The upcoming season of Girls will provide much fodder for this blog. Lena Dunham has cast Donald Glover, a black comedian/hipster rapper, to play the part of her Republican boyfriend. From the Atlantic Wire:
So this is how Girls is going to deal with race. And politics. But mostly race. Tim Goodman’s review of the show in The Hollywood Reporter this morning explains that Community star Donald Glover plays “a handsome black Republican named Sandy” dating Lena Dunham’s protagonist.
Goodman notes that Sandy’s presence as Hannah’s [Lena Dunham] boyfriend at the beginning of the season is a random leap. He adds:
Now, some people surely will think that Dunham has listened to the legions of disgruntled viewers who thought the show was a) too white, b) too entitled and c) too niche and has thus addressed the issues at hand. I’m not sure she has (though I’m quite sure she needn’t bother).
What artistic integrity Dunham has. Do “real” artists cater to the immediate demands of a few snarksites? Remember, the criticism of the lily white Girls began among a handful of progressive blogs. Though Goodman tries to give Dunham the benefit of the doubt, it is painfully obvious that she has cast a token black character in order to appease viewers. So then we’re not getting the viewpoint of Dunham and her writers, we’re getting their viewpoint through the prism of political correctness – a theatre of the oppressed in premium cable format.
The Atlantic and Goodman are unsure of the significance of Sandy’s politics. What is clear is that Sandy is a token of the GOP, and Glover is a token of Girls. It remains to be seen if Dunham will connect those dots.
Turn here each Monday starting next week for a review of each episode. I assume The Lion of the Blogosphere (TAFKAHS) will be doing the same.
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Think seriously about whether this is worth doing. Lena Dunham and her show are far less interesting than the other material this blog covers so we won’t really benefit by your watching it regularly, and neither will you, since it’s tediously written and the hot one will never, ever, ever get naked.
The Glover-Dunham pairing is the most realistic interracial couple on scripted TV ever. Skinny average looking black guy with overweight white girl. Maybe they can have a scene shot at a Dennys. Glover gets quite a push from casting directors.
Republicans/conservatives are just so odd. They must be studied and lampooned into submission.
Half Sigma?
Yep, Half Sigma was doing weekly reviews of the show. I’m hoping he’ll continue doing so as the Lion of the Blogosphere.
@ Eric. I was almost wondering if his casting has something to do with nepotism / stage parenting, but apparently he’s not related to Danny Glover, so I can scratch that theory.
What is the meaning of “(TAFKAHS)” ?
I could find the answer on google.
The Artist Formerly Known as Half Sigma.
Sorry, obscure Prince reference.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=TAFKAP
This is a Jump the Shark moment. The reason being that people like this show for its realness and she just made the jump into Fantasyland. Female hipsters rarely know, much less date, black guys. And the Republican angle is contrived.
There was a show that did this years ago, “The Days and Night of Molly Dodd,” but the characters there were in a different cultural milieu than “Girls,” even though both take place in NYC.
“It remains to be seen if Dunham will connect those dots.”
I wonder if they’ll connect the dots between this and that campaign video she made about her gina tingles for Barack Obama. Maybe this is partially a joke about that. Or maybe she just has a thing for black guys in politics in general.
Didn’t “Sex and the City” do the same thing when people complained that they had zero black characters?
They immediately trotted out Blair Underwood (a high-profile sports Doctor) as the boyfriend of one of the female characters.
I’m not sure which is more rare – black male doctors or black male republicans.
i’ll have to look that one up. interesting similarity. i’ve luckily never seen an entire episode of SATC.
Yes, SaTC did add in Blair Underwood in a late season. Let’s add “Friends” and Aisha Taylor. Aisha Taylor is a very attractive woman, but they threw her into a Friends romantic storyline to make sur they had their diversity quotient filled before the PC police kneecapped them.
“I’m not sure which is more rare – black male doctors or black male republicans.”
I’ve got both in my immediate family; and it’s not really rare.
i didn’t know that Blair Underwood played Stanley Kowalski from “A Streetcar Named Desire”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7Qvab5oZPQ
nikcrit:
depends on how you define “rare”. less than 5% of blacks being republican sounds pretty rare.
but doctors of any race are rare, period, so any argument about the rareness of doctors is sort of abstract.
nikcrit,
Obsidian wrote a nice post about you.
“depends on how you define “rare”. less than 5% of blacks being republican sounds pretty rare”
yeah, i suppose it is rare; the black republican is my paternal grandmother, who’s in her 80s, and truth be told, she voted for Obama in ’08 ——- ya know, the novelty thing and all that. lol!
Obsidian wrote a nice post about you
thnx Lara, I’ll check it out when i get home.
Used to see Donald around when he was working the local sketch comedy scene here in NYC. He’s very smart, very talented and very funny and deserves to be working, even if it’s on a shitty show. I don’t think being a “token” on that show is keeping him up on nights–that’s how the industry is. Know another very funny, talented guy, who’s Iranian and had to settle for playing “terrorist of the week” on a zillion Law & Order spin-offs in the early 2000′s. That’s the industry.
So is this guy a token black in an all-white cast or a token Republican in an all-Democrat cast? And which of those tokenisms is more dispiriting?
I don’t think being a “token” on that show is keeping him up on nights–that’s how the industry is. Know another very funny, talented guy, who’s Iranian and had to settle for playing “terrorist of the week” on a zillion Law & Order spin-offs in the early 2000′s. That’s the industry.
If anybody is facing being underrepresented in Hollywood it’s straight, gentile whites (especially from flyover country) and not black males or Iranians.
Sure, Camlost, because the last time I checked the majority of the cast of most TV shows are all black guys, Iranian-Americans (Aryans to you, natch) and Chinese bull-dykes.
I sympathize with a lot of the political perspective on this blog, particularly how males are screwed in the marriage and divorce industry and by the State, but that last statement is just sheer B.S. It sounds as self-pitying and victim-mentality-delusional as anything the Left shits out their mouths on a daily basis.
Sounds amusing. There are some funny people writing for that show and they may be nimble enough to stay ahead of the Volunteer Thought Police.
I don’t know if it is or not, but you seem to be ignoring the percentage of the population. How many Iranians are there in the US?
The fact that you only understand “white supremacist” as the LIBERAL redefinition only evidences your deference to radical liberalism. You are not alone. All of the manosphere shows the exact same inexplicable deference.
So you’re saying that the HBD/racial-realist manosphere’s very charter is subordinate to ‘the enemy’s’ definiition of ‘white supremacy,’ and by that very fact, is therefore doomed for defeat?
What do you prefer? The pre-New World manifestation of the term, in which western man is one with God’s image and there’s nothing else to as much as consider or reckon with, as the western canon alone is evident proof and reification of that aesthetic ‘fact.’
Ok, I might be able to live with that —– but then what is the ‘other’s’ purpose? To embellish and more elablorately define the vainglory of ‘The West’ via contrast?
I mean, complete the rest of the dialectic. Please!