Sunday, December 5, 2010

This Is Why We Can Have Nice Things, Sometimes

Isaac gently reminds his readers that it's his blog, on his rules:
Lots of people felt alienated from The Walking Dead Roundtable because they weren't watching the show. I dig it. But-- while those posts were often reviews of specific episodes-- they still contained all sorts of interesting ideas about storytelling. There were posts about gender politics in mass entertainment, about how post-apocalyptic narratives work, about why we tell zombie stories, about "genre" entertainment vs. "serious" entertainment and the signals that each sends off and more. The issues raised by the show aren't confined to the show, in other words, even if the way the frame that contained those issues was constructed made people less interested in them.

... I hope you won't skip [the upcoming Buffy Binge]. If you do, you'll be missing out on a really smart writer tackling a piece of popular entertainment through a short list of concerns that she's an expert on, and using that show as a springboard for a discussion of how narrative and storytelling works in different formats. In other words, you could learn something, and it'll be fun. Not bad for a blog.
Maybe that's the answer to the question Monkey See blog asked:
What on earth ever happened to encouraging audiences to pay attention to things that may be different from the things they were expecting?