Choice Viewing
Feb. 8th, 2021 09:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogWe watched nary a moment of the Big Game last night. Maybe it's just as well. I remember an article about Pee Wee's Playhouse when it first came to television in the mid-80s, and CBS only laid down three rules for what he could not do on Saturday morning television:
(1) Pee-wee should not stick pencils in potatoes;
(2) Pee-wee should not emerge from the bathroom with a trail of toilet paper sticking to his shoe;
(3) Pee-wee should not say, in the context of a certain presumably innocent scene, “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.”
This last one turned out to be prophetically wise. One item not on the list, though, was that Pee Wee should not wear his underwear on his head. So of course he did-
- and more than 30 years later on the same network, so did The Weekend's crew:
Between that and the streaker, I'm rather happy about what we missed.
Instead, we were watching two things, one of which continued tonight. One was the previous evening's Saturday Night Live with Daniel Levy hosting. Overall, the reviews from friends weren't that good, but we laughed at an awful lot of it. One thing I didn't get was Phoebe Bridgers' costuming; she's been making her tote-bag-and-chardonnay bones on NPR's World Cafe, but here she was, going all Pete Townshend on her guitar in the closing number and dressing for both of her moments on the 8H stage like it was the return of Howard Shore and His All-Skeleton Band from the show's first season.
The other was a series that goes back to 2017: titled Atypical, it centers on an upper-crust Connecticut family of four with Jennifer Jason Leigh as the materfamilias and an actor named Keir Gilchrist, almost 25 years old in its first season, playing a high school kid with autism. We're now halfway through the eight-episode first season, with two later ones already on Netflix and a fourth and final in production. I've read criticism of the portrayal of the kid as being too stereotypically atypical, what with the limitations and meltdowns and literalism. But in watching it, it's the behaviors of the normies that seem even more stereotypical. The high school bullies and mean girls are right out of Central Casting, the moms (including his) are mostly Karens to varying extents (years before we even had that term for them), and Sam's Sex Maniac Best Male Friend Who Is Also South Asian For THOSE Stereotypes is really grating.
One question I've got for any reading this who are, or live with, kids on the spectrum who are being mainstreamed: to what extent are their friends and fellow students "let in" on the knowledge of their diagnoses? Is it considered a kindness or would it be frowned on (in this country at least) as a HIPAA violation? It would seem that it would make the kids' daily lives a lot easier. Unfortunately, it would also make these episodes a lot shorter.
(1) Pee-wee should not stick pencils in potatoes;
(2) Pee-wee should not emerge from the bathroom with a trail of toilet paper sticking to his shoe;
(3) Pee-wee should not say, in the context of a certain presumably innocent scene, “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.”
This last one turned out to be prophetically wise. One item not on the list, though, was that Pee Wee should not wear his underwear on his head. So of course he did-
- and more than 30 years later on the same network, so did The Weekend's crew:
Between that and the streaker, I'm rather happy about what we missed.
Instead, we were watching two things, one of which continued tonight. One was the previous evening's Saturday Night Live with Daniel Levy hosting. Overall, the reviews from friends weren't that good, but we laughed at an awful lot of it. One thing I didn't get was Phoebe Bridgers' costuming; she's been making her tote-bag-and-chardonnay bones on NPR's World Cafe, but here she was, going all Pete Townshend on her guitar in the closing number and dressing for both of her moments on the 8H stage like it was the return of Howard Shore and His All-Skeleton Band from the show's first season.
The other was a series that goes back to 2017: titled Atypical, it centers on an upper-crust Connecticut family of four with Jennifer Jason Leigh as the materfamilias and an actor named Keir Gilchrist, almost 25 years old in its first season, playing a high school kid with autism. We're now halfway through the eight-episode first season, with two later ones already on Netflix and a fourth and final in production. I've read criticism of the portrayal of the kid as being too stereotypically atypical, what with the limitations and meltdowns and literalism. But in watching it, it's the behaviors of the normies that seem even more stereotypical. The high school bullies and mean girls are right out of Central Casting, the moms (including his) are mostly Karens to varying extents (years before we even had that term for them), and Sam's Sex Maniac Best Male Friend Who Is Also South Asian For THOSE Stereotypes is really grating.
One question I've got for any reading this who are, or live with, kids on the spectrum who are being mainstreamed: to what extent are their friends and fellow students "let in" on the knowledge of their diagnoses? Is it considered a kindness or would it be frowned on (in this country at least) as a HIPAA violation? It would seem that it would make the kids' daily lives a lot easier. Unfortunately, it would also make these episodes a lot shorter.