Autostraddle’s Pop Culture Fix is a weekly round-up of the queer arts and entertainment news you need in your life.
New York Comic Con
This year was my first NYCC (and also maybe my last because I contracted what I think might be the actual plague there), and I was very pleased with the queer pop culture news that came out of the weekend.
+ Person of Interest is really, truly going there with Root and Shaw in the final season. This is a huge deal! With the singular exception of Santana and Brittany on Glee, no TV show has decided to explore a romantic storyline with two established female characters who accidentally have sizzling chemistry. It happens all the time with male/female pairings when TV writers stumble onto that rare on-screen spark they didn’t anticipate, but for female/female pairings, we get the Rizzoli & Isles treatment.
During the POI panel, Sarah Shahi said:
It’s incredibly important for [the LGBT community] to have role models—to have someone on TV they can empathize and emulate and find strength in. I’m so happy to work with this lovely lady, and I want to thank [the writers] for the storytelling. It has been one of the most fulfilling things, to be a voice I feel is underrepresented.
The future is now.
+ Netflix screened the first episode of Jessica Jones and it was even better than I imagined! Carrie-Anne Moss does, indeed, play a gender-flipped Jeryn Hogarth. She has a girlfriend. Also, she has a mistress. Also, the pilot hints very strongly that Jessica Jones herself is bisexual and was, at one time, in a relationship with Trish Walker. And look at what Moss told Entertainment Weekly about Hogarth’s relationship with Jones:
“They’re not friends but they need each other,” Moss said of Hogarth’s relationship with Jessica Jones during an interview with EW. “They come to each other in these scenes, and there’s a lot of back and forth and bad flirtation at times, in life. They’re funny together and can’t stand each other. It’s interesting.”
The series lands on November 20th!
+ The Pretty Little Liars panel at NYCC was interesting. For starters, someone dressed like Red Coat shoved me out of the way to get my seat. But that wasn’t even the most Rosewood role play of the day. No, the most Rosewood role play of the day came when the 50-year-old men in the crowd started screaming at the Liars to love them and marry them, even though they’re all half those guys’ ages.
Here are the first four minutes of the season 6B premiere; it screened at the panel.
Y’all know I have loved this show and have a lot of affection for so many of the people who make it, but I don’t have a great feeling about what’s coming.
Teevee
+ CBS has ordered a comedy pilot from Liz Feldman.
+ Laneia mentioned this in Monday’s AAA, but it bears repeating: Cartoon Network is planning an eight-part Adventure Time mini-series focusing on Marceline the (Queer) Vampire Queen!
+ It feels like this rebooted female-led version of Paradise Island has to include a couple of lesbians, right?
+ VH1 is hosting a panel called LHH: Out in Hip Hop. It’s about being openly gay in the hip hop community.
Film
+ Dope is out on Blu Ray, DVD, and VOD today. It’s one of my favorite movies of the year, in large part because it features one of the most refreshing lesbian characters in film.
+ Jennifer Lawrence wrote an essay about Hollywood’s gender pay inequality problem, and everyone loved it.
+ The trailer for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is so much better than it has a right to be!
https://youtu.be/QWr3mLI8Xl8
Queer Folks
+ This is a really good interview with Ellen Page. Here is an excerpt:
To experience being in love and get to live my life, hold my partner’s hand, bring her to the premiere of the film, go down the red carpet — it’s all these firsts in my life. I’m like, “This is the first time I’m in an out relationship in an airplane!” That might sound so insignificant to a lot of people, but probably not to a lot of people in the LGBT community because they would understand. I can’t tell you how special it is. It’s really extraordinary, and I feel really lucky.
+ Hey, you can read an excerpt from Carrie Brownstein’s new book, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir, in The New Yorker. It’s about her father coming out as gay and it is some gorgeous prose.
Ugh I contracted Con plague too.
I really enjoyed that Ellen Page interview, thank you.
That squealing sound you just heard from north-central Kentucky? That was me, right after I read that Sarah Shahi quote. (I am a big Shoot fan.)
It looks to me like that bar that Emily is working in is in California (state flag on the wall). Is there anybody that we know in the “Pretty Little Liars” universe who’s in California? I seem to remember somebody. Can’t think of who.
okay but why wouldn’t the pride & prejudice & zombies trailer be good??
I wonder what watching PLL is like as a 50 year old dude. Do they just relentlessly root for Ezra and see their frustrated selves in Byron?
Maybe they identify with Andrew “I’m the victim” Campbell.
Who now?
At some point I literally stopped absorbing the new male characters into my brain
They defs think Vernon is the best dad on TV.
Yay! I’m really really glad about all the good things I’ve been hearing about Jessica Jones coming out of NYCC and your news is the best news!
I can’t believe Spencer was in WASHINGTON D.C.! Like LITERAL, ACTUAL, REAL-LIFE D.C. And I’m so glad that I, as a viewer can experience the story COMING ALIVE through the MAGIC of television. Thanks, Freeform.
That was awesome, wasn’t it? I’m glad PLL’s production values keep getting better and better, just like the writing and everything else.
Haha I actually thought maybe Spencer had grown up to become an actress. Like, I thought the camera was going to zoom out to reveal she was on a movie set!
I can’t give away too much of what Brittney Williams told me about the new Korra comics, but there is going to be kissing…
I’m so excited that she’s going to be the artist on that!
Person of Interest! Jessica Jones! YAS.
I watched the entire POI NYCC panel on Monday night, and I LITERALLY got up and jumped around and screamed and “awww”‘d and shouted “SARAH I LOVE YOU!”. Everything she said, just, ugh! I was a little miffed about how she seemed to be saying “no homo”, just with the whole calling bullshit on her and Amy’s obvious chemistry, but on the whole, I thought most of what she said was really, really supportive of both the Shoot relationship and her LGBT following. I love how she takes every possible opportunity to talk about her time on The L Word and her queer fans, and how much she loves working with Amy. My brain is still kind of unable to process that SHOOT IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING!
Also, the BEST part of POI at NYCC was the interview with Amy and Sarah where Amy says that some of the writers have indicated to them that SHOOT HAS ALREADY HAPPENED AND HAS BEEN HAPPENING OFF SCREEN. Like, some of the writers think that Shaw and Root have been having sex all along, off screen. Which is absolutely my personal headcanon (Hello, 10 hours to kill in a CIA safe house? Taking all night for a full decontamination? Nothing to do on a long flight to Alaska, and then another long flight to Miami? Yeah, They’ve done it.)
TL;DR, January cannot come fast enough, and Heather, I’m now even more excited to read your POI thinkpiece :)
I hung out with friends on Sunday night, and when I got home my twitter feed was full of all of the POI news and interviews.
I was FLAILING!
I feel that having a subtextual pairing go mainstream, just because they have chemistry and the storyline is leading there and it’s nbd, ranks somewhere with first kiss on TV, first relationship, wedding, whatever, it’s monumental.
And so,so overdue.
Here’s to hoping that maybe some other showrunners will see, that the sky won’t fall down if they do follow the chemistry and write their effing show the way it wishes to be written.
Also kudos to CBS.
I do remember a time, not so long ago, when they didn’t even let Otalia on Guiding Light smooch.
Now they’re posting galleries with the best Shoot moments on their website.
That excerpt from The New Yorker that Carrie posted has me really excited to get the book. Thank goodness she didn’t go straight, and republican just to be different from her father and is still this kick-ass queer! Thank you Carrie!
I’ve already SEEN the PP&Z trailer and I dropped everything to watch it again her because I CAN’T WAIT
I’m so excited for Jessica Jones. Alias is one of my favorite comics (although it has its share of problems). I just hope this doesn’t turn into one of those situations where it’s like the queer characters end up being punished for their queerness. But still, really looking forward to it.
Red Coat shoving you out of the way wasn’t to get your seat, Heather. She was giving you the plAgue.
Very happy for Liz Feldman