Pansopher
Joined May 2005
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Ratings31
Pansopher's rating
Reviews3
Pansopher's rating
Briefly: She's tough and cold (and smart at her job). The men are irrational whim-worshipping wimps (and chase along behind her like barking dogs while she solves the crimes).
Prime Suspect was a disappointment to me. I like Bello and was prepared to love seeing her in her own show. But several things precluded that:
The writing suffers from too much naturalism: the 2 writers wanted (as they said in their interviews) to keep things really really *real*. But their idea of reality is to show most NYC cops as sophomoric, drunken, foul-mouthed, narrow-minded, anti-woman buffoons. I can't stand a one of them, and the idea of those morons working to protect citizens' rights... is a bad joke.
Maria Bello's character is a cut above the sub-human males, but at a terrible price: her femininity is somehow missing. She's tougher than the men--and more important, far more intelligent and reasonable in her work. I could get to liking a woman like Jane T., if she were written *as* a woman. In her present form, I don't quite know *what* she is. Seeing her act like that makes me cringe.
In another TV board, they were talking about the "empowered women" trend in new shows, and a fellow reviewer complained about all the emphasis on gender, asking "why can't we just be human beings instead of male and female?" My answer to that is apropos to Prime Suspect: We can't "just be human beings" because our gender is built in, and deeply affects our world view and sense-of-life. That, in a nutshell, is my problem with Prime Suspect, which portrays a woman who's more gruffly manly than any of the men in the show. (In fact, the men are painted as either wimps or frothing idiots -- or both.) Every second we have to spend watching the needless nagging and straining based on anti-women silliness -- is a precious second taken from the advancement of the real plot: solving crimes with tenacity, ingenuity, and guts. That gender-battle stuff bores me to death.
Somewhere buried down amongst the fol-de-rol of this show is a grand potential: to portray a woman who's bold, courageous, independent in her thinking, and a very clever, intuitive cop.
I wish we could have more of that. Prime Suspect could be - and should have been - great TV art. Unfortunately, as it stands now, it ain't.
Prime Suspect was a disappointment to me. I like Bello and was prepared to love seeing her in her own show. But several things precluded that:
The writing suffers from too much naturalism: the 2 writers wanted (as they said in their interviews) to keep things really really *real*. But their idea of reality is to show most NYC cops as sophomoric, drunken, foul-mouthed, narrow-minded, anti-woman buffoons. I can't stand a one of them, and the idea of those morons working to protect citizens' rights... is a bad joke.
Maria Bello's character is a cut above the sub-human males, but at a terrible price: her femininity is somehow missing. She's tougher than the men--and more important, far more intelligent and reasonable in her work. I could get to liking a woman like Jane T., if she were written *as* a woman. In her present form, I don't quite know *what* she is. Seeing her act like that makes me cringe.
In another TV board, they were talking about the "empowered women" trend in new shows, and a fellow reviewer complained about all the emphasis on gender, asking "why can't we just be human beings instead of male and female?" My answer to that is apropos to Prime Suspect: We can't "just be human beings" because our gender is built in, and deeply affects our world view and sense-of-life. That, in a nutshell, is my problem with Prime Suspect, which portrays a woman who's more gruffly manly than any of the men in the show. (In fact, the men are painted as either wimps or frothing idiots -- or both.) Every second we have to spend watching the needless nagging and straining based on anti-women silliness -- is a precious second taken from the advancement of the real plot: solving crimes with tenacity, ingenuity, and guts. That gender-battle stuff bores me to death.
Somewhere buried down amongst the fol-de-rol of this show is a grand potential: to portray a woman who's bold, courageous, independent in her thinking, and a very clever, intuitive cop.
I wish we could have more of that. Prime Suspect could be - and should have been - great TV art. Unfortunately, as it stands now, it ain't.
This show never laughs at itself (setting it apart from most of the James Bond and follow-on genre shows). Instead, it projects the inimitable Patrick McGoohan as a consistently efficacious hero: fast-thinking, innovative, ultra-capable, tenaciously-focused on the mission, yet when achieving the mission is not enough, he's able to think outside the box, to re-define his goals and achieve success in a wider context.
For a little boy starving to see a hero on television, "Danger Man" (and the subsequent "Secret Agent Man") was just what I needed. A hundred times over the years, facing my own moments of challenge, I remembered how John Drake had handled things. Nevermind the detail of his job being a "secret agent," the essential of this show is: a man of quintessential skill and reason who uses his mind to take him over, under, around or through all obstacles -- and *that* is what you take away from every episode.
It's food for the soul.
For a little boy starving to see a hero on television, "Danger Man" (and the subsequent "Secret Agent Man") was just what I needed. A hundred times over the years, facing my own moments of challenge, I remembered how John Drake had handled things. Nevermind the detail of his job being a "secret agent," the essential of this show is: a man of quintessential skill and reason who uses his mind to take him over, under, around or through all obstacles -- and *that* is what you take away from every episode.
It's food for the soul.
This show never laughs at itself (setting it apart from most of the James Bond and follow-on genre shows). Instead, it projects the inimitable Patrick McGoohan as a consistently efficacious hero: fast-thinking, innovative, ultra-capable, tenaciously-focused on the mission, yet when achieving the mission is not enough, he's able to think outside the box, to re-define his goals and achieve success in a wider context.
For a little boy starving to see a hero on television, "Danger Man" (and the subsequent "Secret Agent Man") was just what I needed. A hundred times over the years, facing my own moments of challenge, I remembered how John Drake had handled things. Nevermind the detail of his job being a "secret agent," the essential of this show is: a man of quintessential skill and reason who uses his mind to take him over, under, around or through all obstacles -- and *that* is what you take away from every episode.
It's food for the soul.
For a little boy starving to see a hero on television, "Danger Man" (and the subsequent "Secret Agent Man") was just what I needed. A hundred times over the years, facing my own moments of challenge, I remembered how John Drake had handled things. Nevermind the detail of his job being a "secret agent," the essential of this show is: a man of quintessential skill and reason who uses his mind to take him over, under, around or through all obstacles -- and *that* is what you take away from every episode.
It's food for the soul.