Also on today’s menu:
Exploiting A Tragedy
Apple Renews Unfaithful ‘Foundation’
“Everybody laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well, they’re not laughing now.”
~ comedian Bob Monkhouse
About 100 people have protested outside Netflix’s headquarters over the airing of a comedy special they say was transphobic. During the show The Closer, standup comedian Dave Chappelle says “gender is a fact” and that LGBT people are “too sensitive”.
“We are here today not because we don’t know how to take a joke. We’re here because we’re concerned that the jokes are taking lives,” said rally organizer Ashlee Marie Preston in an interview with AFP news agency. Forty-four transgender people were killed in the United States last year, according to Human Rights Watch, a non-governmental organization.
Chappelle has laughed off the backlash, saying: “If this is what being cancelled is about, I love it.” Laugh Factory founder Jamie Masada issued a call for comedians to rally behind Chappelle in an open letter, saying, “What we are witnessing is an attack on the independence of comedy and the freedoms that make comedy the most organic, noncommercial form of entertainment. … If we don’t stand up for one another it won’t just be one of us that loses this freedom — it will be all of us — and once this freedom is gone, the doors of comedic expression will be sealed shut. There’s no going back. Dave deserves the same freedoms that we all enjoy — the ones that make comedy what it is and provoke perspective shifts time and time again.”
Exploiting A Tragedy
When 22-year-old Gabby Petito of Blue Point in Long Island, New York, set out on her road trip with her fiancé, Brian Laundrie, 23, in July, she had fewer than 1,000 followers on Instagram. Now, her account has 1.3 million followers, despite the fact she’ll never post on it again.
After Petito’s disappearance, upon learning that the couple had been in the Bridger-Teton National Forest at the same time as their family, Kyle and Jenn Bethune scoured a video they had taken until they found the couple’s van. The video went viral and, soon after, police found Gabby’s remains nearby. Now investigators report having found what appears to be human remains, along with personal items such as a backpack and notebook belonging to Laundrie, in a Florida wilderness park, in an area that, until recently, had been underwater, according to FBI Special Agent Michael McPherson, who described Laundrie as “a person of interest in the murder of Gabby Petito.”
Social media has been fascinated by every new development, responding with a slew of fresh speculation and amateur sleuthing. Some, however, have been accused of exploiting Gabby’s death by turning it into entertainment. True crime as a genre has exploded in popularity following hit podcasts and series such as Serial and Making A Murderer. Millions of people have been following every detail of Petito’s final days.
Apple Renews Unfaithful ‘Foundation’
We were so looking forward to Apple TV’s adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and have been so disappointed in its execution. In 1966, the original trilogy was voted the best science fiction series of all time at the Hugo Awards. Today, many critics are praising the big-budget Apple series for its spectacular visuals, and the company has announced its plans for a second season — but even those praising it note how boring the story line is. For those of us who loved the original, it’s worse than that: They have completely missed the point.
The novels are about science and barbarism, how civilizations develop over time — and how they end — and the power of logic to overcome challenges. The new series is a melodramatic tale that pushes all those things into the background.
As Rob Bricken in Gizmodo notes, “Here’s the catch: Making a 10-episode season out of about 100 pages of text is an act of lunacy …. So much needs to be added to fill out these episodes, which feel so much longer than the hour they generally run. … Even if you’re coming in without having read a page of Asimov, you’ll still notice the drawn-out plots that go nowhere, the padding, and the weird choices the show has the characters make to keep the plot from moving forward.”
I love Bricken’s final assessment: “For people who don’t know or care about the source material, the result is extremely pretty but not particularly compelling sci-fi. For people who know or are fans of Isaac Asimov and his work, I feel compelled to warn you that if you watch the show you will see a scene so enraging that you will tear your TV in two with your bare hands; then you’ll realize how utterly unnecessary the scene was, and tear it into four.”
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