldn’t even accept them as decent.  They just seemed mean and lazy.

Of course, Molly does herself no favors by talking about ghosts instead of just telling people that Heather is spending all her time in gross, dangerous places where multiple people have died.  I didn’t remember how dumb she was.

After slogging through the majority of the book, I finally got to the end where Helen actually does some scary stuff and it’s up to Molly to save Heather, showing her love for her so they can finally become real sisters.  This part is fine, and although it isn’t scary to me now, it’s probably a good level of scary for an 8- or 10-year-old.  Maybe the length was intended to develop Heather’s character, but I can’t help feeling that the book would be so much better if there were half as many incidents of Michael, Heather, Dave, and Jean ganging up on Molly.

The Nightmare Factory

This is a comic adaptation of some stories by Thomas Ligotti, who is apparently famous. In my original review of this book, I said it was confusingly terrible, but after doing further research I have to say that I just don’t understand Ligotti’s vision and he would probably want someone like me to have the reaction I did. From this sample of four, I can say that Ligotti’s idea of a horror story goes something like this:

An underdeveloped male character, probably kind of depressed and studious, hears about something bad. A big group of people do something mysterious. Something scary and disturbing is seen. The protagonist is a little creeped out but ultimately just miserable. At the end of the story he’s even more depressed and makes a comment about how his sanity is lost forever.

I am a dull person and I guess I enjoy by-the-numbers horror. To me the scariest part of a horror story is usually the explanation or realization of the horror. Whenever a disturbing image would appear in Ligotti’s stories, I would get excited for the reveal of where the image came from or what it signified, but instead the main character would just reveal how depressed and miserable he was.

When I internet researched Thomas Ligotti he seemed like a respectably consistent guy who, rather than failing to write what I expected from a horror story, is just pursuing entirely different goals. He says that he’s very depressed, hates everything, isn’t interested enough in real life to write realistic characters, and only wants to communicate how much he hates everything and thinks life is meaningless. He actually seems like a nice guy.

I wouldn’t read any more of his writing, but I did think the second and third story in the graphic novel had interesting art, and the art in the fourth story was beautiful.

Bedlam 1x04, 1x05, 1x06

Heart is broken that even the ever-loyal Jim won't read my posts about this show. It is so funny you guys! Can't actually explain why.

Anyway, it is British and therefore short, so it wasn't too much trouble to finish. HERE'S WHAT HAPPENED.

Episode Four

"IS THIS SOME KIND OF EX-MENTAL PATIENT THING GETTING ALL MORALISTIC THE WAY PRISONERS GET RELIGION?"--one of Kate's awful comments when Jed criticized her for sleeping with a married man.

When I watched the teaser for episode three, I had dared to hope that Lily Loveless was going to be having power exchange sex with Jed! But in fact the clip that I thought (hoped/dreamed) was her was actually about Kate getting possessed by a creepy ghost while having sex with a married man, and slapping him and acting like she was going to kill him, and then seeing herself in a mirror with giant lopsided eyeballs.

Anyway, in this episode Kate tried to come back to the guy and get him to sleep with her again. FAIL. She did this by saying, "I was in bed and I lost control, how flattering is that?" and suggesting that this time, he can hit her during sex. It's only fair!

Not surprisingly the guy was not into it and told her to go away. I did think it was weird since she's his landlady that he didn't try to be more polite about it. But how could you be?

Molly got a job as a nanny/babysitter for a little girl named Ella who lives in the building. She wanted to sleep with Ella's dad and they had the most bizarre romantic dialogue as he told her he wished he could switch lives with her and she told him that, in fact, her life sucks.

Molly: You would get the worst deal, trust me.
Ella's dad: (looking lovingly at her) I don't believe that for a second.
Molly: (swoons)

If I told someone I thought I had a crappy life and they told me they DIDN'T BELIEVE ME...that probably wouldn't increase my attraction to them? Is Molly turned on by men thinking she's a liar/unable to judge the circumstances of her life?

Admittedly, as far as I can tell, Molly's life IS better than everyone else's life on the show. Kate is possessed and her dad is probs evil, Jed's life sucks for obvious reasons, Ryan is gay and his brother got murdered, and John Foster has to look in the mirror every day and see this:



But I guess no one on this show tells anyone their secrets (except Jed and Ryan, bros forever!) so Molly probably doesn't know how good she has it. Anyway, they slept together, but the guy started hating her because a ghost was after his daughter and Jed saved her. I know this doesn't make sense, but Ella's dad decided that because Jed was in a "loony bin," he clearly kidnapped Ella and then brought her back as a joke.

All of the sudden, Jed looked up and guess what was there:



This show is making me want to make little YouTube horror movies because it's SO EASY TO MAKE THINGS SCARY. This was the only semi-scary ghost and they didn't have to do anything expensive: they just made her a little kid who runs really fast, draws creepy pictures, has clown makeup on, and has her spooky face flashed on the screen at random moments. Finally. This isn't rocket science.

By the point she was randomly on the ceiling though the episode stopped being scary because I had seen her face enough to just go, "Oh, there's a little kid wearing clown makeup."

Oh well. Good try.

Episode Five

Can someone explain why Jed always looks so scared when he has a vision. He has them all the time! I get it when the vision is about someone drowning or cutting their wrists, but in this episode, he kept having a vision of a girl having sex with an ugly man, and every time he surfaced from the vision he would look really shaky and upset. Ugly people have sex too Jed!

Ryan and Molly researched Jed's biological mom who I may have mentioned was a patient at the hospital who died in childbirth. Some shady things were revealed. The best part was when Ryan told her that Jed was born in the asylum and Molly said, "What." As beautiful as Molly is, I have come to realize that the actress who plays her never attempts to come off like a person having emotional reactions, but just tries to seem more and more and more beautiful.

The ghost was okay.

At the end of the episode Kate realized that her dad John Foster is obvs a serial killer, so she was crying to Jed about how she wants to run away or something, and then they made out. I was SO surprised, not.

Episode Six

This episode started with Kate being the worst person in the world. Molly and Ryan were playing with Tarot cards and a ghost got mad and set Molly's arm on fire. Then Kate came home and yelled at Molly for burning "stupid hippie candles" and said, "I'll charge you for damages."

Later Kate apologized, which led me to believe she has been possessed by someone nicer.

Jed got a text that said "kate dad danger" and showed it to Ryan and was asking what it meant. FFS. I WONDER WHAT IT MEANS.

Jed did explain thought that he hasn't always gotten supernatural texts. It turned out that he just started getting them at the beginning of the series and they're from this weird number, which turns out to be the number of a room in the asylum. I think it turns out his mom is actually texting him, which is solid.

Molly kept trying to hint to Ryan that they should get married. Kate kept telling Molly Ryan was gay and Molly basically said that she didn't care if he was gay because "love is more than sexuality." FFS Molly! Her greatest goal in life is to be the Linda Thomas to someone's Cole Porter?

John Foster was trying to be a good dad and take Kate out to lunch which was awkward since Kate knows he's evil now. Kate basically ended up admitting she knows he's a serial killer and he told her he's actually not and she believed him. I actually thought this was a pretty realistic turn of events because it would be hard to accept your dad is John Foster. But whatever.

Ryan and Jed were discussing the ghost who set his sister on fire and is now trying to set Molly on fire. Why did he do that?

Ryan: Maybe he was just a nutter.
Jed: No one's just a nutter, Ryan.

Come on Ryan, if someone appears in multiple scenes and we see their face they can never be "just a nutter." Actually this time I guess he was because the show kind of forgot about him in all the drama. Ryan slept with Molly like an asshole and when she realized he wasn't into her she angrily decided to leave and stay with friends. She was walking down the street trying really hard to look cute:



I think it took that moment for me to realize how much Molly's facial expressions are just NOT facial expressions. She just opens her eyes really wide and looks dazed and bites her mouth. Anyway, she got into a white van just as a helpful voiceover reminded us that Zoe (her friend who went missing) was last seen getting into a white van.

A bunch of stuff happened but none of it made sense. Kate went to the room she's been having scary dreams about. It turned out that when she was a little kid she saw her dad and another guy carrying a dead body out of that room. Jed and Kate went to smash the wall and get into the room and Kate's dad was running after them saying that he didn't kill Zoe but implying that he knows who did and Kate definitely shouldn't go into the room.

In the room there was an elevator and Jed went down on it. Kate went down too but her dad caught up to her and made her go back up while Jed was yelling at her from inside a room that she needed to leave because it wasn't safe. This was actually semi-scary because we didn't know why everyone was so upset about Kate in particular being there. Jed said something to his mom and there was a scary ghost.

THE END.

As someone said on the IMDB board:

"A cliffhanger is something that leaves you wondering what will happen next. By that definition, Bedlam did not end on a cliffhanger."

The unfunny Bedlam post

So here's what I have to say about the show Bedlam that isn't really about the show at all. It's about the way people think about disability and the way this is reflected in and reinforced by pop culture.

Any institution (school, hospital, or prison) is a great setting for horror fiction because a)you can use a huge creepy-looking building with winding halls, b)there are lots of people there hence the potential for lots of ghosts, and c)people are likely to have been abused there.

But mental institutions are such a good setting that they're almost cheating because, even more than abuse or winding halls, people with disabilities are one of the basic units of the horror genre. I'd argue that at least half of villainous humans and ghosts in horror movies could be considered disabled--in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of disabled movie characters appear in horror movies.

I come to praise horror not to bury it though. After all, I like it. I also think that physical and mental "weakness" may be themes that are inherently scary because they threaten our security. The idea of criticizing porn for being offensive always strikes me as really senseless because porn is created to push certain buttons so I don't see how it can be any more offensive than an icemaker can be offensive for making ice--and the same argument can be made about horror.

So I'm not talking about the fact that Bedlam a TV show set in a haunted institution for people with mental health disabilities. I do think it says something interesting, though, that while the idea of the institution (and therefore disability) is used to give the show its spookiness, there are very few disabled characters.

I first found out about Bedlam on the Skins LiveJournal community when someone posted some gifs of Lily Loveless's guest appearance on the show. From the gifs, I could tell that her character was supposed to be ill (she was taking medication) and that she had moved into a new place. The name of the show made me assume that it took place in a psychiatric hospital, so I imagined that she had just been admitted to a hospital for treatment, only to discover it was haunted.

I thought this show was going to be about people with psychiatric disabilities in a haunted hospital. Like, there would be a few main ghost hunters who were either long-term patients or staff, and the guest stars would be various short-term patients who would be menaced by a ghost. After actually looking up the show, I realized that the hospital was no longer a hospital, but I figured the ghosts were going to have psychiatric disabilities since they were the ghosts of patients.

In fact, every single ghost of a patient has been casually mentioned to not actually have been mentally ill--even when this doesn't have anything important to do with the ghost's motivations. I want to make it clear I am not criticizing this particular show for this! But I went through every character in the first five episodes (living or dead) who has been a patient in a psychiatric hospital or is thought to have mental health problems.

There were ten characters like this--four were main character ghosts, three were living characters, and three were part of a ghost or living character's backstory. Only half of the characters who have been institutionalized or said to have MH problems actually have MH problems. Of these five, three are part of someone's backstory--they only appear very briefly and exist to drive the motivation of another character.

Of the four ghosts of patients, not one of them actually has MH problems. They were all institutionalized "wrongly."

The show portrays a lot of abuse against people labeled with psychiatric disabilities. Jed is constantly made fun of, insulted, or feared because of his label. All of the patients, especially the female ones, were treated unfairly or even killed by staff. This abuse is portrayed as wrong, but all the abuse we see against people with disabilities is experienced by characters who don't actually have disabilities.

It would be kind of a heavy accusation (especially against such an awesomely stupid show) if I tried to argue that the writers of the show are trying to say that abuse of people with disabilities is okay, and is only wrong when it happens to people without disabilities who are mistakenly perceived as disabled. I also think it would be wrong to try to read something into the fact that most of the actually-disabled characters are only notable for having killed themselves and/or someone else. That comes with them being backstory characters in a show where every character has a tragic past.

What I'm trying to say is more simple. Definitely a lot of people are institutionalized when they don't actually have a disability, and in the 19th century (which most of the ghosts are from) this was much more true than it is now. But there must have been some patients in the institution who actually had disabilities. Most of them, even.

So, where are the ghosts with disabilities? I think we are probably supposed to imagine they are among the many ghosts in Bedlam Heights. Like the ghosts without disabilities, they probably were abused and had tragic lives. But for some reason, none of the disabled ghosts get to be the ghost of the week, who Jed sees visions of and whose terrible experiences he clucks over with Ryan.

I think this isn't through anyone's decision to ignore the experience of actually crazy people in an institution for crazy people. I think when the writers were coming up with the concept for the ghost of the week, every week they just happened to come up with a ghost who was non-disabled, because main characters--characters whose point of view is show--are almost always non-disabled. Given the premise of this show, it makes absolutely no sense! But I think it's totally, completely ordinary and frankly I would have been surprised if it was any other way.

Bedlam 1x01, 1x02, 1x03

So I started watching Bedlam. First it was just the worst ever, not like, "This should be good but I don't like it," like I originally felt about The Fades, but just, like, this is a disaster. But I was really enjoying it from my awkward position as someone who loves horror as a genre while being so easily scared that watching the most average horror movie in the world, or even being exposed to pictures or descriptions of some horror movies, can debilitate me for a week.

Because like...let me tell you. The main character Kate, who is an asshole, was working in the office of the ridiculous apartment building she and her dad own. Then in the background, behind these glass doors, was a ghost! Kate didn't notice and just walked by the doors. Cut back to the ghost.



I couldn't even deal with how hard I was laughing as blood (or possibly black water?) started dripping down the glass. This continued happening for practically the whole episode. Kate was making out with a gay dude in the bathroom, and blood started dripping down over the bathroom walls, including the weird sexy picture of herself that Kate has in her own bathroom because she's CRAZY. (Not really crazy, of course. More on that later.) Later, Kate was lying in a bathtub with her eyes closed and the blood started dripping down the walls again. Also, the ghost started telekinetically writing the word "DROWN" on the bathroom mirror.

Then it started trying to pull Kate underwater and drown her. Her adopted cousin Jed runs in and saves her by giving a ring she was wearing to the ghost, because the ghost was the original owner of the ring. Jed pulls Kate out of the water and as she sits all upset in a towel trying to recover from almost dying, Jed comforts her by saying:

"YOU MUST HAVE FALLEN ASLEEP IN THE WATER."

Is this supposed to make anyone feel good? Now Kate has to be concerned that not only is she an asshole, she's apparently so incompetent that she can accidentally drown herself while taking a bath?

Maybe it's just me, but this show makes me LOL and LOL, and I felt relieved that there was a horror show I could watch without being at all scared.

THE BASICS.

This show is terrible. Look:



TERRIBLE.

The major characters are, from left to right:

1. Jed, the ~adopted cousin of Kate. I use an ironic squiggle for the reason that apparently, this is a really big deal? I don't usually think about whether people are adopted, but the fact that Jed both was adopted and has been labeled with mental health problems (don't worry, he's not actually crazy, he's just a ghost hunter!) has caused him to be some sort of family outcast, e.g.:

Ryan: Who is this, Kate?
Jed: I'm her cousin.
Kate: You're not my cousin. We're not even related.

What the fuck? He's just adopted.

I have a really bad feeling that Kate and Jed might have sex at some point and this is the reason for the constant reiteration that they aren't related. Jed comes to the apartment building because his phone was sending him texts telling him to save Kate, because yeah, in addition to seeing ghosts he somehow receives texts and big popup windows on his computer giving him supernatural advice on what to do? (Originally I thought he was using a dayplanner to remind him of his various ghosthunting tasks.) Then after he saves Kate from that particular hilarious ghost, he realizes how many ghosts are in the apartment building, so he decides to stay and put them all to rest.

2. John Foster. I don't know this guy's real name. All I know is that on Skins he played a character so annoying that a person of my acquaintance uses his name as a safeword when engaging in BDSM. John Foster is the perfect safeword because the mere mention of his name destroys all happiness/boners.

In Bedlam, John Foster is Kate's dad who does nothing but act sort of evil and nasty. At one point, Jed tries to pretend it's a joke (I don't remember the context but we're probs better off without it):

Jed: Ha ha, are you trying to electrocute me?
John Foster: It's a pity they didn't give you some of that at the hospital, might be less bother.

What the hell, John Foster? Let me be clear, I really don't like Jed very much, but it seems like he can't do anything without his terrible uncle and cousin yelling at him that he's adopted and making fun of him for having been institutionalized. I get the impression that John Foster is going to be revealed to be a serial murderer or something, so the fact that he's an asshole is a little less annoying than the fact that Kate is an asshole.

3. Kate. The biggest asshole in the entire world. Sorry I keep quoting, but let me tell you what she said in the third episode (spoiler alert, like you care).

Jed: Did you know that my mother was a patient here? Did you know that she died in childbirth?
Kate: I didn't know that. Sorry.

I guess it's not possible to capture in writing the way that Kate says the word "Sorry." But it's like she bumped into him on the train and she doesn't even want to say it. Kate spends most of her time doing awful and/or inexplicable things (like having a sexy picture of herself on her own bathroom wall).

In the first episode, Molly tells Kate that she is interested in Ryan. Kate seduces Ryan. Soon after, she starts having sex with a married guy. When Molly's friend goes missing, Kate makes an effort whenever she mentions the missing girl to say, "She's not my friend. I thought she was annoying." When Jed's girlfriend comes over for dinner and mentions she was in a psychiatric hospital, Kate says, "Oh, so you and Jed have something in common!" and starts making fun of Jed's supposed mental health problems.

I assume she's written this way on purpose, but I don't think she's going to turn out to be evil so my question is, why?

4/5. Molly and Ryan. I don't exactly get the background with Molly and Ryan which may be my own laziness. I think Molly is Kate's old friend and knew her and Jed when they were kids. Ryan is a newer friend of Molly and Kate? And when Kate and her dad decided to turn this building into apartments, Kate, Molly, and Ryan moved into a big apartment together (where I think Jed also lives).

I have a feeling Kate doesn't make Molly and Ryan pay rent because they are much cooler than her. In the third episode, the two of them just start bitching about Kate at one point and I was really into it! I'd love to think that they both really hate Kate and are just using her for a free apartment.

Molly is pretty attractive, which is good, and is supposed to be the nice/caring character, but I think without the contrast of Kate she would probably seem like a bitch. Ryan's brother was brutally murdered a year ago and Jed tells him all the details of how his brother was feeling when being murdered? Asshole!

Ryan is also played by a guy who apparently is a famous pop star. My major concern with Ryan was that he was the gayest person I had ever seen, and when I found out he was played by a gay dude whose primary job is not acting, I was like...why did they try to make the character straight. But in this aspect, the show really surprised me, because they revealed that Ryan is gay but maybe hasn't dealt with it or doesn't want to tell Molly and Kate. I'm pretty into the fact that Ryan's character isn't defined by being gay and isn't even revealed to be until a few episodes in.

I'm really fond of Ryan. But his likability and Molly's attractiveness/lack of utter evil aren't enough to make up for Jed being pretty boring and Kate being the most awful person in the world.

So why did I imply this show is less of a disaster after the first episode? Guest characters obviously! In episodes two and three, a new person moves into the apartment building who is better-looking and more charismatic than the major characters. But they have a secret and a ghost starts torturing them. At the end of the episode the guest character goes away, which is awful.

The first guest character was Leah, a cool lady who stole money and flirted with all the guys. Eventually it turned out that while drunk-driving away from her abusive husband, she ran over two kids, so this ghost wants to kill her because his wife committed suicide with their kids in the car? I don't get it. Cars! Kids! Women! Awesomely, Leah is haunted by SKID MARKS (the kind on the road not the kind in your underwear). They keep appearing on her floor, and one day, her cat is lying dead on the floor in a skid mark as if it was run over by a car.

Soon after, the ghost is terrorizing Leah and she runs into the bathroom. BUT THEN THE LIGHT COMES ON IN THE BATHROOM AND GUESS WHAT!



Ahhh! Are you serious. This is the dumbest thing I've ever seen.

I actually enjoyed this episode since Leah was pretty cool but it still made no sense. The most annoying thing was how all the main characters hated Leah after finding out what she had done. Maybe I'm being too easy on her since she was awesome, but accidentally killing people would be a pretty awful experience and they acted like she did it on purpose. Jed was trying to convince Ryan that they should let the ghost kill her by comparing Leah to the guy who murdered Ryan's brother.

Fortunately Ryan was slightly more forgiving and convinced Leah to turn herself into the police, after which the ghost decided not to kill her. Which made no sense. Except for the skid mark bathroom, the best part of the episode was when Kate told Molly that Leah wasn't using her legal first name (because if you were trying to hide from your abusive husband you would obvs change your first name and not your last name). Molly proceeded to look up Leah on Facebook and discovered that, in fact, Leah was on Facebook under HER OLD NAME!

Because if you were going by a different name, you wouldn't change your name on Facebook even if you started renting an apartment under your new name, which is way more likely to cause problems when it's not the name on your credit card. Changing your name on Facebook is super difficult!

The third episode was legitimately not bad. It had Lily Loveless and she looked GOOD. She played a girl named Sadie who moved into the apartment building after being in a psych ward for several years. She started dating Jed, but unfortunately a ghost wanted to fuck with her in a way that was finally actually logical and semi-scary! Great job everyone!

It was also pretty cool that because Sadie has mental illness, she didn't react in the conventional way when she was being tormented by a ghost. For most of the episode, something scary would happen to her and she'd look kind of sad/spaced out, and then tell Jed that maybe moving to an apartment by herself is too much of a change and she should be living with her parents. We have all seen characters who think they are haunted but are actually mentally ill, but I'd never seen a mentally ill character who thought she wasn't being haunted because she ascribed all the supernatural phenomena to her mental illness.

(I have seen this with characters who have been tricked into thinking they're ill, but that's different. Sadie obviously had/has real problems, but the ghost is real too.)

This brings me to the one gripe I have with the show that is not related to its quality--and maybe it's more accurate to say it's a gripe with pop culture in general that Bedlam happens to be a great example of. As you may have guessed from the name of the show, the apartment building in Bedlam used to be a mental institution. But so far, there are no ghosts with mental disabilities. I am going to write a separate post on this instead of sticking it at the end of my post about how funny the show is--and seriously, watch it, I hope you enjoy the ghostly skid marks as much as I do.