NCIS:LA spinoff - oh dear

I am not much into spinoff shows, mostly because I just don´t bother watching them but I am partial towards the NCIS spinoff NCIS:LA. And now the newest thing is the fact that they´ll be making a new spinoff of the spinoff NCIS:LA. Except this time it´ll involve a team that travels the country and are forced to live together. I was not too excited about the idea of a spinoff but accepted it might be good. Today I just ran into the description of the characters of this new spinoff and oh dear, words cannot describe my feelings of incredulity and disgust when I read those descriptions.

You can read the descriptions when you click this link

First of all the main character is called Paris - That is just a bad name in every way and for someone that´s a secret agent, even worse. I doubt anyone takes seriously a person called Paris so I am secretly hoping for an awesome middle name like Camille, Cecilia or just Elizabeth for that matter, jut any normal sounding name. And she is described as beng as sexy as she is tough. And apparently she works best alone, so she is the sexy lone wolf?

Why oh why in the world do the producers feel the need to specifically say that she is sexy (as well as smart and tought but that is clearly not important). Do they think no one will watch the show unless the main female character is sexy and drop dead gorgeou. Clearly, normal looking woman are just not the thing today. No, everyone must be sexy!

The character Roy (like the name) that is a retired marine. So I´m guessing it´s the alpha male character in the vein of Hetty Lange. He´s probably a bald guy in his fifties and the resident daddy type of the team.

Danny the forensic specialist that has little talent (except probably for investigating) and is the resident oddball. What does being an oddball mean exactly? Can we except him enjoing classical music and pottery making or just being the typical socially awkward dude. And I am guessin Danny is meant to be like super cute and gorgeous but doesn´t know about it. And apparently he has no skills in driving whatsoever (kind of like Ziva?) .

Clara the brainican, lawyer and military junkie that is also supersexy. And she thinks she´s just the regular tomboy nexy door.

CAN SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN TO ME WHAT IT GOING ON???

Why on earth are they creating a series where two of the main female characters are meant to be drop dead gorgeous and sexy and it seems to be a big portion of their character.
Are the producers implying that it´s imposible for women to be good in their field and be normal looking?
Is it completely impossible for them to create female characters without objectifying them and calling them sexy at every turn?
 Is it not possible to have a tough but normal looking female character on national television?
Have we really come this short in our fight for equal justice between men and women that females still need to be objectified and lowered to a terrible level where only their looks matter, not their character and where showing as much skin as possible is necessary for their survival?

And the character Kai is the youngsest on the team and and IT nerd that is affectinately desribed as being the little brother everyone loves. Excuse me while I go throw up. And yes, my only adivce when it comes to computers is simply to reboot again and again.

To say I am pessimistic about this series is putting it mildly. I know I will not be watching it. Not ever.

A good article worth sharing and female sexualization on TV

I just fond this article and I thought it was very good and worth sharing. It highlights the problem of today´s media and female representation in it.

Click to go to article

Kensi - Part 2

I will be continuing my dissection on Kensi in this post.

In season 3, Kensi actually turned out to be the most developed character on NCIS:LA aside from Deeks. She was so well nuanced, realistic and enjoyable to watch. The Kensi Blye 2 parter was an absolute treat to watch and revealed so much more of the character and explained her motives and past. And in season 3 Kensi startd having her emotions of the surface and displaying them much more frequently than in season 1 which in turn made her seem more human which made her more likeable. I don´t know about others but I want TV characters to be humane and relateable.

And the best treat is her interaction with Deeks. Those two are so much fun to watch. They both keep me laughing and still I find it also god how their complicated but trusiting relationship is portrayed. They are the equivalent of Tony and Ziva. I am looking forward to seeing how the character will continue to develope and change and I am absolutely enjoying the way she is now and from the looks of it, it can only get better.

And Daniela Ruah does do a great job of portraying Kensi.

And to end this dissection

Things I like about Kensi as a character
-Her humour
-The fact she is not particularly obsessed with cleaning or cooking
-Her wardrobe is so nice, simple but stylish (I regularly think 'Oh, I want this t-shirt')
-Her wonderful relationship with Deeks
-The fact that she can speak good French!
-Her well nuanced emotional life and expressions
-The fact that she´s not guy obsessed

Things I don´t like
-How often she is sexualised as a character
-The fact that she always as to perform crazy ninja moves undercover when dressed sexily
-That her tactics are sometimes to good to be true
-Those scenes where her, shooting a gun, is supposed to be sexy or cool. Try as I might, I don´t find anything sexy about guns. And the scene in one episode where she is dressed in a burkah and then pulls out a rifle and starts shooting everyone around her bothers me a lot. I think it was meant to be a cool scene but all I could think was how much this reminded me of Anders Breivik and and the massacre in Utoya.
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Ziva - what a great character

The focus in this post is Ziva David. This post wil be somewhat jumbly as it´s exam season for me so bear with my ramblings and spelling mistakes. 

Ziva is in my personal opinion, one of the more interesting characters on TV right now and is played wonderfully by Cote de Pablo (a great Chilean actress).
And she is the only Israeli, Jewish character on TV. She comes from a country that is completely different from America, has Hebrew as her native language, was shaped by her extraordinary circumstances growing up as the daughter of the director of Mossad and in war-torn Israel. Not to mention that her brother was a terrorist and she lost her sister and mother early on. And she was trained by Mossad and was in the Israeli military. She has some pretty advanced survival skills and tactics, is very beautiful and speaks a multitude of languages.

This makes her sound like a superwoman character and indeed, she could be pretty flat and uninteresting but somehow the NCIS folks managed to make her both lively and interesting. She has an intriguing past and I have always liked how the writers have woven her childhod and nationality into the shows. The characters has been shown speaking Hebrew several times which I love as it´s so refreshing to hear another language than English spoken. Her Jewish faith is regularly incorporated and they have been very succesful in displaying the complication of it. The character has been predjudiced because of her faith multiple times (one scene sticks out when was called a Nazi loving feminist). But there have also been times where the difference of her faith and the Muslim faith have come up and the difficulties of it are acknowledged and the Israeli sistuation (I will not disclose my opinion of Israel and Palestine).

When she first arrived at NCIS she didn´t adjust immediately and without trouble, but the clear opposite. She didn´t get on with Abby for a long time, had difficulty communicating with Gibbs and figuring out how to interact with McGee and DiNozzo. Her past played a part and it took a while for things to settle. And she had a notorious difficulty with figuring out English. In so many shows, it seems that a new character just adjusts to new things without any trouble at all when in the real world it is not so. I have always found it refreshing to they incorpoated Ziva´s difficulty in adjusting to NCIS into the show It seemed realistic and made me enjoy the character far more to see she wasn´t just some superwoman but that she was actually realistic and well nuanced.

I have always enjoyed Ziva as a character and still do now. She is very well executed, has had some wonderful storylines (the arch with her and Tony and her subsequent trip to Somalia is my firm favourite).
The way her character has developed throughout the season has been a treat to watch and is an example of good storytelling.

Next up for dissection is Tony. 

I have to eat up my own words and yes, I am a Densi/Tiva shipper

In the last post I wrote, I moaned about the fact that none of the Russian characters that have appeared on NCS:LA have had Russian accents. Well tonight, all the Russian characters had a nice accent that was actually believeable and there was even spoken Russian.

And if it was possible for the series to get any more good - I am very happy about the fact that Aunjanue Ellis is playing Quinn, Sam´s wife. She is a good actress and I liked her a lot on The Mentalist. Plus, the thing of having two superagents married is actually a nice plot twist. I am hoping to see more off her later.

And on the topic of having two superagents married. Can we just please get Deeks and Kensi together? I really like both characters, their interaction is great (key word: chemistry) and the relationship they have is very nice. I am very much a Densi shipper and it is a gulity conscience of mine to go on youtube and watch Densi videos when I need to shut off my brain (I work in a preschool so I cut myself some slack). I do not want them together like now but someday later. Their journey has to be good so that seeing them together will be fun, just like they did on Castle.

And I want Tony and Ziva to start dating please and thank you. Those characters are wonderful (Ziva is one of the most interesting character I have seen on TV) and I really want to see them together. It´d be so much fun and I am hoping season 10 is the year of Tiva.

NCIS:LA obsession with Russia

One of the things I find it curious to observe is how foreign characters are portrayed on my favorite scenes. I have discovered that the writers of NCIS:LA are obsessed with Russia/Russians. I swear, almost every other episode, mentions or has Russia/Russian military/Russian spies/Russia as an enemy/Russian characters. And every time they have Russian characters appearing in the show, they never speak with English with a Russian accent and the Russian characters are always the bad guys.

There has, if my memory serves me right, never been a Russian character on the show that speaks English with a proper Russian accent. I am fluent speaker of English but I still have an accent because I learned it as a Lingua Franca just like a Russian person would do. The Russian characters always have an American accent in varying degrees.

And there has only been one Russian character on the show that was shown as a friend, but of course that character was then killed. And the rest of Russian sleeper agents were left on to shoot at the American agents and yet again reinforce the stereotypical image that Russia has agents in America and that they are willing to fight Americans to get their own agenda. It´s 2012 people, not 1980! The meeting in Reykjavik with Gorbachev and Reagan happened decades ago!

I am in no way Russian but I am a European that happens to be a huge fan of the country. Not to mention the fact I have studied Russian history and have some knowledge of the history and culture of the country and can read the Cyrilic alphabet. I highly enjoy NCIS:LA as a TV show but the way in which they portray Russians has never sat right with me and never will. The writers of the show are way too caught up in stereotypes of the country that are long since outdated and have been since the Cold War ended.

I have zero idea whether there are Russian sleeper agents in USA today, there might or might not be. I am tempted to go with the latter however. The possibility of there being agents is obviously intriguing and I expect the writers enjoy being able to explore possible scenarios of what might happen in real life it sleeper agents suddenly got active. It does provide some good material for storytelling.

But please, oh please stop being so obsessed with Russia and portraying it as an American enemy, because it´s not (just like no European country is, we may not always like America but we are all it´s allies). Why can´t they go with another country or better yet, stop being so obsessed with the idea of there being sleeper agents all over the place in America and start doing more Naval concentrated story lines.

I am a big NCIS:LA fan but I do wish they´d shift their focus and am hoping they´ll do so. The shows a lot of good things but this is one of their major downsides in my opinion.

Race and TV shows

This post has been swimming around in my brain since last night when I couldn´t fall asleep :)

One of the things I find curious when I watch American TV shows is the way which race characters represent and how the multiethnic culture of USA is reflected in modern media. USA is the most diverse nation on earth and it stands to reason that all of it´s inhabitants are of various nationalities and races and there is a great diversity going on. And that is in my opinion a positive thing.But viewing how media reflects this fact is very interesting.

When looking at episodes before 2000, most shows had Caucasian actors only (European-American for ethnic reference), But after 2000, a change happened and now almost every TV show has at least one member of a different race (either Latino, Af-Am, Nat-Am or Asian) and most shows have two cast members that represent one or more racial groups other than Caucasian. But very few shows include members of all the racial groups. The general rule seems to be that you need at least one cast member that´s not Caucasian, two is even better but if you have three or more it´s starts to look like you´re trying too much (I am obviously generalizing a lot).

To provide a brief example I will show the race of all the regular cast members on 4 shows - Criminal Minds, NCIS, NCIS:LA and Castle.

Criminal Minds has
Reed - Cau
 Jareau - Cau
 Hotchner - Cau
 Garcia - Cau
 Blake - Cau
 Morgan - Af-Am/Cau (infact mixed-race which I find to be a nice move)
Morgan  - Cau

So their ratio is 6/7 of cast members are Caucasian, 1/7 is Af-Am

NCIS
Gibbs - Cau
DiNozzo - Cau
McGee - Cau
David - Jewish (the actress is infact Latino)
Sciuto - Cau
Vance - Af-Am
Mallard - Cau
Palmer - Cau

Their ratio is 6/8 Caucasian, 1/8 Af-Am and 1/8  Jewish. I am well aware that Jews are not considered to be a special race but their is no denying that Jews have a special history and origins that unite them and Ziva happens to be the only Jewish character I can think of on a show today where her faith is an important part of her identity.

NCIS:LA
Blye - Cau (the actress is actually Portuguese which is pretty neat)
Deeks - Cau (the actor ha a Scandinavian last name - Yeah!)
Hanna - Af-Am
Nell - Cau
Beale - Cau
Callen - Cau
Lange - Cau

Their ratio is 6/7 Caucasian and 1/7 African-American.

Castle

Beckett - Cau (the actress is actually Serbian/Croatian)
Castle - Cau
A Castle - Cau
Rodgers - Cau
Esposito - Latino
Ryan - Cau (the actor is Irish-American!)
Captain - Af-Am
Parish - Af-Am

Their ratio is 5/8 Caucasian,  2/8 African-American and 1/8 Latino.

Considering these ratios the Castle characters represent the most ethnic groups and different races with 3 characters with NCIS following with 2 and CM and NCIS:LA with 1 each.

All these shows have characters that are of either African-American, Jewish or Latino background but not on of them has a character that´s Asian-American (which I find interesting). The only shows I can think of from the top of my head tha have Asian cats members currently are Hawai-Five-O and Bones. That is not to say that these shows don´t have Asian guest members regularly because they do, just not as a part of the regular cast. And not one shows has a Native-American character or Arabic!.

This is a phenomeon I find interesting to observe and provies with lots of material for thought which I will post on later on.

And next up is foreigner characters on those shows.

Criminal Minds - Alex Blake is awesome!

Just a quick note.

I have been following Criminal Minds this season (while faithfully avoiding Bones and The Mentalist and I do NOT miss those shows) and honestly, this season of CM has been pretty good. Not season 5 good but a vats improvement on season 6 and 7. The characters are rather interesting, the storylines are good and Shemar is as nice as always. And Jeanne Tripplehorn has been awesome as Alex Blake. I knew I´d like Blake the instant she came on and I just love her charactrer, She´s quick, smart and honest and has a very nice vibe about her. She´s independent, not too girly and grounded. Her characters has been very interesting to watch in my opinion and I love her interactions with the team, particularly Reed.

She is a nice change from JJ and Garcia and brings a fresh face to the series I really enjoy. And one of the good things about her is the fact that she is not portrayed as "sexy" or "hot". I am not saying Jeanne Tripplehorn isn´t beautiful because she is. It´s just so refreshing to see a female character being portrayed as an indepent and tough woman without the sexy factor. Her looks are unimportant and that´s something I really enjoy (and something I´d love to see in the characters of Kate Beckett and Kensi Blye as well).

I am looking forward to seeing how they will continue to develope Alex Blake as a character but currently she is awesome and I hope she will continue to be so.

NCIS:Los Angeles - better than NCIS?

This autumn I have enjoyed following both NCIS and NCIS:Los Angeles, two of my favourite series. I enjoy  waking up more early than usually and catching my favourite shows before I start my day. Since they are both shown one the same day I typically watch one show before I get out of bed and the other one in the evening before I go to sleep. I typically watch NCIS in the morning and NCIS:Los Angeles in the evening as I have always surmised that the NCIS was somehow more enjoyable and more fun and more of an early must-see that the NCIS:Los Angeles one. I like both series very much but have always thought NCIS to be just a tad bit more my vibe for a variety of reasons.

However, this year I have found myself looking much more forward to watching NCIS:LA than NCIS. I am more excited for the episode, watch the promos more often and enjoy the spoiler information more. And when the episodes come out I am much more excited for NCIS:LA. I have been enjoying this season a great deal and the episodes have been terrific. It´s in my opinion, one of the best series on TV right now. NCIS has had a solid season as well but somehow, as a series it has seized being exciting or providing anything new to enjoy. It´s a wonderful series but it seems there is nothing new or fresh going on. Maybe it´s because I have seen every single episode of the series and some of them multiple times (such as "Under Covers") and enjoyed reviewing my favourite scenes on youtube several times the series has simply gotten tired to me.

The storylines are getting tired and repetitive and the characters are getting somehow more flat and uninteresting. Not that they are enjoyable but the freshness and uniqueness that I enjoy so much about them in the earlier series (particularly Ziva and Tony) is lacking. In the earlier series the characters were incredibly realistic and enjoyable and their interaction was a true treat to watch but now it´s just dry and to a certain extent boring.

Whereas on NCIS:LA the characters continue to surprise me and I love their interactions. Deeks (a part Norwegian just like me!) and Kensi continue to be wonderful as personalities and their interaction with each other is just great. Callen has been pretty good this season and Hanna is growing on me and he definitely has his moments. The humor has been great this season (and was last season as well) and the storylines have been generally interesting and well executed. I am loving the Sam Hanna two parter and am looking forward to the next episode. And kudos to the writers for having done their research (the meeting beetween Reagan (I think) and Gorbachev was indeed in Reykjavik (the capital of Iceland) and they even pronounced the name of the city right (which was awesome to hear!)!

Somehow I am just much more psyched about this season on NCIS:LA than NCIS. NCIS:LA is by no means perfect and still has some rough spots but the series has gotten so good whereas NCIS is still solid but nothing has changed since season 8 (which was the last good season in my opinion, 9 didn´t work for me) and the series has been at a standstill.

I will of course continue do follow NCIS and I am looking forward to seeing what the series brings on next but currently NCIS:LA holds my attention better.

And this is a critisism of the series as a whole, NOT of the actors. I enjoy the actors on both series and would go fangirl crazy if I were to meet any of them.