#Real Colin Robinson coded
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"You don't smile a lot, it gets ya through the day!" - Pam from sales to me
#My face#Sorry Pamela its more like I have the senior shop tech now as my boss#And he's a dickhead mechanic type that doesnt like me being on my computer#Ie ya know to do my job functions#And berates me a lot#And Im thinking now would working for Kroger again really be so bad?#And there's always inventory issues#And these people do not pay me enough#But you are so right Pamela#Smilllleeee through the shit#Sigh#Shes nice and well meaning#But beyond... well me... I have never seen someone so dry and uncomfortable to talk to#Real Colin Robinson coded#Office life ya know#I really... dont smile a lot do I
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It's absolutely bonkers that they just randomly decide in the middle of the season to drop that Colin Robinson is NOT Colin Robinson's real name, TELL US his real name, drop that he dated DAVY CROCKETT, whom I had to look up because I'm not American and then that he has a bowie knife that was given to him BY JIM BOWIE
JUST LIKE THAT
#tbf i was mostly blown off by the real name thing and the ex-boyfriend thing#not that I thought Colin Robinson was straight I'm kinda sad hes not more aroace-coded is all#wwdits#wwdits spoilers#what we do in the shadows#colin robinson#wwdits colin robinson#wwdits season 5 spoilers#wwdits season 5
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I’m still thinking about my accent lol like when I’m like visiting family or talking on the phone it’s all-out Colin Robinson with that northern cities shift going on (especially for like initial a in words like “apple” or “accent” and that o in things like “mom” like it p much sounds like I’m just saying “mam”)
but in the Real World to compensate I’ve unconsciously gone way more Stereotypical Canadian with the cot/caught merger and I say obnoxious shit like “oatside” and also a lot of eh lol
my theory for that is p interesting- those were the two accents of where I grew up, like you had one or the other and I just naturally grew up able to code switch. Wild.
#idk linguistics interest me and I overanalyze language a ton#like I’m so annoying to watch movies with for example I’m always judging the quality of the actors accents lol#text#tian talks
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Guía de series: Estrenos y regresos de octubre 2021
Una considerable cantidad de series se nos presentarán en la tele próximamente. Como siempre, habrá que ver si cantidad es lo mismo que calidad.
¡Feliz octubre!
Leyenda:
Verde: series nuevas.
Negro: regresos de otras series.
Naranja: miniseries o series documentales.
Amarillo: tv movies, documentales, especiales o pilotos.
Morado: season finales.
Púrpura: midseason finales.
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Calendario de series
1 de octubre:
SWAT (5T), Magnum PI (4T) y Blue Bloods (12T) en CBS
The Many Saints of Newark en HBO Max
Maid (1T completa), The Guilty, Forever Rich y Diana: The Musical en Netflix
3 de octubre:
Ridley Road (1T completa) en BBC One
The Walking Dead: World Beyond (2T y última) en AMC
4 de octubre: On My Block (4T y última) en Netflix
5 de octubre: Escape the Undertaker y Dave Chapelle: The Closer en Netflix
6 de octubre:
CSI: Vegas (1T) en CBS
Brassic (3T) en Sky Max
La venganza de las Juanas (1T completa) y There's Someone Inside Your House en Netflix
7 de octubre:
Young Sheldon (5T), United States of Al (2T), Ghosts (1T) y Bull (6T) en CBS
One of Us Is Lying (1T) en Peacock
The Billion Dollar Code en Netflix
The Outpost (series finale) en The CW
8 de octubre:
Nancy Drew (3T) en The CW
Leverage: Redemption (1bT) en IMDb TV
Pretty Smart (1T completa), Family Business (3T y última completa), Mio fratello mia sorella y Grudge en Netflix
Acapulco (1T) en Apple TV+
Madame X en Paramount+
Justin Bieber: Our World en Prime Video
10 de octubre: The Equalizer (2T) y SEAL Team (5T) en CBS
11 de octubre:
The Baby-Sitters Club (2T completa) en Netflix
We're Here (2T) en HBO
The L Word: Generation Q (2T finale) en Showtime
12 de octubre:
Chucky (1T) en Syfy
The Oval (3T) en BET
13 de octubre:
Dopesick (1T) en Hulu
The Sinner (4T) en USA Network
Legends of Tomorrow��(7T) y Batwoman (3T) en The CW
Sistas (3bT) y Twenties (2T) en BET
Just Beyond (1T) en Disney+
Hiacynt y Distancia de rescate en Netflix
14 de octubre:
B Positive (2T) en CBS
Guilty Party (1T) en Paramount+
Legacies (4T) en The CW
Aquaman: King of Atlantis (1T) en HBO Max
Another Life (2T completa) en Netflix
15 de octubre:
You (3T completa), I onde dager y De slag om de Schelde en Netflix
I Know What You Did Last Summer (1T) en Prime Video
Day of the Dead (1T) en Syfy
Cobra (2T) en Sky Max
Puppy Place (1T) en Apple TV+
Halloween Kills en Peacock
16 de octubre: Misfit: The Series (1T completa) en Netflix
17 de octubre:
Succession (3T) en HBO
Fear The Walking Dead (7T) en AMC
Hightown (2T) en Starz
19 de octubre:
Queens (1T) en ABC
Runt en Apple TV+
20 de octubre: Found, Night Teeth y Stuck Together en Netflix
21 de octubre:
The Blacklist (9T) en NBC
The Girl in the Woods (1T) en Peacock
Sex, Love & Goop en Netflix
One of Us Is Lying (1T finale) en Peacock
22 de octubre:
Invasion (1T) en Apple TV+
Inside Job (1T completa), Locke & Key (2T completa) y Maya and the Three (1T completa) en Netflix
Dune en HBO Max
24 de octubre: Insecure (5T y última) y Curb Your Enthusiasm (11T) en HBO
25 de octubre: All American (4T) y 4400 (1T) en The CW
26 de octubre:
Todo lo otro (1T) y Dolores en HBO Max
The Last O.G. (4T) en TBS
27 de octubre: Sintonía (2T completa), Hypnotic y W lesie dzis nie zasnie nikt 2 en Netflix
28 de octubre:
Luis Miguel: La serie (3T y última completa) en Netflix
Walker (2T) en The CW
Love Life (2T) en HBO Max
29 de octubre:
Colin in Black & White (1T completa), El tiempo que te doy (1T completa) y Army of Thieves en Netflix
Swagger (1T) en Apple TV+
Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin en Paramount+
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Estrenos de series
Maid (Netflix)
Para lidiar con la pobreza y la falta de vivienda, una madre soltera (Margaret Qualley; The Leftovers, Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood) comienza a trabajar como criada en casa de una exitosa abogada (Anika Noni Rose; Roots, Assassination Nation). Con Nick Robinson (Love, Simon; A Teacher), Andie MacDowell (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Groundhod Day), Billy Burke (Revolution, Twilight), Tracy Vilar (House, M.D., Partners), Xavi de Guzmán (The 100, Take Two), BJ Harrison (Chilling Advenures of Sabrina, Motherland: Fort Salem) y Rylea Nevaeh Whittet.
Basada en las memorias de Stephanie Land (2019). Escrita por Molly Smith Metzler (Shameless, Orange Is the New Black). Dirigen John Wells (Shameless, Animal Kingdom), Helen Shaver (Vikings, Orphan Black) o Nzingha Stewart (Little Fires Everywhere, Black Monday). Diez episodios.
Estreno: 1 de octubre
Estreno en España: 1 de octubre en Netflix España
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Ridley Road (BBC One)
Vivien (Agnes O'Casey) es una joven judía que, en 1962, abandona su vida cómoda en Manchester e, inspirada por el Grupo 62, una coalición militante antifascista que combate el neofascismo en Reino Unido después de la guerra, se infiltra en el NSM, un movimiento neonazi que está creciendo en Londres, tras la desaparición de su novio. Completan el reparto Rory Kinnear (Years and Years, Penny Dreadful), Tracy-Ann Oberman (It's a Sin, After Life), Eddie Marsan (Ray Donovan, Gangs of New York), Tamzin Outhwaite (New Tricks, EastEnders), Samantha Spiro (Sex Education, Me Before You), Rita Tushingham (In the Flesh), Danny Hatchard (Our Girl, EastEnders), Tom Varey (Ackley Bridge, No Offence), Julia Krynke (The A Word, Line of Duty), Gabriel Akuwudike (1917, Hanna), Danny Sykes (Bulletproof) y Hannah Traylen (Harlots, Unforgotten).
Basada en la novela de Jo Bloom (2014), escrita y producida por Sarah Solemani (Barry) y dirigida por Lisa Mulcahy (Years and Years, Blood). Cuatro episodios.
Estreno: 3 de octubre
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CSI: Vegas (CBS)
William Petersen (Grissom), Jorja Fox (Sara), Wallace Langham (Hodges) y Paul Guilfoyle (Brass) vuelven a esta secuela de CSI (2000-2015) a la que se unen Matt Lauria (Friday Night Lights, Kingdom), Paula Newsome (Chicago Med, Barry), Mel Rodriguez (The Last Man on Earth), Mandeep Dhillon (After Life, Bulletproof), Jamie McShane (Bloodline, SEAL Team), Robert Curtis Brown (The Handmaid's Tale, Station 19), David Paladino (You), Sean Alexander James (The Morning Show) o Johnny Rey Diaz (Pam & Tommy).
Escrita por Jason Tracey (Elementary, Burn Notice). Diez episodios.
Estreno: 6 de octubre
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La venganza de las Juanas (Netflix)
Cinco mujeres con la misma marca de nacimiento, y todas llamadas Juana, deciden investigar sobre su pasado y descubren una red de mentiras montada por un poderoso político (Carlos Ponce; Devious Maids, Julie and the Phantoms). Protagonizada por Juanita Arias (El señor de los cielos, Como tú no hay dos), Sofía Engberg, Oka Giner (Señora Acero, Gossip Girl: Acapulco), Renata Notni (Mi adorable maldición, Sueño de amor) y Zuria Vega (Mi marido tiene familia, Que te perdone Dios). Completan el reparto Carlos Athié (Mi adorable maldición, Que te perdone Dios), Federico Espejo (La casa de las flores, La jefa del campeón) y Pablo Astiazarán (Ingobernable, Club de Cuervos).
Adaptación mexicana de la telenovela colombiana Las Juanas (1997-1998). Escrita por Jimena Romero (Más sabe el diablo, ¿Quién eres tú?). Dieciocho episodios.
Estreno: 6 de octubre
Estreno en España: 6 de octubre en Netflix España
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Ghosts (CBS)
Comedia monocámara adaptación de la serie británica en la que una pareja hereda una casa de campo destartalada y llena de fantasmas. Protagonizada por Rose McIver (iZombie, Woke), Utkarsh Ambudkar (The Mindy Project, Brockmire), Brandon Scott Jones (The Good Place, The Other Two), Rebecca Wisocky (Devious Maids, For All Mankind), Danielle Pinnock (Young Sheldon, Get Shorty), Richie Moriarty (The Tick), Asher Grodman, Sheila Carrasco (Jane the Virgin) y Román Zaragoza (Austin & Ally).
Escrita y producida por Joe Port y Joe Wiseman, productores de Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist o New Girl.
Estreno: 7 de octubre
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One of Us Is Lying (Peacock)
Cinco estudiantes de instituto son castigados y enviados a la sala de detención, de la que solamente cuatro salen vivos. Todos son sospechosos y todos tienen algo que ocultar. Protagonizada por Marianly Tejada (The Purge), Cooper van Grootel, Annalisa Cochrane (Cobra Kai, Heathers), Chibuikem Uche, Barrett Carnahan (Cobra Kai, Alexa & Katie), Jessica McLeod (You Me Her), Melissa Collazo (Swamp Thing), Mark McKenna (Wayne, Sing Street), Martin Bobb-Semple (Pandora, Free Rein), Karim Diané (StartUp), Sara Thompson (The 100, Burden of Truth), George Ferrier (Dirty Laundry), Miles J. Harvey (American Vandal), Zenia Marshall (Date My Dad), Hugo Ateo (Siren, The Terror) y Alimi Ballard (Queen of the South, CSI).
Basada en la novela de Karen M. McManus (2017). Escrita y producida por Darío Madrona (Élite, Los protegidos) y Erica Saleh (Evil, Instinct). Dirige y produce el piloto Jennifer Morrison (Euphoria). Ocho episodios.
Estreno: 7 de octubre
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The Billion Dollar Code (Netflix)
En los años 90, dos pioneros de la informática alemanes fueron a juicio con una demanda multimillonaria para luchar por sus derechos como inventores del algoritmo de Google Earth. La historia real de la dura batalla de dos grandes amigos contra un oponente aparentemente invencible cuenta con el mundo del hackeo en Berlín y el idealista mundo de los inicios de Silicon Valley como telón de fondo. Con Mark Waschke (Dark, Tatort), Mišel Matičević (Babylon Berlin, Tatort), Leonard Scheicher (Das Boot, Das schweigende Klassenzimmer), Marius Ahrendt, Lavinia Wilson (Deutschland 86, Deutschland 89) y Seumas Sargent (Spy City).
Creada y producida por Oliver Ziegenbalg y Robert Thalheim, escrita por Ziegenbalg y dirigida por Thalheim.
Estreno: 7 de octubre
Estreno: 7 de octubre en Netflix España
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Pretty Smart (Netflix)
Comedia multicámara centrada en Chelsea (Emily Osment; Young & Hungry, Hannah Montana), una altanera e ingeniosa intelectual sin habilidades sociales para vivir en el mundo real que, cuando su novio la deja inesperadamente, se ve obligada a vivir con su despreocupada y jovial hermana Claire (Olivia Macklin; The Young Pope, Filthy Rich) y sus amigos: Grant (Gregg Sulkin; Runaways, Wizards of Waverly Place), un dulce y romántico entrenador personal; Solana (Cinthya Carmona; Greenhouse Academy, East Los High), una antigua abogada que ahora se dedica a la sanación; y Jayden (Michael Hsu Rosen; Tiny Pretty Things, Jessica Jones), un influencer de las redes sociales.
Creada, escrita y producida por Jack Dolgen (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Diary of a Future President) y Doug Mand (How I Met Your Mother, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend). Producida por Kourtney Kang (How I Met Your Mother, Fresh Off the Boat) y dirigida por Pamela Fryman (How I Met Your Mother, Frasier). Diez episodios.
Estreno: 8 de octubre
Estreno en España: 8 de octubre en Netflix España
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Acapulco (Apple TV+)
Comedia bilingüe centrada en Máximo (Enrique Arrizon; Las hijas de Abril, La jefa del campeón), un joven mexicano que en 1984 consiguió el que creía que sería el trabajo de sus sueños en un resort pero que resultó ser un puesto mucho más complicado que le haría cuestionarse su moral y sus creencias. Eugenio Derbez (No se aceptan devoluciones, Dora and the Lost City of Gold) producirá y narrará la serie interpretando a la versión actual del joven. Completan el reparto Damián Alcázar (Narcos, Señora Acero), Camilla Pérez (A Teacher, Gotham), Raphael Alejandro (Once Upon a Time, Bunk'd), Jessica Collins (The Young and the Restless, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia), Chord Overstreet (Glee), Vanessa Bauche (Luis Miguel: La Serie, Rosario Tijeras), Rafael Cebrián (Las aventuras del capitán Alatriste, Narcos), Fernando Carsa, Regina Reynoso (La rosa de Guadalupe), Regina Orozco (La casa de las flores, Mi marido tiene familia) y Carlos Corona (El señor de los cielos, Doña Flor y sus dos maridos).
Inspirada en la película How to Be a Latin Lover (2017). Creada por Austin Winsberg (Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist, Gossip Girl), Eduardo Cisneros (No se aceptan devoluciones) y Jason Shuman (Anger Management) y escrita por Winsberg y Chris Harris (How I Met Your Mother). Diez episodios.
Estreno: 8 de octubre
Estreno en España: 8 de octubre en Apple TV+ España
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Chucky (Syfy)
Serie continuación de la saga cinematográfica protagonizada por Chucky (Brad Dourif) en la que Jake (Zackary Arthur; Transparent, Kidding), un adolescente gay solitario que sufre acoso y busca su sitio tras la muerte de su madre, encuentra al muñeco diabólico en una venta de garaje. Alex Vincent, Christine Elise McCarthy y Jennifer Tilly volverán a interpretar a Andy Barclay, Kyle Simpson y Tiffany Valentine. Completan el cast Devon Sawa (Final Destination, Casper), Teo Briones (Ratched, Pretty Little Liars), Alyvia Ayn Lind (Daybreak, Masters of Sex), Fiona Dourif (True Blood, The Blacklist), Barbara Alyn Woods (One Tree Hill; Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: The TV Show), Björgvin Arnarson (The Seventh Day) y Lexa Doig (Continuum, Arrow).
Creada y escrita por Don Mancini (Child's Play, Bride of Chucky), que también dirigirá el primer episodio. Ocho episodios.
Estreno: 12 de octubre
Estreno en España: Enero en Syfy España
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Dopesick (Hulu)
Limited series que explorará el inicio de la crisis del opio en Estados Unidos y cómo afectó a varias familias, cuyas historias se cruzaron, desde el lanzamiento al mercado del fármaco OxyContin a finales de los 90 con una promoción que obviaba los altos índices de adicción que generaba. Protagonizada por Michael Keaton (Birdman, Beetlejuice), Peter Sarsgaard (The Killing, The Slap), Kaitlyn Dever (Last Man Standing, Unbelievable), Rosario Dawson (Luke Cage, Jane the Virgin), Will Poulter (The Maze Runner, Midsommar), Michael Stuhlbarg (Boardwalk Empire, Call Me by Your Name), Jaime Ray Newman (Veronica Mars, Bates Motel), Will Chase (Nashville, Smash), John Hoogenakker (Jack Ryan, Castle Rock), Phillipa Soo (Hamilton, Smash), Jake McDorman (Shameless, Greek), Ray McKinnon (Deadwood, Sons of Anarchy), Cleopatra Coleman (The Last Man on Earth, In the Shadow of the Moon), Andrea Frankle (Cloak & Dagger, The Purge), Rebecca Wisocky (Devious Maids, For All Mankind), Meagen Fay (Agent Carter, Malcolm in the Middle) y Trevor Long (Ozark, Low Winter Sun).
Adaptación del libro de no ficción de Beth Macy (2018), escrita por Danny Strong (Empire, The Butler) y dirigida por Barry Levinson (Paterno, Rain Man). Producen Strong, Levinson y Keaton. Ocho episodios.
Estreno: 13 de octubre
Estreno: 12 de noviembre en Disney+ Star España
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Just Beyond (Disney+)
Antología que adapta Goosebumps, las historias gráficas de R.L. Stine en las que distintos personajes realizan viajes de autodescubrimiento en mundos llenos de brujas, aliens, fantasmas o universos paralelos. Podremos ver en la serie a Mckenna Grace (The Haunting of Hill House, Designated Survivor), Nasim Pedrad (Scream Queens, New Girl), Lexi Underwood (Little Fires Everywhere, The First Lady), Henry Thomas (The Haunting of Hill House, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial), Christine Ko (Dave, Upload), Malcolm Barrett (Preacher, Timeless), Sally Pressman (Army Wives, Good Girls), Cedric Joe (Space Jam: A New Legacy), Riki Lindhome (Another Period, Enlightened), Tim Heidecker (Moonbase 8), Gabriel Bateman (The Mosquito Coast, Outcast), Cyrus Arnold (The Exorcist), Arjun Athalye (Are You Afraid of the Dark?), Jack Gore (Billions, The Kids Are Alright), Logan Gray (Vengeance), Elisha Henig (American Vandal, Mythic Quest), Rachel Marsh (Before We Go), Jy Prishkulkni (The Birch), Izabela Vidovic (The Fosters, Supergirl) y Megan Stott (Little Fires Everywhere).
Escrita y producida por Seth Grahame-Smith (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, The Hard Times of RJ Berger). Produce R.L. Stine. Ocho episodios.
Estreno: 13 de octubre
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Guilty Party (Paramount+)
Comedia negra en la que Beth Burgess (Kate Beckinsale; Underworld, Serendipity), una periodista sin prestigio, trata de salvar su carrera siguiendo la historia de Tony Plimpton (Jules Latimer), una joven madre que está en prisión y condenada a cadena perpetua por asesinar a su marido aunque ella dice ser inocente. Beth tendrá que lidiar con contrabandistas de armas, la cultura del clickbait o su propio pasado. Con Geoff Stults (Enlisted, Little Fires Everywhere), Laurie Davidson (Will, Cats), Andre Hyland, Tiya Sircar (The Good Place, The Fugitive), Alanna Ubach (Euphoria, Girlfriends' Guide to Divorce) y Madeleine Arthur (The Family, Snowpiercer).
Creada por Rebecca Addelman (Dead to Me) y dirigida por Trent O'Donnell (No Activity, New Girl). Producida por Addelman, O'Donnell y Beckinsale. Diez episodios.
Estreno: 14 de octubre
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I Know What You Did Last Summer (Prime Video)
Un año después del accidente mortal que estropeó la noche de la graduación, un grupo de adolescentes es perseguido por un asesino. Mientras averiguan quién es, descubren el lado secreto de su pueblo aparentemente perfecto y de ellos mismos. Con Madison Iseman (Jumanji, The Next Level), Bill Heck (The Old Man, Locke & Key), Brianne Tju (Light as a Feather), Ezekiel Goodman, Ashley Moore (Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping), Sebastian Amoruso (Solve), Fiona Rene (Stumptown), Cassie Beck (Connecting, Good Joe Bell), Brooke Bloom (Homecoming, Alpha House), Sonya Balmores (Inhumans), Spencer Sutherland (Afterlife of the Party), Chrissie Fit (Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens)
Basada en la novela de Lois Duncan (1973) en la que se inspiró la película de 1997. Escrita y producida por Sara Goodman (Preacher, Gossip Girl). Produce James Wan (Saw, The Conjuring). Ocho episodios.
Estreno: 15 de octubre
Estreno en España: 15 de octubre en Prime Video España
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Misfit: The Series (Netflix)
Tras la trilogía cinematográfica neerlandesa, Julia (Djamila) y las misfits trabajan en las canciones y las coreografías de un musical que la nueva directora quiere prohibir para que se centren en la disciplina, las notas y los estudios. Julia idea un plan para sabotear las reglas de dirección y trabajar en el musical en secreto.
Estreno: 16 de octubre
Estreno en España: 16 de octubre en Netflix España
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Day of the Dead (Syfy)
Oda a la película de George A. Romero (1985) en la que seis extraños intentarán sobrevivir en las primeras veinticuatro horas de una invasión zombie. Con Keenan Tracey (Bates Motel, The 100), Daniel Doheny (Brand New Cherry Flavor, Alex Strangelove), Natalie Malaika (The Color Rose), Morgan Holmstrom (I Still See You), Kristy Dawn Dinsmore (Vikings), Miranda Frigon (Aurora Teagarden Mysteries), Mike Dopud (Power, Arrow), Dejan Loyola (Saving Hope, iZombie), Marci T. House (iZombie, Julie and the Phantoms), Kevin O'Grady (Julie and the Phantoms, You Me Her), Matty Finochio (Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, The Order), Trezzo Mahoro (Van Helsing), Christopher Russell (UnREAL, Dirk Gently) y Lucia Walters (The 100, The L Word).
Escrita por Jed Elinoff y Scott Thomas, creadores de Raven's Home. Diez episodios.
Estreno: 15 de octubre
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Queens (ABC)
Cuatro mujeres de cuarenta y tantos se reúnen para intentar recuperar la fama y el estilo que tenían en los 90 cuando se convirtieron en leyendas del hip-hop con el grupo Nasty Bitches. Protagonizada por Eve (Eve, Feel Good), Naturi Naughton (Power, The Client List), Nadine Velazquez (My Name Is Earl, Six), Taylor Selé (P-Valley, The Deuce), Pepi Sonuga (Famous in Love, Ash vs. Evil Dead), Brandy Norwood (Moesha, Star) y Precious Way (Days of Our Lives, Partners in Rhyme).
Escrita y producida por Zahir McGhee (Scandal, Stumptown). Dirige el piloto y produce Tim Story (White Famous, Prince of Peoria).
Estreno: 19 de octubre
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The Girl in the Woods (Peacock)
Hay una colonia de carácter sectario en el noroeste del Pacífico que protege al mundo de los monstruos escondidos tras una puerta secreta en pleno bosque. Carrie (Stefanie Scott; A.N.T. Farm, Insidious: Chapter 3), una misteriosa guerrera, huye de esta colonia y trata de mantenerse a salvo en el pequeño pueblo de West Pine, donde se da un debate medioambiental entre mineros y activistas. Allí, Nolan (Misha Osherovich; Freaky, NOS4A2) y Tasha (Sofia Bryant, I Am Not Okay with This), mejores amigos aunque formen parte de distintos bandos, reaccionan de diferente manera ante la llegada de Carrie y de las fuerzas extrañas que comienzan a acechar el pueblo. Además, el antiguo mentor de Carrie (Will Yun Lee; The Good Doctor, Altered Carbon) tiene ahora la misión de encontrarla y obligarla a regresar a la colonia, donde deberá enfrentarse a las consecuencias de su deserción. Completan el reparto Kylie Liya Page (Ninja Assassin), Reed Diamond (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Designated Survivor) y Leonard Roberts (Heroes, Buffy the Vampire Slayer).
Adaptación de los cortometrajes de Crypt TV The Door in the Woods (2018) y su secuela The Girl in the Woods (2020). Escrita por Casey Modderno (The Birch). Krysten Ritter (Jessica Jones) dirige los cuatro primeros episodios y Jacob Chase (Come Play), el resto. Producen Modderno, Ritter, Chase y Jack Davis y Darren Brandl, de Crypt TV. Ocho episodios.
Estreno: 21 de octubre
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Invasion (Apple TV+)
Cuenta una invasión alienígena desde distintos continentes, con el punto de vista de un sheriff a punto de retirarse (Sam Neill; Jurassic Park, Peaky Blinders), un soldado en Afganistán (Shamier Anderson; Wynonna Earp, The Next Step), un matrimonio de inmigrantes sirios que viven en Long Island (Goldshifteh Farahani y Firas Nassar) o una inteligente miembro del control de las misiones del programa espacial japonés (Shioli Kutsuna, Deadpool 2).
Escrita y producida por Simon Kinberg (X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Twilight Zone) y David Weil (Hunters). Dirigida y producida por Jakob Verbruggen (The Alienist, The Fall). Diez episodios.
Estreno: 22 de octubre
Estreno en España: 22 de octubre en Apple TV+ España
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Inside Job (Netflix)
Para los empleados de esta organización secreta, las conspiraciones no son teorías, son hechos. Precisamente, es su trabajo mantenerlas en secreto. Cuenta con las voces de Lizzy Caplan (Masters of Sex, Castle Rock), Christian Slater (Mr. Robot, Dr. Death), Clark Duke (Greek, I'm Dying Up Here), Andrew Daly (Silicon Valley, Veep), Bobby Lee (MADtv, Love), John DiMaggio (Mythic Quest, Disenchantment), Tisha Campbell (My Wife and Kids, Dr. Ken) y Brett Gelman (Stranger Things, Fleabag).
Comedia de animación creada y escrita por Shion Takeuchi (Disenchantment, Gravity Falls). Producida por Alex Hirsch (Gravity Falls). Veinte episodios.
Estreno: 22 de octubre
Estreno en España: 22 de octubre en Netflix España
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4400 (The CW)
Reboot de la serie The 4400 (2004-2007) en la que 4400 personas ignoradas, menospreciadas o marginadas que han desaparecido durante los últimos cien años aparecen en un instante sin haber envejecido ni un solo día y sin recuerdos de qué les ha ocurrido en todo este tiempo. Mientras el gobierno corre a analizar la potencial amenaza y contener la historia, los 4400 deben afrontar su nueva vida y hacerse a la idea de que es probable que hayan vuelto por una razón específica. Con T.L. Thompson, Cory Jeacoma (Power Book II: Ghost), Ireon Roach (Candyman), Derrick A. King (Call Your Mother), Autumn Best, Joseph David-Jones (Arrow, Nashville), Khailah Johnson, Brittany Adebumola (Grand Army), Jaye Ladymore (Empire) y Amarr Wooten (Knight Squad, American Housewife).
Creada, escrita y producida por Ariana Jackson (Riverdale, UnREAL).
Estreno: 25 de octubre
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Colin in Black & White (Netflix)
Limited series que sigue los años formativos de Colin Kaepernick, el quarterback de los San Francisco 49ers y activista que durante la temporada de 2016 se arrodilló antes de los partidos mientras sonaba el himno nacional. Jaden Michael (The Get Down) interpretará una versión adolescente del jugador. Completan el reparto Nick Offerman (Parks and Recreation, Devs), Mary-Louise Parker (Weeds, The West Wing), Klarke Pipkin, Amarr Wooten (Knight Squad, American Housewife) y Mace Coronel (Nicky, Ricky, Dicky & Dawn).
Escrita y producida por Michael Starrbury (When They See Us). Producida por Ava DuVernay (When They See Us, Queen Sugar) y Kaepernick, que narrará la historia. Seis episodios.
Estreno: 29 de octubre
Estreno en España: 29 de octubre en Netflix España
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Swagger (Apple TV+)
Drama que explorará el mundo del baloncesto juvenil centrándose en los jugadores, sus familias y los entrenadores. Tocará temas como los sueños, la ambición, el oportunismo o la corrupción inspirándose en los años de juventud del jugador Kevin Durant. Protagonizada por O'Shea Jackson Jr. (Obi-Wan Kenobi), Isaiah Hill, Shinelle Azoroh, Quvenzhané Wallis (Beasts of the Southern Wild, Annie), Caleel Harris (When They See Us, Castle Rock), James Bingham, Solomon Irama, Ozie Nzeribe (Shameless), Tessa Ferrer (Grey's Anatomy, Mr. Mercedes), Tristan Mack Wilds (The Wire, 90210) y Jason Rivera.
Escrita, dirigida y producida por Reggie Rock Bythewood (Shots Fired, Players). Produce Durant. Diez episodios.
Estreno: 29 de octubre
Estreno en España: 29 de octubre en Apple TV+ España
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What We Do in the Shadows Season 3 Episode 1 Review: The Prisoner
https://ift.tt/2Yoqza7
This What We Do in the Shadows review contains spoilers.
What We Do in the Shadows Season 3 Episode 1
What We Do in the Shadows season 3 episode 1, “The Prisoner,” moves quickly through the blood and raw meat left over from the slaughter of the season 2 finale, “Nouveau Théâtre des Vampires.” The episode is named for the faithful familiar Guillermo (Harvey Guillén), who took out about 70 percent of the most powerful vampires in the Tri-State area. When the episode opens, he is being held in a cage while Nandor the Relentless (Kayvan Novak), Nadja of Antipaxos, (Natasia Demetriou), Laszlo Cravensworth (Matt Berry), and Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) decide his fate.
It’s not an easy decision, apparently. Much of the opening finds the vampires arguing over whose responsibility the errant servant is. Nandor is happy to share ownership of the young man who slew the upper echelon of blood-thirstiest suckers in the northeast. Nadja and Laszlo vote thumbs down, no way, kill him. Even Nadja’s doll wants to take the stuffing out of the Van Helsing descendant. The discussion which leads to the living doll having a vote in the Staten Island house rules is priceless foolishness. The highlight comes in unison. Colin Robinson really doesn’t care what happens to “Gizmo,” the name he adopted after Laszlo tagged Guillermo with it.
Colin drops the first F-bomb of the season, and it lands a little awkwardly. This is a vampire who takes energy from people with subtle and usually passively aggressive attacks. Here he is frustrated and, let’s face it, drained by the vampires around him. Nadja and Laszlo have especially had enough of their psyche-draining roommate and Colin should be energized by their annoyance. But he is visibly agitated at being shut down, even though he should be eating that up. Also, it’s not quite clear what he gets out of sifting through the prisoner’s toilet bucket, looking for secret messages. He seems to be only draining himself there again. That’s not vampiric, that’s cannibalistic.
While it is highly amusing how Guillermo has to warn Colin about touching an electric cattle prod to a metal bar, it seems the psychic vampire endowed with will-sapping trivia knowledge would know which end was hot. However, when Colin refuses to give credit to the prison for making him zap himself, he might actually be paying the vampire hunter a compliment. We are not entirely sure whether Colin is playing up the dangers the prisoner poses to the vulnerable vampires because he believes it or is just feeding on the fear he can raise. It feels like Colin believes it when he warns the others that they don’t know Guillermo’s full powers. He is also the only roommate to notice how the imprisoned slaughterer got out of his cage in time to toss stakes at an unannounced visitor.
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What We Do in the Shadows Season 3 Prepares For Colin Robinson’s 100th Birthday
By Tony Sokol
TV
What We Do in the Shadows Season 3: Guillermo Gets a Promotion
By Tony Sokol
“Yes, we get it, you’re a vampire killer with the stakes and the reflexes and all that,” Dark Shade (Kristen Schaal), the Floating Woman from the Vampiric Council, says. “Great job.” This affirms what Nandor has been saying, and Guillermo has been Machiavellian-ing, since the beginning of the episode. There is a warriors’ code. Guillermo lived up to that code, and continues to do so, while also performing his other tasks unencumbered by the cumbersome vampires.
His is an interesting character arc, which Guillén presents completely unselfconsciously. Guillermo is as naïve as the day we first saw him, but wise enough to impress his acumen onto the audience and camera crew. Guillermo is even beyond the effects of quadruple hypnosis, something which would give the brain-scramblies to even the most willful humans. This may be because he had an intellectual head start. All of the vampires, except for Nadja and Laszlo – who would never think to look a familiar in the eye – acknowledge his growth. Even the high counselor on the council which rules over all the councils takes notice.
What We Do in the Shadows is based on the 2014 feature film by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, so it should come as no surprise one of the true creators is the Supreme Worldwide Vampiric Council member who presents the Staten Island vampires with their new obligations. It should be a surprise he can’t work a VCR, but none of the vampires really got a handle on it. They all bought Betamax machines. The elder vampire reaches a completely valid conclusion. Yes, the Staten Island vampires broke the biggest vampire code: don’t kill vampires. Yes, it’s a big rule, it comes up in every conversation, vampires never shut up about it to remind themselves how big a rule it is.
However, when a vampire takes out 37 vampires in a clip it shows a kind of leadership quality. And putting these vampires at the tops of the local Vampiric Council begins with the very promise of things to come. Before anyone has even sat on the throne, there’s a scrabble for leadership, false humility, and some real ennui from Laszlo. He did not become a vampire to be a paper pusher, and doesn’t give a shit about vampire councils. Colin Robinson, as we know from previous episodes and are reminded again, has been very active on the local vampire political front.
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Giving power to the main character is a gamble, both for the Council and for the series. The logic which brings them there is absurdly perfect. The wisdom to stay will probably be too much for them, so it will be fun to also watch them fumble it. While it is a thrill to see a supernatural kick from Nandor send a heavy crate sailing across a cell, it is more fun to hear him complain about the splinter in his boot. These vampires have lived longer than most creatures on earth, and in all that time, they’ve learned nothing. They are still clumsy, whining, children. It is too easy to call them narcissists, they are only amateur hedonists.
“The Prisoner,” which was written by Paul Simms and directed by Kyle Newacheck, is a fast-moving opener to what looks to be a brisk season of transitions. Guillermo remains vertical but gets a lateral promotion. Three of the four vampires get to vie for local power, and one gets to spend more time in the potting shed.
What We Do in the Shadows‘ “The Prisoner” aired Sept. 2 at 10:00 p.m. on FX.
The post What We Do in the Shadows Season 3 Episode 1 Review: The Prisoner appeared first on Den of Geek.
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The LARB Ball NBA Roundtable
NOVEMBER 1, 2018
With the NBA season in full swing, I reached out to Theresa Runstedtler (Associate Professor of History at American University) and Yago Colás (Professor of English at Oberlin College), sports scholars with expertise (and books in progress) about the pro game, to discuss the state of the league today and its history. Moving between on- and off-court issues, and from the 1970s to our expectations for the new season, the conversation takes up topics including LeBron’s move west, NBA vs. NFL politics, race and power, the basketball version of “moneyball,” the league’s embrace of gambling, and the past and future of business-minded player-celebrities. How long can Golden State’s stranglehold on the league last? Will big data analytics sap the game of its pleasing uncertainty? Can a new generation of players, coaches, and owners steer the league to a more politically progressive place? And for those interested as much in reading about the sport as watching the games, stick around to the end for book recommendations. Enjoy! – BRJ
Brian Jacobson: Let’s start broadly: what story lines—on or off the court—most interest you as the NBA season kicks off?
Theresa Runstedtler: I’m interested to see what happens as LeBron James makes his transition from the Cavaliers to the Lakers. Will he continue to be vilified for his lack of loyalty and individual career ambitions? I’m also interested to see what happens with Vince Carter’s year with the Hawks. I was part of the Raptors organization during his first season in 1998. To hear him talked about as the “old guy” at 41 years of age is amusing to me (and tells me I’m getting old too). I guess even though I haven’t lived in Toronto for 17 years, I’m still a Raptors fan at heart. I’m curious to see whether the addition of Kawhi Leonard will improve or hurt the team’s chemistry on the court. #WetheNorth
Yago Colás: I share Theresa’s interest in LeBron’s move to the West, but for slightly different reasons. I’ve lived half an hour from Cleveland for the last seven years, and my sense is that, at least in this region, fans wish LeBron well. They are grateful for the 2016 championship, and recognize all he does (and will surely continue to do) for the area. As the mother of one of the youngsters participating in the LeBron James Family Foundation educational initiative told Howard Bryant on the radio program Only a Game, “I don’t care where he works.”
I am interested, however, to see how LeBron responds to his changed competitive circumstances. He now has a young team around him and will be facing the much deeper Western Conference. Will the Lakers make the playoffs? If they struggle early (they are 2-3 as I write), will they add a superstar? What will Kobe’s legendary legion of insane fans do to LeBron if LA is horrible? On the other hand, if they do make the playoffs, how deep a run can they make? And, as a massive LeBron fan, OH MY GOD, what if they beat the Thunder, Rockets and Warriors to get to the finals and then beat the Celtics or the Raptors?!! LeBron will have become, as Obi Wan once said, “more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”
The other interesting story emerging from LeBron’s move to the Lakers is what will happen in the East now that the roadblock to the Finals named LeBron James has been removed. Toronto or Boston should be ready to come out of the East, but will they? Will the young Sixers continue their ascent? As I write, Toronto is undefeated (congrats Theresa!), but the other unbeaten teams in the East are Milwaukee and Detroit! Of course, it’s early, but with so many exciting and talented young players distributed on different teams, I think the Eastern conference could be very exciting.
A week or so into the season, the one league-wide trend that has caught my eye is the marked uptick in both scoring and pace (meaning: possessions per game) this season. Though it’s early in the season, both figures are on pace to easily set historic high marks and observers have attributed this to the convergence of a number of factors, one of which is NBA officials calling defensive fouls away from the ball more closely, which obviously works to the offense’s advantage, especially given the penchant in today’s NBA for Warriors-esque action away from the ball. It’ll be interesting to see if this early offensive explosion prompts any effective defensive adjustments, provokes any kind of backlash among fans and, if so, any kind of adjustments from the League.
Finally, at a personal level, I’m always interested to see how my former University of Michigan students fare as they adjust to the demands of pro ball. As the season opened, former students of mine were playing for Brooklyn (Caris LeVert), the Knicks (Trey Burke and Tim Hardaway, Jr.), the Pistons (Glenn Robinson III), the Trailblazers (Nik Stauskas), and the Lakers (Moe Wagner). Having gotten to know these hard-working players when they were just 18 year old freshman with big NBA dreams, I’m happy to see that they have all stuck with it and are beginning, each in their own way, to make a mark.
BRJ: I too am interested in Lebron’s move and how a single player can shape so many storylines. Here in Boston, where I spend part of my time, the Celtics still appear to be built for long-term success, but the reintegration of Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward hasn’t been as seamless as fans might have hoped. Will that allow Toronto, finally, to get to the finals (and perhaps even keep Kawhi from packing his bags for LA next summer)? Or will this be the year the 76ers move from process to product? (*paging Markelle Fultz’s jump shot*)
I guess we’d be remiss if we didn’t also mention the Jimmy Butler situation (fiasco?) in Minnesota, which represents fairly well, I think, the internal and individual tensions—among players, coaches, and management—that PR-minded teams and agents usually do so well to keep out of the spotlight—but that sports journalists, when given the opportunity, just can’t seem to get enough of.
But in the interest of other stories, I want to shift directions now to talk about the politics of the NBA, especially in comparison to the NFL, which was covered in the column last month. The NFL, and especially its owners and commissioner, have (rightly, I think) been denounced for their conservative politics and failure to respond to Donald Trump’s comments about and implicit threats against players kneeling during the anthem. In contrast, some critics see the NBA as a progressive league, with younger, more liberal owners and both players and coaches who have spoken out against Trump, racial injustice, and other political issues without receiving the kind of backlash as Colin Kaepernick or Eric Reid. Is this a fair contrast? If so, how do we account for the NBA’s comparative progressive politics—or at least the impression of it?
TR: When I tell people I’m working on a project about race and professional basketball in the 1970s, they often take the opportunity to tell me that the NBA is “so much more progressive” than any other professional sports league. I think that there is some truth to this statement when you compare the NBA to the NFL. However, something about this idea that the NBA is racially progressive doesn’t sit well with me–and it doesn’t really hold water when I look at the demonization and disciplining of both black players and black style over the decades. I think that if the NBA is progressive at all, it is because they have to be. In other words, since the 1970s the majority of the players have been black, and the NBPA has had many black leaders. The global audience of basketball has become increasingly multicultural and multiracial. It is not good business to be overtly racist. That said, the NBA has been very clever about how to depoliticize and aestheticize blackness for the sake of profitability, while also containing and managing its mix of danger and respectability for its corporate partners and white fans.
YC: I absolutely agree with Theresa’s more sober view of the NBA’s much-celebrated political progressiveness. Sure, it looks great compared to the NFL, but that’s not saying much. The NBA’s racial containment strategies (e.g. the dress code), especially under former commissioner David Stern, from the late 70s through the 2000s were real and must be kept in mind. (Readers might be interested in Todd Boyd’s Young, Black, Rich & Famous, David Leonard’s After Artest and Jeffrey Lane’s Under the Boards for accounts of these dynamics.)
At the same time, I wouldn’t underestimate the power of NBA players. The NBA is a much smaller league than the NFL, and one in which individual stars have a much greater impact (not just on competitive outcomes, but on financial outcomes, and on the culture surrounding the league). I sense that over the past eight years, the players have begun to experiment with exercising the power they have. Some of these experiments have involved internal power differentials within the league (like LeBron, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh “usurping” team formation powers that had always resided with GM’s and owners) or the NBPA resisting the use of biometric devices in game play, others have involved the manifestations of racism within the NBA (the Chris Paul-led reaction to the Donald Sterling case in 2015), and of course many have involved players acting or speaking out against police lethality against black men, transphobia, Donald Trump, or just racism more generally.
I also think it’s important to note that 1) there is nothing politically retrograde in the NBA that is not also to be found in American society and 2) I’m wary of the general expectation that professional athletes have some sort of unique responsibility, different than any of the rest of us, to make the world more free and more just.
BRJ: As your answers make clear, even if the NBA is comparatively more progressive than the NFL today—which, as Yago says, is hardly a rousing endorsement—no doubt it remains an institution with a history of racism and front offices dominated by just as many white men as the NFL. Last year, Draymond Green accused one of these men, New York Knicks owner James Dolan, of having a “slave master mentality.” Meanwhile, a recent investigation into sexual harassment by former Dallas Mavericks president and CEO Terdema Ussery revealed “a corporate culture rife with misogyny and predatory sexual behavior,” followed just weeks ago by another report about sexual harassment by a Mavericks team photographer. What do these kinds of reports tell us about the league’s progressive claims?
TR: These incidents are hardly surprising to me. Racism and sexism are very much alive and well in professional basketball. All we need to do is look at someone like the LA Clippers’ former owner Donald Sterling to see that team owners (behind closed doors) still view their majority-black players as mere pawns (if not property) who are there to earn them money. Also, I was a dancer for the Toronto Raptors back in the late 1990s and can attest that aspects of toxic masculinity pervaded the league from bottom to top. That said, I don’t think there is anything exceptional about the NBA in this regard. Big-time sports leagues are all complicit in the production of anti-blackness and toxic masculinity. At the same time, they also reflect and reinforce the racism and sexism of society at large.
YC: Of course, I agree. But what do we mean by “the League” when we talk about its politics. Are we talking about the Commissioner? The various owners? The legal corporation? The players? The superstar players? The NBPA? I think we get different answers depending on who we are talking about. And, as I say, for me personally the most interesting political phenomenon over the past decade has been the increasing autonomy players are showing. I’m very curious to see what the immediate and long-term effects of this will be.
The work I did to write Ball Don’t Lie! taught me that the whatever the League administrators and owners and their corporate partners, and even some more conservative fans may want, the players make the game and it is a game that is at its most essential level on the court about getting free. I wouldn’t underestimate the cultural and political power of a group of young wealth, influential black men with a strong sense of shared interests and collective responsibility who have spent most of their lives dedicated to the embodied practice of getting free.
BRJ: It has become a common refrain that the NBA is a year-round league, with fans just as, if not more, interested in what’s happening off the court as on it—whether in free agency or the constant rumor mill about which player wants to play on which team, not to mention off-court politics and the players’ various entanglements in non-sports work. For those who love the game itself, this might seem like a sad state of affairs, but it also brings into focus something critics of course know: that the game itself is just the beginning. My question is this: is there actually anything new about the “year-round” nature of the league, or are we just more attentive to what happens beyond the games? If it is different, what has prompted the change?
TR: I don’t think there is anything particularly new about year-round reporting on the NBA and its players; however, the volume of reporting has definitely increased. I think there are a number of reasons for the uptick in coverage. Firstly, before the advent of the ABA and the players’ victory in removing the option clause as a condition of the ABA-NBA merger in 1976, there simply wasn’t as much player movement to report. (The option clause meant that a team retained the rights to a player even after the expiration of his contract. Thus, the team had full control over when a player could be re-signed, traded, or released.) Free agency has added another storyline to the sports news cycle. Since the expansion of professional basketball in the 1970s, publications have reported on players’ non-sports work—particularly the charitable, mentorship kind—because the league wanted to improve its public image. On the flipside, the press also has covered basketball players’ misdeeds, crimes, etc.—especially those of black players. However, changes to the media industry landscape have ramped up this coverage. With the move to a segmented marketplace of growing numbers of niche publications/networks, on both traditional and internet media, there is now a constant demand for more and more content. I suppose this kind of coverage might be dismaying to basketball “purists,” but it has long been part of the game.
YC: I agree with everything Theresa has said here: it’s not new, though factors like free agency and transformations in the mediascape around the game have definitely fueled an expansion in the volume of coverage and interest around both off-court and off-season happenings. My own current research (see below) is on the effect of quantification and big data analytics on the sport (i.e. the hoops version of “moneyball”) and I’ve found that this issue of year-round coverage is one of the areas of the sport’s culture impacted by the phenomenon. As in other areas of American society, big data analytics in the NBA has the explicit aim of maximizing competitive and financial efficiency. I suspect that fans and journalists know a great deal more about the financial side of the sport than they previously did and that, together with the player assessment data available to fans through the media today, it’s easier to generate (and publish) opinions about off-seasons transactions.
BRJ: It seems to me that part of the reason the league garners so much coverage beyond the games has to do with the celebrity power of today’s NBA stars, and probably no more so than LeBron. This summer, his foundation launched the “I Promise” school in Akron. Meanwhile, as many journalists have noted, his move to Los Angeles to join the Lakers seems to have as much to do with media production ambitions and life after basketball as NBA ambitions. And of course LeBron isn’t alone: we could say something similar about Kevin Durant’s move to Golden State and his ties with the Bay area startup scene, or about Russell Westbrook’s turns through the fashion world, or about Dwayne Wade’s wine business. What can we expect of the new NBA celebrities who have their sights set on personal brands and long-term non-basketball franchises? NBA players have long been spokesmen and some have gone into politics. Is the new generation—with its enormous salaries and business acumen—any different?
TR: I think the scale of their wealth and fame is certainly different. However, I was doing some reading in a 1970s-era publication called Black Sports a couple of weeks ago, which suggests that this idea of player-businessman is not so new. (Black Sports was the first major sporting publication to specifically target black readers from 1971 to 1978.) There was a monthly feature called “Taking Care of Business” that featured former professional athletes who translated their success in sports to success in the corporate world or as entrepreneurs. I think there has long been the expectation, particularly among black athletes, that they should parlay their sporting achievements into wealth and an elevated socio-economic status. When I was part of the Raptors organization back in the late 1990s, I also recall many of the players talking about side-hustles/hobbies that they hoped to turn into full-fledged businesses upon retirement. However, I do think that the players nowadays have much more access to contacts and capital to launch their own companies. What’s also interesting is the emergence of second-generation NBA stars such as Steph Curry (father Dell Curry played in the league from 1986-2002). They have an even better sense of how to work the business of basketball to their own advantage.
BRJ: Can you imagine any of today’s players going into politics? Is Lebron gearing up for a presidential run?
TR: Perhaps. Hey, if Donald Trump managed to become president, a former basketball player certainly can.
BRJ: Let’s talk more about the game itself. Even readers who don’t follow sports are likely to be familiar with the “moneyball” phenomenon that hit baseball with the publication of Michael Lewis’s book fifteen years ago in July. Has the “analytics revolution” shaped the NBA in similar ways?
TR: Obviously, some aspects of data analysis have contributed to the success of teams like the Golden State Warriors. How can one deny that the strategy of taking more three-point shots has been a good one for the Curry and the Warriors? However, I want to think about the analytics revolution in light of the ongoing negotiation of power between team owners and the players. I know that proponents of the data analytics revolution have tended to scoff at naysayers like Charles Barkley, casting them as less-evolved luddites who are simply suspicious of change. I’m no Barkley fan, but I’m wondering if part of this critique has to do with fears about the players losing control over the game. It seems as if the rise of data analytics has the potential to shift the balance of power more so in favor of the team owners, potentially taking away the autonomy and creativity of the players in practicing their craft. As Yago asks in Ball Don’t Lie, who makes the game? The league and the team owners or the players? Also, what about the invasiveness of the statistics garnered from trackers that some players now have to wear? What is the bodily autonomy of the athlete in this case? Data can be used as a means for increased surveillance, discipline, and punishment. I also wonder if the data analytics revolution may change the character of the game. What is the end goal of the game? Is it the efficiency of scoring? Is it creative, entertaining play? Are these incompatible? I’m not sure, but they’re definitely things to think about. Basketball, much like soccer, is one of the few professional team sports that encourages free-flowing play. How will data analytics impact this aspect of the game? It suggests a potential move away from the ethics and aesthetics of black streetball that have come to define modern basketball. I’m not sure this is a good thing.
YC: As I said above, I’m writing a book called Numbers Don’t Lie! Counting and What Counts in the Culture of Basketball (forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press) to explore the question of the impact of basketball analytics on NBA play and culture. It’s played out a little differently than in baseball simply because in the NBA, the use of advanced statistical methods, enabled in part by computing power, to discern hidden patterns (which was what baseball’s moneyball was about) has coincided with the use of very sophisticated digital data production technologies (such as Second Spectrum’s optical tracking cameras, installed in every NBA arena, and which capture the movement of the ball and all ten players 25 times per second, thus delivering 800,000 data points to each franchise every game) so that basketball analytics is, at this point, essentially big data analytics.
The most obvious and frequently noted impact is the continued rise of the three-point shot in response to the statistical insight that it’s greater point value, given the skills and patterns of play prevailing in the league, make it a more efficient scoring play than many two-point shots. Another major trend that is still unfolding involves the use of wearables and other kinds of biometric technologies. Currently these can only be used in training and practice. Players understandably may want to know all they can about their bodies, their tendencies, and their futures. But the use of these devices should occasion serious discussion about the ethical and political implications related to quantification, surveillance, and the use of predictive algorithms in situations (like the NBA) where power differential exists.
However, as fascinating and powerful as basketball analytics are, and as important as the political and ethical questions raised by them are, I find myself personally even more compelled by a possibly more esoteric question raised by these techniques and technologies. Let me put it to your readers this way. Nobody argues that the purpose of analytics is to minimize risk by maximizing the capacity to forecast future outcomes. In other words, when owners and GMs use the data to project career arcs for players and correlate those with financial cost-benefit analyses, when coaches use the data to make decisions about matchups and rotations, and when players use the data to make tactical and technical decisions, they are all hoping that they will not be surprised.
Now, speaking for myself, most (not all, but most) of the delight I derive from watching basketball comes from being surprised. The wonder and awe, the beauty and grace and power, that I experience when I watch basketball play depends, at least in part, on players and teams doing unexpected (and even probabilistically unadvisable) things. I feel pretty sure that chance, randomness and surprise will continue to play a role in the NBA, but I wonder how that role will change with the continued expansion and advance of various kinds of predictive technologies. The predictability of the Warriors’ dominance of the league over the past four seasons (2016 is the exception that proves this rule) may be interpreted as a sign of this.
To wit, here is a slide from a lecture I recently gave to members of International Association for the Philosophy of Sport.
Just sayin.
BRJ: The risk that probability and big data could take some of the fun out of the game by limiting surprise rings true to me. To wit, the conventional wisdom about Golden State seems to be that they can only lose in the unlikely event that one of their stars gets injured. That’s hardly the kind of surprise eagerly awaited by most fans. At the same time, one might rightly argue that the pleasure also comes from watching the game at its finest, and what could be finer than the Warriors offense? This, at least, was the argument many of Kevin Durant’s supporters made about his decision to boost this juggernaut by joining the already great team he couldn’t quite defeat.
The other argument might be that enough chance will always remain, especially for the casual fan. After all, even the best shooting teams—currently the New Orleans Pelicans(?!)—only make 50% of their shots, and so, one might argue, any play could always go either way (if you’re wondering, Pelicans star Anthony Davis is shooting over 59% after 3 games). And perhaps part of the fun is simply the work of calculating the odds—and betting on them. Earlier this month the Mavericks, following something of this logic, hired a former professional gambler as “director of quantitative research and development.” This follows the announcement, back in September, that the NBA had entered an agreement with sportsbook provider MGM Resorts, now the league’s “official gaming partner.” What does this official sanctioning of gambling signal about the league’s future ambitions? Can you see any long-term consequences for the game itself?
YC: The NBA, in its earliest years, benefited enormously from the disrepute that befell college basketball in the early 1950s as a result of the CCNY game-fixing scandal. So I certainly expect that the League will do everything possible to avoid anything like that occurring. But as my comment above suggests, everybody involved in the NBA (from owners, to GMs, to coaches, to players) are all already essentially gamblers and already using quantitative data to inform their bets. Because of this, I see the official sanctioning of gambling more like the simple addition of another revenue stream rather than some sea change in the nature of the sport.
TR: I agree with Yago. It seems like a move to create another revenue stream. Nevertheless, this discussion makes me think back to the blackballing of Connie Hawkins for nearly a decade for his suspected ties to gambling ring leader, Jack Molinas. (Molinas ran a game-fixing operation.) Because of these unsubstantiated claims, Hawkins’ was first blackballed from the NCAA and then from the NBA, which nearly destroyed his chances of playing professional basketball. Forced to play in the ABL, ABA, and for the Harlem Globetrotters, Hawkins finally sued and won a settlement from the NBA in 1969. However, by then, his best playing days were over. Against the backdrop of this move to incorporate gambling, Hawkins’ story is all the more tragic.
BRJ: Thinking more about the NBA’s future and its relationship with college athletics, last week the New York Times reported that top high school recruit Darius Bazley, having already decommitted from Syracuse to sign with the NBA’s development league (the “G League”) has now opted instead to sign a deal with New Balance that will pay him $1 million to be an intern next year while he waits to meet the minimum age requirement (19) to enter the league. This is just the latest in a long struggle over when players should be allowed to enter the league—and what role the scandal-prone NCAA should play in the development of amateur athletes. Where do you see this debate going? Is the NBA headed for a system more like Major League Baseball’s minor league? This gets us away from the NBA, but what might this mean for the college game?
TR: At face value, the age minimum strikes me as paternalistic and unjust. Moreover, I can’t help but see the age minimum rule as part of the gentlemen’s agreement between the NBA and the NCAA to preserve the interests of both leagues. For a long time, the NBA needed the NCAA and its stars and player rivalries in order to capture their fans as college players moved on to the professional game. At the same time, the NCAA relies on being the proven path to the NBA in order to replenish its talent pools and suppress labor costs. In the course of doing research covering from the 1970s to the present, I’ve found that the critiques of the NCAA acting as the NBA’s defacto farm system have been very consistent over the decades. (i.e. the academics for NCAA basketball players are a sham, the “student-athletes” involved in Division I basketball are amateur only in name, the players are being exploited, the punishments of the players are draconian while the NCAA and its teams wash their hands of any culpability of rule violations, etc.) I don’t think it would be bad thing to disrupt this gentlemen’s agreement between two organizations that act as monopolies (Taylor Branch even called the NCAA a cartel). This is what happened back in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the advent of the ABA (the NBA’s rival league from 1967-1976) and then with Spencer Haywood v. NBA (1971), which struck down the league rule that a team could not draft a player until four years after his high school graduation. Thanks to these and other disruptions of the monopolistic control of the NCAA and NBA, the players were eventually able to use their position of increased power to end the option clause. I’m not really much of a prognosticator, but rules violations are endemic to the NCAA system, so I’m not terribly sentimental about it losing some of its control over the fates of players. I think that the fact that it has survived the way it has for so long has something to with the racial makeup of the players. People don’t care; they just want to be entertained regardless of what it is doing to the players.
YC: Theresa, again, is right on the mark as far as my experience (personal and scholarly) with these issues goes. She’s also wiser than I in refraining from prognostication. But what the hell: there are so many leaks in the NCAA boat right now that I have a hard time imagining its current D1 basketball model functioning too much longer into the future. On the one hand, college athletes seem to me to be growing in their awareness of their economic power and in their willingness to exercise that power as leverage (e.g. Missouri football), while on the other hand, the recurrent scandals and generally unsavory air of corruption and racialized exploitation surrounding the NCAA I think is already spurring (and is likely to continue to prompt) various individuals and organizations (even simply entrepreneurially motivated) to imagine and attempt to implement competitive models of sub-NBA caliber basketball play. One of the most interesting of these to me is the HB league, an initiative to create a national college basketball league that would compensate the college students who played in it beyond simply covering the costs of attendance . I like it because it addresses the racist dimensions of the current situation, acknowledges the importance of the financial piece (not only to players but to investors in any viable alternative to the NCAA), and seems to be trying to value education.
BRJ: We’ll have much more to say about the NCAA in future LARB Ball pieces, but I share your sense that D1 basketball needs to change.
Thanks to both of you for taking the time to talk with me. A couple of quick questions to end: Yago’s inevitability slide aside, can anyone unseat the Warriors—or, put another way, when and how does this reign end? And for those interested in tracing some of the issues we’ve discussed in more depth, what basketball books—aside from your own, of course—should we be reading, or anticipating, this fall?
YC: I don’t see anyone knocking off the Warriors this season (barring, as you mentioned, Brian, a major injury to a member of the core). But after this season, KD is a free agent, and there’s already lots of talk of him moving on to new challenges. But even if that doesn’t happen, time, eventually catches up with every great team (such as the Spurs currently). Players age, their skills diminish even if only slightly, they become more vulnerable to minor injuries and fatigue, and in the meantime, a new cadre of young players is on the rise who are themselves exhibiting new combinations of size, athletic ability and skill that may, eventually, make the on-court innovations of Curry & Co. seem routine.
As for book recommendations, my gosh, there are so many great, thoughtful books inspired by by basketball. One of my favorites is Aram Goudsouzian’s riveting biography of Bill Russell, King of the Court, which gives a superb account not only of Russell himself, but of the overlapping contexts of sport, American society, and race that shaped Russell and that he also helped to transform in the 50s and 60s. In a different vein, the pioneering works by the FreeDarko blogging collective (The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac and The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History) are great introductions both to basketball and to the innovative creative writing that has emerged around the game in the past 15 years. I’m looking forward to Theresa’s work on the 70s, but in the meantime, I think that historian Adam Criblez’ Tall Tales and Short Shorts: Dr. J, Pistol Pete, and the Birth of the Modern NBA gives an excellent account of that pivotal decade, perhaps paired with Halberstam’s The Breaks of the Game. Boyd’s and Lane’s books that I mentioned above do an excellent job tracing the complicated intersections of race, class, and culture converging on hoops in the 80s and 90s. Among the most recent works, I think that Jonathan Abrams Boys Among Men (on the prep-to-pro generation) is not only thoroughly reported, but very beautifully written. It may in some ways be a bit outdated, but your readers might appreciate this more extensive list of my favorite basketball books that I posted a few summers ago on my blog.
TR: There is always a human element to the game, so you never know what is going to happen. As I said before, I’m not much of a fortune teller, but bodies fail, minds get side-tracked, and unforeseen circumstances are always in the wings.
As for books, I agree with Yago’s selections. A few that I would add are Sam Smith’s book on the Oscar Robertson et al v. NBA suit, Hard Labor: The Battle that Birthed the Billion-Dollar NBA, John Feinstein’s, The Punch: One Night, Two Lives, And the Fight that Changed Basketball Forever, and David J. Leonard’s After Artest: The NBA and the Assault on Blackness. My own book, tentatively titled, Black Ball: Rethinking the “Dark Ages” of Professional Basketball, is still very much a work in progress. According to popular memory, the NBA struggled during the seventies because it was too black, too violent, and too drug-infested for its majority-white audience. Black Ball critiques this declension story. It explores how professional basketball emerged as a site for public debates over black politics and culture in the late twentieth-century United States, as African American athletes not only became the demographic majority (approximately 75 percent of the players), but fought for more control over their labor. I also explore how black players changed the aesthetics and rules of the game, infusing it with the style and ethics of urban black streetball. This underlying tension played out in the form of numerous “crises” throughout the decade—over not just on-court violence and drug abuse, but also the league’s monopoly status, the option clause, and the slam dunk—as NBA league executives and team owners tried to figure out how best to market and monetize a sport now dominated by African American players. It promises to shed light on this relatively understudied era that gave rise to the modern NBA.
Source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/larb-ball-nba-roundtable/
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The LARB Ball NBA Roundtable
NOVEMBER 1, 2018
With the NBA season in full swing, I reached out to Theresa Runstedtler (Associate Professor of History at American University) and Yago Colás (Professor of English at Oberlin College), sports scholars with expertise (and books in progress) about the pro game, to discuss the state of the league today and its history. Moving between on- and off-court issues, and from the 1970s to our expectations for the new season, the conversation takes up topics including LeBron’s move west, NBA vs. NFL politics, race and power, the basketball version of “moneyball,” the league’s embrace of gambling, and the past and future of business-minded player-celebrities. How long can Golden State’s stranglehold on the league last? Will big data analytics sap the game of its pleasing uncertainty? Can a new generation of players, coaches, and owners steer the league to a more politically progressive place? And for those interested as much in reading about the sport as watching the games, stick around to the end for book recommendations. Enjoy! – BRJ
Brian Jacobson: Let’s start broadly: what story lines—on or off the court—most interest you as the NBA season kicks off?
Theresa Runstedtler: I’m interested to see what happens as LeBron James makes his transition from the Cavaliers to the Lakers. Will he continue to be vilified for his lack of loyalty and individual career ambitions? I’m also interested to see what happens with Vince Carter’s year with the Hawks. I was part of the Raptors organization during his first season in 1998. To hear him talked about as the “old guy” at 41 years of age is amusing to me (and tells me I’m getting old too). I guess even though I haven’t lived in Toronto for 17 years, I’m still a Raptors fan at heart. I’m curious to see whether the addition of Kawhi Leonard will improve or hurt the team’s chemistry on the court. #WetheNorth
Yago Colás: I share Theresa’s interest in LeBron’s move to the West, but for slightly different reasons. I’ve lived half an hour from Cleveland for the last seven years, and my sense is that, at least in this region, fans wish LeBron well. They are grateful for the 2016 championship, and recognize all he does (and will surely continue to do) for the area. As the mother of one of the youngsters participating in the LeBron James Family Foundation educational initiative told Howard Bryant on the radio program Only a Game, “I don’t care where he works.”
I am interested, however, to see how LeBron responds to his changed competitive circumstances. He now has a young team around him and will be facing the much deeper Western Conference. Will the Lakers make the playoffs? If they struggle early (they are 2-3 as I write), will they add a superstar? What will Kobe’s legendary legion of insane fans do to LeBron if LA is horrible? On the other hand, if they do make the playoffs, how deep a run can they make? And, as a massive LeBron fan, OH MY GOD, what if they beat the Thunder, Rockets and Warriors to get to the finals and then beat the Celtics or the Raptors?!! LeBron will have become, as Obi Wan once said, “more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”
The other interesting story emerging from LeBron’s move to the Lakers is what will happen in the East now that the roadblock to the Finals named LeBron James has been removed. Toronto or Boston should be ready to come out of the East, but will they? Will the young Sixers continue their ascent? As I write, Toronto is undefeated (congrats Theresa!), but the other unbeaten teams in the East are Milwaukee and Detroit! Of course, it’s early, but with so many exciting and talented young players distributed on different teams, I think the Eastern conference could be very exciting.
A week or so into the season, the one league-wide trend that has caught my eye is the marked uptick in both scoring and pace (meaning: possessions per game) this season. Though it’s early in the season, both figures are on pace to easily set historic high marks and observers have attributed this to the convergence of a number of factors, one of which is NBA officials calling defensive fouls away from the ball more closely, which obviously works to the offense’s advantage, especially given the penchant in today’s NBA for Warriors-esque action away from the ball. It’ll be interesting to see if this early offensive explosion prompts any effective defensive adjustments, provokes any kind of backlash among fans and, if so, any kind of adjustments from the League.
Finally, at a personal level, I’m always interested to see how my former University of Michigan students fare as they adjust to the demands of pro ball. As the season opened, former students of mine were playing for Brooklyn (Caris LeVert), the Knicks (Trey Burke and Tim Hardaway, Jr.), the Pistons (Glenn Robinson III), the Trailblazers (Nik Stauskas), and the Lakers (Moe Wagner). Having gotten to know these hard-working players when they were just 18 year old freshman with big NBA dreams, I’m happy to see that they have all stuck with it and are beginning, each in their own way, to make a mark.
BRJ: I too am interested in Lebron’s move and how a single player can shape so many storylines. Here in Boston, where I spend part of my time, the Celtics still appear to be built for long-term success, but the reintegration of Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward hasn’t been as seamless as fans might have hoped. Will that allow Toronto, finally, to get to the finals (and perhaps even keep Kawhi from packing his bags for LA next summer)? Or will this be the year the 76ers move from process to product? (*paging Markelle Fultz’s jump shot*)
I guess we’d be remiss if we didn’t also mention the Jimmy Butler situation (fiasco?) in Minnesota, which represents fairly well, I think, the internal and individual tensions—among players, coaches, and management—that PR-minded teams and agents usually do so well to keep out of the spotlight—but that sports journalists, when given the opportunity, just can’t seem to get enough of.
But in the interest of other stories, I want to shift directions now to talk about the politics of the NBA, especially in comparison to the NFL, which was covered in the column last month. The NFL, and especially its owners and commissioner, have (rightly, I think) been denounced for their conservative politics and failure to respond to Donald Trump’s comments about and implicit threats against players kneeling during the anthem. In contrast, some critics see the NBA as a progressive league, with younger, more liberal owners and both players and coaches who have spoken out against Trump, racial injustice, and other political issues without receiving the kind of backlash as Colin Kaepernick or Eric Reid. Is this a fair contrast? If so, how do we account for the NBA’s comparative progressive politics—or at least the impression of it?
TR: When I tell people I’m working on a project about race and professional basketball in the 1970s, they often take the opportunity to tell me that the NBA is “so much more progressive” than any other professional sports league. I think that there is some truth to this statement when you compare the NBA to the NFL. However, something about this idea that the NBA is racially progressive doesn’t sit well with me–and it doesn’t really hold water when I look at the demonization and disciplining of both black players and black style over the decades. I think that if the NBA is progressive at all, it is because they have to be. In other words, since the 1970s the majority of the players have been black, and the NBPA has had many black leaders. The global audience of basketball has become increasingly multicultural and multiracial. It is not good business to be overtly racist. That said, the NBA has been very clever about how to depoliticize and aestheticize blackness for the sake of profitability, while also containing and managing its mix of danger and respectability for its corporate partners and white fans.
YC: I absolutely agree with Theresa’s more sober view of the NBA’s much-celebrated political progressiveness. Sure, it looks great compared to the NFL, but that’s not saying much. The NBA’s racial containment strategies (e.g. the dress code), especially under former commissioner David Stern, from the late 70s through the 2000s were real and must be kept in mind. (Readers might be interested in Todd Boyd’s Young, Black, Rich & Famous, David Leonard’s After Artest and Jeffrey Lane’s Under the Boards for accounts of these dynamics.)
At the same time, I wouldn’t underestimate the power of NBA players. The NBA is a much smaller league than the NFL, and one in which individual stars have a much greater impact (not just on competitive outcomes, but on financial outcomes, and on the culture surrounding the league). I sense that over the past eight years, the players have begun to experiment with exercising the power they have. Some of these experiments have involved internal power differentials within the league (like LeBron, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh “usurping” team formation powers that had always resided with GM’s and owners) or the NBPA resisting the use of biometric devices in game play, others have involved the manifestations of racism within the NBA (the Chris Paul-led reaction to the Donald Sterling case in 2015), and of course many have involved players acting or speaking out against police lethality against black men, transphobia, Donald Trump, or just racism more generally.
I also think it’s important to note that 1) there is nothing politically retrograde in the NBA that is not also to be found in American society and 2) I’m wary of the general expectation that professional athletes have some sort of unique responsibility, different than any of the rest of us, to make the world more free and more just.
BRJ: As your answers make clear, even if the NBA is comparatively more progressive than the NFL today—which, as Yago says, is hardly a rousing endorsement—no doubt it remains an institution with a history of racism and front offices dominated by just as many white men as the NFL. Last year, Draymond Green accused one of these men, New York Knicks owner James Dolan, of having a “slave master mentality.” Meanwhile, a recent investigation into sexual harassment by former Dallas Mavericks president and CEO Terdema Ussery revealed “a corporate culture rife with misogyny and predatory sexual behavior,” followed just weeks ago by another report about sexual harassment by a Mavericks team photographer. What do these kinds of reports tell us about the league’s progressive claims?
TR: These incidents are hardly surprising to me. Racism and sexism are very much alive and well in professional basketball. All we need to do is look at someone like the LA Clippers’ former owner Donald Sterling to see that team owners (behind closed doors) still view their majority-black players as mere pawns (if not property) who are there to earn them money. Also, I was a dancer for the Toronto Raptors back in the late 1990s and can attest that aspects of toxic masculinity pervaded the league from bottom to top. That said, I don’t think there is anything exceptional about the NBA in this regard. Big-time sports leagues are all complicit in the production of anti-blackness and toxic masculinity. At the same time, they also reflect and reinforce the racism and sexism of society at large.
YC: Of course, I agree. But what do we mean by “the League” when we talk about its politics. Are we talking about the Commissioner? The various owners? The legal corporation? The players? The superstar players? The NBPA? I think we get different answers depending on who we are talking about. And, as I say, for me personally the most interesting political phenomenon over the past decade has been the increasing autonomy players are showing. I’m very curious to see what the immediate and long-term effects of this will be.
The work I did to write Ball Don’t Lie! taught me that the whatever the League administrators and owners and their corporate partners, and even some more conservative fans may want, the players make the game and it is a game that is at its most essential level on the court about getting free. I wouldn’t underestimate the cultural and political power of a group of young wealth, influential black men with a strong sense of shared interests and collective responsibility who have spent most of their lives dedicated to the embodied practice of getting free.
BRJ: It has become a common refrain that the NBA is a year-round league, with fans just as, if not more, interested in what’s happening off the court as on it—whether in free agency or the constant rumor mill about which player wants to play on which team, not to mention off-court politics and the players’ various entanglements in non-sports work. For those who love the game itself, this might seem like a sad state of affairs, but it also brings into focus something critics of course know: that the game itself is just the beginning. My question is this: is there actually anything new about the “year-round” nature of the league, or are we just more attentive to what happens beyond the games? If it is different, what has prompted the change?
TR: I don’t think there is anything particularly new about year-round reporting on the NBA and its players; however, the volume of reporting has definitely increased. I think there are a number of reasons for the uptick in coverage. Firstly, before the advent of the ABA and the players’ victory in removing the option clause as a condition of the ABA-NBA merger in 1976, there simply wasn’t as much player movement to report. (The option clause meant that a team retained the rights to a player even after the expiration of his contract. Thus, the team had full control over when a player could be re-signed, traded, or released.) Free agency has added another storyline to the sports news cycle. Since the expansion of professional basketball in the 1970s, publications have reported on players’ non-sports work—particularly the charitable, mentorship kind—because the league wanted to improve its public image. On the flipside, the press also has covered basketball players’ misdeeds, crimes, etc.—especially those of black players. However, changes to the media industry landscape have ramped up this coverage. With the move to a segmented marketplace of growing numbers of niche publications/networks, on both traditional and internet media, there is now a constant demand for more and more content. I suppose this kind of coverage might be dismaying to basketball “purists,” but it has long been part of the game.
YC: I agree with everything Theresa has said here: it’s not new, though factors like free agency and transformations in the mediascape around the game have definitely fueled an expansion in the volume of coverage and interest around both off-court and off-season happenings. My own current research (see below) is on the effect of quantification and big data analytics on the sport (i.e. the hoops version of “moneyball”) and I’ve found that this issue of year-round coverage is one of the areas of the sport’s culture impacted by the phenomenon. As in other areas of American society, big data analytics in the NBA has the explicit aim of maximizing competitive and financial efficiency. I suspect that fans and journalists know a great deal more about the financial side of the sport than they previously did and that, together with the player assessment data available to fans through the media today, it’s easier to generate (and publish) opinions about off-seasons transactions.
BRJ: It seems to me that part of the reason the league garners so much coverage beyond the games has to do with the celebrity power of today’s NBA stars, and probably no more so than LeBron. This summer, his foundation launched the “I Promise” school in Akron. Meanwhile, as many journalists have noted, his move to Los Angeles to join the Lakers seems to have as much to do with media production ambitions and life after basketball as NBA ambitions. And of course LeBron isn’t alone: we could say something similar about Kevin Durant’s move to Golden State and his ties with the Bay area startup scene, or about Russell Westbrook’s turns through the fashion world, or about Dwayne Wade’s wine business. What can we expect of the new NBA celebrities who have their sights set on personal brands and long-term non-basketball franchises? NBA players have long been spokesmen and some have gone into politics. Is the new generation—with its enormous salaries and business acumen—any different?
TR: I think the scale of their wealth and fame is certainly different. However, I was doing some reading in a 1970s-era publication called Black Sports a couple of weeks ago, which suggests that this idea of player-businessman is not so new. (Black Sports was the first major sporting publication to specifically target black readers from 1971 to 1978.) There was a monthly feature called “Taking Care of Business” that featured former professional athletes who translated their success in sports to success in the corporate world or as entrepreneurs. I think there has long been the expectation, particularly among black athletes, that they should parlay their sporting achievements into wealth and an elevated socio-economic status. When I was part of the Raptors organization back in the late 1990s, I also recall many of the players talking about side-hustles/hobbies that they hoped to turn into full-fledged businesses upon retirement. However, I do think that the players nowadays have much more access to contacts and capital to launch their own companies. What’s also interesting is the emergence of second-generation NBA stars such as Steph Curry (father Dell Curry played in the league from 1986-2002). They have an even better sense of how to work the business of basketball to their own advantage.
BRJ: Can you imagine any of today’s players going into politics? Is Lebron gearing up for a presidential run?
TR: Perhaps. Hey, if Donald Trump managed to become president, a former basketball player certainly can.
BRJ: Let’s talk more about the game itself. Even readers who don’t follow sports are likely to be familiar with the “moneyball” phenomenon that hit baseball with the publication of Michael Lewis’s book fifteen years ago in July. Has the “analytics revolution” shaped the NBA in similar ways?
TR: Obviously, some aspects of data analysis have contributed to the success of teams like the Golden State Warriors. How can one deny that the strategy of taking more three-point shots has been a good one for the Curry and the Warriors? However, I want to think about the analytics revolution in light of the ongoing negotiation of power between team owners and the players. I know that proponents of the data analytics revolution have tended to scoff at naysayers like Charles Barkley, casting them as less-evolved luddites who are simply suspicious of change. I’m no Barkley fan, but I’m wondering if part of this critique has to do with fears about the players losing control over the game. It seems as if the rise of data analytics has the potential to shift the balance of power more so in favor of the team owners, potentially taking away the autonomy and creativity of the players in practicing their craft. As Yago asks in Ball Don’t Lie, who makes the game? The league and the team owners or the players? Also, what about the invasiveness of the statistics garnered from trackers that some players now have to wear? What is the bodily autonomy of the athlete in this case? Data can be used as a means for increased surveillance, discipline, and punishment. I also wonder if the data analytics revolution may change the character of the game. What is the end goal of the game? Is it the efficiency of scoring? Is it creative, entertaining play? Are these incompatible? I’m not sure, but they’re definitely things to think about. Basketball, much like soccer, is one of the few professional team sports that encourages free-flowing play. How will data analytics impact this aspect of the game? It suggests a potential move away from the ethics and aesthetics of black streetball that have come to define modern basketball. I’m not sure this is a good thing.
YC: As I said above, I’m writing a book called Numbers Don’t Lie! Counting and What Counts in the Culture of Basketball (forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press) to explore the question of the impact of basketball analytics on NBA play and culture. It’s played out a little differently than in baseball simply because in the NBA, the use of advanced statistical methods, enabled in part by computing power, to discern hidden patterns (which was what baseball’s moneyball was about) has coincided with the use of very sophisticated digital data production technologies (such as Second Spectrum’s optical tracking cameras, installed in every NBA arena, and which capture the movement of the ball and all ten players 25 times per second, thus delivering 800,000 data points to each franchise every game) so that basketball analytics is, at this point, essentially big data analytics.
The most obvious and frequently noted impact is the continued rise of the three-point shot in response to the statistical insight that it’s greater point value, given the skills and patterns of play prevailing in the league, make it a more efficient scoring play than many two-point shots. Another major trend that is still unfolding involves the use of wearables and other kinds of biometric technologies. Currently these can only be used in training and practice. Players understandably may want to know all they can about their bodies, their tendencies, and their futures. But the use of these devices should occasion serious discussion about the ethical and political implications related to quantification, surveillance, and the use of predictive algorithms in situations (like the NBA) where power differential exists.
However, as fascinating and powerful as basketball analytics are, and as important as the political and ethical questions raised by them are, I find myself personally even more compelled by a possibly more esoteric question raised by these techniques and technologies. Let me put it to your readers this way. Nobody argues that the purpose of analytics is to minimize risk by maximizing the capacity to forecast future outcomes. In other words, when owners and GMs use the data to project career arcs for players and correlate those with financial cost-benefit analyses, when coaches use the data to make decisions about matchups and rotations, and when players use the data to make tactical and technical decisions, they are all hoping that they will not be surprised.
Now, speaking for myself, most (not all, but most) of the delight I derive from watching basketball comes from being surprised. The wonder and awe, the beauty and grace and power, that I experience when I watch basketball play depends, at least in part, on players and teams doing unexpected (and even probabilistically unadvisable) things. I feel pretty sure that chance, randomness and surprise will continue to play a role in the NBA, but I wonder how that role will change with the continued expansion and advance of various kinds of predictive technologies. The predictability of the Warriors’ dominance of the league over the past four seasons (2016 is the exception that proves this rule) may be interpreted as a sign of this.
To wit, here is a slide from a lecture I recently gave to members of International Association for the Philosophy of Sport.
Just sayin.
BRJ: The risk that probability and big data could take some of the fun out of the game by limiting surprise rings true to me. To wit, the conventional wisdom about Golden State seems to be that they can only lose in the unlikely event that one of their stars gets injured. That’s hardly the kind of surprise eagerly awaited by most fans. At the same time, one might rightly argue that the pleasure also comes from watching the game at its finest, and what could be finer than the Warriors offense? This, at least, was the argument many of Kevin Durant’s supporters made about his decision to boost this juggernaut by joining the already great team he couldn’t quite defeat.
The other argument might be that enough chance will always remain, especially for the casual fan. After all, even the best shooting teams—currently the New Orleans Pelicans(?!)—only make 50% of their shots, and so, one might argue, any play could always go either way (if you’re wondering, Pelicans star Anthony Davis is shooting over 59% after 3 games). And perhaps part of the fun is simply the work of calculating the odds—and betting on them. Earlier this month the Mavericks, following something of this logic, hired a former professional gambler as “director of quantitative research and development.” This follows the announcement, back in September, that the NBA had entered an agreement with sportsbook provider MGM Resorts, now the league’s “official gaming partner.” What does this official sanctioning of gambling signal about the league’s future ambitions? Can you see any long-term consequences for the game itself?
YC: The NBA, in its earliest years, benefited enormously from the disrepute that befell college basketball in the early 1950s as a result of the CCNY game-fixing scandal. So I certainly expect that the League will do everything possible to avoid anything like that occurring. But as my comment above suggests, everybody involved in the NBA (from owners, to GMs, to coaches, to players) are all already essentially gamblers and already using quantitative data to inform their bets. Because of this, I see the official sanctioning of gambling more like the simple addition of another revenue stream rather than some sea change in the nature of the sport.
TR: I agree with Yago. It seems like a move to create another revenue stream. Nevertheless, this discussion makes me think back to the blackballing of Connie Hawkins for nearly a decade for his suspected ties to gambling ring leader, Jack Molinas. (Molinas ran a game-fixing operation.) Because of these unsubstantiated claims, Hawkins’ was first blackballed from the NCAA and then from the NBA, which nearly destroyed his chances of playing professional basketball. Forced to play in the ABL, ABA, and for the Harlem Globetrotters, Hawkins finally sued and won a settlement from the NBA in 1969. However, by then, his best playing days were over. Against the backdrop of this move to incorporate gambling, Hawkins’ story is all the more tragic.
BRJ: Thinking more about the NBA’s future and its relationship with college athletics, last week the New York Times reported that top high school recruit Darius Bazley, having already decommitted from Syracuse to sign with the NBA’s development league (the “G League”) has now opted instead to sign a deal with New Balance that will pay him $1 million to be an intern next year while he waits to meet the minimum age requirement (19) to enter the league. This is just the latest in a long struggle over when players should be allowed to enter the league—and what role the scandal-prone NCAA should play in the development of amateur athletes. Where do you see this debate going? Is the NBA headed for a system more like Major League Baseball’s minor league? This gets us away from the NBA, but what might this mean for the college game?
TR: At face value, the age minimum strikes me as paternalistic and unjust. Moreover, I can’t help but see the age minimum rule as part of the gentlemen’s agreement between the NBA and the NCAA to preserve the interests of both leagues. For a long time, the NBA needed the NCAA and its stars and player rivalries in order to capture their fans as college players moved on to the professional game. At the same time, the NCAA relies on being the proven path to the NBA in order to replenish its talent pools and suppress labor costs. In the course of doing research covering from the 1970s to the present, I’ve found that the critiques of the NCAA acting as the NBA’s defacto farm system have been very consistent over the decades. (i.e. the academics for NCAA basketball players are a sham, the “student-athletes” involved in Division I basketball are amateur only in name, the players are being exploited, the punishments of the players are draconian while the NCAA and its teams wash their hands of any culpability of rule violations, etc.) I don’t think it would be bad thing to disrupt this gentlemen’s agreement between two organizations that act as monopolies (Taylor Branch even called the NCAA a cartel). This is what happened back in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the advent of the ABA (the NBA’s rival league from 1967-1976) and then with Spencer Haywood v. NBA (1971), which struck down the league rule that a team could not draft a player until four years after his high school graduation. Thanks to these and other disruptions of the monopolistic control of the NCAA and NBA, the players were eventually able to use their position of increased power to end the option clause. I’m not really much of a prognosticator, but rules violations are endemic to the NCAA system, so I’m not terribly sentimental about it losing some of its control over the fates of players. I think that the fact that it has survived the way it has for so long has something to with the racial makeup of the players. People don’t care; they just want to be entertained regardless of what it is doing to the players.
YC: Theresa, again, is right on the mark as far as my experience (personal and scholarly) with these issues goes. She’s also wiser than I in refraining from prognostication. But what the hell: there are so many leaks in the NCAA boat right now that I have a hard time imagining its current D1 basketball model functioning too much longer into the future. On the one hand, college athletes seem to me to be growing in their awareness of their economic power and in their willingness to exercise that power as leverage (e.g. Missouri football), while on the other hand, the recurrent scandals and generally unsavory air of corruption and racialized exploitation surrounding the NCAA I think is already spurring (and is likely to continue to prompt) various individuals and organizations (even simply entrepreneurially motivated) to imagine and attempt to implement competitive models of sub-NBA caliber basketball play. One of the most interesting of these to me is the HB league, an initiative to create a national college basketball league that would compensate the college students who played in it beyond simply covering the costs of attendance . I like it because it addresses the racist dimensions of the current situation, acknowledges the importance of the financial piece (not only to players but to investors in any viable alternative to the NCAA), and seems to be trying to value education.
BRJ: We’ll have much more to say about the NCAA in future LARB Ball pieces, but I share your sense that D1 basketball needs to change.
Thanks to both of you for taking the time to talk with me. A couple of quick questions to end: Yago’s inevitability slide aside, can anyone unseat the Warriors—or, put another way, when and how does this reign end? And for those interested in tracing some of the issues we’ve discussed in more depth, what basketball books—aside from your own, of course—should we be reading, or anticipating, this fall?
YC: I don’t see anyone knocking off the Warriors this season (barring, as you mentioned, Brian, a major injury to a member of the core). But after this season, KD is a free agent, and there’s already lots of talk of him moving on to new challenges. But even if that doesn’t happen, time, eventually catches up with every great team (such as the Spurs currently). Players age, their skills diminish even if only slightly, they become more vulnerable to minor injuries and fatigue, and in the meantime, a new cadre of young players is on the rise who are themselves exhibiting new combinations of size, athletic ability and skill that may, eventually, make the on-court innovations of Curry & Co. seem routine.
As for book recommendations, my gosh, there are so many great, thoughtful books inspired by by basketball. One of my favorites is Aram Goudsouzian’s riveting biography of Bill Russell, King of the Court, which gives a superb account not only of Russell himself, but of the overlapping contexts of sport, American society, and race that shaped Russell and that he also helped to transform in the 50s and 60s. In a different vein, the pioneering works by the FreeDarko blogging collective (The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac and The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History) are great introductions both to basketball and to the innovative creative writing that has emerged around the game in the past 15 years. I’m looking forward to Theresa’s work on the 70s, but in the meantime, I think that historian Adam Criblez’ Tall Tales and Short Shorts: Dr. J, Pistol Pete, and the Birth of the Modern NBA gives an excellent account of that pivotal decade, perhaps paired with Halberstam’s The Breaks of the Game. Boyd’s and Lane’s books that I mentioned above do an excellent job tracing the complicated intersections of race, class, and culture converging on hoops in the 80s and 90s. Among the most recent works, I think that Jonathan Abrams Boys Among Men (on the prep-to-pro generation) is not only thoroughly reported, but very beautifully written. It may in some ways be a bit outdated, but your readers might appreciate this more extensive list of my favorite basketball books that I posted a few summers ago on my blog.
TR: There is always a human element to the game, so you never know what is going to happen. As I said before, I’m not much of a fortune teller, but bodies fail, minds get side-tracked, and unforeseen circumstances are always in the wings.
As for books, I agree with Yago’s selections. A few that I would add are Sam Smith’s book on the Oscar Robertson et al v. NBA suit, Hard Labor: The Battle that Birthed the Billion-Dollar NBA, John Feinstein’s, The Punch: One Night, Two Lives, And the Fight that Changed Basketball Forever, and David J. Leonard’s After Artest: The NBA and the Assault on Blackness. My own book, tentatively titled, Black Ball: Rethinking the “Dark Ages” of Professional Basketball, is still very much a work in progress. According to popular memory, the NBA struggled during the seventies because it was too black, too violent, and too drug-infested for its majority-white audience. Black Ball critiques this declension story. It explores how professional basketball emerged as a site for public debates over black politics and culture in the late twentieth-century United States, as African American athletes not only became the demographic majority (approximately 75 percent of the players), but fought for more control over their labor. I also explore how black players changed the aesthetics and rules of the game, infusing it with the style and ethics of urban black streetball. This underlying tension played out in the form of numerous “crises” throughout the decade—over not just on-court violence and drug abuse, but also the league’s monopoly status, the option clause, and the slam dunk—as NBA league executives and team owners tried to figure out how best to market and monetize a sport now dominated by African American players. It promises to shed light on this relatively understudied era that gave rise to the modern NBA.
Source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/larb-ball-nba-roundtable/
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[Author’s note: this article was originally published on June 5, 2018.]
President Trump rescinded an invitation to the White House for the Super Bowl-winning Philadelphia Eagles on Monday, claiming it was because they “disrespected” the flag by “staying in the locker room for the playing of our National Anthem.”
As my Vox colleague Jane Coaston noted, no Eagles players stayed in the locker room or kneeled during the anthem throughout the season, but that’s not really the point.
This is just latest episode in a story that began in the summer of 2016, when then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick decided to protest police brutality and racial injustice by taking a knee during the national anthem before games.
Kaepernick’s protest, initially overlooked, ballooned into a massive national story. Soon, other players followed his lead and it became a weekly drama for the NFL. Conservative media pounced on the story, ignoring Kaepernick’s stated intentions and instead accusing him of being unpatriotic and disrespectful of the American flag.
The controversy exploded when Trump weighed in at a rally for Alabama Senate candidate Luther Strange. Before a crowd of (mostly white) Southerners, Trump fantasized about firing the protesting players. “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners … say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. He’s fired!’”
The NFL protests were always about race in America; Trump’s remarks turned them into a full-blown culture war. Since then, I’ve wondered if there’s something unique about football and the NFL that makes it a hotbed for this kind of racial tension. There’s nothing new about race and politics overlapping with sports, but football seems to be the source of the most controversy today.
I reached out to Ben Carrington, a professor of sociology and journalism at the University of Southern California and the author of Race, Sport and Politics. I asked him why NFL owners (virtually all of whom are white) are so scared of Kaepernick, and why he considers sports the “most racially tinged spectacle in modern society.”
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
Were you surprised that the Seattle Seahawks, arguably the most progressive team in the NFL, recently canceled its workout with Colin Kaepernick after he refused to say he’d stand for the anthem?
Ben Carrington
Nope, and it’ll be interesting to see if Seattle can hold on to its reputation as the most “woke” NFL team. My understanding is that the team asked Kaepernick to confirm that he wouldn’t kneel anymore. So they weren’t asking if he was actually planning to protest; they wanted a guarantee that he wouldn’t.
This is extraordinary if you think about it. The team is saying, “We’re going to restrict your rights to speech and your rights to protest, and we need you to confirm ahead of time that you’re not going to speak out on any issues as you have before.”
And this gets to the crux of the matter: It’s about power. Kaepernick has shown agency and power in speaking about political issues, which is far rarer in the NFL than it is, say, in the NBA. So this was about an organization trying to reassert its power over the player.
Sean Illing
Race and sports and politics have always overlapped, but, as you just alluded to, there seems to be something unique about football and the NFL that produces this sort of racial tension.
Ben Carrington
Well, there’s a lot going on here. NBA players have always had more power than NFL players, and there are reasons for that that we probably don’t want to go into here. But it’s worth noting that black NFL players have less collective power than black players in other sports, so that’s obviously a factor here.
But I think football also embodies certain ideals of American masculinity in a way other sports don’t. It’s a violent sport, a physical sport. And it’s replete with all these military metaphors: It’s played on a “gridiron” and there are “blitzes” and “bombs thrown into the end zone” while teams “march” down the field to conquer one another.
So it signifies, in a weird but real way, a certain notion of American militarism, American patriotism, American strength and violence, in a way that a skill game like basketball doesn’t.
“People like to talk about sports as a post-racial space in American society, but it’s probably the most racially tinged spectacle in modern society”
Sean Illing
There’s also the fact that the NBA is accepted as “black sport” in a way that the NFL isn’t. Both sports are dominated by black athletes, but the cultural significance of the NFL for white Americans is just different.
Ben Carrington
Absolutely, and it’s such a crucial point. Roughly 75 percent of the players in the NBA are black, and there are very few prominent white American males in the NBA. The NFL has a majority of black players, but it’s not the same as the NBA. And the quarterback position, which Kaepernick plays, has sort of become the last great position of the “Great White Hope.”
Going all the way back to the early 20th century with the famous black heavyweight champion boxer, there’s always been this element of the American sports world that has longed for a white person to reclaim the mantle of masculinity from black athletes.
Quarterbacks are today’s last Great White Hope. It’s a position that the average white American male can identify with to show some type of sporting supremacy in a landscape where, as that atrocious 1997 Sports Illustrated cover story said, “Whatever happened to the white athlete?”
Sean Illing
And no doubt this is something that NFL team owners are acutely aware of.
Ben Carrington
Unquestionably, and the owners still wield almost all of the power in the NFL. To circle back to your point, the real threat that Kaepernick posed isn’t that he’ll bring more attention to police brutality or racial injustice; it’s that he’ll mobilize players and encourage them to assert their rights in a way that’s similar to the NBA. That’s what really scares the NFL.
Sean Illing
I’ve often wondered how different the reaction would have been a few years ago if it were predominantly white players taking a knee to protest something President Barack Obama was doing.
Ben Carrington
But we kind of know, right? Sean Hannity would be praising them with long monologues about how brave the players are for speaking out. He’d make comparisons to Jackie Robinson, saying this is exactly what America is about. People like him would reverse the narrative and claim that soldiers die on the battlefield so that Americans can exercise their First Amendment rights.
What’s interesting to me is you have people like Laura Ingraham on Fox News telling LeBron James to “shut up and dribble,” and yet Fox News is littered with B-list actors and country singers who are posing as political experts and I don’t hear anyone telling them to “shut up and sing.”
Sean Illing
The Fox News audience is attuned to this deeper message, and so I doubt that the hypocrisy is a problem. These are the same people who hear Trump dismiss black NFL players as “sons of bitches” and know exactly what he means.
Ben Carrington
A big part of the history of US sports is this idea that sports in America are preserved for white men. That this is how sports were founded; this is how they were understood. Anyone who has gained entry into sports who aren’t white men, and that includes women, that includes people of color, had to do so with a kind of deference. And they had to be grateful that they were allowed onto our parks, onto our pitches, onto our courts, because these are our spaces.
And so when Trump says, “Wouldn’t you love to fire those sons of bitches?” he’s imagining a kind of re-segregation. He’s telling people to imagine that they’re one of these owners, that they could fire these “sons of bitches.” You don’t need to understand a ton of American history to recognize the racial politics of this moment.
People like to talk about sports as a post-racial space in American society, but it’s probably the most racially tinged spectacle in modern society.
“People like Laura Ingraham [are] on Fox News telling LeBron James to ‘shut up and dribble,’ and yet Fox News is littered with B-list actors and country singers who are posing as political experts and I don’t hear anyone telling them to ‘shut up and sing’”
Sean Illing
Something that I’ve noticed as a white guy who watches a lot of sports is the language commentators and analysts use to talk about white and black athletes. Race is always there, always looming. People call white quarterbacks “heady” or “hard-working” or “coach on the field,” and black quarterbacks are “mobile” or “athletic” or “explosive.” We’ve got all these stereotypes that are constantly reinforced with this coded language.
Ben Carrington
Yeah, and it’s powerful precisely because we deny that it’s there. We have this strange paradox in which we deny the existence of something which we know is there, and then we enjoy it partly because it’s there.
There’s a great bit by the comedian Bill Burr from a few years ago where he talks about how frustrating it is as a white guy watching how good black athletes are, and the inability of white guys to stay in the NBA. He’s like, “I just want the white guys to get out the way when the black guys are dunking on them.”
I think he taps into something real. He talks about watching the Olympics and just hoping the one token white sprinter can at least come in third. It’s hilarious, obviously, and Bill’s a great comic, but it’s a quite honest reflection of white emasculation on the one hand and loving sports on the other.
And this is part of the reason I think sports concerns and confirms the notion of racial difference more than any other cultural medium.
Sean Illing
I assume that’s a big reason why you think we should take sports more seriously as a cultural object and as a space where politics happens.
Ben Carrington
Yeah, that’s right. I think we have to expand what we mean by politics, because we tend to define it too narrowly. Politics is about Democrats and Republicans and Congress and all that, but it’s also about how we live our lives. It’s about identity.
In that sense, sports and popular culture is inherently political. I remember when Trump made his “sons of bitches” comment, I kept hearing cable news pundits say, “Why can’t we get back to speaking about politics? Why are we talking about the NFL?” I thought they were completely misunderstanding what politics is.
Trump was elected to shore up a lot of anxieties that white people have about the state and direction of the country, and that’s why the issues around Kaepernick and sports are so important. It’s part of who we are as Americans.
The games we play aren’t simply games. They’re also about identity, which is why they’re so popular. And if they didn’t tap into identity, they wouldn’t be so popular.
Original Source -> Race and football: why NFL owners are so scared of Colin Kaepernick
via The Conservative Brief
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Guía de series: Estrenos y regresos de agosto 2020
En agosto, la segunda unidad a la mitad. ¡Estamos de saldo! De nuevo, un mes algo ligero, pero nada que no hayamos visto otros años a estas alturas. Verano equivale a sequía. De todas formas, como siempre, seguro que sabéis encontrar alguna joya oculta.
¡Feliz agosto!
Leyenda:
Verde: series nuevas.
Negro: regresos de otras series.
Naranja: miniseries o series documentales.
Amarillo: tv movies, documentales, especiales o pilotos.
Morado: season finales.
Púrpura: midseason finales.
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Calendario de series
3 de agosto:
The Deceived (1T) en Channel 5
The Fugitive (1T) en Quibi
Immigration Nation en Netflix
4 de agosto: Little Birds (1T completa) en Sky Atlantic
6 de agosto:
The Rain (3T y última completa) en Netflix
An American Pickle en HBO Max
Star Trek: Lower Decks (1T) en CBS All Access
Semi-Detached (1T) en BBC Two
7 de agosto: Alta mar (3T completa) y Work It en Netflix
9 de agosto: The Alienist: Angel of Darkness (2T finale) en TNT
11 de agosto: Stargirl (1T finale) en DC Universe
12 de agosto: (Un)Well en Netflix
13 de agosto: Mandy (1T) en BBC Two
14 de agosto:
Ted Lasso (1T) en Apple TV+
3% (4T completa), Teenage Bounty Hunters (1T completa), Fearless y Project Power en Netflix
16 de agosto: Lovecraft Country (1T) en HBO
18 de agosto: The Fugitive (1T finale) en Quibi
20 de agosto: Biohackers (1T completa) en Netflix
21 de agosto:
Lucifer (5aT completa) y The Sleepover en Netflix
Chemical Hearts en Amazon
22 de agosto: Love in the Time of Corona en Freeform
23 de agosto:
The Vow en HBO
Love in the Time of Corona en Freeform
24 de agosto: Reno 911! (7bT) en Quibi
25 de agosto: Trinkets (2T y última completa) en Netflix
28 de agosto: All Together Now y Orígenes secretos en Netflix
30 de agosto: Wynonna Earp (4T midseason finale) en Syfy
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Estrenos de series
The Deceived (Channel 5)
Ophelia (Emily Reid, Belgravia, The Trouble with Maggie Cole) es una estudiante británica que se enamora de un profesor casado (Emmett J. Scanlan; The Fall, In the Flesh), viendo en él todas las respuestas a sus necesidades. La aventura resulta en una trágica muerte y Ophelia se ve atrapada en un mundo en el que ya no puede confiar en su propia mente. Completan el reparto Catherine Walker (Cursed, Versailles), Eleanor Methven (Little Women, Normal People), Ian McElhinney (Game of Thrones, Derry Girls), Shelley Conn (Liar, The Lottery) y Dempsey Bovell.
Escrita y producida por Lisa McGee (Derry Girls, Being Human) y Tobias Beer y dirigida por Chloe Thomas (Victoria, Harlots). Cuatro episodios.
Estreno: 3 de agosto
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The Fugitive (Quibi)
Es una adaptación de la película de 1993 que seguirá a Mike Ferro (Boyd Holbrook; Narcos, Logan), un hombre acusado de organizar un atentado en el metro de Los Ángeles justo seis meses después de salir de la cárcel por otro crimen. Se le puede reconocer perfectamente en las grabaciones de las cámaras de seguridad justo antes del atentado, y la periodista Pritti Patel (Tiya Sircar; The Good Place, Witches of East End) informa antes de tiempo de su autoría. Clay Bryce (Kiefer Sutherland; 24, Designated Survivor) es el agente de contraterrorismo encargado de perseguirle. Completan el reparto Natalie Martinez (Kingdom, Under the Dome), Brian Geraghty (Chicago PD, The Alienist), Genesis Rodriguez (Time After Time, Entourage), Glenn Howerton (It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, The Mindy Project), Daniel David Stewart (Catch-22) y Keilani Arellanes (Euphoria).
Escrita y producida por Nick Santora (Prison Break, Scorpion). Catorce episodios.
Estreno: 3 de agosto
Estreno en España: 3 de agosto en Quibi
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Little Birds (Sky Atlantic)
Inspirada en la colección de historias eróticas de Anaïs Nin, publicadas póstumamente en 1979, sigue a Lucy Savage (Juno Temple; Dirty John, Vinyl), una americana recién llegada a Tánger en 1955 que desea liberarse de la prisión en la que le ha mantenido la sociedad y consigue la dolorosa pero necesaria independencia al mismo tiempo que el país. Participan también Rossy de Palma (Julieta, Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios), Hugh Skinner (Fleabag, W1A), Nina Sosanya (Marcella, Last Tango in Halifax), Jean-Marc Barr (Dancer in the Dark, The Cellar), David Costabile (Billions, Breaking Bad), Amy Landecker (Transparent, Doctor Strange), Matt Lauria (Kingdom, Parenthood), Yumna Marwan (Submarine) y Raphael Acloque (24: Legacy).
Escrita por Sophia Al-Maria (The Girl Who Fell to Earth) y dirigida por Stacie Passon (The Path, Transparent). Seis episodios.
Estreno: 4 de agosto
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Semi-Detached (BBC Two)
Comedia en tiempo real que sigue a Stuart (Lee Mack, Not Going Out), un perdedor que está malgastando su vida en un barrio de las afueras. Solo quiere una vida tranquila como DJ de bodas, pero su familia parece tener otros planes. En el piloto, ya emitido, su esposa April (Ellie White; The Windsors, The Other One) se ponía de parto, y Stuart debía pedirle ayuda al novio de su exmujer (Patrick Baladi; Marcella, Breeders), que vive en el barrio, para llegar al hospital. Con Neil Fitzmaurice (Brassic, Mount Pleasant), Clive Russell (Game of Thrones, Cursed), Samantha Spiro (Sex Education, London Spy), Sarah Hoare (Chewing Gum) y Geoff McGivern (Quiz, Free Rein).
Creada por David Crow y Oliver Maltman y dirigida por Ben Palmer (The Inbetweeners, Breeders). Seis episodios.
Estreno: 6 de agosto
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Mandy (BBC Two)
El sueño de Mandy es criar perros dóberman. Para superar los obstáculos que se lo impiden, intenta llevar una vida más saludable, alquila su habitación en Airbnb y coge varios trabajos de corta duración y sueldo escaso. Por suerte, cuenta con Lola (Michelle Greenidge; After Life, Code 404), su amiga y confidente del salón de manicura.
Escrita, dirigida y protagonizada por Diane Morgan (After Life, Frayed). Seis episodios. Estreno: 13 de agosto
Ted Lasso (Apple TV+)
Ted Lasso es un personaje que creó Jason Sudeikis (Saturday Night Live) en 2013 para cubrir la Premier League en NBC Sports. Es un entrenador de fútbol americano universitario de Kansas. Repitiendo la idea, Ted es contratado por un equipo inglés de fútbol (soccer) pese a su nula experiencia. Le acompañarán Hannah Waddingham (Game of Thrones, Sex Education), Brendan Hunt (Bless This Mess), Jeremy Swift (Downton Abbey, Wanderlust), Juno Temple (Dirty John, Vinyl), Brett Goldstein (Uncle, Drifters), Phil Dunster (Humans, Strike Back), Stephen Manas, Colin Blyth (The Crown), Bronson Webb (Strike, The Aliens) y Nick Mohammed (Uncle, Drifters).
Idea original de Sudeikis y Bill Lawrence (Scrubs, Cougar Town). Diez episodios. Estreno: 14 de agosto Estreno en España: 14 de agosto en Apple TV+ España
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Teenage Bounty Hunters (Netflix)
Sterling (Maddie Phillips; Van Helsing, Supernatural) y Blair (Anjelica Bette Fellini; The Gifted, The French Dispatch) son dos hermanas mellizas de dieciséis años que se alían con un cazarrecompensas (Kadeem Hardison; Black Monday, Love Is___) y conocerán qué es saltarse las normas mientras experimentan el amor y el sexo adolescente.
Creada por Kathleen Jordan (American Princess), escrita por Robert Sudduth (On My Block, American Princess) y producida por Jenji Kohan (Orange Is the New Black, Weeds).
Estreno: 14 de agosto Estreno en España: 14 de agosto en Netflix España
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Lovecraft Country (HBO)
Adaptación de la novela de terror de Matt Ruff (2016) en la que tres afroamericanos viajan por Estados Unidos en los años 50 enfrentándose tanto al racismo de los blancos como a espíritus malvados. Leti Dandridge (Jurnee Smollett-Bell; Underground, Friday Night Lights) es una artista que quiere echar raíces tras protestar por los derechos civiles a través de todo el país. Le acompañan Atticus Black (Jonathan Majors; When We Rise, Hostiles), que está buscando a su padre (Michael Kenneth Williams; The Wire, Hap and Leonard); y su tío George (Courtney B. Vance; American Crime Story, Law & Order: Criminal Intent).
Completan el reparto Wunmi Mosaku (The End of the F***ing World, Kiri), Aunjanue Ellis (Quantico, Designated Survivor), Jamie Chung (The Gifted, Once Upon a Time), Jordan Patrick Smith (Vikings, Neighbours), Jamie Neumann (The Deuce, Jessica Jones), Erica Tazel (Justified, The Good Fight), Mac Brandt (Kingdom, Arrested Development), Tony Goldwyn (Scandal, Ghost), Abbey Lee (Mad Max: Fury Road), Marcus A. Griffin Jr., Chase Brown y Jada Harris .
Escrita por Misha Green (Underground) y producida por Jordan Peele (Get Out) y J.J. Abrams (Castle Rock, Westworld). Ocho episodios.
Estreno: 16 de agosto Estreno en España: 17 de agosto en HBO España
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Biohackers (Netflix)
Mia (Luna Wedler; Dem Horizont so nah, Blue My Mind) decide estudiar medicina en una importante universidad alemana para acercarse a una profesora (Jessica Schwarz) que podría estar relacionada con su tragedia familiar, pero acaba inmersa en un peligroso mundo lleno de experimentos genéticos ilegales y tendrá que decidir entre la venganza y proteger a sus nuevos amigos.. Con Thomas Prenn (8 Tage), Adrian Julius Tillmann, Caro Cult (Babylon Berlin), Jing Xiang, Sebastian Jakob Doppelbauer y Benno Fürmann (Babylon Berlin, Hanna).
Escrita y dirigida por Christian Ditter (Girlboss, Vorstadtkrokodile). Seis episodios.
Estreno: 20 de agosto Estreno en España: 20 de agosto en Netflix España
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Love in the Time of Corona (Freeform)
Limited series sobre la búsqueda del amor y el sexo en tiempos de distanciamiento social. Con Leslie Odom Jr. (Smash, Person of Interest), Nicolette Robinson (The Affair, Hart of Dixie), Tommy Dorfman (13 Reasons Why, Jane the Virgin), Rainey Qualley, Gil Bellows (Ally McBeal, Patriot), Rya Kihlstedt (Charmed, One Mississippi), Ava Bellows y L. Scott Caldwell (Lost, How to Get Away with Murder)
Grabado desde las casas reales de sus protagonistas. Escrita por Joanna Johnson (The Fosters, Good Trouble) y producida por Christine Sacani (The Fosters, Good Trouble) y Robyn Meisinger (Prisoners, Slender Man). Cuatro episodios.
Estreno: 22 de agosto
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