Tag Archives: TV Series

The Big Bang Blog: The Toxic Relationship Comedy

By Veronika M. Heinrich

The Big Bang The­o­ry is pure poi­son in a soci­ety that just got a wake-up call.
Just yes­ter­day, I saw anoth­er post reveal­ing its prob­lem­at­ic themes. What tru­ly shocked me were the com­ments – most of them in defence of their beloved series. “Don’t get your feel­ings hurt. It’s just a fun­ny show!” they claim. But it’s not.
Like many oth­ers, I also enjoyed watch­ing The Big Bang The­o­ry in my teenage years. I was hap­py that there was a show that por­trayed nerd cul­ture and ref­er­enced it. I didn’t ques­tion the harm­ful themes the show relies on. To be hon­est, I didn’t even see them. Now that my eyes are opened, I can’t unsee them. I can bare­ly stand to watch an entire episode. The char­ac­ters’ behav­ior around women and each oth­er is just too painful.
I can’t wrap my head around why this show ran for so many sea­sons and wasn’t can­celled ear­li­er. Sheldon’s quirk­i­ness is so fun­ny after all, isn’t it?
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The Reviews Are In: Babylon Berlin Sets the Scene for Unusually Visionary Television, Intercontinentally

By Hannah Quinque

CC BY-SA 4.0, Lear 21

Grant­ed, Baby­lon Berlin has at its dis­po­si­tion all the means nec­es­sary to become a true block­buster. But it isn’t every day the view­er gets to expe­ri­ence just how phe­nom­e­nal­ly a big bud­get can be spent on a TV series – with­out com­pro­mis­es between bom­bas­tic mon­tages and cin­e­matog­ra­phy for lovers, between fast-paced sto­ry devel­op­ment and cred­i­bly com­plex char­ac­ters, that is.

For Baby­lon Berlin, pro­duced in Ger­many by Ger­man pro­duc­tion com­pa­nies, the com­mit­ment to an unflinch­ing and unre­served depic­tion of a nation on the verge of fas­cism pays off. As a bit of an inside tip, the show’s spec­tac­u­lar efforts are appre­ci­at­ed far beyond its coun­try of ori­gin, as demon­strat­ed by almost exclu­sive­ly glow­ing U.S. reviews.

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ASB 2019 Contest Winner in the Category “Best Books & Fabulous Films”

By Lauren Solomon

On behalf of the Amer­i­can Stud­ies Blog, we would like to extend our sin­cer­est con­grat­u­la­tions to Lau­ren Solomon whose win­ning entry in the cat­e­go­ry “Best Books & Fab­u­lous Films” can be read below.

Mindhunter: Harnessing the Minds of Monsters

Noth­ing cap­ti­vates an audi­ence like the inhu­man and hor­rif­ic acts of a ser­i­al killer. After Con­ver­sa­tions with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes aired on Net­flix in Jan­u­ary 2019, fol­lowed in May by the release of the bio­graph­i­cal crime thriller, Extreme­ly Wicked, Shock­ing­ly Evil and Vile, also based on the Ted Bundy sto­ry, the U.S. has become mes­mer­ized by sto­ries of ser­i­al killing. With that ris­ing fas­ci­na­tion, peo­ple can’t seem to stop talk­ing about the sec­ond sea­son of Mind­hunter.

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