Pop Culture Fix: YOWZAH, Carmilla!

Teevee

+ The Carmilla season three sneak peek thrashed its way across my Twitter timeline yesterday, and I no joke thought I was getting played by a very impressive fan photo manip. But no, children! It is REAL! The final episodes kick off on September 15.

carmilla

+ All good things must come to an end, which is why Pretty Little Liars should have called it quits after season five, but hey, season seven is going to be the last one for real. No, for real. I haven’t watched much this season, but I do hear Paige is back and Ali is in love with Emily (and maybe pregnant with Emily’s babies???) and also Sabrina is in love with her too. A lot too late? Maybe too little? I’ll catch up in the off season. Also: Marlene King answers your burning questions. (Not mine, though; my burning PLL questions remain unaddressed.)

+ TVLand released some promos for Younger, but none have Maggie in them, so I refuse to enjoy them.

+ Kerry Washington is teaming up with ABC to create an all-lady cop drama! It is called Patrol! It is all ladies!

+ Slate goes behind the scenes of Trans Scripts, “a theatrical exploration of the trans experience through verbatim text.” You should pair that read with Jen Richards’ tweet thread earlier this week about cis male actors playing trans women. (Click the original tweet to read the whole, very important thing.)

+ Ellen‘s producing another sitcom.

+ SQUIRREL GIRL IS COMING TO TELEVISION (Get me Hellcat next!)

+ A headline for you: Tig Notaro at Amazon Series ‘One Mississippi’ Premiere: ‘If You Don’t Like It, You’re Wrong’

+ Mary J. Blige will guest star to How to Get Away With Murder!

+ Stranger Things season two bleep bloop.

Movies

+ Jezebel chatted a little chat with Clea DuVall about The Intervention.

A lot of my friends are straight. And when it’s a bunch of couples, it’s a bunch of straight couples, and then me and my girlfriend. But it’s not a thing. It’s not like, Ugh. The gays are here. You know? It’s just, we’re all friends and it’s normal. I think that as much as there are more LGBTQ characters represented on television, it is still a lot of times a thing. Attention is called to it. It is, on some level, about that. And I wanted it to not be a thing. I don’t see that as much, the normalizing of it onscreen.

Queer Humans, Out and About

Demi Lovato riding around town being an undercover Lyft driver is pretty amazing. I would pay a thousand dollars to be in the car with Mey Rude if this ever happened to her.

Also.Also.Also.

The best thing happening on Facebook this week is not me yelling at people from my high school about Colin Kapernick’s first amendment rights; it’s this video of Supergirl stuntwoman Jessie Graff on American Ninja Warrior.

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Heather Hogan

Heather Hogan is an Autostraddle senior editor who lives in New York City with her wife, Stacy, and their cackle of rescued pets. She's a member of the Television Critics Association, GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics, and a Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer critic. You can also find her on Twitter and Instagram.

Heather has written 1718 articles for us.

38 Comments

    • Seriously though, I’ve loved that actor for years and I can’t believe they got him for Carmilla! It’s the most perfect casting and it really gives this beautiful little webseries so much more gravitas. I read yesterday that this season cost between $500,000 and $1,000,000 and I was mystified but now I bet he was a big chunk of that cost.

        • Enrico Colantoni in Veronica Mars:
          “Wow. What is even going on?!?I think I have an idea..I will protect my daughter whatever it takes.”
          E.R. in POI:
          “What even is going on?? I think I have an idea. I will protect my friend, whatever it takes.”
          (Still gut punched over that one)
          E.R. in Carmilla(projected):
          “What the ****? I will be super protective of my daughter.”

          I so need a VM and POI rewatch right now..

          • Lol same I convinced a friend to watch POI as he’s a fan of all things scifi and after talking about it with him I’m like “damn this show is too good, must rewatch!”

          • Me,too. I started a rewatch of the first episode of the last season and even the music kind of fits?
            POI is going to be the tech nerd’s Firefly..

  4. Heather, are you watching The Fosters still? I’m still shaking with anger at the racist tropes they pulled out this week. Plus the fact that poor Callie can never catch a break, and poor Jesus, who I loved back when he was Latino and also not an idiot, never seems to get a plot that doesn’t involve a cranial injury or a love interest or both.

    …sorry, this is so off topic, but all my friends gave up on this mess show ages ago and so I rant in the comments section of an unrelated article.

    • I find that when something was good in the begining (or at least showed potential) the hurt’s more severe when it gets worse instead of improving compared to something that sucked all along. It’s like we invest our hopes into creators and they just punch us in our soul crotches in return. So your rant is 100% understandable.

    • It was frustrating when AJ, who is usually a peach, suddenly had an attack of toxic masculinity and transphobia. I hope this isn’t a permanent character development. (But Aaron, why are you flirting with someone when their SO is RIGHT THERE? Not that the extent of AJ’s reaction was appropriate, but still, that’s rude, bro.)

      I can’t remember a time Jesus wasn’t kind of a dope with constant love interests, though. Like, remember when one made Jesus 1 get an impluse tattoo from street vendor?

      • Yeah, the AJ thing bothered me a lot. Aaron was being an ass, but the whole interaction seemed design to show that AJ is the real jerk for being so transphobic, which was totally new to his character and really surprising since he never had an issue with Cole? If Callie and Aaron are going to get together, that’s fine by me because I’d love to see an actual trans love interest, but doing so while demonizing AJ, the only black male character on the show and one who has never been an aggressive jerk before, is not cool.

        • I mean, the girlfriend referenced in that comment treated him terribly and I was very creeped out by the scene where he stared in horror at the tattoo she made him get. It reminded me of abusive relationships that I didn’t recognize as abusive when I was in high school. I don’t think it’s fair to call him an idiot.

    • Why are u not follwoing. God words. He send only. Men and woman. Becuase he said that only man and woman its the. Only people in to love each other not men to men or women to women. Becuase ist a sin. And they will burn to hell. Becuase. Ur didnt. Follow my word. ?

  6. As a fan of American Ninja warrior to see her fly thru that with ease was amazing. You know this could really bode well for her. In fact the producers of Supergirl could very well use her talent in American Ninja Warrior as a springboard for different stunts and different story lines. Totally awesome.

  7. People are being mean to me because I love Laura with Danny, but I just take my Hollence love and…

    • I totally still ship Laura and Danny and I really bothers me how much hate Danny and even Sharon Belle get from some shippers. I love Hollstein so freaking much but that doesn’t mean I don’t love Danny.

    • I’ve been mostly uninvolved in the fandom because of the hate Danny gets. She’s always been my fave, and I’ve been OT3 since the beginning, cause I love the interactions between all 3 of them

    • No word of a lie, if Danny hadn’t show up in episode 6 or 7 in season one, I was all set to bounce. Hollence was cute while whatever there was of it lasted. I will fangirl for Sharon Belle until the end of time!

  9. The Jen Richards tweet thread was AMAZING! I tried to carve the words into my brain to use for future discussions.

    The last PLL episode was fairly infuriating; you have Hanna and Caleb copulating naked in front of the fireplace in a long, drawn-out, boring-ass scene, you have this out-of-nowhere, inexplicable Spoby kiss in broad daylight, but hey, nothing makes sense anymore anyway, and of course it’s a full-on close up, and then there’s Emily and Alison exchanging pecks behind a curtain of hair in a dark room. Seriously, I am so over that shit!! I’d rather have nothing at all than this pathetic pretense of equality. The babies, though, I hadn’t thought of that! Maybe they are Emily’s babies! It was also annoying how the show went out of their way to talk about sex-related topics as obliquely as humanly possible. They’re called abortions and condoms, not decisions and being careful!

    Also excited about Mary J. Blige.

    • This season has been painful to watch and that kiss … ugh. Literally from the warm, orange glow of the fire while Hannah and Caleb get busy on a fur rug (I’m not making1 that up, am I?) to the cold, blue glow of the TV and a nice, chaste kiss. My eyes rolled so hard it hurt.

    • “They’re called abortions and condoms, not decisions and being careful!”

      BRB writing this in the fucking SKY

      • Was gonna comment just to say this BECAUSE OMG QUOTING THIS FOREVER AND EVERRRRRR.

        Literally looked up Pennsylvania’s abortion laws to see what Alison’s options are. But obviously it’s fucking ABC Family (sorry, FREEFORM) so she’s probably gonna have a miscarriage.

        • I was wondering how they are gonna play out this storyline but now you’ve said miscarriage and I’m sure that is what will happen. To be honest, I don’t even know if I’m up for watching one more season to even find out.

  10. Is it me or is Mark Ruffalo getting himself involved in yet another Hollywood film that inaccurately portrays LGBT people? Trans actors can play cis roles. They have that experience and identity. Cis actors cannot play trans roles. It’s inherently discriminatory and reinforces stereotypes that trans people are just pretending or deceptive.

  11. Carmilla lost a lot of my love with Season 2–I get that they were going for the Empire Strikes Back downbeat ending, but “character is obviously evil/possessed/a zombie/whatever but no one else on screen notices” is my least favorite trope ever. It drove me crazy and I felt like the writing got a lot weaker.

    But the idea of them releasing this season in 3 big binge-able chunks really appeals to me, and I like what that promo talked about–especially more character work and exploring LaFontaine.

    What I really want to know is whether the Dean successfully body-swapped Dani and Maddy. I would kill to see those actresses play each other’s parts!

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