What are some examples of this? Of all the issues Ive seen people have with Netflix, this is definitely a very new one.
Hard to say Netflix is worse for this than various other Hollywood studios tho.
(to clarify in anticipation of downvotes, I welcome and enjoy some of the media about trans people etc, I am just answering your question, to elucidate this issue with the services' content that some people have. Definitely not a rare or new issue, I've been listening to people go on about it for years)
I dont see how stuff like this is complained about though, especially since most shows dont actually have more than token representation anyway. Whats the actual complaint here? That the average cast of a show is slightly different now than it was 10 years ago? People complain about "woke" themes but I hardly see concrete examples of them, and explanations as to whats wrong or what should be done differently.
And fwiw I think using Star Trek as an example is funny* since the show has historically been based on diverse groups of people.
In Star Fleet the fact that someone happens to be a polygamous tri-sexual trans-species cat person should pass mostly without comment.
But modern sensibilities set up a dynamic where nobody is just a character.
Everyone is seen as representing "their team" - a race, or a class. This is a big responsibility, so everyone has to take themselves super seriously.
I think we're in a transitional phase for TV. Representation is a priority (great!) but the industry isn't fully confident with it yet. It's OK, TV has always been about the zeitgeist as much as the show.
Perhaps what we need is also more diversity among writers/producers. Right now it feels like a lot of writers are handling their "diverse" characters with kid gloves which can leave them a bit wooden and gets in the way of telling a good story.
> Perhaps what we need is also more diversity among writers/producers. Right now it feels like a lot of writers are handling their "diverse" characters with kid gloves which can leave them a bit wooden and gets in the way of telling a good story.
This is the answer. Seems like just a bit more time is needed for things to find less wooden footing.
Here's a handful of "woke" things I've grown tired of, more because they're such overused cliches or unrealistic things that break my suspension of disbelief than any opposition (I'm a far left, pro-LGBT+, progressive atheist feminist to disclose any biases), but in no particular order:
Every show having an "overcoming sexism" or "overcoming racism" narrative, where inevitably a white guy is the evil villain who underestimates, mistreats or is unfair to the protagonist and then the female/poc character gets to overcome this systemic injustice. (Sometimes this is central to the whole show, sometimes it feels like just an obligatory scene in an otherwise unrelated story).
Casts that have an unrealistic "forced diversity" element. You might call it token representation, but if the scene is a random office in middle-America and the 6 characters are 6 different races or when each character is designed specifically to be the inverse of a stereotype, it makes the show feel less authentic and genuine. Related is changing characters from existing stories to be more diverse according to contemporary American notions of identity.
Men being depicted as so absurdly rapey, or the general overuse of sexual harassment or threatening behavior.
Exaggerations of nepotism, sexism and racism in most shows.
As to your question of "whats wrong or what should be done differently", I think there are a few challenges. For instance, we all sort of accept action movies being full of guns and explosions while recognizing they're not at all representative of reality. However, there does seem to be some evidence that these movies contribute to European misunderstanding and to greatly overestimating the likelihood of encountering gun violence in America. The current set of media might bias a generation of young women to fear there's a rapist in every room and that every career disappointment is a manifestation of systemic discrimination.
An easy parallel might be looking at the over-use of depictions of Black men as gang members, drug dealers or criminals in 1980s and 1990s Hollywood. Any one particular movie scene or tv show might be fine on its own with such a character, but when similar characters and scenes show up in dozens of unrelated titles and as a disproportionate representation it becomes problematic. It's different groups now being the recurring villains, recurring fools, etc, but it's the same fundamental issue.
No one complains about the fresh prince of Bel-Air having a 100% black cast. But I doubt you wouldn't mind if a reboot was made with 80% white cast because it's a show "from 15 years ago".
What many people hate is the lack of creativity and the "corruption" of already-existing shows for ideologic views.
I would however, pay good money for "Star Trek: all David Bowie edition" where an entire starship is crewed with David Bowie clones.
Thanks for the bigman comeback earlier too, you phrased it better than I could have.
The complaints about CA politics in Netflix are new complaints to me.
As far as politics goes Bridgerton is probably the best example which has American racial and gender politics bolted onto some weird fairy tale version of the British aristocracy in the worst way imaginable.
edit: another thing I just remembered, Netflix removed what is probably the best episode of Community from its catalog because of a blackface character, despite the fact that the character is explicitly used to address racism in the fantasy genre.
You write this as if the same questions of racial and gender politics are not also significant in other parts of (a) the anglosphere (b) western europe.
The one character that outright critiques the practice still ends up revolving around a guy that "she chose" but is lower class. Why did she need a man?
Not only that but the show is all about 15yos marrying 20 something dudes? Just creepy.
On the other hand I thought sex education was great with how it deals with social issues surrounding sex. I do enjoy the aesthetics of it, never really found it weird but its definitely an "american 80s" aesthetic, though that is also how young people are dressing, at least over here.
Personally I dont see an issue with exploring social questions at all, but it does most of the time a superficial analysis just ends up ignoring too many things to be of any use and ends up simply as a performative action. I think this is the case for Bridgerton but not Sex Education.
In any case, what angers me with Netflix is the way they cancel shows without giving them a way to wrap up their stories in a final season. Sure, if you have 2 seasons and you were planning 5 it might be difficult to wrap everything on a third season but it is surely better than simply leaving the story open.
I mean how do you say any of this is American politics and not British/Western European politics? Racial inequality, women's rights, and class structures are not just American things.
I think your mistake is reading Bridgerton as utopian political fiction and not a romance film with a fantasy drawn around combining exaggeration of a few specific facts of Regency England with a couple things drawn from modern Western race and gender politics is the context and engine of conflict.
> There's no classism or anything structural in that show
There is fairly intense classism in the show.
> In that sense it's no different than Hamilton, where you had, ironically enough, an almost all POC cast represent not a single POC character.
Minor nitpick: Hamilton, in fact, has a single explicitly-named on-stage POC character, though the part has no lines.
Major nitpick: you...did not understand a few layers of metaphor in Hamilton.
> superficial diversity in place of actually talking about race, class, and so on.
Hamilton rather directly talks about race, class, “and so on”.
Yes, like most American content sources, the content tends to be flavored by American culture.
> As far as politics goes Bridgerton is probably the best example which has American racial and gender politics bolted onto some weird fairy tale version of the British aristocracy in the worst way imaginable.
I would say it has fairy tale versions of racial and gender politics (which are not, insofar as they connect with real world versions, any less connected to British than American ones) bolted on to a weird fairy tale version of early 19th Century British aristocracy; it's very American, but less in the politics than the style of romance story for which the setting provides the context.