Narcos is a new Netflix original series that premiered all its 10 episodes just before start of the network TV fall season. It centers around a U.S. DEA officer in the 1980s who is sent to Colombia to follow the constantly expanding, multi million dollar cocaine trade to its sources. He soon encounters infamous Colombian drug dealer Pablo Escobar and the show follows the police and DEA agents’ attempts to capture and kill Escobar. There are three things that struck me in the first ten minutes and that are all indicative of the type of show Narcos is:

(1) the layered framing: We start with a voiceover comparing present day NSA surveillance with the much more primitive methods used in the ’80s only to then move back yet again to the early ’70s and a strongly abbreviated history of Pinochet’s military coup. The voiceover narrative evokes films like Goodfellas and Casino, gangster narratives told after the fact. In the end, however, the voiceover keeps the viewer at a distance and often carries the burden of exposition of the highly complex historical and political realities that create the backdrop to the moments we see on screen. In fact, at times it feels like the complexities of reality are at odds with the need for characterization, if not sympathetic protagonists, within this fiction.

(2) the original footage: In the brief historical summaries, the text uses historical footage suggesting the historical veracity of the narrative. In fact, the entire pacing combined with the voiceover often resembles a documentary more than a television drama. Unlike historical fiction that focuses on fictional or composite characters to elucidate the truth of an era or a phenomenon, Narcos places Pablo Escobar front and center, telling his story as fact. And yet the entirety of reality is undermined by prefacing the first episode with defining magic realism as “a realistic setting…invaded by something too strange to believe.” The layering and the verisimilitude suggest that the show is an epistemological inquiry to get to the truths of Pablo Escobar, and the show endeavors to unravel those truths slowly and carefully. The leisurely pacing and often gorgeous backdrop scenery with its clearly marked ’80s fashion all add to a level of care that supports this endeavor—all the while foregrounding and enforcing its fictionality.

(3) the language: As a native German speaker, few things throw me out of a show more quickly than Germans in Germany speaking accented English to one another (like in the recent Sense8). If I suspend my disbelief, they should speak fluent English just like any Star Trek alien does. Or they should be German speaking German and just be subtitled. Narcos yet again tries to invoke a sense of authenticity and documentary evidence by presenting the large majority of the show in Spanish with subtitles. However, I use the term “tries” purposefully, because while I was initially very excited about the choice to present a show primarily in subtitles, it turns out verisimilitude only goes so far: Wagner Moura, who plays Pablo Escobar, is Brazilian (apparently he and director José Padilha are BFFs). My Spanish native speaker friends tell me that the show is surprisingly good in its linguistic authenticity, but that cannot make up for the fact that the central character speaks Colombian Spanish with a clearly noticeable Brazilian accent. Apparently, US monolinguals or, at least, non-Spanish speakers are the primary, if not only, audience.

Last not least: I’m glad I’m not the only one who immediately thought back to Entourage’s Vincent Chase playing Pablo Escobar.

It seems a familiar narrative: the storyteller as maker of worlds, as God. Narrating has always been a way to create, with naming as a particularly generative power. What I find surprising, then, is not that today’s storytellers engage this trope, but how they have chosen to do so. Rather than merely acknowledging how writers are not only Gods of their own universes as they create fictional worlds, there is a strong sense in some recent instances that argues that writers create reality as well.

In recent weeks there have been two plot lines in completely different shows taking up this narrative, and it makes me wonder about our fascination with the auteur and his authorial “Godlike” control. More, it makes me wonder about the ease in which both writers and academics privilege text over action in ways that make our lives of words as, if not more, important as a life of action. This is not to diminish the importance of critical analysis or the awareness that words matter. It is, however, an attempt to question our eagerness to foreground the mode of engagement we have mastered and with which we are most comfortable.

In the recent Doctor Who episode “The Rings of Akhenaten,” the monstrous antagonist eats people’s experiences and stories of the past. When even the Time Lord’s immense past cannot feed it, his companion Clara instead feeds it the potentiality of future story lines: “It’s full of stories, full of history. And full of a future that never got lived… This leaf isn’t just the past. It’s a whole future that never happened.” What is foregrounded here is the infinite potential of imagination and possibilities. Though, as a fan, I couldn’t quite help wonder if Moffat was celebrating the potentiality of the many worlds spun from the reality of Clara’s mom’s life and, by extension, the show or if we fans were rather the nearly insatiable monster wanting ever more stories. Maybe both?

Likewise, the recent Supernatural episode “The Great Escapist” features the new character Megatron, who is the scribe of God, in charge of the Word. The Archangels, he describes, decided “they take over the universe themselves, but they couldn’t do anything that big without the Word of God.” Megatron went into hiding, instead spending his time reading human stories. And he revels in his description of these stories (both history and literature clearly): “It was something to watch, what you brought to His earth… But really, really it was your storytelling… When you create stories, you become Gods.”

Again, humanity’s largest potential is framed not as our achievements, inventions, and discoveries but as our potential for imagination and storytelling. In fact, even when Dean and Sam berate him for his inaction in the war between demons and angels that has caused so much human suffering, the action yet again is an act of writing: “I am the scribe of God. I erased it,” he responds when asked how he overcame the obstructions the King of Hell had erected.

Words becoming actions – ideas creating reality is a trope nearly as common as the author as God of his fictional universe, but somehow combine these two, and the storyteller, the showrunner, becomes something more than an authorial voice. I am reminded of the Derridean il n’y a pas de hors-texte, which became central evidence in accusations of deconstruction as nihilist. But even in an interpretation where acknowledging that any thing is ultimately a text, can be read and analyzed as text, the political message remains problematic.

For me, personally, it is a matter of necessary versus sufficient propositions: To change the world, it may be necessary to be aware of language and ideology, of the cultural text and those who creates it, but I am very doubtful that it is sufficient. In other words, material alterations always contain textual elements but awareness of and changes in ideology do not guarantee real-life changes. And this is regardless of whether the self-importance comes in the guise of academics or showrunners.

I used to have a Facebook, years ago, for a very short time. In that brief time it connected me with some friends from high school, my abusive ex-boyfriend, and my college roommate. Only one of those was a pleasant surprise. So when Facebook suddenly installed new privacy features that forced me to lay open my life to the public or delete various information about myself, I took the (admittedly for me easy) step and deleted my account.

I have boycotted all things Facebook since, but it is hard and getting harder. My friend sends out invitations for a cookie swap, and I cannot see it because it is on Facebook. My favorite restaurant offers discounts, and I cannot use it because it is on Facebook. My favorite podcast asks me to vote for them in the iTunes podcast competition, and—even though I have iTunes!–I cannot vote because it is on Facebook.

What all of these things have in common, besides exhibiting how stubborn I can apparently be, is a complete invisibility and unawareness of the nature of Facebook for those who are members. We all know that Facebook has a variety of privacy settings, we all know about the dangers of nametagging, and we may know about the recent attempt to sell access to its users. Some of us may even have followed the concerns surrounding tracking users. But what I find interesting is the way few who are on Facebook are conscious of the fact that not everyone is.

I can’t call it privilege, because I clearly have the ability to get over myself and just make another account. But it shares with privilege the quiet invisibility of those without accounts, the inability to conceive of anyone not having access, and the resulting lack of consideration for those who choose to remain outside of Facebook’s walled garden. And this is where the crux of the matter is for me—and where this post turns from my whining about not getting to join in these amazingly intimate and supportive shared spaces where many academics gather to a post about the costs of the interfaces we use.

Because yesterday something more momentous happened than my inability to access Facebook: we learned that Google Reader will close down, destroying the most-used RSS feed reader and leaving those of us who relied on it desperately looking for alternatives. Now a savvy reader might ask me why I make a strong categorical stand with Facebook yet support a company at least as evil and exploitative of its users, who also happen to change their products with little input. Who doesn’t remember the nymwars of the summer of 2011? And I will have to admit that I am weak and apparently my conscience only goes as far as my Gmail account. But I try not to assume everyone is on Google, so when I collaborate on Google Docs, I have learned that not everyone is a Google puppet and have learned to create workarounds.

When the Organization of Transformative Works and the Archive of Our Own were but a glimpse in its founders’ eyes, one of the battle cries was: “I want us to own the goddamned servers.” What fans had learned the hard way was that you may be allowed to post virtually anything online, but only as long as your ISP doesn’t send you a cease and desist letter. Even more serious is the control ISPs have over the other side, our actual access to the Internet. This, of course, is a lesson that across the world has long been known by oppressed groups and citizens of oppressive regimes (and not only those!): the Internet may be free, but it is only as accessible as your ISP. In the United States, we are slowly becoming aware of that limitation: with many ISPs ascribing to the new six strikes rule, they are threatening that they can remove our Internet access at will.

Both modes of access are controlled by commercial entities (and, in many cases, by national oversight to boot), and we have little control over any of it. Facebook and its ever changing rules, Google and its ever changing products, and commercial web sites with their eager willingness to delete fanworks on the say-so of media companies with little recourse for the injured party, all of these are reminders that we live in a world where everything seems at our grasp and easily accessible—until we suddenly stand outside and get reminded that these are corporate entities who do not exist for our good but for their profit.

The Following is a new Fox show starring Kevin Bacon as the rugged white law enforcement dude—traumatized, retired, and all but broken–who is pulled back into his old world when asked to consult, because he is simply the best and the FBI desperately need him to catch the bad guy. The bad guy, played by James Purefoy, is a charismatic psychopathic killer who was bested by Bacon once and clearly can only be caught again by him. The setup sounds and feels like a thousand film premises and not a few TV shows we’ve already seen. In fact, watching the pilot, I had to check my watch, because it felt like an entire movie’s worth of plot was crammed into those 45 minutes, starting with Purefoy’s dramatic escape and ending with his capture and the final showdown of the two antagonists.

But this wasn’t a closed story as much as the beginning of a television show, and the final dialog tells us exactly what this show will be about. Purefoy’s character, incidentally, is an English professor (Poe aficionado, though, frankly, I’ve always felt Poe’s a bit like the USian version of Conan Doyle: literature that has captured the imagination of many yet is studied very little beyond secondary school), whose obsession tips over into a ritualistic killing spree with obligatory literary references. And Bacon’s hero himself has penned a bestseller: at the beginning of the show, he captured the bad guy, saved the damsel-in-distress, got almost killed doing so, fucked the professor’s wife, and wrote a book about it.

And yet it still came as a surprise to me when the show explicitly spelled out how it was to be structured. Purefoy reveals to Bacon in a climactic prison confrontation that he has built a cult of followers who will commit murders at his behest, crimes that he expects Bacon to solve. His first literary novel was a flop, but he has learned from that failure, and the formerly lonely artist plans to collaborate with an unwilling Bacon: “I need a strong protagonist, one in whom the reader can truly invest, a flawed broken man, searching for redemption. And that is *you*! You are my flawed hero.”

The show thus literally spells out the very tropes it plan to use, letting us in on its postmodern joke where the plotting criminal is aware that he is creating a literary plot as well (Moriarty, of course, did just that in BBC’s Sherlock, but neither Sherlock nor the audience were aware of that throughout the course of the first season). This move changes what seems to be a fairly generic show into something more interesting. The show is pretty much psychopathic crimes and the dude who solves them by numbers: drunk traumatized white dude, who’s the only one with real insight, female character for whom we just care enough to make it hurt when she gets fridged, a contingent of less-competent FBI agents, and the love interest to both antagonists: former wife of the evil killer and short-term lover of Kevin Bacon.

So far so good. But then there’s the mad professor, who directs his network of “followers” like puppets from his prison cell. When he and Bacon face off in prison, he all but drafts the entire series as a story of which he is in charge and in which Bacon stars as the lead. Or, maybe, he is writer, director, producer, and main character all rolled into one in this real-life drama that he knows will capture an audience. He’s playing to the crowd of appalled yet pruriently curious spectators. Or, stated differently, by pitching his plot (in both senses of the word!) to Bacon, he counts on the public’s desire for gruesome stories and makes Bacon his victim and co-perpetrator. However, whereas within the show this audience includes everyone who read Bacon’s book, everyone who followed the news of the villain’s escape and consequent recapture, everyone who gets a guilty thrill when reading the details of the murders, outside of the show it is *us*, the television audience, whom he is targeting. This is the show’s ultimate sales pitch, and it is geared straight at us. Without an audience, Purefoy suggests, there wouldn’t be any crimes, and as the ultimate audience for whom the spectacle of bloodshed is executed, we are all but put in the place of perpetrator as spectators.

Of course, I am well aware that no actual people were harmed in the making of this show. And I’m not trying to suggest a facile conflation of reality and fiction. I do suggest, however, that this direct pitch at us and our desire for ever more bloody murders, ever more outrageous scenarios, ever more insane psychopaths, addresses how and why we crave excessive and extreme narratives—whether in reality or fiction. Purefoy very clearly uses fiction as a model for reality and then wants his reality turned back into fiction, challenging the clarity of that border within the text at the same time as the setup makes us question the structural relationship between the two.

In fact, the way the show implicates the viewers, both within the narrative and without, reminds me of the concerns I have when viewing disaster reports, where the very act of reporting the news makes the audience potentially partial perpetrators by gaining something out of listening to the suffering. The public within the show is an audience for Bacon’s potential second book, which Purefoy is in the process of drafting. And we as the outside audience are reminded quite uncomfortably what it actually is we get out of both fictional and real crime stories in gory detail. Why do we want (need?) to hear the recounting of anyone’s horrific experiences? Are we witnessing or merely spectating? And at what point does the audience become culpable?

Becoming an independent scholar is quite easy: one merely needs to defend one’s dissertation without a secure job prospect in sight. The next step, as affiliation privileges cease to exist, is to contend with university firewalls and forms where one suddenly has to define one’s identity beyond the clearly demarcated hierarchies of grad student, assistant, and associate professor. Continuing one’s job search into year two or three while teaching as adjunct instructor is generally accepted as merely a stepping stone. It is equivalent to eating Ramen noodles, and only worthy of being acknowledged once a position is secured and everyone gathers with their new colleagues to share job market horror stories.

But staying an independent scholar is actually quite hard: it requires the continuing desire to do research without the non-monetary but nevertheless quite real remunerations university positions afford. Depending on one’s institution, research constitutes different percentages of the expected workload, but most places encourage (if not demand) research and publication as part of the job description—and therefore as part of what’s done in exchange for a paycheck. As an independent scholar, however, research and publishing serves no quantifiable purpose. In a way, it’s love for learning and passion for knowledge in its purest form—or at least that idea is how I sometimes comfort myself.

In reality, though, it means that for the independent scholar, research is not and can never be part of one’s paid labor. It usually doesn’t feed into upper class teaching, as the general wisdom for the necessity of research at the university level goes. It doesn’t create lines on a vita necessary for tenure and promotion. And it doesn’t justify time spent away from one’s real jobs—be they family responsibilities, adjunct teaching, or some other way to keep yourself fed, housed, and comfortable. Being an independent scholar means that research and academic writing must be redefined as pleasure: I research instead of watching TV or reading a book; I write instead of meeting with friends or going shopping; I edit and do professional activities at the cost of my family time.

That’s the reason, I think, why there are so few of us: trying to do research without access to libraries is difficult as is trying to maintain a collegial network without being able to go to conferences. But both are possible with the Internet, online communication, and networks; email, blogs, social networks, IM, Skype—all allow us to remain in touch and to create and maintain a community of likeminded scholars without ever leaving our house or hometown. The real difficulty is in weighing, each and every time, whether you rather want to go to the pool with your kids or write another 500 words, and whether it is really worth it. I love what I do! I love researching and learning; I love brainstorming and writing; and most of all, I love sharing and debating my ideas. I am well aware of the conceptual value of academic scholarship above and beyond the CV line, the academic pecking order, and the minimal monetary or time rewards research often yields. It is a daily decision, however, to return to the open document and the virtual library—not because I have to, but because I want to.

And that, in the end, is why I am an independent scholar: I love the friends and colleagues I’ve made and the intellectual community I’ve been given. I love mentoring younger scholars and seeing their achievements and successes. I love the ability to write what and where I like with no concerns of a upsetting or displeasing anyone who could harm my career. And, I admit, I sometimes love the self-righteousness I feel in knowing I have no vested interest, that my research is as neutral as it can be. Working in fan studies, where academics motives are questioned often, I can easily and openly declare my alliances with my fellow fans.

Wherever we end up after grad school, R1 or community college, liberal arts college or regional university, whether we are lucky or strike out, sacrifice everything for our career or make other life choices, I don’t think we can do what we do without a deep passion not only for our subject but learning in general. As an independent scholar, that’s what I get to keep; that’s why I make this choice, over and over again, to continue to read, research, write, and publish.

The humanities put a lot of emphasis on individual (and, thereby, especially in school, gradable) work. We spend a lot of time teaching (and evaluating) single-authored essays, even as the “real world” very rarely demands these forms of researched writing academia trains, and in its stead, a lot of commercial writing is collaborative. Likewise, plagiarism is not a clearly defined field, neither theoretically nor practically: what constitutes general knowledge shifts with audiences, and one person’s obvious allusion is another’s unreferenced citation. Meanwhile, I spend most of my career foregrounding thematic and generic references and repetitions in story telling, rejecting the Romantic Originalgenie, yet in my discipline the originality of theoretical ideas are still the prime, the only measurement of worthwhile academic writing.

Collaborations are frowned upon in the humanities in a way that’s inconceivable in the sciences: monographs are still the prime currency in tenure and promotion, and our training doesn’t prepare or encourage us for the give and take that collaborative writing demands. For me that’s a shame, because I love writing with others. I learned early in grad school that I think best out loud and with and against others, and where I once had my fellow grad students, I later had fellow fan friends who’d think along and poke holes and challenge me to think deeper and further. But none of that compares to thinking with someone who has the same stakes in the project, who contributes not just ideas but also words to a shared whole.

As a result, I’ve started collaborating quite a bit. As an independent scholar I don’t have to worry about the types of writing I do, and I’ve realized that collaborative thinking and writing suits me: being responsible toward another person keeps me on track, and being able to run ideas by someone moves me over my thinking and writing blocks. I’ve collaborated on conference papers, essays, book collections, and one book project with more than half a dozen different people, and I’ve been co-editing a journal for the past four years. Not all of these projects have been successful, and the failures have taught me as much about the process as have the successes. There are a few rules that I’ve learned along the way.

• Be Balanced — One of the biggest dangers, I think, is that one person puts more time, energy, and ideas into a project than the other. Being balanced doesn’t mean both people have to do exactly the same amount of work or the same type of work, but it does mean that neither one feels exploited or silenced. I’ve worked on projects where I wrote larger parts of the essay but my partner did all the stylistic fine tuning and much of the theoretical heavy lifting. I’ve worked on projects where we both wrote sections and then simply edited the other’s writing. And I’ve worked on projects where we sent the essay back and forth so many times that neither one of us could separate out in the end what we’d written. The important thing is that no one feels they’re working too much or that their ideas are being overlooked.
• Be Clear — My biggest collaboration project failed not because we didn’t get along or because we didn’t want to do it, but because on some level we weren’t writing the same book. We had written the book proposal together (which turned into a great essay after we’d aborted the larger project), but when working on the chapters, we kept on moving in different directions, pulling at odd angles. I feel that we may ultimately have been imbalanced (the idea wasn’t mine, and I may never have been as fully committed) and we may not have talked enough up front about our expectations of the project and one another. Sometimes it’s really useful to state up front and revisit the various goals one has in a project, practically and intellectually.
• Be Honest — Being up front about how much time one has, what other commitments may have to take precedent, and what one hopes to ultimately accomplish is key. If one partner feels they work more and harder than the other, they need to speak up or it’ll create frustration and anger. Likewise, it’s important to retain one’s own ideas if necessary. In one project, I’d been working together with my partner so closely that at one point I wrote her previously articulated ideas as ours. She felt comfortable enough to mention it, and we solved her concerns easily with a simple attribution. Collaborating doesn’t mean all ideas are up for grabs, nor does it mean one gives up all sense of style and diction. It does mean, however, that adjustments may have to be made on all sides.
• Be Timely — That’s the biggest one for me, and my one major requirement at this point in any collaboration. I have to work with academic time and many academics’ lackadaisical relationship to deadlines on too many fronts to want to put up with it in personal projects. For me, quick response time and reasonable turnaround are key to any working collaboration. What constitutes timely can differ from person to person and project to project, but it needs to be clear to everyone participating what is expected and what they need to do.

I’ve been extremely lucky to have had amazing collaborators, with work ethics similar to mine and the ability to share ideas and words. A good collaboration makes you forget who came up with what idea and who wrote (and revised) what sentence and paragraph. A good collaboration allows you both to look back proudly on your essay and know that the whole is better than the sum of its parts. A good collaboration, in the end, is one where you’re still friends after the essay is published.

Both characters have left New Orleans (in Delmond’s case, his hometown; in Janette’s, the city where she built–and lost–her own restaurant) for New York and are deeply ambivalent about New Orleans and their relationship to it. Whereas the first season played out these competing emotions between and among New Orleaneans, the introduction of outside points of view indicates a lack of understanding and overall ignorance as well as deeply seated prejudices now serving the dismissal of the city. Both scenes linguistically demarcate outsider status when the interlocutors pronounce the city [ˈnuː ɔrˈliːnz] rather than [nuː ˈɔrliənz] or [nuː ˈɔrlənz] as would be expected and more correct. Janette, in fact, offhandedly corrects the other sous chef.

Delmond has represented the New Orleans expatriate throughout the first season already. He goes where the jobs are and at times seems conflictedly ashamed and dismissive of his roots. In one of the early recording sessions in Season 1, we see him with other New Orleans players play New Orleans music for New Orleans citizens, yet the recording takes place in New York. In fact, the issue of how to mainstream market authentic New Orleans music in order to help the very citizens whose culture gets appropriated is not just the story of the benefit recording but that of jazz itself.

And yet it is too easy as a viewer to vilify Delmond. Beyond the local who leaves and sells out, Delmond is also representative of a musical artist who experimentally rejuvenates and thereby expands traditional jazz. Rather than revisiting an idealized past that never existed, this artist engages with a living and changing tradition, embracing contemporary jazz forms that are merging and changing and defying the static sense of an original and authentic music. In a way then Delmond is both more and less commodified: going where the money is, he also rejects the static repetition of what popular culture has defined as authentic New Orleans. So when he gets praised for having overcome New Orleans jazz, for forging his own way in contrast to the sellouts who play the same old tunes for ignorant tourists, he jumps to New Orleans’ defense. Telling his girl friend that “I get to say that. They don’t.” indicates both an identity position that allows him to criticize a place that remains his home but also suggests that he is aware that their easy dismissal is not the same as his complicated love/hate for the musical traditions that brought him to where he is now.

Likewise, Janette’s scene speaks to outside representation and its potentially harmful effects. The review not only trashes current cuisine in New Orleans but takes a cheap shot at its reputation in general: “I’m not certain the cuisine was ever as good as its reputation in part because the people who consumed, evaluated, and admired it likely weren’t sober enough at the time of ingestion to know what they were eating.” In response, Janette defends the food but also connects it to Katrina and its aftermath. Chefs are not just cooks–in her story, they become heroes. But that is clearly not something reviewers like Richman can understand or appreciate. Janette, who left the city and has given up on it for herself nevertheless won’t let others malign the city or its food.

These moments speak most strongly about the role the general perception and national coverage have played in regard to New Orleans and its slow recovery. Both Delmond and Janette struggle to negotiate their own conflicted emotions while nevertheless defending the city and its citizens to the last. And in the middle of the slow recovery that Season 2 sketches out, the opponents are not only the outsiders such as predatory Nelson Hidalgo, who won’t let a disaster go to waste, but also the somewhat condescending, ignorant, and uncaring outsiders who don’t get the city–and don’t want to.

The problem of having these conversations within the confines of SCMS and its surrounding social networking tools is that we’re already dealing with a pre- and self-selected group. Said differently, if SCMS hadn’t been held driving distance from where I live, I would not have been part of that conversation nor would I have had access to the members-only section in which part of these discussions were held. The only reason I can speak up now is that I am a unicorn, the mythical creature of the scholar who researches and presents on their own dime for the love of it. It’s an expensive and depressing endeavor and it clearly has no place in an academic organization: my name tag had the university affiliation where I am an adjunct rather than the independent scholar as which I self-define and how I was thankfully noted in the program. Not a big deal, except when you supposedly represent a school who can’t give you even a table, let alone a shared office, to call yours and that rewards your 2/2 load with a yearly four-digit income.

There are many reasons I ended up being a scholar but not an academic, and many of them are my own choices and decisions. So I may indeed not be the best person to question the ideals of meritocracy and the hopeful and encouraging advice seen various places, but who else can speak as and for the many who didn’t make it. And maybe every one of us made choices like I did, family and locality and external circumstances affecting our mobility. Or maybe every one of us really just wasn’t good enough. It’s easy to believe that, both when you made it and when you hope to make it.

I know it must be a real comfort to grad students to be assured by faculty that it gets better. And in many cases it does. I just want to remind everyone that this resounding positive chorus is so unanimous because everyone for whom it didn’t get better, everyone who didn’t get that job, everyone who left or makes ends meet with outrageous class loads, all of those are by definition not part of this conversation any longer. Academia often becomes an echo chamber where the only voices heard are those that already are privileged.

Of course, I am well aware that I’m privileged in my own way. I can publish or not, don’t need to worry about researching the right topics or where to publish, and I can write rants like this one without fear of repercussion. Unlike grad students and junior faculty, I have privileges only shared by senior faculty in that my worthiness isn’t measured in cv lines. That’s the beauty of being a unicorn. The costs, however, both emotional and financial, tend to be too extreme for many to bear, especially when it means repeatedly facing an established community that often prefers to not acknowledge the realities we represent. It does get better indeed! Just not for everyone.

One aspect that tends to be translated is geographic place, even though the original places are overdetermined with cultural resonances–none of these shows and characters can simply be placed in another setting and still retain their central dynamics. I hope, for example, that Shameless moves into its own story lines quickly, because class functions so fundamentally differently in the two nations that I can’t see the characters, their stories, situations, and attitudes translate properly. The cultural associations of places are also worth examining: how does Manchester translate into Chicago in Shameless, but into Pittsburgh in Queer as Folk? And why is Slough best represented by Scranton in The Office?

Place, however, is intimately connected to time as a cultural framework, and it is time that I would like to focus on. Rosenberg bemoans Being Human‘s remake as coming too soon when she claims that “the remake will be forever haunted by the original, simply because they are airing so close together.” In the following I want to look at one of the more successful remakes, Queer as Folk, in order to examine how and why it managed to work in its American setting. While the two Queer as Folk versions were close together in era, I’d suggest that the temporal situatedness of both shows excuse the remake from that particular reproach. Stuart Alan Jones’ life in Manchester 1999-2000 may be not unlike Brian Kinney’s life in Pittsburgh 2000-2005, but their environment, their friends, and the issues they face in terms of queer visibility and gay rights are very different. Or rather, the way the show creators choose to represent these issues illustrates different cultural responses.

I recently rewatched both shows, and what strikes me most about the US version is the way it simultaneously celebrates ahistoricity as a form of eternal youth through its central focus on gay dance club Babylon and the unchanging pulse of that particular aspect of gay life and its music, and a deep immersion into the debates specific to the early 2000s. Watching the show as it aired, I was immersed in those conversations as well; watching it nearly a decade later, it has clearly become a distinct historical moment. The contemporary issues that are addressed in the show range from gay bashing and police harassment to AIDS, STDs and cancer; to drug and sex addiction; to same-sex parenting, adoption, and marriage. In contrast, what struck me most when watching QAFUK was an ever-present focus on class, something that could have been included in the US version given the characters’ diverse backgrounds and incomes, but ultimately wasn’t.

In the case of the US version, it is the last issue, marriage, that resonates most strongly for me. When I think back to 2004, the two things most present in my memory are the same-sex marriage debates and the elections. In my experience, the two were not independent of one another, as in my deeply redneck of the woods, I saw many people hating the cultural liberalism they feared the Democrats would bring and reacting to that fear by committing us to four more years of Bush. Among my friends, the so-called gay marriage debate was omnipresent, both in practical terms as San Francisco issues the first legal marriage licenses spring of 2004, and theoretically as queer scholars debated the issue.

As I was watching same sex marriage debate unfold within the series, I couldn’t help but view Brian’s adamant opposition as a particular philosophical moment in time, possibly best represented by Michael Warner’s 1999 book The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. In it, Warner passionately opposed same-sex marriage, advocating an ethics modeled on queer life and approaches to sexuality, one that resists shame, values diversity, and is based fundamentally on respect and honesty. Brian Kinney’s speeches to his friends as they marry and move to suburbia could have been lifted directly from Warner.

The final episode of the US version of the show brings to a head these opposing dynamics within the gay rights movement, as the two main characters cancel their wedding–an event which clearly had gone against everything Brian believed in–and return to their alternative model of love and commitment. Claiming that they “don’t need rings or vows to prove that [they] love each other,” they refuse to sacrifice their dreams to adopt the ties of marriage. Whereas most of the show’s emotional arc focused on Brian slowly overcoming his inability to grow up, to commit, or to express his feelings, QAFUS refuses to let him prove this emotional maturity via marriage. In its stead, the show returns to its thread of timelessness embodied by the night club, ending with a club dance scene that could have occurred at any point during its five year run. In so doing, QAFUS tentatively explored Warner’s hypothesis; while narrative judgment is withheld from both Brian’s choices and those of his married best friends, the show offers viewers a temporally embedded yet simultaneously timeless moment.

Returning to the subject of failed adaptations–and those we might fear will fail–I suggest that we not only look at place but also time as a central category whose uniqueness impacts a show’s success, as well as the necessary factor of any successful remake stepping away from the original in order to engage a new audience.

When The Good Wife was announced last fall my first reaction was interest, as Julianna Margulies and Christine Baranski are both awesome, but that reaction quickly turned to apprehension. Infidelity is the one topic I really avoid in entertainment if I can help it, and I had no interest in seeing this play out. However, the power of word-of-mouth swayed me when a number of my friends–friends who tend to not have much of a fannish love intersection–raved about the show. I gave it a try, and I got hooked. Watching a season in the course of just a few days is always a heady experience, and one that differs from following a series as it airs, week by week. The compressed viewing can highlight weaknesses, but it can also allow longer story lines to gain impact for the viewer, benefitting from the accelerated narration.

Yet neither the larger story lines, such as the myth-arc of corrupt politicians and unjustly imprisoned husbands, nor the smaller, episodic court case narratives were what kept me watching. Rather, I found that the depth of the characters and their interactions had me riveted and wanting to see more. Bechdel test aside, it is nice to see three main female characters interact about everything other than their relationships to or with men. It is even nicer to see these women struggle and yet remain sympathetic and strong. I’m looking at Alicia Florrick and I feel myself identifying more than I have with many other characters who more closely resemble me and my life. It is the program’s demonstrated ability to show depth without needless melodrama and stereotyped caricature that I’ve fallen in love with.

By genre classification, The Good Wife is, disputably, a procedural. And what’s more, it isn’t even innovative as such. The audience is usually presented with one case per episode, and the good side tends to win: defendants are innocent and are vindicated in the nick of time. I’m not sure we have a more precise category for such procedurals cum drama (which seem to cluster in medical and legal settings), but it is the characterization in these shows as well as those in more traditional prime time soaps that I measure Alicia’s portrayal against. I don’t identify (or even much like) most of the characters on Grey’s Anatomy or Parenthood to use two shows I still watch as examples. The drama tends to be extreme, not in the actual issues–because clearly the imprisoned husband and large political scheming are dramatic indeed–but in the responses to those issues. The appeal for me is that the show succeeds in presenting mature adults with adult capabilities beyond their profession, and yet the women are not dominated by any single issue in their lives–neither motherhood nor work nor their sexuality.

The balance of work drama and home issues presents Alicia in different roles that do not defer to one another (mother, lover, wife, professional) but rather mutually influence and affect. This feels like my life: constant negotiation, juggling of different roles and responsibilities, the small concessions and compromises that are part and parcel of most adult lives. In my favorite line of the show, former boss Stern tells Alicia “I always thought the CIA could take lessons from the suburban housewife,” calling out the similar emotional demands of Alicia’s different roles. The show doesn’t shy away from the challenges Alicia faces in negotiating her adult life; this is more than I tend to expect to see on television, where story lines often trade in emotionally false dichotomies. “Issues got more complex. And I grew up,” Alicia explains to her brother; this is the moment where I feel that I am seeing a real person on the TV screen. People may up and run to Africa and break up relationships in airports (example), but most of us go to work and pick kids up from school and have fights and make up and continue on with our lives.

In Alicia, we are presented a woman who’s recovering from an immense emotional trauma and upheaval in her life, but whose response isn’t extreme. She isn’t divorcing her cheating jail-bound husband, but she refuses his demands in a way that make it clear he’s not used to refusal. In the subtle details we see her change and grow, rather than in big melodramatic gestures, and this is why I love the show. At one point, her husband and potential lover discuss a court case while Alicia prepares coffee for everyone in the kitchen. When she moves to present some cakes along with the coffee, she suddenly throws them back in the box, clearly redefining her role. Emotions may not be writ large in this drama, but the message comes through loud and clear nevertheless: this Good Wife is not simply a suburban mom who was publicly shamed by her husband’s infidelities. She is a host of other things at the same time, as are we all. Adult issues are complex indeed!