Previously on Dynasty: Fallon thought she deserved to run her dad’s company, but he offered the COO position to his new fiancee, Cristal. So Fallon teamed up with this guy Jeff to form a company called Carrington Windbriar. Cristal’s nephew Sammy Joe declared her the “black sheep” of the family, and Cranky Butler had dirt on her but we don’t know what it is. Finally, Cristal’s married ex-lover died at Windbriar and Steven got arrested for it.
If you haven’t read it, Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch,” published in Granta a few years ago and based on the story of the girl with the green ribbon around her neck, makes for great Halloween reading.
LitHub has a fascinating article on James Baldwin’s giant FBI file. Turns out one way to make the bureau lose its shit was to be an influential black writer who was planning a book on the FBI.
I remember how amused I was when I went to Planet Fitness last year and realized TNT was STILL rerunning Charmed every morning. I was trying to think of something that was more undeserving of such longevity and the best I could come up with is “It’s like if a radio station was still playing S Club 7 every day.” Anyway, Vulture published a hilarious piece called “The Best Thing to Watch at the Gym Is Silent Reruns of Charmed,” where the author tries to figure out the plot just from staring at Charmed playing every morning at the gym. Money quote: “I tried dating Charmed episodes by fashion, but the series takes place in a world where crop tops are always in style.”
Previously on Dynasty: The Carringtons are super rich; Fallon Carrington’s father Blake got engaged to Cristal; Cristal had a married ex-boyfriend, a mischievous nephew named Sammy Joe who made out with Fallon’s brother Steven Carrington, and a dark secret that Cranky Butler totally knows, but we don’t. Cristal got the COO position that Fallon wanted, so Fallon got a guy named Jeff to back her as the CEO of a different company, Carrington Windbriar. Then Cristal’s married ex got blown up and squished by a windmill blade at Windbriar, and his wife thought Blake did it.
Famous authors from Jane Austen to Zora Neale Hurston respond to your unsolicited dick pics. Via McSweeney’s.
The Harvey Weinstein revelations continue. I’ll draw your attention to a pair of New York Times articles that I think are particularly important. In the first, Lupita Nyong’o describes in an op-ed just how hard Harvey Weinstein worked to try to get around her clearly stated boundaries, and how alone she felt in her situation. In the second, Quentin Tarantino gives a brutally self-aware interview about the fact that he knew about Weinstein and failed to do anything. I think his interview really shows how normal this thought process seems despite the horrifying consequences, and also shows that people who aren’t invested in seeming like perfect allies (ahem, Ben Affleck) are sometimes more capable of learning and improving. (Assuming, of course, that Tarantino does improve in the future.)
“I chalked it up to a ’50s-’60s era image of a boss chasing a secretary around the desk,” he said. “As if that’s O.K.”
Speaking of which, Hachette has quickly and quietly “terminated” Weinstein Books, per The Guardian, but are keeping all of the titles and transferring the women who run the imprint to the main branch. That’s how you do it.
James Wood wrote a piece in The New Yorker dissecting why Never Let Me Go by recently crowned Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro is so great (or, in his words, “one of the central novels of our age”).
The first people to appear onscreen in the series premiere of Dynasty, Josh Schwartz’s modernized remake of the classic show, are the Trumps: Donald, Ivanka, Tiffany, Trump Junior, and Eric are at a ribbon cutting ceremony. This is followed by a shot of the Kardashians.
I take this as a declaration of intent: Like Gossip Girl and The OC before it, the latest Josh Schwartz creation is going to be about rich people. But this time it’s not those quiet, repressed, Emily Gilmore-type rich people who seem to throw big parties precisely in order to avoid having scenes. These are rich people who throw parties in order to have more witnesses when they do make a scene. These are rich people for the age of reality TV! We aren’t on the Upper East Side anymore, baby.
The New Inquiry has a fascinating piece on the “American monomyth” of good outsiders saving the American community from “bad” outsiders, and how Wonder Woman critiques it even though it eventually upholds it.
Joss must be so happy. Harvey Weinstein made him look like a feminist hero again (but only comparatively).
Hallie’s plotline on Nashville kind of annoyed us (until we just stopped covering it altogether), but we are super psyched that the talented Rhiannon Giddens won a MacArthur. (article on Billboard)
How did Buffy spring from the mind of a misogynist? That is the question Joss Whedon fans have been grappling with for the last month, and it’s a worthy one. The allegations against Joss are impossible to ignore, and disturbing enough that it’s difficult to view his work in the same way. So how do we continue to watch and love Buffy in light of the personal misogyny of its creator? How do we reinterpret this beloved feminist anthem as the brainchild of a toxic fake ally?
The short answer is: we don’t. Joss doesn’t own Buffy anymore, but even if he did, any problems with its feminism have already been discussed by its fandom (and/or Buffy Studies scholars) at length. Buffyheads have known for a long time that Buffy sprung from a very flawed creator–we just didn’t know how flawed.
Continue reading →
The new Off-Broadway staging of A Clockwork Orange holds little interest for us here at Adversion, but the New York Times reviewer was so hilariously distracted by the hot actors and their sixpacks that it made for entertaining, if mystifying, reading nonetheless. (For once it’s the male actors being unnecessarily objectified, not the women. Progress? Regress?)
Speaking of profiles that are overly focused on female actors’ looks, this profile of Kate McKinnon is certainly guilty, but if you’re like us you probably can’t get enough of reading about Kate McKinnon and reliving her Hillary impressions from a more optimistic time. (via Vanity Fair)
We are 100% for sure going to be covering Josh Schwartz’s remake of Dynasty, which premieres next Wednesday. How could the creator of The OC and Gossip Girl not get our full attention? Here are some links to whet your anticipation:
Speaking of Josh Schwartz, ICYMI (since we haven’t done a links post in like two months), Vanity Fair published a great oral history of Gossip Girl, which if you can believe it is having its tenth anniversary.
A friend of mine has been urging me to watch Reign, a CW teen soap revolving around a heavily fictionalized Mary Queen of Scots and her betrothed, Prince Francis of France, for almost two years now. My response was that of course I would get around to it eventually: “It’s basically everything I want in a TV show: a campy romantic drama with an out-of-control costume department starring familiar faces from the girly movies of my youth.”
Boy, was I right.
(spoilers behind the cut)
Adversion 