#Due south

[gjdraws]

Let's pretend the Rays are in the basement of an all girls school again okay

Bonus:

[pigtailedgirl]

#due south s1 my sweet angel

@variousqueerthings

I maintain that as crazy as Invitation To Romance is, it, and more importantly placing Heaven and Earth right after and lead in to the finale run was not just fun and games. Oh oh no. There be building themes.

There be Fraser getting bowled over by an aggressive woman and what the concept of chasing love means to him and big damn heroes and belief reaching that tip point and the whole what are you going to let in or reach out for.

Oh so many things coming together!!!

shows should have 22 episodes a season again where half of them are low stakes silly fun shit happening. this i believe with my whole heart

[systematic-and-somehow-tragic]

them! on the rooftop jungle gym

based on this promo photo:

[variousqueerthings]

happy ace day, and inspired by @aq2003 some favourite asexuals:

hon. mention: the entire oeuvre of middle-earth + 50 characters or so from star trek (star trek is so ace, there's a whole essay to be written about that). and every doctor from dw ofc, but decided to rep with 10, as they're misunderstood in that iteration. also sugar in some like it hot but i went for monroe's character in seven year itch who is doing The Most around this mediocre guy. someone save her

[dirtyzucchini]

I rewatched Seeing Is Believing for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture*, and I noticed something cool I hadn't spotted before!

I think most of us have noticed the fantastic background activity in the flashbacks from Lieutenant Welsh's point of view, where everyone looks like they're Officially In The Mob?

And today I noticed that both Inspector Thatcher and Ray each have their unique backgrounds as well!

For Thatcher, it's couples all the way back. Holding hands, walking with their arms around each other, you name it.

Ray's signature background took me a second to spot, because there's not much to go on at first:

Looks normal, doesn't it? That's because his first flashback is really short. In the second, longer one we get a lot more background activity, and I realized that all the extras are women!

I may have a thought or two on what this says about him, but I have to let them percolate a little.

Anyway, there you have it. This show really is the gift that keeps on giving.

[sammaggs]

3x01 Burning Down the House | Continuous

THIS IS ALL ONE SHOT!!!!!!!!!!! THIS IS ALL. ONE SHOT.

A nearly two-minute walk and talk in the precinct set with NO CUTS. For TWO MINUTES.

This is TWO FULL YEARS before The West Wing, which popularized the long hallway single shot walk and talk.

Genuinely hard to convey how difficult a shot like this is to choreograph with so many different moving pieces. As one continuous take this shot is WILD. It means everything—including the push in to Ray and Elaine, the pull back out to include Fraser stepping precisely back into frame, the ACTUAL LIVE DOG, the walk into the bullpen with all the extras cutting in front of camera, the gag with the ink—all of that is in ONE GO, NO FUCK UPS.

INCLUDING!! One of the best pieces of acting in the ENTIRE SERIES right here:

THE love at first sight moment. In the MIDDLE of all this.

My favourite thing about this is imagining Gordon Pinsent standing patiently in the bullpen waiting for his moment for the 45 times it took to get the first ninety seconds of this shot clean.

Oh I will never be done being obsessed with this show. The level of stagecraft involved here alone is insane. Paul Gross the man you are,

Happy 27th birthday today, Burning Down the House (Sept. 14, 1997)!! You are still iconic🇨🇦🍁

due South Long Shots [one] [two] [three] [four]

[blueniverse42]

A while ago, I found this pic, and then came across this on TV tropes:

Leslie Nielsen, who played Sgt. Buck Frobisher, was the son of a Mountie in real life. During his first appearance on the show, he took Paul Gross aside and told him that he was lacing his boots incorrectly and then proceeded to teach him the proper way for a Mountie to tie his shoes.

I find the whole quote extremely endearing (and also vividly Canadian).

P.S. If you want to see more Due South stuff, go check out the fest for the 30th anniversary! There's a lot to see! @ds30below

[thenightblogcometh]

ray matching fraser's unhinged energy

[jedusaur]

I know I'm 25 years late to the party but I'm finally watching Due South and this is the hardest I've laughed in MONTHS

[thepunkpanther]

"Does this conversation seem strangely familiar to you?" "Oddly, yes." @ds30below's 30 BELOW FEST: canon appreciation week DUE SOUTH x BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID

[otpin-arts]

Ray gets distracted by the brown uniform.

So far I only saw it once in S3. And me and some folks over on discord really appreciate the brown uniform so this popped into my mind.

[gayvecchio]

It recently occurred to me that one of my fave feel good/comfort movies, Big Eden, could be included as part of C6D because it stars Eric Schweig who was in the due South pilot.

Big Eden is a sweet film about a gay man who returns to his small hometown in Montana to take care of his ill grandfather, and pretty much the whole town then proceeds to play matchmaker between him and the local general store owner, Pike (Eric Schweig).

This film means a lot to me as Native/Indigenous representation is hard to come by, and queer Native/Indigenous rep even more so. I highly recommend it to any dS/C6D fans, and anyone in general, who wants to watch a lovely queer romance.

[systematic-and-somehow-tragic]

Heaven and Earth : a daring rescue

attempted a painterly style with this one, happy with how it came out!

[variousqueerthings]

meg and fraser are colleagues with benefits, except neither of them could say exactly what the benefits are. only that there are benefits.

[syrupmap]

You deserve a person who looks at you like Benton Fraser looks at Ray Kowalski

[sammaggs]

1x02 Diefenbaker’s Day Off // 2x08 One Good Man // 2x13 White Men Can’t Jump to Conclusions // 3x01 Burning Down the House | Normalized

due South does a main character re-casting better than any other show on TV, and they do it by playing with television's own accepted meta-narrative.

Recasting a character has a long tradition in television, creating a viewership that knows and understands the storytelling short form at play. As viewers, we realize that sometimes actors aren't available to reprise a role (or simply aren't interested in it anymore); but, for the sake of the story, sometimes the show needs that character to come back. So we lean hard into suspended disbelief and just go with it. After all, the characters in the show accept the parareality of it—why shouldn't we?

Of course, the most famous example of a character recast would be the Dick/Darren disaster on 1960s sitcom Bewitched, when Dick York was unceremoniously replaced by Dick Sargent in the role of Darrin Stephens. ("The Dick Wars" would have gone absolutely insane).

it was... not successful

But they weren't the only ones to do it. Aunt Viv from Fresh Prince, Becky from Roseanne, Daario Naharis from Game of Thrones, Greg Serrano from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (pain, agony)—recasting characters but maintaining the fiction is a storied tradition in TV. New actor, same character; totally normalized.

And shows continue to do it, even today, with a—uh—similar dedication to fucking it up doing it poorly.

why must we be punished like this

due South even engages in this trope itself in season 2, when hard-hitting investigative journalist Mackenzie King is recast and they don't even try to find an actress who looks similar. In 1x02 Diefenbaker's Day Off, she's played by brunette Madolyn Smith-Osborne; in 2x08 One Good Man, she's been replaced by blonde Maria Bello, and nobody talks about it.

yeah i'm absolutely the same person, obviously

Everyone diegetically (within the world of the show) is just like, oh yeah, that's hard-hitting investigative journalist Mackenzie King. Totally. Only non-diegetically (outside of the world of the show) does the viewer go "No, that's not the same person." Internally, the fiction proceeds as usual.

So what would happen if, say, Samantha Stephens turned to Dick Sargent and said "You're not Darrin," when everyone else in the show continued to treat him as though he was? Or if Jaskier told Geralt that he knows he's not actually Geralt, and everyone treated him like he was delusional?

Or if Fraser, even, had recognized Mackenzie King as someone entirely different, and everyone treated him like he had a hole in his bag of marbles because of it? Of course that's Mackenzie King; even her boss knows it. No, she's never been a brunette. What are you talking about?

And that's exactly what happens in Burning Down the House.

the rays vecchio

Diagetically, everyone else treats Callum Keith Rennie's character as though he is Ray Vecchio. "Oh, good, you found him," says Det. Huey. Elaine, Franchesca, literally everyone else both at the station and outside of it treat Callum Keith Rennie Ray Vecchio as though he is David Marciano Ray Vecchio. They're acting exactly as any other TV character would in the face of a recasting: as though absolutely nothing had happened.

Except for Fraser.

Fraser's specific brand of parareal Canadian plot magic means that he's immune to the recasting blindness; he's acting as an agent of the viewer, voicing our non-diegetic concerns. Fraser is (as he so often is) a character with one foot outside of the narrative. He's just always been like this and he doesn't know why.

oh this man is infuriating and hot, fuck. shit.

And for a character who already thinks he is likely insane (he sees the ghost of his dead father! He communicates with his deaf half-wolf! He is instantly committed to a mental institution upon voicing the actual true story of his life!), this is very extremely distressing. Fraser thinks he's actually lost it this time, because everyone else in due South is acting like a TV character, and Benton Fraser is acting like a viewer.

This is so brilliant on so many levels. They just fully lampshade the damn thing. It allows our protagonist to speak for disgruntled or confused viewers. It engages at a postmodern level with television as a medium with a storied history (and due South is incredibly postmodern; nearly every episode is or contains a reference to another piece of media). It's written from the perspective of someone who loves and is knowledgeable about TV tropes.

And it gives us an entirely new Ray while still maintaining respect and loyalty to the original, something no other straight (lol) recast could ever do.

Genuinely one of the most clever, witty, well-crafted hours of television ever made. I could write essays about so many different parts of it. And I guess I will!!!!!!

It’s Burning Down the House week in our dS Stacked Rewatch!