Yasssss Queen

Is your domestic political situation getting you down? Is it mirroring that of your average banana republic? Is your political discourse devolving into an ever-festering sewer of hyperventilating outrage and batshit insane conspiracy theories? Is someone trying to build a wall out of tacos and rage on your southern border? 

Well, never fear. ITV has installed teevee's Jenna Coleman (Dr. Who) as the queen of bloody England. Literally. She is now the queen and will henceforth be in charge. Stand aside and let Miss Thing run this bitch.

Sashay, shante

So, here's what happened. George III of England and Hanover (yes, that George III) had a fuckton of kids. A literal fuckton. What's the best way to ensure a smooth succession and have heirs to spare? Fuck like rabbits. 

There has been much speculation that Queen Charlotte's brandishing of her dairy products caused the royal squires to assemble posthaste to the sovereign quadrangle.

One would think with all of these offspring, keeping the Hanovers on the throne would be no biggie. Actually, not so much. It turns out that keeping your daughters locked in the palace, and not allowing them to marry isn't a good strategy toward procuring an heir. Neither is being unable/unwilling to stop your sons from having licentious (and public) affairs with every passing tart.  George III's sons who made it to adulthood, George (Prince Regent, then George IV); William (William IV); Edward, Duke of Kent; Ernest Augustus (Duke of Cumberland and King of Hanover); Prince Frederick, Duke of Albany and York; Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge; and Augustus, Duke of Sussex, all failed to produce legitimate offspring (or they entered into morganatic marriage, which by definition made their children ineligible to inherit). 

Well, that's not entirely true. George IV put aside his drinking, whoring, gambling, and skirt-chasing aside long enough to marry Caroline of Brunswick, whom he hated, but impregnated and then abandoned. Caroline gave birth to a daughter, Princess Charlotte of Wales. Thus securing the monarchy, George and his fellow brothers went back to drinking, whoring, and gambling. Accompanying these vices were good doses of immorality, wickedness, iniquity, villainy, lechery, and moral turpitude. Everything was going along swimmingly. Princess Charlotte was popular -- viewed by the British public and the press as a welcome antidote to her father's and uncles' debauchery.

Look at Miss Thing snagging King Leopold of Belgium.

AAAAAnnnd then Princess Charlotte died in childbirth. THUD. 

Princess Charlotte's tomb monument...I'm not saying you shouldn't blink, but...

FFS DON'T BLINK

Enter Clara. 

I mean Queen Victoria. 

The remaining male offspring of George III and Queen Charlotte (who were well into their 50s and 60s by the time of Princess Charlotte's death in 1817), rushed around to find a willing woman of childbearing age upon whom to beget a child. The first to the finish line (HA!) was Edward, Duke of Kent, who married Victoria, Princess of Leiningen, sister of Charlotte's widowed husband King Leopold. Princess Victoria of England was born in 1819. 

Having fulfilled his duty, the Duke of Kent dropped dead the following year.

Princess Victoria was left to be raised by her (by all accounts) controlling, parvenu mother, and her mother's advisor (some say LOVAH), John Conroy.

Side note: There is a conspiracy theory among some royal historians that the Duke of Kent was not actually Victoria's father. Rather, the conspiracy posits that John Conroy was her natural father. The line of reasoning comes from Victoria's introduction of the gene for hemophilia into the royal bloodline. There were no known hemophiliacs in the Hanover line until Victoria (the suspected carrier) passed the gene onto her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren (infamously, Tsarevich Aleksei of Russia). However, Conroy was't known to have been a hemophiliac, and hemophilia has been known to arise in children of older fathers.

So, given all of that unnecessary historical context, what should we make of Victoria, airing on PBS this month?

PRINCE ALBERT IS HOT AF. 

Hold onto your ovaries, ladies.

Seriously. I am not all into the serious, moody, brooding type (shut up, Clovis), but OMG. That floppy hair. That dickish, condescending attitude. 

Gloriana.

Get it, girl,  

Episode I: Homegirl Awakens 

Episode I begins at the time history takes note of Victoria -- upon the death of her uncle, Princess Victoria becomes queen at the age of 18. 

Victoria, however, shows her immaturity pretty much right off the bat. Screenwriter Daisy Goodwin has chosen to focus on the Flora Hastings affair, which really happened, and which did indeed mark a turning-point in Victoria's reign.

A side note about Daisy Goodwin. I was a little hesitant to watch this drama when I discovered that Daisy Goodwin wrote the screenplay. I have read one historical fiction novel by Goodwin, and I can't say that it was terrible, but it was THE SILLIEST book I have read in a long, long time. It was amazing. Go read it. I giggled through the whole thing.  

However, I was pleasantly surprised to see the level of detail and relative historical accuracy displayed in Goodwin's screenplay.  The miniseries is based on Goodwin's novel, also called Victoria. For this, Goodwin drew on her reading of Queen Victoria's diaries.

Goodwin  takes some...creative liberties with the relationship between Lord Melbourne and Queen Victoria. It is entirely possible that Victoria had feelings for Melbourne, because let's face it, she probably had a ton of daddy issues, but there's no extant evidence to suggest that Victoria was in the lovez with Melbourne, nor he with her. Their relationship certainly was very close, but Victoria tended to get close to her PMs, forming a close bond with Benjamin Disraeli later in life. It is all very juicy to watch, though. 

Rufus Sewell and Jenna Coleman are both very well cast in this. Coleman is especially noteworthy, convincingly playing an 18-year-old (she's 30).

Yo, dawg.

The action of the first episode is primarily centered around Victoria's struggle for independence from her mother and the presumptuous Conroy. Is he portrayal of Conroy and Victoria's mother entirely historically correct? Well, from what I have read about Conroy and the Duchess of Kent, it's not far off. In fact, the portrayal of the duchess is actually more flattering than some biographical accounts that I have read. Victoria was undoubtedly much more attached to her governess Lehzen than she was to her actual mother, and had more daughterly feelings toward her. Conroy is generally viewed as something of a villain, out to control Victoria, and, according to some accounts, to inveigle himself into the monarchy itself. In any case, the movie does a good job of setting up the conflict between Victoria and her mother and Conroy. 

Yo. 

Even those unfamiliar with the actual history behind all of this can get some satisfaction from how delightfully bitchy Victoria gets to be toward them.

However, Victoria's inexperience and immaturity are brought to the fore in the Flora Hastings affair. Basically, members of Victoria's court decided that her mother's lady-in-waiting, Lady Flora, was pregnant. In the movie, it is Victoria who accuses Lady Flora, but in actuality, it was Lehzen. Hastings had been visiting Dr. Clark because of pain and swelling in her abdomen, and I imagine after bleeding and sweating her, he decided she was pregnant, and not, you know, dying of fucking cancer. You have to remember this is 1839 and an unmarried pregnant woman at court was ESCANDELO!

Dang.

Lehzen passed her suspicions onto the queen and Lord Melbourne, and Queen Victoria wrote in her journals that she suspected Conroy was the father. So, the takeaway is the Flora Hastings affair did happen, only not exactly as it goes down in the movie. 

Of course, the only problem with the whole scenario was that Lady Flora wasn't preg. She agreed to be examined by royal physicians, and that is when they discovered the tumor. She died a few months later, but Victoria did reportedly visit her on her deathbed.

I gonna haunt dat bitch her dreamz yo.

The political intrigue following the affair wasn't quite as complex as it is in the series. Flora's father, Francis Rawdon-Hastings, was actually a Whig.

However, Flora's brother and Conroy stirred up some press hysteria, in an attempt to get Victoria to LEARN HER LESSON ALREADY and appoint Conroy to some kind of advisory position. 

Homegirl wasn't having it. As guilty as Victoria felt about the Hastings affair, she kept Conroy at a distance, and eventually finagled a way to have him leave court for good. 

Welp, that's all for Episode 1. Stay tuned for Episodes 2 and 3, brought to you by the letter Z. 

TV Sluts: Live! And in Person!

Clovis originally wrote the beginning of this post...and then had to leave town for work. *sad trombone* So I'm actually posting it (I'm = Maggie Cats) and writing the introduction to the introduction. Got it?

Oh, whatever. Just go with it.

Clovis:

Two things happened this week that are both rare and heavenly: Haley’s comet will make a pass-by to earth (no visuals, but there was a meteor shower!) and three of the TV Sluts managed to find ourselves in the same room at the same time. What did we do? Watch television, natch.

Damn, those are some good-looking tv bloggers. From left to right: Arsenic Pie, Maggie Cats, and Clovis.

Arsenic Pie, Maggie Cats and I all caught the first two episodes of Salem, WGN’s bloody and provocative new thriller set in Salem, Massachusetts during the infamous witch trials. How is it? Well, it ain’t your father’s Crucible, that’s for sure.

Salem covers the real history of the witch trials in only the broadest of strokes, something we should frankly expect from a show that takes one of the most poignant episodes of the real horrors of fear-mongering and suspicion in early American history and goes, “yeah, but sexy witches are totally more fun, right?”

Obviously the show places fast and loose with the facts, but fans of history and Arthur Miller will recognize some of the high points – In this incarnation, we see the events through the eyes of John Alden, a soldier who has recently returned to Salem after a long time as a POW in an Indian camp, to find Salem has become a hotbed of witchy activity. John Alden is not to be confused with John Proctor, the upstanding moralist in Arthur Miller’s play, but in real life is one of the contemporaries who wrote about the witch trials and thus how we know many details about that event. (Fun fact, he’s also my great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great-grandfather. True story.)

So who’s leading this sudden upsurge in witchery? Unbeknownst to everyone but us viewers, it is Mary Sibley, John’s former love who has married into wealth and power in his absence and apparently also developed a taste for witchcraft after having a magical abortion in the woods. Yes, you read that right – this show doesn’t just go there, it has a summer home there plus a timeshare with options on New Year’s. In the first two episodes alone we see Mary’s demon abortion, apparitions of an Old Hag attacking a teenage girl, a demon orgy in the woods that looked like something out of evil Burning Man, a frog that is repeatedly expelled and shoved back into a man’s body, and a broomstick appropriated to a use that is far from its traditional expectation.

Watching Salem is kind of like this.

In short, Salem is what American Horror Story: Coven should have been – utterly crazy, completely unafraid of gore and terror, and willing to go the extra mile to bring the squicky and the sexy into the same room with each other. I make no secret of how much I enjoy watching train wreck shows – for that reason alone, I’m going to keep up with this one. But what did the other TV Sluts think of it? Take it away, Ladies…


Arsenic Pie:

Will you all think less of me if I say that I liked Salem? I didn't like it in an "OMG this is so thought-provoking and riveting" way, but I liked it in more of an, "OMG. This is so awesomely ridiculous that I cannot look away" way.

Aside from the completely anachronistic "I call bullshit" line from our hero, John Alden, I was interested in how the show mixed fantasy with actual events. It's an interesting take to say, "No, there were legit witches in real actual Salem doing all kinds of bad in order to get rid of people they didn't like" instead of the intense Arthur Miller "Joe McCarthy is an asshole" theme. I think that we are more familiar with the latter, and with the teenage Abigail Williams as the primary accuser. I'm not actually sure which character in the show is supposed to correspond with which character in The Crucible and which character in The Crucible corresponds to real life. I will defer to Clovis on that point.

I am more familiar with the play (English major what) than I am with the actual people in Salem. The Crucible was Arthur Miller's own particular brand of fan fiction, and he took people from the real trials and put them in his play but I'm not really sure how that translates to historical fact. Giles Corey, a character on Salem, appears in the Miller play, as does Brigid Bishop, who I believe at least gets a mention. In the play, Mercy Lewis is just one of the little nasty Salem accuser girls and not the one who is "bewitched" and it's Betty Parris who becomes bewitched. So, I did like that they changed things around. The play does rather beat one over the head with its morality stick whereas the show is morally ambiguous. Also, there are a lot of gross-out moments on Salem, which, sadly, there is a deplorable lack of in The Crucible.

ANYWAY, Salem also diverges from The Crucible in that its protagonist and primary accuser is a grown-up LADY, Mary (forgot her last name). In The Crucible, obviously it is the teen bitch-whore Abigail Williams. Mary, the only inexplicably English and posh colonist in Salem, was a member of the poorz and a SCARLET WOMAN because she was having RELATIONS with John Alden and she became pregnant. Enter her BFF Tituba (who is never hot in The Crucible, but she's gotten a teevee makeover), who is a witch and she convinces Mary to give up her baby to the forest in exchange for what turns out to be social elevation. Mary ends up married to some really old man, but no fear. She totally keeps him under wraps BY SHOVING A MAGICAL FROG DOWN HIS THROAT to keep him quiet. Mary's entire agenda is to punish the swells of Salem for keeping her down all those years, and I am pretty sure she's hoping that the witchy folk can take over Salem and build like Hogwarts or something. Anyway, she's a horrible human being.

I think the most interesting character thus far is Anne Hale, who is the daughter of Reverend Hale. She is both UPPITY and FORWARD, and is not content to work on her sampler. Oh, no. Girl wants to hit on John Alden and draw photos in the graveyard. Shocking. I think there's a lot of growth potential for her character, but her arc is a bit predictable at this stage. Cotton Mather, who leads the witchcraft investigation (legit -- how was that ever a thing?), is kind of an idiot and a hypocrite at this point, albeit hot, so I would like to see some more development with his character. As for John Alden -- I don't know. He just kind of reminds me of Russell Crowe.

Survey says: I think I will keep up with it unless it completely jumps the rails. Well, I think it already sort of went off the rails, so if it goes off further into Dracula land, I may give up on it. It kind of reminds me of Sleepy Hollow in the sense that it's mixing historical events with fantasy while being aware that the show is kind of silly.


Maggie Cats:

You guys. This show is crazy. And by that I mean crazy awesome. But seriously, it's also just crazy. The first two episodes alone fulfilled my "WTF" quota for probably the next 6 months. It's like somebody went into my brain and plucked out all the things I wished a show would be but was too embarrassed to admit, even to myself.

I went into Salem with no prior knowledge; I can't remember if we ever read The Crucible in my high school (we must have, right?) and I don't think I ever saw the movie with Winona. The actual Salem witch trials never really featured heavily in my interests, despite the fact that I was a History major with a semi-focus on early America. So I can't speak to the, ahem, historical accuracy of the events...though I am pretty certain that the Salem witches weren't real witches, so from my perspective the show can basically dowhatever the hell it wants. AND I LOVE IT.

Clovis described it as a train wreck, but I tend to disagree. Unlike American Horror Story, which basically throws every ridiculous plot device at the screen and sees if anything sticks, Salem unfolds in such a way that I think the writers know exactly what they are doing. The plot may be insane, but it doesn't feel random. Sure there's buckets of blood, sex, demons, and all the other good stuff, but it none of it feels out of place in the world the writers have created. And yet, it still manages to shock and surprise.

In short, Salem is not for the faint of heart. But if you enjoy the macabre, the surreal, and adult themes (i.e. sexy times!), and aren't squeamish, I think Salem might be the show for you. You know us TV Sluts will be watching.

Our impression of the banner at the top of the blog. 

Salem airs on WGN America (check local listings for stations) on Sundays at 10:00pm EST.

I'm holding out for a Hero.

This past week, TNT debuted a new reality series about trying to find a true hero. I would think there are better ways to find a hero other than a cable channel reality competition, but hey, what do I know. And if you're anything like me, you now have Bonnie Tyler's "I Need a Hero" or the theme to Greatest American Hero running in your head on a constant loop. You're welcome.

Hello, THIS is an American Hero. Why are we even still talking about this?

The concept of TNT's The Hero is pretty simple, though the execution is anything but. From the website:

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson brings to TNT an epic competition testing the strength, courage, and integrity of a diverse group of nine individuals. Each week, the contestants will be tested, physically, mentally, and morally, as they try to prove that they truly deserve the title of "The Hero" and the life-changing grand prize that goes with it. With temptations around every corner, America watches to see what the contestants are willing to overcome, undergo, and sacrifice on behalf of themselves and others. In the end, it's America's call on who will be "The Hero."

Yes, it's hosted by The Rock. Apparently, an ex-pro wrestler turned adventure movie "actor" is an expert on heroism. Because this is America.

Oh, whatever.

If every episode is going to follow the same format as the premiere, there are three challenges presented to the contestants. First, a team challenge, where they compete together to achieve a common goal and receive a code. Then a smaller team (selected by the larger team) works to overcome a second challenge--to succeed they must overcome a physical test and enter the code in a computer within the time allowed. THEN, the entire group must select one person from the smaller team to compete in a solo challenge. If the individual succeeds in the challenge, $50,000 is added to the overall pot that the winner gets at the end of the show. But the individual challenge winner also has the option to take the money for themselves, and the rest of the contestants will be told he/she didn't succeed in the challenge and be none the wiser.

Yeah, it's kind of complicated, but I was entertained and I like the twist that it's not just physical challenges--there are some ethical challenges involved as well. For the most part, the contestants seem slightly more tolerable than your average reality show competitors--and they are at least physically prepared. There's a fitness instructor, a trauma surgeon, a construction worker, a wrestler (of course)....and an NFL cheerleader (of course again). There are already some personality clashes and douchebaggery, but hey, it's reality tv. You gotta give the people what they want, and in-fighting is part of the deal. Oh, and the way the competitors idolize The Rock is laughable. It's not like he's Tyra Banks, after all.

I'll definitely stick with The Hero for a few more episodes, and it's fun, inoffensive summer viewing. I don't believe for one second that the winner will be a hero or deserving of the title in any manner, but hyperbole is also part of the deal.

The Hero airs Thursday nights at 8pm on TNT. You can watch the entire first episode on their website.

Man, if they had gotten THIS guy to host the show, it would be so much more badass. In other news, who wants to watch this movie with me sometime?