Supplemental 4- Sabina

 Television and The Globe - What happens when a show goes international?

Not to continue on this whole Drag Race trend, but I mean it is interesting to me! Drag Race is popular not just in the United States, but around the globe, with syndicated episodes on various channels, streaming available through Netflix, BBC iPlayer, and Paramount+, and repeated calls from the fans for “RuGirls” to visit specific countries and interact with fans of the show inside and outside of the U.S. As of 2015, Drag Race has expanded into several different countries and territories, starting with Chile, followed by Thailand, the U.K, Canada, Holland, with Spain and Australia/New Zealand being released this year. I've personally watched a couple of these seasons, but the ones that get the most attention are the Western ones specifically that English speakers can understand. I've noticed that the seasons with RuPaul as a judge are skewed toward an American judging perspective, and what I mean by that is despite the nation specific nuances each franchise attempts to do, it always comes down to if RuPaul likes it or not. Doesn't that seem to create a conflict of interest between, say the national specificities of drag in the UK if RuPaul is questioning that drag's validity? What I often wonder is, how are the contestants themselves reacting to the franchising? Are they frustrated at having to perform a drag style that is potentially different than one they are used to performing on the regular? I began to wonder this because in series one of Drag Race UK, during one of the confessionals, contestant Baga Chipz expressed disdain for another contestant using certain slang words like “yaas queen” and “werk” because according to Baga Chipz, “we don’t do that here”. What is it that is being mistranslated to Baga Chipz and why is she rejecting this? Do queens feel like they have to use Black American drag slang in order to appeal to RuPaul? What would happen if the show removed RuPaul entirely? How can the shows be true to their national identities and still create an interesting international viewing experience?

Core 4: Sabina

 I've been thinking a lot about Anna McCarthy’s “Reality Television: a Neoliberal Theater of Suffering” and how much it relates to my own work on RuPaul's Drag Race. I kind of alluded to this in the group post about Reality TV, but I wanted to take a moment and expand on it. In that post, I talked about contestant Roxxxy Andrews sharing that she was left at the bus stop by her birth mother and raised by her grandmother. Expanding on the theater of suffering, I have this idea that reality television fans love to consume personal crisis. I use the word “consume” here to reference the actions of a vocal subsection of the fanbase that feels entitled to the contestants’ lives and, as such, treat them as inconsequential commodities instead of whole, individual, people.Where the consumption and the exploitation of crisis becomes overt is post-viewing when the audience is free to react to the episode. When I searched Google for “Roxxxy Andrews bus stop speech” to remind myself what exactly she said, the first video that popped up was “Bus stop roxxxy Andrews LOL”. This is a 16 second fan-edited video with 164,000 views that splits Roxxxy Andrews’ speech with a previous video of RuPaul laughing while saying, “That’s funny, tell it again!”. Recommended videos included “Roxxxy Andrews/Say So mashup” and “8 Most Emotional Moments on RuPaul’s Drag Race” but I couldn’t find a video that showed the scene as it aired on Logo without ultimately turning to Netflix. What this tells me is that something in the production is allowing the queens to be treated as a product meant for consumption. The authenticity of whatever the moment is doesn’t matter, the trauma doesn’t matter - what matters to production is how viral and sensational (memeable) the moment is, translating to the audience that the queens are an endless commodity. 

When read through a critical lens, the “Bus stop roxxxy Andrews LOL” video is a reflection of Drag Race’s exploitation of trauma and the way fans will react: the audience comes to expect a traumatic storyline and fanvideo RuPaul applauds Roxxxy for making this happen and producing the scene, knowing that it will be it viral moment asking her to “tell it again”. A reliance on traumatic events to create a good storyline is inherent to reality television, sure, but the way Drag Race churns out the personal trauma storyline reveals (ru-veals) how the show exploits trauma from contestants of color and prioritizes the white queens over other contestants, unequally creating racial differences within editing practices.

Supplemental Post #5 - Alexandria

 This year is the first time I’ve watched a couple shows in Norweigian and French. I watched Hjem til jul or Home for Christmas, a Norweigian romantic drama/comedy and the French mystery thriller Lupin on Netflix. Both were recommended by friends. And I realized very quickly that I really don’t like English dubbing and that subtitles are much better. I’ve been studying lip sync on TikTok, and when attempting to watch these shows with English dubbing, I had the hardest time being able to understand what the characters were saying. There was a delay in processing in which my brain was trying to catch up and make sense of the audio/visual mismatch. It made it a hard and uncomfortable experience. 

This IndieWire article from last year describes how the demand for dubbing is increasing and that an insistence on the superiority of subtitles mostly comes from a vocal minority of cinephiles:

https://www.indiewire.com/2020/02/subtitles-vs-dubbing-what-you-need-to-know-1202212800/

But the debate over subs vs dubs has resulted in heated twitter discourse as well. An article for Mother Jones in which the author said that subtitles are only for countries too poor to afford dubbing resulted in heated Twitter debate over the author’s classist and racist assertions:

https://twitter.com/maxwelltani/status/1226931132068966400

Despite the sociocultural dynamics around this question of subs vs dubs, as someone who is relatively new to this, I still need subtitles to understand lol

Supplemental Post #4 - Alexandria

 

Why must Marvel ruin all good things? WandaVision honestly started so strong. I was amazed by the creative risks being taken in a Marvel project—the mystery lingering throughout the first half of the series, the domesticity, the dystopian small town setting. I really enjoyed the glitches that started appear as the episodes progressed. 

*Spoiler Alert* 

Even the concept of Wanda taking an entire town captive and designing her ideal life and family as a way to cope with her grief was truly compelling. Is was a beautiful illustration of what grief can look like, as a character’s interiority was projected into every element of the show—the town she constructed, the characteristics of classic tv shows she incorporated as the days progressed, the way that other characters that were under her control actually felt her pain and grief and were scared by it. But Marvel, in typical Marvel fashion, had to end it with a CGI showdown in the last episode in which Wanda battles Agatha the witch and makes things right. After most of the episodes prior to the finale were so carefully designed and modeled on classic tv shows, all the red cgi splattered across the screen simply looked messy. How could the show have ended differently and maintained its intimacy? I think Marvel missed a great opportunity to explore that, without relying on the classic hero CGI fight. It reminds me of how The Mandalorian ended by having Luke Skywalker come to claim Baby Grogu. Even shows that are extremely well executed can falter as they rely on formulaic and reliable elements in order to please audiences for finales. It’s kind of lazy writing. But I think these larger franchises—Marvel, Star Wars—have definitely conditioned us to expect grand endings, instead of offering more subtlety. 

Supplemental Post #3 - Alexandria

 I truly did not watch much TV this semester, at least not in a traditional sense of watching complete episodes. I think what I’m realizing increasingly is how much my day to day experience of TV shows is actually through shorter clips posted on YouTube and memes and references on platforms like TikTok. Even though I don’t often sit down to commit to a show in its entirety and I tend to be much more of a movie person, I am constantly exposed to shows as they are referenced within a platform environment. Some of the audio clips I quote and have memorized are actually clips from reality tv that have been taken up by TikTok users. I am constantly exposed to memes that use characters from TV shows on Instagram. And when I think of a scene from a show that I want to experience again, I usually search for the clip on YouTube instead of locating the full episode. So my experience of TV is much more fragmented, but also more seamlessly integrated into the ways in which I use social media, which I suspect is something that a lot of people experience in our current digital environment.