#and that helped me realize where the miss fisher treatment fell short 4 me.

[olreid]

ok i think what i was (poorly) trying to get at in that original miss fisher post is the way the show really only takes like. three and a half people seriously as full people who are responding intelligently to the particular qualities of the world around them and then the rest of the cast are like. comedy props. thinking particularly about the way dot's religiousness generally serves as a punchline to the joke about the contrast between her backward beliefs and practical nature rather than a jumping off point to experience what was compelling to people in that particular context about organized faith... also the way bert and cec are introduced as communists but it feels like that's because the show was like. well, there were communists then, so here are some! rather than trying to explore what conditions might have produced communist organizing in the 1920s.. anyway,

of course i understand that a tv show is almost never going to focus on everyone equally but it just seems like a lazy approach to be like. well the character that we've given the most 'modern' beliefs is the one who is most portrayed as a fully realized & complex person because of course no thinking person would believe anything Other than what we believe today.. and then the farther away a given character gets from our current way of looking at things, the less time we spend exploring what conditions might have produced their beliefs.

it's also not like a nuanced exploration of the political realities of the 1920s was necessarily ever on the agenda for what is ultimately just supposed to be a like comfortingly structured detective show or whatever but i just think that sometimes you read or watch someone's historical fiction and you can FEEL that, whether consciously or not, they subscribe to a linear conception of history and can't actually fathom the fact that each period has been populated with people who were every bit as sentient and capable as we are. not that miss fisher is like a particularly egregious example of this belief but it is the one i watched the most recently, so.

anyway! historical gimmick show fails to properly historicize human behavior & ultimately creates a fetish of out of progressivism, inadvertently positing that if you're a good enough or smart enough person you will naturally arrive at certain 'modern' beliefs regardless of your time period or historical context when that's just like. really not how anything works. more at 10