Meta: Grad School's Just Like That (How to Get Away with Murder s1)-- DFvQ

How to Get Away with Murder (HTGAWM) premiered when I was halfway through my Master’s. Watching this directly after Community, I’m noticing that many of the shows I’m studying are set in schools: Community (undergrad), HTGAWM (grad), Glee (HS), Teen Wolf (HS), MPGiS (HS). TGP technically isn’t but Chidi does essentially open an ethics school for the other characters, so yeah, a little less than half of these shows are themselves about education. I think that’s partially why I connect to these shows, being an academic, but also schools are often elegant settings for writers because of the built-in constraints/obstacles, especially high schools, which are often highly regulated. Need to delay your character? Sorry, they’re still in “History of Ice Cream”. Need two random characters to have a reason to interact? They have AP Biology together. Need to nerf your characters so they can’t help the protagonist with the A plot? Time for the bar exam! The rhythm of the academic calendar, which often aligns rather neatly with the broadcast television season (historically September to May with a break for the winter holidays), is a comfortable entrée into the story world for me as someone beholden to that regime of time.

 

( Read more... )

 

Meta: Apocalyptic Time (HTGAWM s2)--DFvQ

CW: discussion of Christian theology

The planet is well on its way to becoming uninhabitable. We’re two years into a pandemic much of the western world has simply decided is over. Wars rage, injustices abound, infrastructure is deteriorating, rights are being curtailed—much if not all of the sky is falling, figuratively and sometimes literally. Which means it’s party time.

 

( Read more... )

 

Meta: Who Gets to Be Gay? (HTGAWM s3)--DFvQ

CW: suicide, deportation

Nominated for two GLAAD awards for Outstanding Drama Series and winning one, HTGAWM has since the beginning had a fairly significant proportion of LGBT characters. Connor and Oliver are the first we meet, being established as a pairing from the beginning. Several side characters are revealed to be LGBT, often clients or suspects but sometimes family members such as Aiden (Michaela’s bi ex-fiancé) or Connor’s dads. Several major characters in later seasons are also LGBT, such as Simon and Tegan. Furthermore, there’s a great deal of queerbaiting regarding Asher, Michaela and Laurel, and Bonnie. Most interestingly, in s2 it is revealed that Annalise has an ex-girlfriend, and throughout the rest of the series we watch Annalise come to terms with her bisexuality, which for a Black female main character was ground-breaking in 2015 (and still today, tbh). But one of the questions her arc raises is an important one for this project: who gets to be gay/queer, and who doesn’t?

 

( Read more... )