#longer thoughts

Now that Star Trek: Prodigy is back streaming, I obviously had to rewatch my favorite episode - one of my favorite Star Trek episodes of all time, frankly - "Time Amok". And it's funny how even though I've watched it numerous times since it first aired, it still makes me cry and it still fills my heart entirely. But then I did something I've never actually done, and went on to watching the next episode ("A Moral Star, part 1"). Though I'd rewatched that episode separately, I'd not seen it immediately following "Time Amok" and I hadn't realized just how seamlessly the two fit together. "A Moral Star, part 1" is in my opinion another of the stronger episodes of season 1, with intrigue and cleverness abound, alongside heart and its persistent message and moral core.

Prodigy is a show about learning to become Starfleet, about growing into Star Trek. It's a children's show in as much as it's about children - notably, children from outside of the Federation's sphere of influence - becoming convinced of the virtues of this Federation, of Starfleet as an exploratory body and source of good in the galaxy. Not because anyone forced them to or even expected it of them, but because they want to do good and hold by those values. "Time Amok" is my favorite episode of season 1 because of its story, its exquisitely tragic happy ending, and the way it manages to do so much character work in so short a time. But "A Moral Star" (both parts) maybe best represents what both Prodigy and Star Trek as a whole should be. The fact is that the episode about characters coming into their own - as a team and as individuals - is necessary to lead into the one where they can work together to uphold Federation ideals.

[Aboard a Radden ship in the inner Oort Cloud, a commander is rehearsing their first-contact speech with the translator]

"Hello, uh... what do I call them? Humans?"

"They generally feel othered and objectified if you call them that."

"Oh... okay... what do they want then? Earthlings?"

"No no, that's even worse. Very old fashioned."

"Right. Terrans? Gaians?"

"Painfully Eurocentric, not to mention it makes them feel subjugated under one nation."

"Fine. Do I say People of The Earth? Use some person-first language?"

"Well... that's better... but it has typically been used be groups to promote their viewpoints as global when they're not, and that's not really the kind of thing you want to-"

"Fine. How do I address them?"

"Just say everyone. You're alien to them; they'll understand you're not addressing everyone in the universe."

"Very well. Hello everyone, your puny brains-"

"No!"

She'd make such a good second in command.

Mariner's biggest flaw is her insubordination and tendency to push back against authority. But at the same time, these are often highly calculated acts of insubordination, brought on very intentionally and wielded like a sword. Mariner knows how to manage people and inspire them. She has a great capacity for creative thinking. And she also constantly challenges whoever's in charge. She has no interest in dealing with the bureaucracy of Starfleet and the minutiae of managing and the difficulties of playing politics with the admirals.

I’ve been rewatching Abbott Elementary quite a bit these past few days. It’s not an organized rewatch, but a sporadic, messy mishmash of a few episodes from season 1 and mostly episodes from season 2, in no particular order (and I’ve rewatched some of the same episodes a few times already, even in the same evening). The more I rewatched, the more I found myself recognizing just how much I love Janine - something I’ve already posted about - and recognizing just how much the show leans into the idea that Janine is not well-liked by many (if not most) of her peers. And it got me thinking about the differences between “unliked” characters and “unlikable” characters, particularly in modern television.

At the peak of “peak TV” discourse (ugh), critics and cultural writers loved to talk about antiheros, unlikable (men) characters who were fairly obviously not good people, but compelling protagonists. But Abbott Elementary somewhat flips the script. Janine is a character who is demonstrably unliked by several of her colleagues, with the show’s writing often teasing her directly. And yet she remains the protagonist and the viewer is still clearly supposed to be rooting for her.

Janine’s radical optimism is easily mocked. Her insistence on believing that things can happen by sheer intention is taken down in both plot-direct and -indirect ways. Her tendency to rush to try to fix everything is shown to irritate those around her, though they also depend on it. Her chattiness and outward friendliness exhaust some of her more jaded fellow teachers. Some even go so far as to comment dismissively on how precisely they dislike Janine, whether they’re side characters brought on for one episode or part of the main cast. Ava in particular is often very vocal about her dislike of Janine (even if some of it is obviously performative and there’s a seed of genuine appreciation or admiration at the core of their relationship), but she’s not alone; in season 2, we see numerous occasions of Melissa rather unkindly pillorying Janine or shooting her down. Time and again, we see examples of people simply not liking Janine or not having the patience for her. We see Janine struggling to make friends. We see Janine struggling to connect with fellow teachers. We see Janine struggling to gain recognition for her work. Season 2 in particular is filled with such cases or situations where people are outright mean to Janine, which can often feel especially jarring given the show’s general “feel-good” tone. 

And yet despite all of these obvious textual examples of being “unliked”, Janine is not “unlikable” by any stretch of the imagination. Her intensity is also her greatest asset, which the show demonstrates again and again. Her passion and devotion are looked upon with love by Jacob, Gregory, and even Erica. We see Janine solve problems, do her best to stretch out of her comfort zone, and grow as a person. We see that she’s not trying to change her personality; her growth is about finding space for herself after a lifetime of giving it to others, but this has nothing to do with how she presents herself to the world. (I think this can also be seen in how the show treats her fashion choices, but that’s a bit of a tangent.) 

Janine is a character that the viewer is meant to generally like, whether or not everyone necessarily loves her or sees themselves in her (the way that I rather undeniably do). Janine is still very much the main character of the show and much of the narratives presented surround her relationships with her coworkers, which often do center on their respect for her. The show is not trying to cast her as an antihero or irritating “love to hate her” sort of character. She doesn’t have the cringe factor of a character like Michael Scott of The Office, or even Leslie Knope’s obvious over-the-top humor (though Leslie is probably the closest mapping, at least the Leslie of later, more settled seasons of Parks and Recreation). Earnest characters - and people - are easy to mock in an era of cynicism, but it shouldn’t be the case. 

I’ve already gotten through just around half (certainly the thematic half-point), so I won’t be able to get into all of my observations and thoughts, but I thought I should still write up something before I kick off the Darcy era. So... here are my thoughts, in bullet points, in no particular order, and likely completely incoherently:

Lizzie’s highly judgmental nature comes across a lot stronger than I remembered. The first time I watched the Lizzie Bennet Diaries (and I think the subsequent 2-3 times I rewatched it not long afterward), I obviously recognized Lizzie’s snark and judgmental tendencies. She’s meant to be prejudiced, after all! It’s part of her character. And yet upon rewatch, I can’t help but feel like Lizzie reminds me of so many people who go through life convinced that they’re the good guys, while actually being pretty awful. (I’m vaguely reminded of the line in Megan Whalen Turner’s Return of the Thief: “They were born beautiful and mistake being beautiful for being good”, but that might be a whole other conversation. In a nutshell, it’s as both Lydia and Charlotte observe, that Lizzie’s diaries will always be biased. Which is not a bad thing.) Lizzie is often mean. And needlessly so, it goes without saying. It’s an obviously important character beat, but I think that in 2012, I was more readily forgiving of people like that. But today? I see a Lizzie who is constantly talking down to Lydia (who very obviously worships her older sisters and is constantly seeking their approval/time), who is casually cruel about Mr. Collins, and is unrelentingly negative about Darcy (which... okay, yes, again, plot point! but it’s still really mean to put online!!).

That said, Lizzie’s love for Charlotte is the positive flipside that I also hadn’t remembered. Their mutual hurt in “Friends Forever” and Lizzie’s hollowness in “Missing Charlotte” is evident and it’s hard to fully fault either friend. Both say and behave in a way that’s unfair to the other. It’s brilliantly done and the resolution and reconciliation was great.

Mr. Collins is definitely not as annoying as I remembered. Sure, he’s definitely irritating, but Lizzie treats him way more unkindly than he deserves. Like other than the “barging into a room uninvited” thing (which is definitely not cool!), he’s just trying to share in his part of the passion! And the degree to which Lizzie’s impatience is somewhat out of step with modern norms is only emphasized by how clearly Charlotte is able to manage later on. I also didn’t remember just how much the show subtly teased the possibility of his proposal being romantic after all. Even knowing where things were going, I watched the episode with a distinct sense of discomfort, which is quite impressive. If I wasn’t intent on doing a full rewatch, I probably would have skipped these episodes because they’re “cringe-y”, but no, they were worth it! Unexpectedly.

Lydia, oh man, there are essays to write here. Lydia comes across as so much less put-together in retrospect in how she presents herself to the camera, and I think a huge part of that comes from knowing just how much of her we’ll end up seeing and just how much she needs her environment. If Lizzie is the Bookstagram star, Lydia is clearly a wannabe influencer on TikTok. Yes, Lydia seeks attention in “negative” ways, but she’s also constantly trying to get Lizzie’s attention and acceptance and it’s specifically about Lizzie’s attention and acceptance. She’s hugely loving and loyal to those around her. She is lonely. She’s a youngest daughter who likes to party, but also likes to party with her older sisters and with her older sisters’ friends (which is not trivial). She fiercely defends Mary and Lizzie in this first half of the story, which I think beautifully sets up her struggles in the second half. Lydia’s insecurities are bubbling below the surface, but they’re already there. I could absolutely write so much more here, but maybe that’ll end up in another post, who knows.

Fitz is a nice interlude, but I had a harder time believing he didn’t pick up on Lizzie’s massive NOPEing when he told her about Darcy’s intervention. I never thought of Fitz as a particularly important character, and indeed he isn’t. Definitely doesn’t hurt the story, but he doesn’t really add much either. I found myself wishing he could have offered more insights into Darcy, but... alas.

Like I said in my first post, it’s somewhat strange to discover that a lot of the parts that stretched credibility in 2012... don’t anymore. I don’t especially like that observation, but there it is. And like I mentioned above, there’s a feeling of dissonance between the different types of social media stars that the characters would be. Lizzie could still be a Youtuber, I suppose, but she strikes me more as the sort who would make short videos about “intellectual” topics - her research (?), culture, books, etc. And Lydia would obviously be the sort who is constantly trying to get perform.

I felt this at the time and still feel it: Caroline and Bing are somewhat unnecessary to include on camera. It would have been fine without them. Not, again, that it’s bad with them? But it just doesn’t feel quite as critical and there is the slight ick factor with how everyone just lies to Bing all the time about him being on camera. Nope.

Continuing with the things I didn’t like, the way everyone talks about Jane and Bing’s relationship in terms of purity is unpleasant. The story does this weird thing with Jane and Bing that sort of strips their relationship of depth by using “sweet” terms. And it’d be fine if the show came outright and said how this ties into this particular couple’s choices regarding their relationship (romantically, physically, etc.), but they don’t. Not a fan. Didn’t age well.

Jane’s anger in “Snickerdoodles” is so beyond justified, considering that at this point we’re talking about two modern adults who have been dating for months. Don’t forgive him, Jane. He’s not worth it.

The pacing is excellent. I thought it’d be a slog to rewatch, but not at all. It’s delightful.

No, not everything aged well. The casual sexism - while possibly intentional and tying into bullet point #1 - is irritating. Certain phrases that are obviously meant to emphasize character flaws still should not have been used; the same effect could have been conveyed differently.

As with my endless rewatches of Pride and Prejudice (1995), I continue to relate to and appreciate Mrs. Bennet more upon rewatch. Go figure!

Having Kitty Bennet be a cat who follows Lydia around is still one of the most genius adaptation decisions I have ever encountered in any media. Ever.

So those are some of my initial thoughts from this rewatch. It’s entirely likely that I’ll remember more when I pick it up again later this week, but I’ll obviously also be posting (hopefully shorter) analyses or thoughts about the next episodes as I progress. It’s definitely a positive experience so far and I’m so excited to keep watching not only LBD, but also the next shows on my list.

Confession: I actually started the next rewatch in my Great Webseries Rewatch series a few weeks ago. And then I paused, not because I wasn't enjoying it but because I was traveling. And now that I'm back home, I intend to continue and so it seemed like the right time to start writing up my impressions from the first batch of episodes that I saw.

Let's start with the fact that I even chose to rewatch Green Gables Fables next, after LBD. When I was imagining which show would be second, I kept asking myself whether I'd go with my personal successor to LBD, the show that got me into Tumblr in the first place, or whether I should just continue with the Pemberley Digital set of shows. And then... I ended up going for something else entirely. I picked GGF almost intuitively, thoughtless, just because.

It was a pretty great choice, honestly.

GGF is one of those shows that I watched consistently as it was airing. I reblogged posts about it and I followed all the creators and I got excited over it and I loved it and felt so much from it. But I didn't write all that much about it. It's not that I didn't write about it at all, of course I did. (I wrote and rambled quite a lot in those days, after all...) But it was never the dominant show in my orbit and in a way I felt like I always sort of forgot about it. Every time I watched it, I'd be like "oh right, this is great!" and then it would again just sort of... fade into the background. Part of this has to do with the fact that it originally aired alongside shows that would become among my all-time favorites. Part even has to do with the fact that its second season aired alongside another excellent Anne of Green Gables adaptation (Project Green Gables), which I found somewhat easier to write about.

Anyways. It's time to give GGF its due, because... yeah, this was and remains a good show. And yes, I do love it.

Right from the onset, Mandy Harmon is excellent in how she presents Anne. The filming style is youthful, quippy, a little messy, imperfect, and so utterly Anne. I thought this when the show was airing, that something about GGF's flaws consistently made it better as an adaptation. In a lot of regards, GGF was one of the best in having realism in webseries literary adaptations. Not only did the story easily lend itself to bite-sized episodes (Anne of Green Gables itself being very episodic), but there was a concious effort to make Anne's world fully populated. Anne is thoroughly present online as an aesthetics blogger (excellent adaptation choice), befriending Diana through Tumblr (a nice wink to much of the fanbase itself, and a bit to the way the show developed), and there is a rich and real transmedia experience that I think ended up blowing pretty much every other show out of the water. All these years later, I still marvel over how characters were introduced to the story seamlessly through their online personas, without it necessarily being "plot relevant" for Anne's videos. They simply existed and as such they also occasionally existed in Anne's immediate (filmed) orbit.

But since I'm not reviewing the transmedia (and never really tracked it much when it was live either), let's get back to the show itself: Dang, it's good.

The pacing is great. The acting is great (if a little uneven when Diana is onscreen, though this isn't so much because of bad acting as much as a reflection of the character's relative discomfort/unease onscreen). Most of the adaptational choices are great (I still don't much love the Diana-getting-drunk plotline, which was the last episode I watched, but it was a lot less painful this time around than the first, and better than I remembered). The sense that Anne lives in this fascinating little town is beautifully conveyed in-story and I love how open everything is. Anne doesn't hide her videos and she addresses her mistakes on camera (particularly as relates to being mean or snarky about individuals) and there's none of the awkward work-arounds to explain why some people know certain things. The story just... is.

I'm still at the very beginning, of course, but I find myself wanting to write about the show in a lot more depth than I ever did while it was running. I find myself wanting to talk about how Anne's dramatic filming style feels less like old vlogs and less like new TikToks/Reels and more like the transition from the old world to the new, in how they're so fluid yet dramatic. I find myself thinking about how Anne's loneliness comes across so beautifully in the first few episodes and how she takes a little while to settle into her Avonlea life. I find myself loving how Anne's anger with Gilbert is so freshly realistic, that it's easy to forget that the story is over 100 years old.

Rewatches will never fully recreate the experience of the first time around, for good and for bad. Sometimes, a rewatch strips away some of the joy from a well executed plot twist. Sometimes, it adds entirely new dimensions that could not possibly have been noticed on the first pass. Sometimes the art itself has “changed” in the interim, due to cultural or technical development. No matter what, the viewing experience will be different.

For popular media - and more specifically popular media with involved fandoms - a huge factor can be the post-show narrative. Any good fan will know that a show doesn’t have to be currently airing in order to have an active fandom (Star Trek, anyone?), but there is immense weight to how a longform story that has grown and changed over time is perceived by its longterm fandom. Some shows have huge followings while they’re airing and then basically disappear from the cultural consciousness soon after they finish, often due to burning bridges with their own fanbase or having endings that don’t live up to their earlier seasons (Game of Thrones, How I Met Your Mother), some shows simply fizzle out and nobody remembers that they still exist (I loved Call the Midwife, but I’m about four seasons behind and it very much no longer has the active fandom it had a decade ago...), and then there are the shows that keep chugging along, maintaining their own moderate success and cultural appeal even years after completion (The Office, a show I expected would not have a lasting impact, remains confidently present).

What’s this to say about the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, though?

When it began airing, LBD felt like a minor media earthquake. The show leaned into its vlog-style presentation, integrated different social media platforms as an active part of its storytelling (”transmedia”), bounced between different accounts without minding if someone suddenly missed a part of the story (but trusting their ex-world media to do the job, and also trusting the viewer to find what needed to be found), and doing so in a way that felt shockingly believable. There’s a reason that LBD sparked the imaginations of so many different young creators across the world, who wanted to emulate this sort of storytelling. LBD set the stage.

A common narrative that’s emerged in the years since LBD ended is one that admires how it set that stage, but then adds a caveat about its implementation. Hardcore fans of what became known as “literary inspired webseries” (LIWs) will often point out that LBD was a “flawed” show, obviously not their favorite, “not very good” in retrospect, and so on. I’ve seen countless posts and tags to this extent and have even on occasion caught myself thinking that too. Of course I liked LBD, I would tell myself, but I didn’t love it the way that I went on to love other shows. As time passed and the LBD-specific fandom quieted down, I accepted this narrative as truth.

And this is where a unique benefit of rewatches comes into play: Rewatches can set the record straight.

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is, ultimately, still not my favorite webseries. It’s still not what I would call the “best” literary webseries I’ve seen, either. It doesn’t have the best transmedia. It isn’t the best adaptation of a webseries I’ve seen, nor the best adaptation of the original work itself. (Some might argue that it’s not even the best modernized adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, but here I find myself disagreeing somewhat; I’ll elaborate on that some other time.) Lizzie Bennet Diaries was, in a way, eclipsed in my mind by some of the series that came after it.

All that being said, it’s also a very good series. And it’s not a stretch to say that I loved this rewatch.

I was about to start my Green Gables Fables season 2 rewatch and at the end of the first ("episode 0") video - beyond realizing that I'd fully misremembered the show's timeline! - I noticed that there was a disconnected video: "Anne and Gil React...". This video isn't included in either the seasons 1 or 2 playlists and since the show has been unlisted, it was harder to find it. (I ended up scrolling through Anne's Tumblr feed, which also helped remind me what took place when and how excellent the transmedia was on this show.)

I'll linger on the video for a moment before I continue my actual season 2 rewatch, because it occurs to me that this is the mental image I have of Green Gable Fable's versions of Anne and Gilbert. Specifically, I always remember them as that final moment, when Gilbert side-hugs Anne and she pushes his face away. They're both so clearly comfortable and friends in this video that it's easy to forget that their friendship came about at the very end of season 1 (as in Anne of Green Gables). As I've mentioned before, I have a very strange relationship with GGF, in that I feel like I forgot about the show oddly quickly, despite liking it so very much. Going into season 2, I'm especially aware of that fact, since I realize that I actually remember fairly little. There are a few plot points and major scenes that are fresh in my memory and I'm excited to re-experience, but I don't have many expectations of the season as a whole, which is kind of exciting.

And that makes me think about how I wouldn't have remembered "Anne and Gil React..." without the little thumbnail at the end of season 2's "teaser" episode, "Goodbye, Avonlea" (which, sadly, does not directly link to the video). And that makes me think about how contemporary literary webseries were, whether in the context of their use of specific social media platforms for the purposes of transmedia or in how rooted to a particular slice of time they are or, as is now emerging, how hard it is to replicate the original viewing experience almost a decade later. (Sidebar: This makes the forthcoming Nothing Much to Do rewatch project all of the more interesting, but naturally I'll be writing about that separately when the time comes.) This one little out-of-place video - which actually perfectly captures what I best remember from GGF - seems to represent something about this rewatching project on the whole, about the way these webseries blazed to life and have faded from collective memory, about art as a whole, and about what it means to rework a classic story.