#sorry Cole and Anthony supporters

[new-berry]

Pretty much every pic is Cole staring at Levi

[sincerelyreidburke]

Hey again! So like, you are under no obligation, and I send you too many asks anyway but... if you're down for writing Spencer's reaction to A FROSH GETTING EVAN THE AUDACITY I would be so pleased :) lol

First of all: you don’t send me too many asks. I believe the phrase you’re looking for is “I enable you to write fun things often”. Which is highly encouraged, in this establishment.

Second: yes. And for those who aren’t Via, let me enlighten you. Spencer is a Kiersey College drama club OC, part of the group of characters I created to enhance Quinn’s college drama club experience (and to have more fun on “Quinn Theatre Hours” Monday nights). You can read a comprehensive introduction to the drama club cast in this fic, which tells the story of the week leading up to Quinn’s casting in Dear Evan Hansen his freshman year.

Spencer is... hm, how shall we say. A giant asshole. He’s a junior theatre kid who fully expects that the role of Evan will land neatly in his lap. This ficlet depicts as much. It takes place pretty much simultaneously with the casting fic I linked to above.

This is also a precursor of sorts to a longer drama club fic, which I’m working on, that Via has also asked after. Stay tuned for that, because there is where you’ll see some serious, well... drama.

Until then: Spencer can choke. I’m entertained by the fact that I’m now being asked to write things from the point of view of the bully. Here’s what you asked for!

//

Today is going to be an amazing day.

And here’s why. Spencer has been waiting— all week, certainly, but also for months, even since the school year began, to see something he finally gets to see today. During all three of his years at Kiersey, the spring musical has been something to look forward to, but especially this year, with so much riding on it. Today, the cast list goes up for the biggest show of his life. Today, he confirms his place in a  role he’s been dreaming of playing for months. Today, he starts to lead this year’s cast.

He knows that the show was chosen for him. Dr. C is notorious for it— she’s not shy about choosing shows based on who she has available for casting. It’s resourceful, Spencer has told her time and again; after all, you have to work with what you have. It’s like how she chose Book of Mormon last year for him— well, and for Reid, he guesses, but mostly for him. And how the director at his and Kelsie’s high school chose Thoroughly Modern Millie for the two of them their senior year.

He planted the seed for Dear Evan Hansen in Dr. C’s head last spring, an offhanded mention in a conversation, right around the time Book of Mormon was closing. He forwarded her a few articles over the summer, just to jog her interest, and he and Kelsie even went to New York to see the show in June, so he typed up a review and sent it her way. When he arrived on campus this past fall, he was thrilled to hear she’d taken his advice. It would be their spring 2018 show.

His audition went just as expected, and he read for Evan during his callback. So this morning, when he rolls out of bed at five-thirty sharp, it’s the first thing on his mind, without a doubt in it. Today is the day he starts being Evan Hansen.

He deserves this.

To start his great day, he grabs a morning workout, like always. In the gym, he sees one of the freshmen who auditioned, using an elliptical and wearing pink leggings. She has curly, golden blond hair piled into a high ponytail, full lips, and tan skin. Her name is… Maddie? Mallory? He isn’t sure, but what does it matter anyway. She was in callbacks with him last night, and she wasn’t projecting well.

So he doesn’t say hello, and doesn’t even think she’ll notice him until he passes her as he’s leaving. She’s refilling a water bottle with stickers all over it, and she waves. “Hey, Spencer.”

“Oh!” He pretends to be surprised. “Hi, Maddie.”

“Uh.” She chuckles a little, and shakes her head. “It’s— Maggie, actually.”

“Oh. Sorry about that.” He stops in front of her, and bends down— she’s a little short— to deliver a word for the wise. “Hey, by the way… don’t take it too hard if you aren’t cast in a bigger role today.” She arches an eyebrow, and he continues, because she ought to know. “There just aren’t a lot of roles that would fit… you, y’know?”

It doesn’t look like Maggie understands what he means, but she shrugs and folds her arms, all standoffish. “Well, good luck to you, too.”

“Thank you!” He flashes a smile. “It’s always great to see beginners joining the musical.”

Maggie purses her lips and scowls as he turns to go. Huh. What a bitch. He was only telling her what she needed to hear.

Well, it’s her loss. Freshmen rarely ever get speaking roles. And it’s not like Zoe is going to anybody besides Kelsie.

He texts his girlfriend on the way out of the gym. Kelsie is an early riser, too, but she doesn’t work out in the morning like he does. By now, in her morning routine, she’ll be through with her shower and doing her hair.

They meet for breakfast every morning, but this morning, it’ll be a quick affair. The cast list goes up at 9:00 sharp in the Beckett Performing Arts Center lobby, and they have every intention to be the first ones there.

So Spencer showers and gets dressed, donning a blue shirt for the occasion. He meets up with Kelsie in the lobby of their dorm, and they walk to the dining hall hand-in-hand, leaving right around 8:00. It’s sunny out today, but still freezing cold.

“So,” she asks him, as they stroll down the sidewalk. “Any bold predictions?” She pauses to grin and bump against his hip, as she adds, “Besides the obvious.”

Spencer beams. He loves their relationship for so many reasons, but especially because they support each other so well. “Well,” he begins, pulling his stocking cap down on his head. “I think Reid is a dead ringer for Jared.” Which will be easy, because although Reid is unfunny at best, Spencer is used to working with him; he got well accustomed to it on Book of Mormon.

“Oh, absolutely.” Kelsie nods. “And I think… Claire, as Heidi? I can’t be sure, but—” She pauses for an exaggerated eyeroll, which is absolutely warranted, because Claire is such a goody two-shoes it’s insufferable. “I know Dr. C likes giving her principal roles.”

“Which I, for one, do not understand,” he quips.

“Tell me about it.” Kelsie sighs, then shakes her head. “But I could see Claire going that way.”

“I could, as well.” He pauses, racks his brain of the names on the audition list. He checked it religiously, to see who was trying to get involved, even after he had secured his spot as first on the list. “And… hm… alright, I’m not saying I’d like to see Danny Cho as Larry, but given they didn’t run his part in callbacks at all last night…”

“Mm,” Kelsie hums. “I think you’re right. That’s a shame. His singing is suspect at best.”

“And his acting…” He sighs. “I hope he can pull it off.”

“Maybe he can.” Kelsie swings his hand a little, and they sidestep for a rushing student who must be late to their eight-AM class. When they regain sidewalk space, she looks to him, smoothing her bangs, and asks, “And Connor?...”

“Hm.” Spencer’s mind lands on someone, but it’s an underwhelming thought. “Cole?”

“Oh.” Kelsie pauses, like she forgot he existed. Which is easy to do, because Cole, the sophomore he’s thinking of, is quiet and irrelevant. Spencer was surprised to see him audition; he played guitar in the pit for Book of Mormon, and from there he always assumed he was a fly-under-the-radar type. But he read all of Connor’s parts in callbacks. “Well, he has the look.”

“It’s a typecast,” he agrees. “He seems… sketchy?”

“Right? Kind of a weirdo,” Kelsie says. She raises an eyebrow at him, and asks, “Do you think you could work with him?”

“Well, it isn’t like I’ll have much of a choice,” he remarks. “But who knows? Maybe someone else will get Connor.”

“Maybe.” Kelsie pauses, then smiles and says, “You can do it.”

He kisses her cheek, as they walk along. “Thank you.”

From there, they move onto a rehearsal schedule tangent. It’s not until they’re almost at the dining hall that casting gets brought up again. “What about that kid?” Kelsie asks, suddenly, almost laughing. “The really short one, the freshman? Could he beat out Cole or Danny?”

“Oh…” Spencer thinks he knows who she means. “Scarf kid?” When she nods, he laughs out loud. “I highly doubt he’ll be seeing the cast list. I mean, Kels, he’s a freshman.”

“That’s true.” She shrugs. “You did get Anthony freshman year, though…”

He straightens a little as he walks, because it still makes him proud to think about Sweeney Todd freshman year. “I reserve myself as a small exception to the rule.”

Kelsie grins. “You’re gonna be great, babe,” she says, and even though he knows he will be, it still feels nice to hear it.

Breakfast is very nice. He has scrambled eggs and sausage patties from the grill, and she has a fruit salad with unsweetened tea, in accordance with her New Year’s weight-loss diet. They have a breakfast table in the corner, by tradition, and they even see Reid when they’re in there. He’s eating with his girlfriend, and flashes jazz hands at the both of them, with a grin. “Happy casting day!”

Spencer wonders, just slightly, if Reid has seen the cast list yet. He may be a student, but he’s drama club president all the same, and maybe he has pre-existing knowledge. But on second thought, Spencer doesn’t think Dr. C would do that. She doesn’t even give him advance knowledge of casting, and he would venture to call himself her favorite student.

So he just waves to Reid, because he and Kelsie are on their way out. “Morning, Reid.” There’s something like a shit-eating grin on Reid’s face, so he can’t resist asking. “Have you seen the list yet?”

“Oh, yeah, dude!” Reid kicks back in his chair. “Didn’t you hear the good news? I’m Evan!”

Spencer’s soul leaves his body. “You— I’m sorry, what?”

“I’m so excited.” Reid smooths out his hair before he dusts off his graphic tee. “Tell me— do you think I’ll look good in striped blue?”

This is not real life. “You can’t be serious.”

“No, tell him, Bri!” Still grinning, Reid looks to his girlfriend, this chubby art student who always has ceramic work on display in the admissions lobby. “Weren’t we just discussing how lovely my angelic voice will sound on Words Fail?”

Bri nods, with her chin in her hands. “Oh, for sure.”

Reid throws his hands up, all smiles. “See?”

Kelsie steps forward, like she’s about to say something. And just as Spencer’s heart is set to beat out of his chest, Reid doubles over and bursts out laughing. “Jesus, Spencer,” he says, smacking the table. “I’m just fucking with you, dude. Could you not tell I was joking?”

“Well, he’s a little on edge,” Kelsie cuts in. “We both are.”

Reid shrugs, putting his hands behind his head like his dining hall chair is actually a lounge chair on the beach. “Well,” he remarks. “I have seen the list, but it’s not up for another…” He glances at the big clock on the wall in the dining room. “Fourteen minutes, so you won’t hear any leaks from me.”

“Wait, really?” he asks. “Have you actually seen it.”

Reid shrugs, making a face like he’s just been instructed to ‘do a silly one’ in a family portrait.

Spencer hates Reid Burke. He’s never really been sure about this fact until today. It’s partly the fact that Reid is still kind of grinning, like this is some big joke— Reid treats everything like a big joke— and partly the fact that he knows, even if he resorted to groveling (which he will not), that he truly won’t get any leaks out of him. Even with fifteen minutes left until he’ll see it himself, it’s tantalizing to know that Reid is sitting right here with full knowledge of the cast, and won’t say a word.

And by the way, what the hell, Dr. C? Since when does she leak the cast list to students?

But standing here being mad at Reid isn’t going to make the list go up faster, so he rolls his eyes, as Reid zips his lips, and says, “Well, I’ll see you later.”

“Bye,” Kelsie adds, like she is less than enthused that she wasted three minutes of her life on this useless conversation. Which is exactly how Spencer feels.

“Idiot,” he mutters, as they walk away, and doesn’t even care if he’s in earshot. “He almost gave me a heart attack.”

“Spence,” Kelsie says, taking his hand to squeeze it. “You know you have nothing to worry about.”

“I know,” he replies, because she’s right, “but what’s up with Dr. C letting Reid see the list early? How does that work? I practically picked the show—”

“It’s bullshit,” she replies, as they bust their breakfast trays. “You should say something to her, later.”

“I think I will,” he says. He’s already planning what he’ll say, as they leave the dining hall and head at a brisk pace in the direction of Beckett. It’s a quick walk, fueled by both of their adrenaline, and when they reach the double doors, Spencer takes one last breath of crisp winter air before walking inside.

Dr. C is in the lobby, crossing from the direction of Beck 1C, where the board is, back toward her office. She’s in a multicolored knit sweater, and she holds her head high, a surefire sign she just did something important. “Good morning, Dr. C,” he says, with a chipper wave. “Is the list up? We wanted to be the first ones to see it.”

“Yes.” Dr. C nods, adjusting her glasses as she stops a moment to talk to them. “It was definitely difficult to cast, and… some people may not be happy, but it’s the best fitting for the programme, as we say.”

Her wording is cryptic, but it always is. Two and a half years in her inner circle, and he knows her well. “Ah, I’m sure you picked the right people,” he says, with a wink.

Dr. C looks between him and Kelsie, then nods. “I’m confident I did,” she says, and it gives him an extra thrill of excitement. A quick glance to Kelsie and she’s smiling like she won the lottery. “Have a nice morning, you two!” Dr. C says, as she starts for her office again.

Kelsie blows her a kiss, and Spencer waves. When they meet eyes again, he takes her hand, and looks to the corner where the bulletin board is.

“Ready?” she asks him.

It’s time.

“Never more ready,” he replies, and together, they walk to the board with its promised sheet of paper.

The anticipation is adrenaline enough. Spencer knows what he’ll find on the list, but is still eager to get to it, to see his name at the top. They round the corner, and there’s the list, fresh white against the board’s maroon paper base. It’s only a few more steps.

When they get there, Kelsie sees it first. She leans forward, then recoils, like she’s been burned. “What?!” she cries, loud enough to be heard inside the actual auditorium.

“Kels? What’s wrong?” He wonders if Claire beat her out for Zoe. He consults the list to investigate, and— and— oh.

Right around then is when the world stops turning.

*

“Quinn Cooper?” Kelsie is staring at the list, her arms crossed over her chest, a permanent scowl etched on her perfect face. “The scarf freshman? Are they kidding?”

Spencer feels frozen. He stares at the list in disbelief, reads it up and down again and again. He feels like he’s been standing here for twenty minutes, but it’s probably only been two or three.

DEAR EVAN HANSEN

Cast & Crew List

Evan Hansen: Quinn Cooper

Connor Murphy: Cole Kolinsky

Zoe Murphy: Claire Deshaies

Heidi Hansen: Allison Halterman

Larry Murphy: Daniel Cho

Jared Kleinman: Reid Burke

Cynthia Murphy: Kelsie Wilkes

Alana Beck: Maggie Atkins

U/S Evan: Spencer Bergen

It’s fake. One of Reid’s practical jokes. They’re all out to play a big junior-year prank on him. Everyone is in on it. Including the scarf freshman.

There’s. No. Way.

“This is—” Kelsie sputters, then shakes her head. “I can’t believe this.”

“I won’t believe this,” he says, speaking for the first time since he saw the list. “There has to be some kind of mistake.”

“Um, I would sure hope so,” she says, popping the p in ‘hope’. “This is— this is a joke.”

Quinn Cooper. The freshman the size of a hobbit. Who wears scarves to every drama club meeting. Who’s barely been at Kiersey for half a year. Who just stole the role of his dreams right out from under him.

Spencer absolutely cannot believe this. “I have to talk to Dr. C,” he says, and it’s more an out-loud realization than anything, but he turns on his heel and marches straight for her office as soon as the words are out. “Like. Right now.”

*

But talking to Dr. C is a useless affair. “I work with what I’m given, Spencer,” she says, sitting behind her desk like some kind of supervillain, more closed-off to him than he’s ever seen her. “The cast may not look exactly how you imagined it, but some of the newer students showed real promise this year.”

“But Dr. C—” He paces in front of her desk. “I suggested the show. I practiced all summer. I thought for sure—”

“Spencer, I chose the show on my own accord,” she says, evenly. “It’s true I take input from students, but that has no bearing on my casting decisions.”

He throws his hands in the air. “But you have to see how this is unfair to me—”

“I think,” she cuts in, in this icy tone that’s usually reserved for people who fuck up majorly, and never for him, not in his entire time at Kiersey, “that once you see how the cast falls together, you’ll respect the casting decisions I made as your director.”

He sputters and rants, but he doesn’t dare disrespect her, no matter how much she’s betrayed him.

And so it goes. He’s lost out on his role, in his spring musical, to some no-name freshman who probably can’t even belt.

And just in case there needed to be a cherry on top, he’s his understudy. Of all things. How humiliating.

Spencer’s life is over.

It’s not until much later that day, when he’s sulking in Kelsie’s dorm room, mourning his lost musical season, that the idea for a solution crosses his mind.

It’s sort of her idea, but sort of his. She, at least, brings it up. “Spence,” she says, nudging his arm. He’s been scrolling mindlessly through Twitter for who knows how long, while she flips through her newly acquired script. “Y’know… you’re his understudy.”

“Well, jeez, Kels, I hadn’t noticed,” he snaps, dropping his phone onto the bed. “Thanks for reminding me.”

“That wasn’t my point,” she replies, scowling. “What I meant was… you’re his understudy.”

He knows she isn’t stupid enough to say the same thing twice over, so he tries to read her meaning. She’s gesturing, like she wants him to get it, and on top of the day he’s had, he doesn’t appreciate being made to feel like an idiot. He’s about to tell her as much when something dawns on him.

Something in the form of very, very useful knowledge. “And that means…” he says. “I perform if he can’t.”

A wise smile crosses Kelsie’s face. “Exactly.”

“So all we have to do is…” He nods. It’s taking shape in his head now. His spring musical season may not be completely lost.

Kelsie’s fingernails dance over his knee. “You’re getting it.”

“Figure out a way to inhibit his ability to perform,” he finishes. He loves her so much. “Kels. You’re right.”

“I’m right?” Her smile goes innocent. “What are you talking about, babe? That was all your idea.”

For the first time since before the saw the list, he smiles, too. He wonders if he looks as conniving as he feels. “I might be able to figure this out,” he says.

“That you might,” she replies, with a nod. “All we have to do is figure out what that looks like.”

To save his musical, Spencer is very much willing to figure that out.

[scifrey]

In February of 2017 I had the great pleasure of addressing the Grant MacEwan University English Department with a keynote speech titled “Your Voice is Valid.”

This speech was all about Mary Sues, fandom, and marginalized voices, and is a direct response to the negative reactions that media texts receive when they announce a protagonist that is deemed to be a "Mary Sue".

In the intervening years I think the message of my talk has become even more vital to creators, so I thought I’d record a  new video of the speech to share with a wider audience.

 If you liked this video, you can find more of my writing advice on my website.

Read the full speech on Wattpad, or below:

(Text may not match the video exactly as I did alter some of the phrasing.)

*

My friends, I have a declaration to make. A promise. A vow, if you will. And it is this:

If I hear one more basement-dwelling troll call the lead female protagonist of a genre film a ‘Mary Sue’ one more time, I’m going to scream.

I’m sure you’ve all seen this all before. A major science fiction, fantasy, video game, novel, or comic franchise or publisher announces a new title. Said new title features a lead protagonist who is female, or a person of color, or is not able-bodied, or is non-neurotypical, or is LGBTQA+.

It might be the new Iron Man or Spider-man, who are both young black teenagers in the comics now, or the Lt. Michael Burnham of Star Trek: Discovery, or the new Ms. Marvel, a Muslim girl. It could be Jyn Erso, the female lead of the latest Star Wars film or Chirrut, her blind companion. It could be the deaf FBI Director Gordon Cole from Twin Peaks or Clint Barton from Fraction and Aja’s Hawkeye graphic novel series. It could be Sara, of Dragon Age fame or Samantha Traynor from Mass Effect, both lesbians, or Dorian also from Dragon Age, who is both a person of color and flamboyantly queer. Maybe it’s Lt. Stamets and Dr. Hugh Culber, played by Anthony Rapp of (best known for his time as Mark in Rent) and Wilson Cruz, both open out gay men playing openly out gay men in a romantic relationship in Star Trek Discovery. It could be Captain Christopher Pike, from both the original Star Trek series and the reboot film, who uses a wheelchair and assistive devices to communicate. Or maybe it’s Bucky Barnes, aka the Winter Soldier, fights with a prosthetic arm in the comics, or Iron Man, whose suit serves as Tony Stark’s ego-tastic pacemaker.

And generally, the audience cheers at this announcement. Yay for diversity! Yay for representation! Yay for working to make the worlds we consume look more like the world we live in! Yay!

But there’s a certain segment of the fan population that does not celebrate.

I’m sure you all know what I’m talking about.

This certain brand of fan-person gets all up in arms on social media. They whine. They complain. They say that it’s not appropriate to change the gender, race, orientation, or physical abilities of a fictional creation, or just protest their inclusion to begin with. They decry the erosion of creativity in service of neo-liberalism, overreaching political-correctness, and femi-nazis. (Sorry, sorry – the femi-“alt-right”).

It’s not realistic. “Women can’t survive in space,” they say, “It’s just a fact.” (That is a direct quote, by the way.) “Superheroes can’t be black,” they say. “Video game characters shouldn’t have a sexual orientation,” unless – it seems - that sexual orientation is straight and the game serves to support a male gaze ogling at half-dressed pixilated prostitutes.

“And strong female characters have to wear boob armor. It’s just natural,” they say.

These fan persons predict the end of civilization because things are no longer being done the way they’ve always been done. “There’s nothing wrong with the system,” they say. “So don’t you dare change it.”

And to enforce this opinion, to ensure that it’s really, really clear just how much contempt this certain segment of the fan population holds for any lead protagonist that isn’t a white, heterosexual, able-bodied, neurotypical, cismale, they do everything they can to tear down them down.

They do this by calling that character a ‘Mary Sue.’

When fan fiction author Paula Smith first used the term ‘Mary Sue’ in her 1973 story A Trekkie’s Tale, she was making a commentary on the frequent appearance of original characters in Star Trek fan fiction. Now, I’m going to hazard that most of these characters existed as a masturbatory avatar – wanna bone Spock? (And, um, you know, let’s face it who didn’t?) They you write a story where a character representing you gets to bone Spock.

And if they weren’t a sexual fantasy, then they were an adventure fantasy. Wanna be an officer on the Enterprise? Well, it’s the flagship of the Starfleet, so you better be good enough to get there. Chekov was the youngest navigator in Starfleet history, Uhura is the most tonally sensitive officer in linguistics, and Jim Kirk’s genius burned like a magnesium flare – your self-representative character would have to keep up to earn thier place on that bridge. This led to a slew of hyper sexualized, physically idealized, and unrealistically competent author-based characters populating the fan fiction of the time.

But inserting a trumped-up version of yourself into a narrative wasn’t invented in the 1970s. Aeneas was totally Virgil’s Mary Sue in his Iliad knock off. Dante was such a fanboy of the The Bible that he wrote himself into an adventure exploring it. Robin Hood’s merry men and King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table kept growing in number and characteristics with each retelling. Even painters have inserted themselves into commissioned pictures for centuries.

This isn’t new. This is not a recent human impulse.

But what Paula Smith and the Mary Sue-writing fan ficcers didn’t know at the time was that they were crystallizing what it means to be an engaged consumer of media texts, instead of just a passive one. They had isolated and labelled what it means to be so affected by a story, to love it so much that this same love bubbles up out of you and you have to do something about it, either in play, or in art. For example: in pretending to be a ninja turtle on the play ground, or in trying to recreate the perfect version of a star fleet uniform to wear, or in creating art and making comics depicting your favorite moments or further adventures of the characters you love, or writing stories that encompass missing moments from the narratives.

‘Mary Sues’ are, at their center, a celebration of putting oneself and one’s own heart, and one’s own enjoyment of a media text, first.

Before I talk about why this certain segment of the fan population deploys the term ‘Mary Sue’ the way it does, let’s take a closer look at this impulse for participatory play.

Here’s the sixty four thousand dollar question: where do ‘Mary Sues’ come from?

I’d like you take a moment to think back at the sorts of games you enjoyed when you were about seven years old. Think back. Picture yourself outside, playing with your siblings, or the neighbour’s kids or you cousins. What are you doing? Playing ball games, chase games, and probably something with a narrative? Are you Power Rangers? Are you flying to Neverland with Peter Pan? Are you fighting Dementors and Death Eaters at Hogwarts? Are you the newest members of One Direction, are you Jem and the Holograms or the Misfits? Are you running around collecting Pokémon back before running around and collecting Pokémon IRL was a thing?

That, guys, gals and non-binary pals, is where Mary Sues come from. That’s it. It’s as easy as that.

As a child you didn’t know that modern literary tradition pooh-poohs self-analogous characters, or that realism was required for depth of character. All you knew was that you wanted to be a part of that story, right.  If you wanted to be a train with Thomas and Friends, then you were a train. If you wanted to be a magic pony from Equestria, you were a pony. Or, you know, if you were trying to appease two friends at once, then you were a pony-train.

Self-insert in childhood games teach kids the concept of elastic play, and this essential ability to imagine oneself in skins that are not one’s own, and to stretch and reshape narratives is what breeds creativity and storytelling. It shapes compassion.

Now, think of your early stories. As a child we all told and wrote stories about doing what, to us, were mundane everyday things - like getting ice cream with the fictional characters we know and love.

My friend’s three year old tells his father bed time stories about going on walks through Home Hardware with his friends, the anthropomorphized versions of the local taco food truck and the commuter train his dad takes to work every morning. He doesn’t recognize the difference between real and fictional people (or for him, in this case, the stand-ins that are the figures that loom large in his life right now as a three year old obsessed with massive machines). When you ask him to tell you a story, he talks about these fictions as if they’re real. And he does not hesitate to insert himself into the tale. “I did this. I did that. We went there and then had this for lunch.” He is present in all his own stories because, at this age, he understands the world only from his limited personal POV.

As we grow up, we do learn to differentiate between fantasy and reality. But, I posit that we never truly loose that “me too!” mentality. We see something amazing happening on the screen, or on the page, or on a playing field, and we want to be there, a part of it.

So we sort ourselves into Hogwarts Houses. We choose hockey teams to love, and we wear their jerseys.  We buy ball caps from our favorite breweries. We line up for hours to be the first to watch a new release or to buy a certain smartphone. We collect stamps and baseball cards and first editions of Jane Austen and Dan Brown. We want to be a part of it. Our capitalist, consumer society tells us to prove our love with our dollars, and we do it.

And for fan creators, we want to be a part of it so badly that we’re willing to make more of it. Not for profit, but for sheer love. And for the early writers, the newbies, the blossoming beginners, Mary Sues are where they generally start. Because those are the sorts of stories they’ve been telling yourselves for years already.

But as we get older, as we consume more media texts and find more things to adore, we begin to notice a dearth of representation – you’re not pony trains in our minds any more. We have a better idea of what we look like. And we don’t see it. The glorious fantasy diversity of our childhoods is stripped away, narratives are codified by the mainstream media texts we consume, and people stop looking like us.

I’m reminded of a story I read on Tumblr, of a young black author living in Africa – whose name, I’m afraid, I wasn’t able to find when I went back to look for it, so my apologies to her. The story is about the first time she tried to write a fairytale in elementary school. She made her protagonist a little white girl, and when she was asked why she hadn’t chosen to make the protagonist back, this author realized that it hadn’t even occurred to her that she was allowed make her lead black. Even though she was surrounded by people of color, the adventures, and romance, and magic in everything she consumed only happened to the white folks. She did not know she was allowed to make people like her the heroes because she had never seen it.

This is not natural. This is nurture, not nature. This is learned behavior. And this is hegemony.

No child grows up believing they don’t have place in the story. This is something were are taught. And this is something that we are taught by the media texts we consume.

I do want to pause and make a point here. There isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with writing a narrative from the heterosexual, able bodied, neurotypical, white cismale POV in and of itself. I think we all have stories that we know and love that feature that particular flavor of protagonist. And people from that community deserve to tell their stories as much as folks from any other community.

The problem comes from a reality where when it’s the only narrative. The default narrative. The factory setting. When people who don’t see themselves reflected in the narrative nonetheless feel obligated to write such stories, instead of their own. When they are told and taught that it is the only story worth telling. ‎

There’s this really great essay by Ika Willis, and it’s called “. And I think it’s the one – one of the most important pieces of writing not only on Mary Sues, but on the dire need for representation in general.

In the essay, Willis talks about Mary Sues – beyond being masturbatory adventure avatars for young people just coming into their own sexuality, or avatars to go on adventures with – but as voice avatars. Mary Sues, when wielded with self-awareness, deliberateness, and precision, can force a wedge into the narrative, crack it open, and provide a space for marginalized identities and voices in a media-text that otherwise silences and ignores them.

This is done one of two ways. First: by jamming in a diverse Mary Sue, and making the characters and the world acknowledge and work with that diversity. Or, second: by co-opting a pre-existing character and overlaying a new identity on them while retaining their essential characterization. For example, by writing a story where Bilbo Baggins is non-binary, but still thinking that adventures are messy, dirty things. Or making Sherlock Holmes deaf, but still perfectly capable of solving all the crimes. Or making James Potter Indian, so that the Dursleys prejudiced against Harry not only for his magic, but also for his skin color. Or making Ariel the mermaid wrestle with severe body dysphoria, or Commander Sheppard suffer from severe PTSD.

I like to call this voice avatar Mary Sue a ‘Meta-Sue’, because when authors have evolved enough in their storytelling abilities to consciously deploy Mary Sues as a deliberate trope, they’re doing so on a self-aware, meta-textual level.

So that is where Mary Sues comes from.

But what is a Mary Sue? How can you point at a character and say, “Yes, that is – definitively – a Mary Sue”.

Mary Sues can generally be characterized as:

-Too perfect, or unrealistically skilled. They shouldn’t be able to do all the things they do, or know all the things they know, as easily as they do or know them. For reasons of the plot expedience, they learn too fast, and are able to perform feats that other characters in their world who have studied or trained longer and harder find difficult. For example, Neo in The Matrix.

-They are the black hole of every plot – every major quest or goal of the pre-existing characters warps to include or be about them; every character wants to befriend them, or romance them, or sleep with them, and every villain wants to possess them, or kill them, or sleep with them. This makes sense, as why write a character into the world if you’re not going to have something very important happen to them? So, for example, like Neo in The Matrix.

-A Mary Sue, because it’s usually written by a neophyte author who’s been taught that characters need flaws, has some sort of melodramatic, angsty tragic back-story that, while on the surface seems to motivate them into action, because of lack of experience in creating a follow-through of emotional motivation, doesn’t actually affect their mental health or ability to trust or be happy or in love. For example, like the emotional arc of Neo in The Matrix.

– A Mary Sue saves the day. This goes back to that impulse to be the center of the story. Like Neo in The Matrix.

-And lastly, Mary Sues come from outside the group. They’re from the ‘real world’, like you and I, or have somehow discovered the hero’s secret identity and must be folded into the team, or are a new recruit, or are a sort of previously undiscovered stand-alone Chosen One. Like, for example, Neo in The Matrix.

Now, as I’ve said, there’s actually nothing inherently wrong with writing a Mary Sue. Neo is a Mary Sue, but The Matrix is still a really engaging and well written film. And simply by virtue of the fact that an individual with ingrained cultural foundations is writing a story, that story is inherently rooted in that writer’s lived life and experiences. As much as a writer may try to either highlight or downplay it, each character and story they create has some of themselves in it. The first impulse of storytelling is to talk about oneself. We write about ourselves, only the more we write, the more skilled we become at disguising the sliver of us-ness in a character, folding it into something different and unique. We, as storytellers, as humans, empathize with protagonists and fictional characters constantly – we love putting our feet into other people’s shoes. It’s how we understand and engage with the world.

And we as writers tap into our own emotions in order to describe them on the page. We take slices of our lives – our experiences, our memories, our friend’s verbal tics or hand gestures, aunt Brenda’s way of making tea, Uncle Rudy’s way having a pipe after dinner, that time Grannie got lost at the zoo – and we weave them together into a golem that we call a character, which comes to life with a bit of literary magic. I mean, allow me to be sparklingly reductionist for a second, but in the most basic sense, every character is a Mary Sue.

It’s just a matter of whether the writer has evolved to the point  in their craft that they’ve learned to animate that golem with the sliver of self-ness hidden deep enough that it is unrecognizable as self-ness, but still recognizable as human-ness.

For years, mainstream western media has featured characters that were primarily heterosexual, able bodied, neurotypical, white cismales. And, regrettably, because of that, this flavor of human is now assumed to be the default for a character. When people from other communities speak up requesting other flavours, for characters for whom the imbedded sliver of humanity remains just as poignant and relatable, but the outer shell is of a different variety, this is when that certain segment of the fan population looses their cool.

That certain segment of the fan population has been telling us for years that if we don’t like what we see on TV or in video games, or in books, or comics, or on the stage, that we should just go make our own stuff. And now we are.

“Make your own stuff,” they say, and then follow it up with: “What’s with all this political correctness gone wild? Uhg. This stuff is all just Mary Sue garbage.”

Well, yes. Of course it is. That’s the point.

But why are they saying it like that?

Because they mean it in a derogatory sense.

They don’t mean it in the way that Paula Smith meant it – a little bit belittling but mostly fun; a bemused celebration of why we love putting ourselves into the stories and worlds we enjoy. They don’t mean it the way that Willis means it – a deliberate and knowing way to shove the previously marginalized into the center. They don’t even mean it the way that I mean it in my own work - as a tool for carefully deconstructing and discussing character and narrative with a character and from within a narrative.

When a certain segment of the fan population talks about ‘Mary Sue’, they mean to weaponize it. To make it a stand-in for the worse thing that a character can be: bland, predictable, and too-perfect. Which, granted, many Mary Sues are. But not all of them. And a character doesn’t have to be a Mary Sue to be done badly, either.

When this certain segment of the fan population says ‘Mary Sue’, they’re trying to shame the creators for deviating from the norm - the white, the heterosexual, the able bodied, the neurotypical, the straight cismale.

When this certain segment of the population says ‘Mary Sue,’ what they’re really saying is: “I don’t believe people like this are interesting enough to be the lead character in a story.”

When this certain segment of the population says ‘Mary Sue,’ what they’re really saying is: “I don’t think there’s any need to listen to that voice. They’re not interesting enough.”

When this certain segment of the population says ‘Mary Sue,’ what they’re really saying is: “This character is not what I am used to a.k.a. not like me, and I’m gonna whine about it.”

When this certain segment of the population says ‘Mary Sue,’ what they’re really saying is: “Even though kids from all over the world, from many different cultural, religious and ethnic backgrounds have had to grow up learning to identify with characters who don’t look or think like them, identifying with characters who don’t look or think like me is hard and I don’t wanna.”

When this certain segment of the population says ‘Mary Sue,’ what they’re really saying is: ”Even though I’ve grown up in a position of privilege and power, and even though publishing and producing diverse stories with diverse casts doesn’t actually cut into the proportionate representation that I receive, and never will, I am nonetheless scared that I’ll never see people like me in media texts ever again.”

When this certain segment of the population says ‘Mary Sue,’ what they’re really saying is: “Considering my fellow human beings as fellow human beings worthy of having stories about them and their own experiences, in their own voices, is hard and I don’t wanna do it.”

When this certain segment of the population says ‘Mary Sue,’ what they’re really saying is: “I only want stories about me.”

They call leads ‘Mary Sues’ so people will stop writing them and instead write… well, their version of a ‘Mary Sue.’ The character that is representative of their lived experiences, their power and masturbatory fantasies, their physical appearance, their sexual awakenings, their cultural identity, their voice, their kind of narratives.

Missing, of course, that the point of revisionist and inclusive narratives aren’t to shove out previous incarnations, but to coexist alongside them. It’s not taking away one entrée and offering only another – it’s building a buffet.

Okay, so who actually cares if these trolls call these diverse characters Mary Sues?

Well, unfortunately, because this certain segment of the population have traditionally been the group most listened-to by the mainstream media creators and the big money, their opinions have power. (Never mind that they’re not actually the biggest group of consumers anymore, nor no longer the most vocal.)

So, this is where you come in.

You have the power to take the Mary Sue from the edge of the narrative and into the centre. And you do can do this by normalizing it. Think back to that author who didn’t think little black girls were allowed to be the heroes of fairy tales. Now imagine how much different her inner world, her imagination might have been at the stage when she was first learning to understand her own self-worth, if she had seen faces like hers on the television, in comics, in games, and on the written page every day of her life.

And not just one or two heroes, but a broad spectrum of characters that run the gamut from hero to villain, from fragile to powerful, from straight to gay, and every other kind of intersectional identity.

You have the power to give children the ability to see themselves.

Multi-faceted representation normalizes the marginalized.

And if you have the privilege to be part of the passing member of the mainstream, then weaponize your privilege. Refuse to work with publishers, or websites, or conventions that don’t also support diverse creators. Put diverse characters in your work, and do so thoughtfully and with the input of the people from the community you are portraying. And if you’re given the opportunity to submit or speak at an event, offer to share the microphone.

The first thing I did when actor Burn Gorman got a Twitter account was to Tweet him  my thanks for saving the world in Pacific Rim while on a cane. As someone who isn’t as mobile as the heroes I see in action films - who knows for a fact that when the zombie apocalypse comes I will not be a-able to outrun the monsters – it meant so much to me that his character was not only an integral and vital member of the team who cancelled the apocalypse, but also that not once in the film did someone call him a cripple, or tell him he couldn’t participate because of his disability, or leave him behind.

Diversity matters.

Not because it’s a trendy hashtag, or a way to sell media texts to a locked-down niche market, but because every single human being deserves to be told that they have a voice worth listening to; a life worth celebrating and showcasing in a narrative; a reality worth acknowledging and accepting and protecting; emotions that are worth exploring and validating; intelligence that is worth investing in and listening to; and a capacity to love that is worth adoring.

White, heterosexual, neurotypical, able-bodied cismales are not the only people on the planet who are human.

And you have a right to tell your story your way.

Calling something a ‘Mary Sue’ in order to dismiss it out of hand, as an excuse to hate something before even seeing it, is how the trolls bury your Narrative and your Identity.  We are storytellers, all of us. Every person in this room. Whether your wheel house is in fiction, or academia, or narrative non-fiction, we impart knowledge and offer experience through the written word, through the telling of tales, through leading a reader from one thought to another.

And we none of deserve to be shouted down, talked over, or dismissed. No one can tell you that your story isn’t worth telling. Of course it is. It’s yours.

And don’t let anyone call your characters, or your work, or you a ’Mary Sue’ in the derogatory sense ever again. Or I am going to scream.

[malte1mj-blog]

2018/2019 Matt TV Awards

Best Drama Series: Game of Thrones Homecoming Pose Sex Education Sorry for Your Loss Succession This Is Us HONORABLE MENTION: The Affair, Better Call Saul, Bodyguard, The Deuce, The Good Fight, Narcos: Mexico, The OA Part II, Ozark, Room 104, This Is Us, The Twilight Zone, The Umbrella Academy, Wanderlust

Best Actor - Drama Series: Jason Bateman, Ozark - “One Way Out” Sterling K. Brown, This Is Us - “R & B” Brian Cox, Succession - “Which Side Are You On?” Bob Odenkirk, Better Call Saul - “Wiedersehen” Michael Pena, Narcos: Mexico - “881 Lope de Vega” Billy Porter, Pose - “The Fever” Jeremy Strong, Succession - “Nobody Is Ever Missing” HONORABLE MENTION: Asa Butterfield, Sex Education; Mike Colter, Marvel’s Luke Cage; Charlie Cox, Marvel’s Daredevil; Kit Harington, Game of Thrones; Joshua Jackson, The Affair; Stephan James, Homecoming; John Krasinski, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan; Peter Krause, 9-1-1; Diego Luna, Narcos: Mexico; Richard Madden, Bodyguard; Ian McShane, American Gods; Sean Penn, The First; Bill Pullman, The Sinner; Milo Ventimiglia, This Is Us; Dominic West, The Affair

Best Actress - Drama Series: Christine Baranski, The Good Fight - “The One About the End of the World” Toni Collette, Wanderlust - “Episode 5” Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Deuce - “Inside the Pretend” Sandra Oh, Killing Eve - “Do You Know How to Dispose of a Body?” Elizabeth Olsen, Sorry for Your Loss - “One Fun Thing” Julia Roberts, Homecoming - “Protocol” Mj Rodriguez, Pose - “Mother’s Day” HONORABLE MENTION: Angela Bassett, 9-1-1; Emilia Clarke, Game of Thrones; Jodie Comer, Killing Eve; Carrie Coon, The Sinner; Viola Davis, How to Get Away with Murder; Mariska Hargitay, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit; Christina Hendricks, Good Girls; Taraji P. Henson, Empire; Laura Linney, Ozark; Brit Marling, The OA Part II; Mandy Moore, This Is Us; Ellen Pompeo, Grey’s Anatomy; Retta, Good Girls; Emmy Rossum, Shameless; Mae Whitman, Good Girls; Robin Wright, House of Cards

Best Supporting Actor - Drama Series: Jovan Adepo, Sorry for Your Loss - “The Penguin and the Mechanic” Bobby Cannavale, Homecoming - “Protocol” Kieran Culkin, Succession - “Prague” Peter Dinklage, Game of Thrones - “The Iron Throne” Ncuti Gatwa, Sex Education - “Episode 5” Jacob Latimore, The Chi - “Guilt, Viral Videos and Ass Whuppings” Matthew Macfadyen, Succession - “Pre-Nuptial” HONORABLE MENTION: Gbenga Akkinagbe, The Deuce; Mamoudou Athie, Sorry for Your Loss; Jonathan Banks, Better Call Saul; Nicholas Braun, Succession; Reg E. Cathey, Marvel’s Luke Cage; Emory Cohen, The OA Part II; Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Game of Thrones; Vincent D’Onofrio, Marvel’s Daredevil; Aidan Gallagher, The Umbrella Academy; Justin Hartley, This Is Us; Alex Hibbert, The Chi; Jason Isaacs, The OA Part II; Tracy Letts, The Sinner; Delroy Lindo, The Good Fight; Ntare Guma Mbaro Mwine, The Chi; Pablo Schreiber, American Gods; Michael Sheen, The Good Fight; Chris Sullivan, This Is Us; Ryan Jamaal Swain, Pose; Connor Swindells, Sex Education; Shea Whigham, Homecoming; Jeremy Allen White, Shameless; Jesse Williams, Grey’s Anatomy

Best Supporting Actress - Drama Series: Julia Garner, Ozark - “Game Day” Indya Moore, Pose - “Giving and Receiving” Rhea Seehorn, Better Call Saul - “Quite a Ride” Sarah Snook, Succession - “Pre-Nuptial” Maura Tierney, The Affair - “Episode 401” Susan Kelechi Watson, This Is Us - “R & B” Maisie Williams, Game of Thrones - “The Bells” HONORABLE MENTION: Gillian Anderson, Sex Education; Gwendoline Christie, Game of Thrones; Patricia Clarkson, House of Cards; Dominique Fishback, The Deuce; Lisa Gay Hamilton, The First; Keeley Hawes, Bodyguard; Aisha Hinds, 9-1-1; Dominique Jackson, Pose; Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Homecoming; Cush Jumbo, The Good Fight; Diane Lane, House of Cards; Emma Mackey, Sex Education; Audra McDonald, The Good Fight; Janet McTeer, Sorry for Your Loss; Sophie Okonedo, Wanderlust; Ellen Page, The Umbrella Academy; Sarah Steele, The Good Fight; Kelly Marie Tran, Sorry for Your Loss; Sophie Turner, Game of Thrones; Ruth Wilson, The Affair; Alfre Woodard, Marvel’s Luke Cage

Best Writing - Drama Series: Game of Thrones - “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” - Bryan Cogman Homecoming - “Protocol” - Eli Horowitz Pose - “Love Is the Message” - Janet Mock & Ryan Murphy Pose - “Pilot” - Steven Canals, Brad Falchuk & Ryan Murphy Sex Education - “Episode 3” - Sophie Goodhart Succession - “Nobody Is Ever Missing” - Jesse Armstrong Succession - “Which Side Are You On?” - Susan Soon He Stanton HONORABLE MENTION: The Affair - “Episode 409”; Better Call Saul - “Quite a Ride”; Better Call Saul - “Widersehen”; Better Call Saul - “Winner”; Bodyguard - “Episode 4”; The Deuce - “All You’ll Be Eating Is Cannibals”; The Deuce - “Inside the Pretend”; The Deuce - “We’re All Beasts”; Game of Thrones - “The Long Night”; The Good Fight - “The One Where the Sun Comes Out”; Grey’s Anatomy - “Silent All These Years”; Homecoming - “Stop”; Homecoming - “Toys”; Narcos: Mexico - “881 Lopes de Vega”; The OA - “Chapter 6: Mirror Mirror”; Ozark - “One Way Out”; Pose - “The Fever”; Pose - “Mother’s Day”; Room 104 - “Arnold”; Room 104 - “Josie & Me”; Sex Education - “Episode 1”; Sex Education - “Episode 5”; Sorry for Your Loss - “One Fun Thing”; Sorry for Your Loss - “The Penguin and the Mechanic”; Succession - “Prague”; Succession - “Pre-Nuptial”; This Is Us - “Our Little Island Girl”; This Is Us - “R&B”; The Twilight Zone - “Replay”; The Umbrella Academy - “Changes”; Wanderlust - “Episode 5”

Best Directing - Drama Series: The Deuce - “Inside the Pretend” - Minkie Spiro Game of Thrones - “The Long Night” - Miguel Sapochnik Homecoming - “Protocol” - Sam Esmail Pose - “Love Is the Message” - Janet Mock Pose - “Mother’s Day” - Silas Howard Succession - “Nobody Is Ever Missing” - Mark Mylod Succession - “Prague” - S.J. Clarkson HONORABLE MENTION: The Affair - “Episode 409”; Better Call Saul - “Quite a Ride”; Better Call Saul - “Widersehen”; Better Call Saul - “Winner”; Bodyguard - “Episode 4”; The Deuce - “All You’ll Be Eating Is Cannibals”; The Deuce - “We’re All Beasts”; Game of Thrones - “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms”; The Good Fight - “The One Where the Sun Comes Out”; Homecoming - “Stop”; Homecoming - “Toys”; Narcos: Mexico - “881 Lopes de Vega”; The OA - “Chapter 6: Mirror Mirror”; Ozark - “One Way Out”; Pose - “The Fever”; Pose - “Pilot”; Room 104 - “Arnold”; Room 104 - “Josie & Me”; Sex Education - “Episode 3”; Sex Education - “Episode 7”; Sorry for Your Loss - “Welcome to Palm Springs”; Sorry for Your Loss - “A Widow Walks Into a Wedding”; Succession - “Pre-Nuptial”; Succession - “Which Side Are You On?”; This Is Us - “Our Little Island Girl”; This Is Us - “R&B”; The Twilight Zone - “Replay”; The Umbrella Academy - “The White Violin”; Wanderlust - “Episode 5”

Best Guest Actor - Drama Series: Michael Angarano, This Is Us - “Songbird Road, Part 1” Gary Cole, The Good Fight - “The One Where Kurt Saves Diane” James Cromwell, Succession - “I Went to Market” Griffin Dunne, This Is Us - “Songbird Road, Part 2” Brian Tyree Henry, Room 104 - “Arnold” Johnny Sibilly, Pose - “Love Is the Message” Jeremy Allen White, Homecoming - “Pineapple” HONORABLE MENTION: Alan Alda, The Good Fight; Mahershala Ali, Room 104; Eric Bogosian, Succession; Bill Camp, The First; Zach Gilford, Good Girls; Russell Hornsby, The Affair; Ron Cephas Jones, Marvel’s Luke Cage; Luke Kirby, Sorry for Your Loss; Carl Lumbly, This Is Us; Michael McKean, Better Call Saul; Christopher Meloni, Pose; Lars Mikkelsen, House of Cards; John Cameron Mitchell, The Good Fight; Kumail Nanjiani, The Twilight Zone; Bryce Romero, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit; Adam Scott, The Twilight Zone; Michael Shannon, Room 104; Glynn Turman, How to Get Away with Murder; Dylan Walsh, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit; Rainn Wilson, Room 104; Dean Winters, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit

Best Guest Actress - Drama Series: Lu Corfield, Sex Education - “Episode 3” Lisa Gay Hamilton, Sorry for Your Loss - “I Hate Chess” Sanaa Lathan, The Twilight Zone - “Replay” Phylicia Rashad, This Is Us - “Our Little Island Girl” Allison Tolman, Good Girls - “Jeff” Harriet Walter, Succession “Pre-Nuptial” Mary Wiseman, Room 104 - “Josie & Me” HONORABLE MENTION: Debbie Allen, Grey’s Anatomy; Zazie Beetz, The Twilight Zone; Sandra Bernhard, Pose; Courteney Cox, Shameless; Tyne Daly, Grey’s Anatomy; Michelle Forbes, Grey’s Anatomy; Irene Jacob, The OA Part II; Zoe Kazan, The Deuce; Debra Mooney, Grey’s Anatomy; Deirdre O’Connell, The Affair; Phylicia Rashad, Empire; June Squibb, Good Girls; Regina Taylor, The Good Fight; Beverly Todd, 9-1-1; Cicely Tyson, How to Get Away with Murder; Carice van Houten, Game of Thrones; Kate Walsh, The Umbrella Academy; Chloe Webb, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit

Best Ensemble - Drama Series: The Deuce Game of Thrones The Good Fight Pose Sex Education Succession This Is Us HONORABLE MENTION: The Affair, Better Call Saul, Bodyguard, The Chi, Empire, Good Girls, Grey’s Anatomy, Homecoming, House of Cards, How to Get Away with Murder, Killing Eve, Marvel’s Luke Cage, Narcos: Mexico, 9-1-1, The OA Part II, Ozark, Shameless, The Umbrella Academy

Best New Drama Series: Bodyguard Homecoming Narcos: Mexico Pose Sex Education Sorry for Your Loss Succession The Twilight Zone The Umbrella Academy Wanderlust HONORABLE MENTION: The First, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan

Best Comedy Series: Barry Fleabag GLOW The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel PEN15 Ramy Veep HONORABLE MENTION: Better Things, Black Monday, black-ish, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Dead to Me, Forever, The Good Place, Insecure, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, The Kominsky Method, Mom, On My Block, One Day at a Time, Orange Is the New Black, The Other Two, Russian Doll, She’s Gotta Have It, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

Best Actor - Comedy Series: Anthony Anderson, black-ish - “Enough Is Enough” Ted Danson, The Good Place - “Everything Is Bonzer!, Parts 1 & 2” Michael Douglas, The Kominsky Method - “Chapter 1: An Actor Avoids” Bill Hader, Barry - “The Show Must Go On, Probably?” Andrew Rannells, Black Monday - “2” Drew Tarver, The Other Two - “Chase Turns Fourteen” Ramy Youssef, Ramy - “Between the Toes” HONORABLE MENTION: Fred Armisen, Forever; Jason Bateman, Arrested Development; Jim Carrey, Kidding; Don Cheadle, Black Monday; Rob Delaney, Catastrophe; Idris Elba, Turn Up Charlie; Jason Genao, On My Block; Keir Gilchrist, Atypical; John Goodman, The Conners; Pete Holmes, Crashing; Avan Jogia, Now Apocalypse; Chris Lilley, Lunatics; Eric McCormack, Will & Grace; Ryan O’Connell, Special; Timothy Olyphant, Santa Clarita Diet; Jim Parsons, The Big Bang Theory; Andy Samberg, Brooklyn Nine-Nine; Diego Tinoco, On My Block

Best Actress - Comedy Series: Pamela Adlon, Better Things - “Toilet” Rachel Brosnahan, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - “Vote for Kennedy, Vote for Kennedy” Maya Erskine, PEN15 - “Ojichan” Anna Konkle, PEN15 - “Anna Ishii-Peters” Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Veep - “Veep” Natasha Lyonne, Russian Doll - “Ariadne” Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fleabag - “Episode 4” HONORABLE MENTION: Christina Applegate, Dead to Me; Drew Barrymore, Santa Clarita Diet; Kristen Bell, The Good Place; Candice Bergen, Murphy Brown; Alison Brie, GLOW; Aidy Bryant, Shrill; Sierra Capri, On My Block; Linda Cardellini, Dead to Me; Anna Faris, Mom; Jane Fonda, Grace and Frankie; Melissa Fumero, Brooklyn Nine-Nine; Regina Hall, Black Monday; Sharon Horgan, Catastrophe; Allison Janney, Mom; Ellie Kemper, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt; Justina Machado, One Day at a Time; Debra Messing, Will & Grace; Issa Rae, Insecure; Gina Rodriguez, Jane the Virgin; Tracee Ellis Ross, black-ish; Maya Rudolph, Forever; Yara Shahidi, grown-ish; Frankie Shaw, SMILF; Lily Tomlin, Grace and Frankie; DeWanda Wise, She’s Gotta Have It; Helene Yorke, The Other Two

Best Supporting Actor - Comedy Series: Alan Arkin, The Kominsky Method - “Chapter Two: An Agent Grieves” Rob McElhenney, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia - “Mac Finds His Pride” Anthony Ramos, She’s Gotta Have It - “#OhJudoKnow?” Andrew Scott, Fleabag - “Episode 4” Tony Shalhoub, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” Timothy Simons, Veep - “Discovery Weekend” Henry Winkler, Barry - “The Audition” HONORABLE MENTION: Will Arnett, Arrested Development; Charlie Barnett, Russian Doll; Andre Braugher, Brooklyn Nine-Nine; Tituss Burgess, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt; Ty Burrell, Modern Family; Jaime Camil, Jane the Virgin; Anthony Carrigan, Barry; Terry Crews, Brooklyn Nine-Nine; Charlie Day, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia; Kevin Dunn, Veep; Brett Gelman, Fleabag; Brett Gray, On My Block; Todd Grinnell, One Day at a Time; Tony Hale, Arrested Development; Tony Hale, Veep; William Jackson Harper, The Good Place; Sean Hayes, Will & Grace; Frank Langella, Kidding; Zachary Levi, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel; Marc Maron, GLOW; Beau Mirchoff, Now Apocalypse; Ed O’Neill, Modern Family; Bill Paterson, Fleabag; Sam Richardson, Veep; Stephen Root, Barry; Paul Scheer, Black Monday; Matt Walsh, Veep; Michael Zegen, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

Best Supporting Actress - Comedy Series: Alex Borstein, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - “Vote for Kennedy, Vote for Kennedy” Danielle Brooks, Orange Is the New Black - “Gordons” D’Arcy Carden, The Good Place - “Janet(s)” Sian Clifford, Fleabag - “Episode 3” Betty Gilpin, GLOW - “Mother of All Matches” Rita Moreno, One Day at a Time - “She Drives Me Crazy” Molly Shannon, The Other Two - “Chase Drops His First Album” HONORABLE MENTION: Hiam Abbass, Ramy; Uzo Aduba, Orange Is the New Black; Hannah Alligood, Better Things; Stephanie Beatriz, Brooklyn Nine-Nine; Mayim Bialik, The Big Bang Theory; Julie Bowen, Modern Family; May Calamawy, Ramy; Anna Chlumsky, Veep; Ivone Coll, Jane the Virgin; Olivia Colman, Fleabag; Sarah Goldberg, Barry; Isabella Gomez, One Day at a Time; Jessica Hecht, Special; Marin Hinkle, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel; Sarah Hyland, Modern Family; Carol Kane, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt; Jane Krakowski, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt; Jenifer Lewis, black-ish; Taryn Manning, Orange Is the New Black; Laurie Metcalf, The Conners; Megan Mullally, Will & Grace; Andrea Navedo, Jane the Virgin; Rosie O’Donnell, SMILF; Yvonne Orji, Insecure; Natasha Rothwell, Insecure; Alia Shawkat, Arrested Development; Jessica Walter, Arrested Development

Best Writing - Comedy Series: Barry - “The Show Must Go On, Probably?” - Alec Berg & Bill Hader Fleabag - “Episode 1” - Phoebe Waller-Bridge The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - “Simone” - Amy Sherman-Palladino The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - “Vote for Kennedy, Vote for Kennedy” - Daniel Palladino PEN15 - “Anna Ishii-Peters” - Maya Erskine, Anna Konkle & Stacy Osei-Kuffour Ramy - “Strawberries” - Ramy Youssef Veep - “Veep” - David Mandel HONORABLE MENTION: American Vandal - “The Brownout”; Barry - “berkman > block”; Barry - “ronny/lily”; Better Things - “No Limit”; Better Things - “Toilet”; Black Monday - “0”; Brooklyn Nine-Nine - “Four Movements”; Crashing - “The Viewing Party”; Dead to Me - “I Can’t Go Back”; Easy - “Blank Pages”; Fleabag - “Episode 3”; Fleabag - “Episode 4”; Forever - “Andre and Sarah”; GLOW - “Mother of All Matches”; GLOW - “Nothing Shattered”; The Good Place - “Janet(s)”; Insecure - “Fresh-Like”; It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia - “Mac Finds His Pride”; It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia - “Time’s Up for the Gang”; The Kominsky Method - “Chapter Two: An Agent Grieves”; The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - “Let’s Face the Music and Dance”; The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - “Midnight at the Concord”; The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - “We’re Going to the Catskills!”; Modern Family - “A Year of Birthdays”; Mom - “Jell-O shots and the Truth About Santa”; On My Block - “Chapter Sixteen”; One Day at a Time - “Nip It in the Bud”; Orange Is the New Black - “Be Free”; The Other Two - “Chase Drops His First Album”; The Other Two - “Chase Gets the Gays”; PEN15 - “AIM”; PEN15 - “Dance”; PEN15 - “Ojichan”; Ramy - “Between the Toes”; Ramy - “Ne Me Quitte Pas”; Russian Doll - “Ariadne”; Russian Doll - “Reflection”; She’s Gotta Have It - “#IAmYourMirror”; Shrill - “Pool”; Veep - “Discovery Weekend”

Best Directing - Comedy Series: Barry - “ronny/lily” - Bill Hader Fleabag - “Episode 1” - Harry Bradbeer GLOW - “Every Potato Has a Receipt” - Jesse Peretz It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia - “Mac Finds His Pride” - Todd Biermann The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - “Midnight at the Concord” - Amy Sherman-Palladino The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - “We’re Going to the Catskills!” - Daniel Palladino Veep - “Veep” - David Mandel HONORABLE MENTION: Barry - “berkman > block”; Barry - “The Show Must Go On, Probably?”; Better Things - “Monsters in the Moonlight”; Better Things - “No Limit”; Black Monday - “0”; Brooklyn Nine-Nine - “Suicide Squad”; Crashing - “The Viewing Party”; Dead to Me - “You Have to Go”; Easy - “Blank Pages”; Fleabag - “Episode 4”; Fleabag - “Episode 6”; Forever - “Andre and Sarah”; GLOW - “Mother of All Matches”; GLOW - “Nothing Shattered”; The Good Place - “Janet(s)”; Insecure - “Fresh-Like”; It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia - “Time’s Up for the Gang”; The Kominsky Method - “Chapter Two: An Agent Grieves”; The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - “Let’s Face the Music and Dance”; The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - “Simone”; The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - “Vote for Kennedy, Vote for Kennedy”; Modern Family - “A Year of Birthdays”; Mom - “Jell-O shots and the Truth About Santa”; On My Block - “Chapter Sixteen”; One Day at a Time - “Ghosts”; Orange Is the New Black - “Be Free”; The Other Two - “Chase Drops His First Album”; The Other Two - “Chase Gets the Gays”; PEN15 - “AIM”; PEN15 - “Anna Ishii-Peters”; PEN15 - “Dance”; Ramy - “Ne Me Quitte Pas”; Ramy - “Strawberries”; Russian Doll - “Alan’s Routine”; Russian Doll - “Ariadne”; She’s Gotta Have It - “#NationTime”; Shrill - “Pool”; Veep - “Discovery Weekend”

Best Guest Actor - Comedy Series: Diedrich Bader, Better Things - “Shake the Cocktail” Matthew Broderick, Better Things - “Toilet” Elisha Henig, Ramy - “Strawberries” Ken Marino, Black Monday - “243” Marc Maron, Easy - “Blank Pages” Lin-Manuel Miranda, Brooklyn Nine-Nine - “The Golden Child” Brandon Uranowitz, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - “Midnight at the Concord” HONORABLE MENTION: Brian Jordan Alvarez, Special; Jacob Artist, Now Apocalypse; Jon Bernthal, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt; Bruce Dern, Black Monday; Johnny Galecki, The Conners; Marc Evan Jackson, The Good Place; Jake Johnson, Easy; Richard Karn, PEN15; Keegan-Michael Key, Veep; Luke Kirby, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel; Robert Klein, Will & Grace; Peter MacNicol, Veep; Jason Mantzoukas, The Good Place; Ken Marino, Brooklyn Nine-Nine; Michael McKean, The Good Place; Jason Mitchell, Forever; R.J. Mitte, Now Apocalypse; David Paymer, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel; John Mulaney, Crashing; Danny Pino, One Day at a Time; Zachary Quinto, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt; Craig Robinson, Brooklyn Nine-Nine; David Schwimmer, Will & Grace; Adam Scott, The Good Place; Jimmy Tatro, Modern Family; Steve Way, Ramy; Katt Williams, black-ish; Henry Winkler, Arrested Development; Dean Winters, Brooklyn Nine-Nine; Jaboukie Young-White, Crashing

Best Guest Actress - Comedy Series: Hong Chau, Forever - “Andre and Sarah” Jane Lynch, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - “Vote for Kennedy, Vote for Kennedy” Melanie Lynskey, Easy - “Blank Pages” Sheridan Pierce, One Day at a Time - “The First Time” Maya Rudolph, The Good Place - “Chidi Sees the Time-Knife” Kristin Scott Thomas, Fleabag - “Episode 3” Wanda Sykes, The Other Two - “Chase Gets the Gays” HONORABLE MENTION: Christine Baranski, The Big Bang Theory; Connie Britton, SMILF; Nicole Byer, Brooklyn Nine-Nine; Nicole Byer, The Good Place; Sadie Calvano, Mom; Laverne Cox, Orange Is the New Black; Blythe Danner, Will & Grace; Lea DeLaria, Orange Is the New Black; Heather Headley, She’s Gotta Have It; Kirby Howell-Baptiste, The Good Place; Mindy Kaling, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia; Valerie Mahaffey, Dead to Me; Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Easy; Estelle Parsons, The Conners; Melissa Rauch, Black Monday; Haley Lu Richardson, Jane the Virgin; Annabella Sciorra, GLOW; Kyra Sedgwick, Brooklyn Nine-Nine; Chloe Sevigny, Russian Doll; Fiona Shaw, Fleabag; Anna Deavere Smith, black-ish; Mary Steenburgen, The Conners; Wanda Sykes, black-ish; Marsha Thomason, Better Things; Quvenzhane Wallis, black-ish; Michaela Watkins, Catastrophe

Best Ensemble - Comedy Series: Brooklyn Nine-Nine Fleabag GLOW The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Orange Is the New Black PEN15 Veep HONORABLE MENTION: Arrested Development, Atypical, Barry, Better Things, The Big Bang Theory, Black Monday, black-ish, Catastrophe, The Conners, Dead to Me, The Good Place, Grace and Frankie, Insecure, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Jane the Virgin, Kidding, The Kominsky Method, Modern Family, Mom, Murphy Brown, On My Block, One Day at a Time, The Other Two, Ramy, Russian Doll, She’s Gotta Have It, SMILF, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

Best New Comedy Series: Black Monday Dead to Me Forever The Kominsky Method The Other Two PEN15 Ramy Russian Doll Shrill Tuca & Bertie HONORABLE MENTION: Camping, The Conners, Disenchantment, Kidding, Lunatics, Now Apocalypse, Special, Turn Up Charlie

Best TV Movie/Limited Series: The Act Catch-22 Chernobyl Escape at Dannemora Fosse/Verdon Sharp Objects When They See Us HONORABLE MENTION: American Horror Story: Apocalypse, Castle Rock, Deadwood: The Movie, Good Omens, The Haunting of Hill House, Icebox, Julius Caesar (Great Performances), King Lear, Les Miserables, The Little Drummer Girl, Maniac, My Brilliant Friend, My Dinner with Herve, Native Son, True Detective, A Very English Scandal

Best Actor - TV Movie/Limited Series: Christopher Abbott, Catch-22 Mahershala Ali, True Detective Hugh Grant, A Very English Scandal Jared Harris, Chernobyl Jharrel Jerome, When They See Us Ian McShane, Deadwood: The Movie Sam Rockwell, Fosse/Verdon HONORABLE MENTION: Benicio Del Toro, Escape at Dannemora; Peter Dinklage, My Dinner with Herve; Jay R. Ferguson, The Romanoffs; Cody Fern, American Horror Story: Apocalypse; Donald Glover, Guava Island; Anthony Gonzalez, Icebox; Jonah Hill, Maniac; Anthony Hopkins, King Lear; Bill Nighy, Ordeal by Innocence; Timothy Olyphant, Deadwood: The Movie; Chris Pine, I Am the Night; Ashton Sanders, Native Son; Michael Sheen, Good Omens; Alexander Skarsgard, The Little Drummer Girl; David Tennant, Good Omens; Dominic West, Les Miserables; Fionn Whitehead, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch; Jeffrey Wright, O.G.

Best Actress - TV Movie/Limited Series: Amy Adams, Sharp Objects Patricia Arquette, Escape at Dannemora Kathryn Hahn, The Romanoffs Joey King, The Act Florence Pugh, The Little Drummer Girl Emma Stone, Maniac Michelle Williams, Fosse/Verdon HONORABLE MENTION: Kate Beckinsale, The Widow; Connie Britton, Dirty John; Gaia Girace, My Brilliant Friend; Carla Gugino, The Haunting of Hill House; Christina Hendricks, The Romanoffs; Margherita Mazzucco, My Brilliant Friend; Sarah Paulson, American Horror Story: Apocalypse; Amanda Peet, The Romanoffs; Harriet Walter, Julius Caesar (Great Performances)

Best Supporting Actor - TV Movie/Limited Series: Kyle Chandler, Catch-22 Oliver Jackson-Cohen, The Haunting of Hill House Eric Lange, Escape at Dannemora Michael Shannon, The Little Drummer Girl Stellan Skarsgard, Chernobyl Ben Whishaw, A Very English Scandal Callum Worthy, The Act HONORABLE MENTION: Asante Blackk, When They See Us; David Bradley, Les Miserables; Steve Buscemi, Miracle Workers; Norbert Leo Butz, Fosse/Verdon; Chris Chalk, When They See Us; George Clooney, Catch-22; Paul Dano, Escape at Dannemora; Stephen Dorff, True Detective; Matthew Goode, Ordeal by Innocence; Caleel Harris, When They See Us; Ethan Herisse, When They See Us; Michiel Huisman, The Haunting of Hill House; Timothy Hutton, The Haunting of Hill House; Joshua Jackson, When They See Us; John Leguizamo, When They See Us; Michael McKean, Good Omens; Scoot McNairy, True Detective; Gerald McRaney, Deadwood: The Movie; Chris Messina, Sharp Objects; Freddy Miyares, When They See Us; David Oyelowo, Les Miserables; Bill Skarsgard, Castle Rock; Daniel David Stewart, Catch-22; Justin Theroux, Maniac; Jack Whitehall, Good Omens; Michael K. Williams, When They See Us

Best Supporting Actress - TV Movie/Limited Series: Patricia Arquette, The Act Patricia Clarkson, Sharp Objects Aunjanue Ellis, When They See Us Niecy Nash, When They See Us Eliza Scanlen, Sharp Objects Sissy Spacek, Castle Rock Emily Watson, Chernobyl HONORABLE MENTION: Doona Bae, Sense8: Amor Vincit Omnia; Jessie Buckley, Chernobyl; Aya Cash, Fosse/Verdon; Jamie Clayton, Sense8: Amor Vincit Omnia; Jackie Clone, Julius Caesar (Great Performances); Lily Collins, Les Miserables; Olivia Colman, Les Miserables; Elisa Del Genio, My Brilliant Friend; Carmen Ejogo, True Detective; Sally Field, Maniac; Julia Garner, Dirty John; Annabeth Gish, The Haunting of Hill House; Harriet Sansom Harris, American Horror Story: Apocalypse; Felicity Huffman, When They See Us; Isabelle Huppert, The Romanoffs; KiKi Layne, Native Son; Billie Lourd, American Horror Story: Apocalypse; Paula Malcolmson, Deadwood: The Movie; Ludovica Nasti, My Brilliant Friend; Victoria Pedretti, The Haunting of Hill House; Florence Pugh, King Lear; Margaret Qualley, Fosse/Verdon; Margaret Qualley, Native Son; Elizabeth Reaser, The Haunting of Hill House; Vanessa Redgrave, Man in an Orange Suit; Miranda Richardson, Good Omens; Juno Temple, Dirty John; Emma Thompson, King Lear; Emily Watson, King Lear; Robin Weigert, Deadwood: The Movie

Best Variety Series: Full Frontal with Samantha Bee Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Late Night with Seth Meyers The Late Show with Stephen Colbert My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas HONORABLE MENTION: At Home with Amy Sedaris, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Documentary Now!, I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, The Late Late Show with James Corden, Saturday Night Live, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Tracey Ullman’s Show, 2 Dope Queens, Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, Who Is America?, Whose Line Is It Anyway?

Best Variety Special: Full Frontal with Samantha Bee Presents: Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner 2019 Hannah Gadsby: Nanette Homecoming: A Film by Beyonce John Leguizamo’s Latin History for Morons Live in Front of a Studio Audience: Norman Lear’s All in the Family and The Jeffersons Rent: Live The 72nd Annual Tony Awards HONORABLE MENTION: The 91st Annual Academy Awards, Adam Sandler 100% Fresh, An American in Paris: The Musical (Great Performances), Amy Schumer: Growing, Annaleigh Ashford in Concert (Live From Lincoln Center), Aretha! A Grammy Celebration for the Queen of Soul, Carpool Karaoke: When Corden Met McCartney, The Comedy Central Roast of Bruce Willis, Cynthia Erivo in Concert (Live From Lincoln Center), Drew Michael, Ellen DeGeneres: Relatable, Flight of the Conchords: Live in London, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee Presents: Christmas on I.C.E., The 76th Annual Golden Globe Awards, The 61st Annual Grammy Awards, Ken Jeong: You Complete Me Ho, Julia Louis-Dreyfus: The Mark Twain Prize, The Late Late Show Carpool Karaoke Primetime Special 2019, A Legend Christmas with John & Chrissy, Ray Romano: Right Here Around the Corner, RuPaul’s Drag Race Holi-slay Spectacular, Springsteen on Broadway, Trevor Noah: Son of Patricia, A Very Wicked Halloween: Celebrating 15 Years on Broadway, Wanda Sykes: Not Normal

Best Male Performer - Variety Series/Special: Brandon Victor Dixon, Rent: Live Jordan Fisher, Rent: Live John Leguizamo, John Leguizamo’s Latin History for Morons Hasan Minhaj, Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj John Oliver, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Adam Sandler, Adam Sandler 100% Fresh Bruce Springsteen, Springsteen on Broadway HONORABLE MENTION: Anthony Anderson, Live in Front of a Studio Audience; Wayne Brady, Whose Line Is It Anyway?; Wyatt Cenac, Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas; RuPaul Charles, RuPaul’s Drag Race Holi-slay Spectacular; Jemaine Clement & Bret McKenzie, Flight of the Conchords: Live in London; Sacha Baron Cohen, Who Is America?; Stephen Colbert, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert; James Corden, The Late Late Show with James Corden; Matt Damon, Saturday Night Live; Pete Davidson, Saturday Night Live; Robert Fairchild, An American in Paris: The Musical (Great Performances); Jimmy Fallon, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon; Jamie Foxx, Live in Front of a Studio Audience; Woody Harrelson, Live in Front of a Studio Audience; Ken Jeong, Ken Jeong: You Complete Me Ho; Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Kimmel Live!; John Legend, A Legendary Christmas with John & Chrissy; David Letterman, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction; Seth Meyers, Late Night with Seth Meyers; Drew Michael, Drew Michael; Colin Mochrie, Whose Line Is It Anyway?; John Mulaney, Saturday Night Live; Trevor Noah, Trevor Noah: Son of Patricia; Tim Robinson, I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson; Ray Romano, Ray Romano: Right Here Around the Corner; Adam Sandler, Saturday Night Live; Ryan Stiles, Whose Line Is It Anyway?; Kenan Thompson, Saturday Night Live

Best Female Performer - Variety Series/Special: Annaleigh Ashford, Annaleigh Ashford in Concert (Live From Lincoln Center) Beyonce, Homecoming: A Film by Beyonce Aidy Bryant, Saturday Night Live Hannah Gadsby, Hannah Gadsby: Nanette Vanessa Hudgens, Rent: Live Cecily Strong, Saturday Night Live Wanda Sykes, Live in Front of a Studio Audience: Norman Lear’s All in the Family and The Jeffersons HONORABLE MENTION: Samantha Bee, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee; Kristin Chenoweth & Idina Menzel, A Very Wicked Halloween; Kelly Clarkson, The 2019 Billboard Music Awards; Kiersey Clemons, Rent: Live; Leanne Cope, An American in Paris: The Musical (Great Performances); Ellen DeGeneres, Ellen DeGeneres: Relatable; Cynthia Erivo, Cynthia Erivo in Concert (Live From Lincoln Center); Tiffany Haddish, The 2018 MTV Movie & TV Awards; Leslie Jones, Saturday Night Live; Alicia Keys, The 61st Annual Grammy Awards; Kate McKinnon, Saturday Night Live; Sandra Oh, The 76th Annual Golden Globe Awards; Paula Pell, Documentary Now!; Phoebe Robinson & Jessica Williams, 2 Dope Queens; Amber Ruffin, Late Night with Seth Meyers; Amy Schumer, Amy Schumer: Growing; Amy Sedaris, At Home with Amy Sedaris; Emma Stone, Saturday Night Live; Marisa Tomei, Live in Front of a Studio Audience; Tracey Ullman, Tracey Ullman’s Show

Best Animated Series: Big Mouth Bob’s Burgers BoJack Horseman F Is for Family Family Guy Tuca & Bertie HONORABLE MENTION: Disenchantment, The Simpsons, South Park

Best Voice-Over Performance - Animated Series: Will Arnett, BoJack Horseman - “Free Churro” Bill Burr, F Is for Family - “It’s in His Blood” Laura Dern, F Is for Family - “Summer Vacation” Tiffany Haddish, Tuca & Bertie - “Plumage” Julie Kavner, The Simpsons - “Heartbreak Hotel” Nick Kroll, Big Mouth - “Smooch or Share” Amy Sedaris, BoJack Horseman - “The Amelia Earhart Story” HONORABLE MENTION: H. Jon Benjamin, Bob’s Burgers; Alex Borstein, Family Guy; Alison Brie, BoJack Horseman; Nancy Cartwright, The Simpsons; Dan Castellaneta, The Simpsons; Laura Dern, F Is for Family; John DiMaggio, Disenchantment; Abbi Jacobson, Disenchantment; Jessi Klein, Big Mouth; Seth MacFarlane, Family Guy; Jason Mantzoukas, Big Mouth; Dan Mintz, Bob’s Burgers; Eugene Mirman, Bob’s Burgers; Trey Parker, South Park; Aaron Paul, BoJack Horseman; John Roberts, Bob’s Burgers; Maya Rudolph, Big Mouth; Kristen Schaal, Bob’s Burgers; Yeardley Smith, The Simpsons; David Thewlis, Big Mouth; Vince Vaughn, F Is for Family; Ali Wong, Tuca & Bertie; Steven Yeun, Tuca & Bertie

Best Reality Series - Competition: The Amazing Race Nailed It! Project Runway RuPaul’s Drag Race So You Think You Can Dance Survivor Top Chef HONORABLE MENTION: The Challenge: Final Reckoning, The Challenge: War of the Worlds, Hollywood Game Night, The $100,000 Pyramid, Making It, Match Game

Best Reality Series - Non-Competition: Dancing Queen Hoarders Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath Queer Eye The Real Housewives of New York City RuPaul’s Drag Race: Untucked Shark Tank HONORABLE MENTION: Catfish: The TV Show, Dating Around, First and Last, Flipping Out, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Teen Mom, Teen Mom 2, Tidying Up with Marie Kondo

Breakthrough Male Performance: Ncuti Gatwa, Sex Education Caleel Harris, When They See Us Freddy Miyares, When They See Us Ryan O’Connell, Special Ryan Jamaal Swain, Pose Connor Swindells, Sex Education Ramy Youssef, Ramy HONORABLE MENTION: Asante Blackk, When They See Us; Theothus Carter, O.G.; David Castaneda, The Umbrella Academy; Desmond Chiam, Now Apocalypse; Taj Cross, PEN15; Justin Cunningham, When They See Us; Angel Bismark Curiel, Pose; Ethan Herisse, When They See Us; Sam McCarthy, Dead to Me; Marquis Rodriguez, When They See Us; Paxton Singleton, The Haunting of Hill House; Daniel David Stewart, Catch-22; Kedar Williams-Stirling, Sex Education

Breakthrough Female Performance: Gaia Girace, My Brilliant Friend Emma Mackey, Sex Education Margherita Mazzucco, My Brilliant Friend Indya Moore, Pose Mj Rodriguez, Pose Eliza Scanlen, Sharp Objects Sarah Snook, Succession HONORABLE MENTION: Patricia Allison, Sex Education; May Calamawy, Ramy; Elisa Del Genio, My Brilliant Friend; Frankie Hervey, Turn Up Charlie; Dominique Jackson, Pose; Violet McGraw, The Haunting of Hill House; Victoria Pedretti, The Haunting of Hill House; Emmy Raver-Lampman, The Umbrella Academy; Madeline Wise, Crashing; Aimee Lou Wood, Sex Education

Best Documentary Series: America to Me - Steve James, Bing Liu, Rebecca Parrish & Kevin Shaw The Case Against Adnan Syed - Amy Berg Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes - Joe Berlinger Dogs - Amy Berg, Heidi Ewing, Richard Hankin, Daniel Lindsay, T.J. Martin & Roger Ross Williams Last Chance U - Greg Whiteley Lorena - Joshua Rofe The Staircase - Jean-Xavier de Lestrade Surviving R. Kelly - Nigel Bellis & Astral Finnie Vice - Shane Smith Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men - Sacha Jenkins HONORABLE MENTION: I Am a Killer, The Innocent Man, Making a Murderer, Shut Up and Dribble, Watergate

Best Documentary Special: The American Meme - Bert Marcus At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal - Erin Lee Carr Foster - Mark Jonathan Harris & Deborah Oppenheimer Fyre Fraud - Jenner Furst & Julia Willoughby Nason Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened - Chris Smith Harold Prince: The Director’s Life (Great Performances) - Lonny Price The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley - Alex Gibney Jane Fonda in Five Acts - Susan Lacy Knock Down the House - Rachel Lears Leaving Neverland - Dan Reed Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind - Marina Zenovich Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland - Kate Davis & David Heilbroner The Sentence - Rudy Valdez Vice Special Report: Panic: The Untold Story of the 2008 Financial Crisis - John Maggio Wrestle (Independent Lens) - Suzannah Herbert HONORABLE MENTION: Betty White: The First Lady of Television, The Bleeding Edge, Crime + Punishment, Game of Thrones: The Last Watch, John Leguizamo’s Road to Broadway (Great Performances), Last Chance U: EMCC & Life After, Lindy Lou Juror Number Two (POV), Marcos Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (Frontline), Momentum Generation, The Providers (Independent Lens), Quincy, Recovery Boys, Reversing Roe, Running with Beto, United Skates, Vice Special Report: The Future of Work

[claudia1829things]

"HE KNEW HE WAS RIGHT" (2004) Review

”HE KNEW HE WAS RIGHT” (2004) Review My knowledge of 19th century author, Anthony Trollope, can be described as rather skimpy. In fact, I have never read any of his works. But the 2004 BBC adaptation of his 1869 novel, ”He Knew He Was Right”, caught my interest and I decided to watch the four-part miniseries.

”HE KNEW HE WAS RIGHT” told the decline and fall of a wealthy gentleman named Louis Trevelyan (Oliver Dimsdale) and his marriage to the elder daughter of a British Colonial administrator named Sir Marmaduke Rowley (Geoffrey Palmer) during the late 1860s. Louis first met the spirited Emily Rowley (Laura Fraser) during a trip to the fictional Mandarin Islands. Their marriage began on a happy note and managed to produce one son, young Louis. But when Emily’s godfather, the rakish Colonel Osborne (Bill Nighy), began paying consistent visits to her, the house of cards for the Trevelyan marriage began to fall. Doubts about his wife’s fidelity formed clouds in Louis’ mind upon learning about Osborne’s reputation as a ladies’ man. His insistence that Emily put an end to Osborne’s visits, along with her stubborn opposition to his demands and outrage over his lack of trust finally led to a serious break in their marriage. What followed was a minor public scandal over their estrangement, a change of addresses for both husband and wife, Louis’ kidnapping of their son and his final descent into paranoia and madness. The miniseries also featured several subplots. One centered around the forbidden romance between Emily’s younger sister, Nora (Christina Cole), and a young journalist named Hugh Stansbury (Stephen Campbell Moore), who happened to be Louis’ closest friend. Another featured the efforts of Hugh’s wealthy Aunt Jemima Stansbury (Anna Massey) to pair his younger sister Dorothy (Caroline Martin) to a local vicar in Wells named Reverend Gibson (David Tennant). Unfortunately for Aunt Stansbury, her desires for a romance between Dorothy and Reverend Gibson ended with Dorothy’s rejection of him and his lies about her moral character. Later, Dorothy and Aunt Stansbury found themselves at odds over Dorothy’s friendship and burgeoning romance with the nephew of her old love, Brooke Burgess (Matthew Goode). Gibson found himself in hot water with the socially powerful Aunt Stansbury over his lies about Dorothy. But that was nothing in compare to his being the center of a bitter sibling rivalry between two sisters, Arabella and Camilla French (Fenella Woolgar and Claudie Blakley). One last subplot evolved from Nora Rowley’s rejection of a wealthy aristocrat named Mr. Glascock (Raymond Coulthar). While traveling through Italy, he became acquainted with Caroline Spalding (Anna-Louise Plowman), one of two daughters of an American diplomat; and began a romance with her. Most of the subplots from ”HE KNEW HE WAS RIGHT” proved to be mildly entertaining or interesting. But the one subplot that really caught my attention featured Reverend Gibson and the French sisters. There were times when I could not even describe this story. I found it hilarious in a slightly twisted and surreal manner. Considering the vicar’s sniveling personality, there were times I felt it served him right to find himself trapped in the rivalry between the sweetly manipulative Arabella and the aggressive Camilla. But when the latter proved to be obsessive and slightly unhinged, I actually found myself rooting for Reverend Gibson to be free of her grasp. In some ways, Camilla proved to be just as mentally disturbed as Louis Treveylan. For me, the best aspect of ”HE KNEW HE WAS RIGHT” proved to be the main plot about the Treveylan marriage. I have to give kudos to Andrew Davies for his excellent job in adapting Trollope’s tale. I found the Louis and Emily’s story to be fascinating and well written. When their marriage ended in separation at the end of Episode One, I wondered if Davies had rushed the story. Foolish me. I never realized that the separation would lead toward a slow journey into madness for Louis and one of frustration and resentment for Emily. Her resentment increased tenfold after Louis kidnapped their young son, Little Louis; and upon her discovery that as a woman, she did not have the law on her side on who would be considered as the boy’s legal guardian. For me, the most surprising aspect of ”HE KNEW HE WAS RIGHT” was that despite all of the hell Louis forced Emily to endure, I ended up feeling very sorry for him. Due to his own insecurities over Colonel Osborne’s attentions to Emily and her strength of character, Louis ended up enduring a great deal of his own hell. Another aspect I found rather interesting about ”HE KNEW HE WAS RIGHT” was the topic of power abuse that permeated the tale. Many film and literary critics have used the Louis Trevelyan character as an argument that the story’s main theme was the abuse of paternal or male power. I heartily agree with that argument. To a certain extent. After all, Louis’ hang-ups regarding Emily’s relationship with Colonel Osborne seemed to be centered around her unwillingness to blindly obey him or his fear that he may not be enough of a man for her. And Sir Marmaduke’s insistence that Nora dismiss the idea of marrying the penniless Hugh Stanbury for a wealthier gentleman – namely Mr. Glascock. But the miniseries also touched upon examples of matriarchy or female abuse of power – something that most critics or fans hardly ever mention. Jemima Stanbury’s position as the Stanburys’ matriarch and only wealthy family member gave her the belief she had the power to rule over the lives of her family. This especially seemed to be the case in her efforts to control Dorothy’s love life. Camilla French struck me as another female who used her position as Reverend French’s fiancée to abuse it – especially in her aggressive attempts to ensure that he would give in to her desires and demands. And when that failed, she used her anger and threats of violence to ensure that her sister Arabella did not win in their rivalry over the spineless vicar. Some would say that Camilla was merely indulging in masculine behavior. I would not agree. For I believe that both men and women – being human beings – are capable of violence. For me, aggression is a human trait and not associated with one particular gender. In the end, both Sir Marmaduke and Aunt Stanbury relented to the desires of their loved ones. Camilla had no choice but to relent to Arabella’s victory in their race to become Reverend Gibson’s wife, thanks to her mother and uncle’s intervention. As for Louis, he continued to believe he was right about Emily and Colonel Osborne . . . at least right before the bitter end. Oliver Dimsdale proved to be the right actor to portray the complex and tragic Louis Trevelyan. He could have easily portrayed Louis as an unsympathetic and one-note figure of patriarchy. Instead, Dimsdale skillfully conveyed all of Louis’ faults and insecurities; and at the same time, left me feeling sympathetic toward the character. Dimsdale’s Louis was not a monster, but a flawed man who believed he could control everything and especially everyone in his life. And this trait proved to be his Achilles heel. But despite my sympathies toward him, I could never accept the righteousness of Louis’ behavior. And the main reason proved to be Laura Fraser’s portrayal of the high-spirited and stubborn Emily Rowley Trevelyan. One could say that Emily should have conceded to her husband’s wishes. As the spouse of a pre-20th century male, one would expect her to. I could point out that she did concede to Louis’ wishes – while protesting along the way. And Fraser not only did a marvelous job with Emily’s strong will and stubbornness, but also anger at Louis’ paternalism. Amazingly, she also effectively portrayed Emily’s continuing love for Louis and doubts over the character’s actions with a great deal of plausibility. This last trait was especially apparent in Emily’s conversations with Hugh Stanbury’s sister, Priscilla, in Episode Two. And both Dimsdale and Fraser created a strong and credible screen chemistry, despite their characters’ flaws, mistakes and conflicts. Another reason I managed to enjoy ”HE KNEW HE WAS RIGHT” turned out to be the solid performances by the supporting cast. However, several performances stood out for me. Three came from veteran performers such as Bill Nighy, Anna Massey and Ron Cook. Nighy, ever the chameleon, gave a delicious performance as the mischievous and rakish Colonel Osborne; who proved to be something of a blustering phony in the end. Anna Massey gave a wonderful and entertaining portrayal as the wealthy matriarch of the Stanbury family, Jemima Stanbury. Despite being a tyrannical and no-nonsense woman, Massey’s Aunt Stanbury also proved to be a likeable and vulnerable individual. And Cook did a marvelous job in portraying Mr. Nozzle as more than just a study in one-dimensional seediness. Cook aptly conveyed the private detective’s conflict between his greedy desire for Louis’ business and his sympathy toward Emily’s plight. The second trio of performances that impressed me came from David Tennant, Fenella Woolgar and Claudie Blakley, who portrayed the Reverend Gibson and the French sisters. Tennant, who was two years away from portraying the 10th Doctor Who, gave a hilarious performance as the avaricious vicar with a spine made from gelatin. Both Woolgar and Blakley were equally funny as the two sisters battling for his affections . . . or at least a marriage proposal. Blakley also seemed a tad frightening, as she delved into Camilla’s aggressive and homicidal determination to prevent Mr. Gibson from returning his “affections” to the more mild-tempered and manipulative Arabella. The production values for ”HE KNEW HE WAS RIGHT” seemed pretty solid. But I found nothing exceptional about it, except for Mike Eley’s photography and Debbie Wiseman’s haunting score, which seemed appropriate for the Trevelyans’ doomed marriage. However, I do have one major problem with Trollope’s tale . . . and Davies’ script. Quite simply, the story suffered from one too many subplots. Many have counted at least five subplots in ”HE KNEW HE WAS RIGHT” and they would be correct. At least three of them – Dorothy’s problems with Reverend Gibson, her conflict with Aunt Stanbury over Brooke Burgess, and Reverend Gibson’s problems with the French sisters – having nothing to do with the main storyline. Despite the fact that I found them either interesting or entertaining, I felt as if they belonged in another novel or series. I realize that Trollope had used these subplots as examples of comparisons to the Trevelyan marriage, but I always have this strange sensation that I am watching a completely different series altogether. I believe that Davies should have realized this before writing his script. Despite my problems with the tale’s numerous subplots, I found ”HE KNEW HE WAS RIGHT” to be a first-rate adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s novel. I must admit that all of the plotlines proved to be interesting. And Tom Vaughn’s direction, along with a first-rate cast led by Oliver Dimsdale and Laura Fraser, ”HE KNEW HE WAS RIGHT” proved to be a literary adaptation worth watching.

[thisguyatthemovies]

Addicted to love

Title: “The Souvenir”

Release date: May 17, 2019

Starring: Honor Swinton Byrne, Tom Burke, Tilda Swinton, Tosin Cole, Jack McMullen, Richard Ayoade, Ariane Labed, Jaygann Ayeh

Directed by: Joanna Hogg

Run time: 1 hour, 59 minutes

Rated: R

What it’s about: A shy film school student in 1980s England falls in love with a charming and narcissistic heroin addict

How I saw it: “Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence,” late American journalist H.L. Mencken once wrote. And Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne), the lead character in writer/director Joanna Hogg’s semi-autobiographic film “The Souvenir,” has let imagination triumph. And it never stops triumphing, right up to the predictable end.

Newcomer Swinton Byrne (the daughter of Tilda Swinton, also her mother in this film) plays a shy film school student in early 1980s England. She is planning a feature-length film about a working-class boy who is afraid that his mother will die, and she is in desperate need of a push to blossom not only as a filmmaker but as a young woman. Enter Anthony (Tom Burke), a stylishly dressed, chain-smoking young man who works for the Foreign Office and seems to be of privilege (just as Julie is). They embark on a slow-building romance that is dysfunctional right off the bat. Soon they are sharing the same bed, at first quarreling over who is infringing on the other’s side before they are, so to speak, meeting in the middle.

Anthony is a narcissist and borderline sociopath, but he gives Julie the attention she desperately craves, though little of it is positive attention. He frequently questions her film writing, her motivation for making movies, even her reserved personality. But that’s not the worst of it. Julie learns at a dinner party that Anthony has been keeping a secret – he is a heroin addict.

It’s all downhill from here. Anthony, who is a man of appearances but questionable credentials, starts borrowing money from Julie, and in turn she borrows it from her mother. Dealing with Anthony starts to take its toll on Julie, affecting her schooling and health. Their relationship seems to hit rock bottom when Julie comes home to Anthony to find that most of her valuable possessions have been stolen. Later, he confesses that he had taken everything but (and here’s where love, dysfunction, sociopathic behavior and enabling intersect) she ends up apologizing to him. That kind of behavior becomes a pattern through the rest of their relationship. When Anthony is jailed, Julie takes a new lover but – wait for it – takes Anthony back when he is released. His addiction worsens, and with jail already out of the way, there’s only one outcome left.

“The Souvenir” is a deeply personal film by Hogg. Perhaps too personal. It plays like an inside joke minus the joke. Watching it seems voyeuristic. Perhaps because the characters are privileged and pretentious the way you would expect film school students to be, it’s hard to muster sympathy or empathy for any of them. We learn nothing about how Anthony’s addiction started, and even in his most vulnerable moment, while he is going through withdrawal, feeling sorry for him or rooting for him only vaguely comes to mind and heart. Julie is a sympathetic character if you can view her as a victim of Anthony’s mess, but mostly she either makes bad decisions or apologizes to Anthony for, well, bothering to exist. She stands by her man, but why exactly? Is that what love is supposed to be?

The three main actors (Swinton Byrne, Swinton and Burke) are terrific, as is the supporting cast. “The Souvenir” is stylishly made with great detail and, as is the usual for an arthouse film, slow-moving and quiet. Music doesn’t play often, but when it does it’s played on vinyl and cassettes (this being the ‘80s), and it’s a great mix of opera, jazz, classical and 1980s post-punk and new wave (the Pretenders, Joe Jackson, The Fall).

But “The Souvenir” is as pretentious as its characters, and it’s surprisingly distant instead of intimate. Its purpose, apparently, is to show how a turbulent and doomed relationship helped make a young woman a better artist and person. But who’s to say that wouldn’t have happened anyway, through other, better experiences? Was the relationship the path to growth, or was it just an awful detour?  

My score: 28 out of 100

Should you see it? No. It might hold some interest if there is a heroin addict in your life, so that you know what not to do.

[flauntpage]

Your Monday Morning Roundup

It was a mixed bag this weekend.

The Phillies lost two of three to the Braves in Atlanta. Those losses were polar opposites of one another.

Let’s begin on Friday, where the Phils led 5-1 after five innings and 8-6 in the bottom of the ninth. Atlanta scored eight runs in the final four innings, three of them in the ninth to take a 9-8 walk-off win on a Brian McCann single (and his 1,000th RBI). You can blame Hector Neris for that collapse, allowing the game-winner with a 2-2 count. Two weeks ago, he gave up a walk-off homer to Will Smith in the Dodgers’ 4-3 win.

Saturday was better, as the Phils came back to beat the Braves. Josh Donaldson gave Atlanta a 5-4 lead in the bottom of the fifth on a three-run homer. But after a Scott Kingery single and Sean Rodriguez reached via a sacrifice bunt thanks to a throwing error, Cesar Hernandez drove home both runners in the top of the ninth to give the Phillies the lead. And unlike Friday night, Neris had a 1-2-3 inning to earn the save.

Sunday was a very bad day. If you didn’t watch the game, you did yourself a favor as the Phils got trounced 15-1. Atlanta scored runs in all but two innings (second and eighth) and scored multiple runs in those innings except for the sixth. Vince Velasquez, Cole Irvin, and Jerad Eickhoff all sucked. Sean Rodriguez was the team’s best pitcher. He pitched an inning, had a strikeout, and didn’t allow a hit.

This was a big series for the Phillies, but they’re now 2 1/2 games back of the Braves for tops in the NL East. There’s still plenty of pitching problems, especially with that fifth starter spot. Pat Neshek came off the injured list on Sunday, which should help the bullpen.

With that, the Phillies continue their long NL East stretch with a four-game set beginning tonight against the Nationals at 7:05 PM on NBC Sports Philadelphia. Jake Arrieta’s on the mound against Patrick Corbin.

While you wait, you can enjoy former Phillie Brett Myers’ new album if you want.

Before we continue, a word from our sponsors:

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The Roundup:

Start the week off with the latest edition of the Crossing Broadcast.

Here’s another set of 50 hot takes for the Philadelphia sports fan.

The Eagles named Andy Weidl their new Vice President of Player Personnel. Howie Roseman got a new title and is officially a general manager again.

The Flyers made a couple of moves over the weekend. They traded away defenseman Radko Gudas to Washington for defenseman Matt Niskanen.

And they’re buying out Andrew MacDonald’s contract.

While the Raptors celebrated to Meek Mill, Sixers fans should have a “glass half-full” reaction to Toronto winning the NBA Finals.

But the Sixers are one of the betting favorites to win it all next year.

In other sports news, the Lakers traded for Anthony Davis. They’re also reportedly interested in Jimmy Butler and Kawhi Leonard. I mean who isn’t?

Gary Woodland held off Brooks Koepka to win the U.S. Open.

The US Women’s National team defeated Chile, 3-0, on Sunday.

Sorry for burying the lead, but our very own Bob Wankel was named the Inquirer’s South Jersey Baseball Coach of the Year.

In the news, 16 employees reportedly accepted buyouts at the Inquirer.

A fire occurred at a Sea Isle marina, and there’s now calls for a full-time fire department there.

The post Your Monday Morning Roundup appeared first on Crossing Broad.

Your Monday Morning Roundup published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/

[junker-town]

Every team in the MLB postseason, ranked

Let’s take stock of the rooting situation before the Wild Card games.

After a wild final weekend for the National League in which the spoilers failed to do their jobs at all, resulting in two Game 163s that were also exciting, all of the 2018 postseason teams are finally locked in. That took long enough. RIP Cardinals.

So now that we not only know which teams are in the playoffs but their opening round positions as well, we’re going to rank each team for a fun yet completely arbitrary list of who to root for this postseason.

We already covered a ranking of every possible World Series matchup elsewhere on this fun site, so this isn’t dependent on who the teams are playing in any given round. This is just based on the levels of fun and rootability of each team, with points removed for any racist logos or alleged domestic abusers they might have hanging around. Every round, I’ll update these rankings based on the events of the previous round.

Feel free to yell at me about the rankings in the comments, but know in advance I won’t care and also probably won’t remember my ranking logic and reasoning by the time you get around to complaining. It’s the postseason, let’s have fun.

10. Cubs

The Cubs are ... sigh. They haven’t been especially fun this year, and that’s before the Addison Russell situation flared up again (which the team handled poorly) or they traded for Daniel Murphy (which the team also handled poorly). Cole Hamels is doing alright, so that’s fine. And, oh boy, is Javy Báez a lot of fun. Anthony Rizzo and Kris Bryant remain their enjoyable Bryzzo selves even through slumps and injuries.

But other than that, the Cubs aren’t really a team you’re drawn to this postseason. Even some Cubs fans are having a bit of trouble supporting the team right now because of the aforementioned poorly handled player situations. They just won a World Series, so they’ll be fine without any extra fans on their side.

9. Indians

Besides José Ramírez and Francisco Lindor’s bats, one of which has been very sleepy heading into this postseason, the Indians don’t have a ton to latch on to this year. Gone is the team that rattled off an AL record of consecutive wins with a lineup to be feared.

Now they have Corey Kluber sans beard, Trevor Bauer rejoining the roster in time for the playoffs, and a racist logo they won’t drop and which some fans will still be wearing throughout their postseason run. All of that and every other team in the American League race is more fun by one metric or another. Just not a great year to latch on to Cleveland, there are better options.

8. Astros

One of those options is the Astros. They just won so there’s no desperation in their hunt, which is why they’re this low on the list, but they still have people like Jose Altuve, George Springer, and Alex Bregman being joyful on the field and in the dugout.

Yet where the “they could repeat as champs!” bonus should push them a little higher on this ranking, the “they traded for a domestic abuser at the deadline while he was still suspended by the league and court proceedings were ongoing, then pretended they still had a zero tolerance policy” thing cancels that bump out. At least watching Justin Verlander ruin batters’ lives throughout the postseason will still be fun, which is always an upside.

7. Brewers

The Brewers are ... fine. They’re fine! There’s nothing to really root against here other than Josh Hader succeeding in any way, shape, or form in October. Yet when you think about it there’s not really something to root for either besides Christian Yelich continuing to be a force to be reckoned with at the plate.

That Craig Counsell’s success with this Milwaukee team is a shock is a bit of a backhanded compliment but it also explains why they’re not the most enticing team to root for this year. Congrats to Jonathan Schoop for getting out of Baltimore? Mike Moustakas and Eric Thames still exist? Zach Davies still seems cool? Not much to work with. Sorry, Brew Crew.

6. Rockies

Rockies fans are going to be mad at me that they’re this low and that’s OK. But the Rockies end-of-season push can only place them so high in entertainment value and there’s no overarching story or theme that makes them more enticing to root for than the teams above them.

Nolan Arenado, Charlie Blackmon, CarGo, and German Márquez are all nice and fun and entertaining. Their pitching has mostly avoided the Coors Field Curse (hello, Kyle Freeland’s 2.85 ERA) and they’re more or less completely inoffensive as a team to get behind. They’re definitely the team most likely to move up these rankings as the postseason goes on though.

5. Yankees

A healthy Aaron Judge, pitching that runs very hot and very cold in the same game, 100 wins without winning the division, and the single-season home run record. The Yankees are good, and they are entertaining, but they are also the New York Yankees and if you are looking for a team to root for because you don’t have one I can’t in good conscience recommend them.

Yet, similar to last year, they’re a fun Yankees team. So I also can’t be mad if you decide you’d like to bandwagon them right now. You’d be wrong and unoriginal, but I’d at least understand. They’re most likely to launch up these rankings if it ends up being a Yankees-Cubs World Series or something. Oh god, can you even imagine?

4. Red Sox

The Red Sox are fun for the same reason the Yankees are (young stars, lots of dingers, facing their biggest rivals in the opening round) with the added bonus of being historically good. “They had to paint new number panels for the scoreboard” good is a type of good you don’t get to see that often.

They have two MVP candidates in Mookie Betts and J.D. Martinez, Chris Sale remains magical even in a slightly down year for the ace, and they have other young, entertaining guys like Rafael Devers, Jackie Bradley Jr., Andrew Benintendi, and Xander Bogaerts. But they are still the Red Sox and that’s understandably a tough pill to swallow for many people.

They also just won a World Series in 2013 (and two more before that, of course) so they wouldn’t come close to qualifying as an underdog even if they didn’t win 108 games. Boston is this year’s “wow are they fun to watch play baseball but no one wants them to actually win any games” team. Which is fair.

3. Dodgers

The Dodgers are this high by their sheer howdidtheyevengethere quality. If you put the Dodgers’ howdidtheyevengethere in a town’s water supply it would immediately qualify as unsafe levels for humans to consume. Their pitching situation alone should be classified as toxic waste.

For a team that barely made it to the postseason, they could also easily win the whole thing and avenge 2017’s seven game loss.

If they can get out of their own way of course. Which makes them way more interesting than many teams on this list. They are neither an underdog nor a steamroller, they are both. They are every possible outcome for a playoff team at any given time. They are so entertaining because they could swing between farcical and world beating within a two inning span.

2. A’s

The A’s have this weird thing going on where they are really fun as a team but when you break them into individual entities they’re not as purely awesome. Khris Davis won the home run title this year and is by all accounts very nice but could you identify one awesomely fun thing he did this season besides hit dingers?

Matt Olson and Matt Chapman are both defensive marvels and Olson can rake, but the most entertaining thing about the both of them is pointing at the screen and saying “that’s Chappie” when Chapman does something impressive. Jed Lowrie will always be Jed Lowrie, and we love him for it. But there’s also no one unsavory on this team and besides their ongoing ballpark situation ownership is doing a decent job of hiding all of the things that make people dislike baseball owners.

Their last World Series win was in 1989, long enough ago that it’s definitely a drought that we want them to end, and they’re gone through more than enough down seasons since then that the desire for them to win it all is boosted accordingly.

1. Braves

The Braves are at the opposite spectrum of the Cubs, and they’re here because in a lot of ways they are the opposite of this year’s Chicago squad. They haven’t won a World Series since 1995, which is long enough we can call it a drought and say it would be fun if they ended it, they’re ahead of schedule in their rebuild rather than battling a closing window so there’s not much downside if they don’t win it this year, and they’re fun.

They’re so much fun! Between Freddie Freeman, Ronald Acuña, Jr., and Ozzie Albies, they have players that electrify games and force you to root for their happiness just through sheer charisma and talent. Thanks to the Phillies not living up to their rebuild promise this year and the Nationals being the Nationals, the Braves are in the postseason and poised to do something special thanks to a mix of talent and blind confidence.

If your team gets eliminated before the World Series and you’re looking for a group to invest in, you can’t do much worse than the Atlanta Braves. Bandwagon away. Just don’t look at the Tomahawk Chop and taxpayer money used to pay for their unnecessary new field behind the curtain.

[amtushinfosolutionspage]

The Rise of HS Basketball Highlight Reel Factories and the Impact on Students

In April 2017, the Bristol Herald Courier, a newspaper in Southwest Virginia, named junior guard Mac McClung its boys basketball player of the year. The Courier said McClung’s games at Gate City High School “were standing-room only affairs.” In a town of roughly 2,000 people, McClung was afforded big-man-on-campus status while still maintaining a modicum of anonymity, at least beyond his tiny pocket of the state.

Then a curious thing happened. McClung became the poster boy for the burgeoning Internet era of high school basketball, leaping from local star to a national stage shared by other elite adolescent talents who have their every move documented on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. That’s because in May of 2017, someone at Ballislife, the crème de la crème of high school basketball highlights, caught McClung aggressively dunking on everyone in his vicinity at an AAU game. By June of 2017, McClung was hovering around 20,000 Instagram followers. His final year of high school ball turned into a complete circus, with more viral clips than one could possibly count. Now, McClung is headed to Georgetown, with a tad more Instagram followers: roughly 644,000.

It’s nothing new for basketball recruits to have fame bestowed upon them at an early age, though in the prep-to-pro era, most of the footage of future stars was limited to grainy mixtapes. That’s no longer the case. If you Google even fringe players from the classes of 2018 or 2019, you’re certain to find a video with tens if not hundreds of thousands of views and an entire comments section dissecting every jump shot. Many of the videos aren’t just highlights—they’re mini-documentaries showing a day in the life of a 17-year-old.

“These kids are thinking about making sure they have the right Clif Bar in their locker for after practice,” said Dr. Jenelle Gilbert, a professor and graduate program coordinator for the kinesiology department at Fresno State. “They have very high school-centered needs, but they’re being thrust into an adult world very, very quickly.”

Ballislife founder Matt Rodriguez boasts on his LinkedIn page that Ballislife viewership jumped from 97.99 million across social media platforms in 2016 to 682.78 million in 2017. Overtime, which launched in Dec. 2016, says it has “20 million minutes of watch time each month” and, since the start of 2018, has received $9.5 million in Series A funding plus $2.5 million in seed funding. There’s also Mars Reel (25 million unique views per month as of January; they also landed $2.5 million in seed funding this year), EliteMixtapes, HoopDiamonds, and CityLeagueHoopsTV, which focuses on middle school boys and girls.

“This is something that’s completely new to us, and frankly [the channels] were almost expecting to have access,” said Archbishop Molloy High School athletic director and boys basketball coach Mike McCleary. He oversees a team in Queens, New York, that had three Division I prospects in 2017-18: UCLA signee Moses Brown, Georgia Tech signee Khalid Moore, and point guard Cole Anthony, ESPN’s No. 6 prospect in the class of 2019. “A lot of times [the videographers] would just show up,” McCleary continued. “They do a lot of communicating with the athletes themselves, and not as much communicating with me as necessary.”

Each of the channels has seen an eruption in popularity over the last year or so. Problem is, kids (and adults) don’t necessarily understand the drawbacks to this degree of outsized exposure. Concerns about players’ emotional well-being have been raised in the NBA, but the high school level has barely begun to grapple with the detrimental impact an industry eager to build on its bottom line could have on teenagers, who get a boost in name recognition in exchange for an entirely new set of stressors and expectations.

Gate City boys basketball coach Scott Vermillion, for instance, knows McClung was acutely aware of his newfound audience during his senior season, which ended with a 29-2 record and a Class 2 state title. “He felt pressure to perform because of all of the cameras. People are traveling from California to film our games and do highlights,” Vermillion said. “He attempted a couple dunks this year that didn’t go in, but I didn’t mind.”

https://sports.vice.com/en_us/embed/article/a37gze/cole-anthony-wants-to-revolutionize-basketball-and-play-zelda-the-16-project?utm_source=stylizedembed_sports.vice.com&utm_campaign=zmkbvy&site=sports

At Archbishop Molloy, it’s Anthony who’s the biggest draw. He, like McClung, has eclipsed the six-digit Instagram followers mark. Both have cultivated a social media image that looks like it’s straight out of a public relations firm. Documentary-style videos provide glimpses into their personalities, but their Instagram and Twitter accounts rarely deviate from posting highlight-reel clips they’re tagged in.

McCleary and Vermillion have slightly differing opinions about the influx of high school basketball-dedicated channels. Vermillion believes they’re a net positive, noting that the “overall effect it had on our community, on our kids, on our region, on our team, on the game of basketball, far outweighs the negative parts.” McCleary was careful to note he had no ill will toward any one entity, and he’s all for “the kids getting some notoriety.” But he also felt the channels were a distraction, and wished he “would have put a few more stipulations” in place when they started showing up. On the whole, McCleary finds the channels to be a net negative.

One downside both coaches cited was how the spotlight messed with the other kids on their rosters. Said McCleary: “I think it does individualize a player when you’re trying to build a team. We had three very good players, all very nice kids—respectful, did what we asked them to do, and I think they were in for the team. But they’re getting the attention, and the other 12 kids aren’t.”

Unlike college or pro basketball, where there are clearly defined boundaries enforced between media members and organizations, there is no standard for high schools or high school basketball channels to adhere to. That’s partly a result of how the channels are set up, with some hiring professional videographers while others outsource contracted positions to people who happen to live in an area with a touted teenager. Coach Vermillion turned down video requests for the last few weeks of the season, but that was an arbitrary call based on how his team was handling the additional scrutiny. For now, that’s the only tangible protection.

Neither Vermillion nor McCleary thought their star players suffered significantly on or off the court as the cameras poured in. But from all indications, the coaches had their players’ best interests at heart, and kids like McClung and Anthony were cited as having especially strong familial support systems, which certainly isn’t the case for every prospect.

Dr. Frank Smoll, a sports psychologist, declined a formal interview for this piece because at this point, he feels talk is cheap. Instead, he suggested in an email that action is required from a large organization like the National Federation of State High School Associations to examine potential negative effects and put guidelines in place to protect teens. On its website, the NFHS says it’s dedicated to “building awareness and support, improving the participation experience, establishing consistent standards and rules for competition, and helping those who oversee high school sports.” In a statement to Vice, Bruce Howard, the director of communications at NFHS, didn’t indicate any policy positions were imminent.

“We would prefer the focus be on the team rather than sensationalizing individual players,” Howard wrote. “I think our schools and state associations will continue to monitor these type of sites to protect the players.”

High school basketball players deserve the opportunity to promote themselves, but like most situations involving young adults and athletics, the scales are tipped against them. They aren’t the ones making money off their likeness. Dollars aside, there are unexplored short- and long-term consequences of sudden fame for still-developing kids. (When asked to comment on the subject, the parents of athletes contacted for this story declined to make them available.) Unfortunately, there’s no break for anyone to take a step back and reassess—AAU ball is in full swing over the summer, and then it’s back to school. In other words, this is the new reality, for better or worse. Or, as Dr. Smoll signed off in one of his emails, “I’m sorry for being so pessimistic, but ‘it is what it is.'”

The Rise of HS Basketball Highlight Reel Factories and the Impact on Students syndicated from https://australiahoverboards.wordpress.com

[gta-5-cheats]

The X-Files, Fight Club, and More – The Weekend Chill

New Post has been published on http://secondcovers.com/the-x-files-fight-club-and-more-ndash-the-weekend-chill/

The X-Files, Fight Club, and More – The Weekend Chill

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Last Friday, Syfy gave us a new image and premiere date for Krypton, the Superman prequel series set on his native planet about 200 years before his birth. It’ll arrive March 21.

Over the weekend, John Williams revealed in an interview that he’d be composing a theme for Solo: A Star Wars Story. The rest of the score is still being handled by John Powell. The standalone Han Solo film releases May 25.

The 32 Most Anticipated Movies of 2018

On Tuesday, Netflix released a brief teaser for A Series of Unfortunate Events season 2, starring Neil Patrick Harris as Count Olaf. The show returns March 30, and adapts books five to nine.

Later that day, Paramount announced that the next Cloverfield movie – which may or may not be called God Particle – has been moved back to April 20 from February. The film stars Daniel Brühl, Elizabeth Debicki, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw among others.

On Wednesday, Netflix said that a Bright sequel is in the works, with stars Will Smith and Joel Edgerton along with director David Ayer all attached. This confirms the Bloomberg report from two weeks ago.

That’s all the entertainment news for this week. Welcome back to The Weekend Chill, your one-stop destination for what to watch, play, or listen to this weekend. Here are the best picks:

TV: The X-Files Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny reprise their roles as FBI special agents for an eleventh year in the second year of the show’s revival era, whose rating success (despite negative critical reception) convinced Fox to greenlit a 10-episode new season. The premiere and finale will focus on the long-arc storyline, with the other episodes being standalone.

Recurring and guest stars include Annabeth Gish, Robbie Amell, Lauren Ambrose, Karin Konoval, Barbara Hershey, and Haley Joel Osment. Scully (Anderson) and Mulder (Duchovny) attempt to locate their son at the beginning of the series, while battling a mysterious organisation led by Erika Price (Hershey).

The X-Files season 1 has gotten average to good reviews from critics, with Vox’s Todd VanDerWerff surprised “how rejuvenated it feels”, and terming it “a damn sight better than the 2016 one”. Uproxx’s Alan Sepinwall concurred with VanDerWerff that it’s not anywhere near its season-three peak, but “it’s much better than it has any business being, particularly given what we got two years ago”.

The Gadgets 360 Winter 2018 TV Guide

How to access: Hotstar Time commitment: 40 minutes

Grown-ish In the penultimate episode of the third season of ABC’s popular African-American family sitcom Black-ish, the eldest daughter Zoey Johnson (Yar Shahidi) went off to college. Usually, audiences would just see less of her from the next season – as has become the case with the ongoing season 4 – but here, she’s gotten her own spin-off.

Stylised like the original, Grown-ish follows Zoey as she begins her freshman year at Southern California University. Joining her is Charlie Telphy (Deon Cole) – now part of Black-ish’s main cast – f and Aaron (Trevor Jackson), who has a recurring role on Black-ish. New cast members include Francia Raisa, Chris Parnell, Emily Arlook, and Jordan Buhat.

Reviews for the show’s first season – critics have seen a few episode – are mostly positive, with EW’s Dana Schwartz praising Shahidi’s chemistry with her Latina Republican roommate Ana (Raisa) and the snappy dialogue, while Variety’s Maureen Ryan called it “a smart, breezy expansion of the Black-ish family”.

How to access: Freeform Time commitment: 1 hour first week, 30 minutes thereafter

Rotten Do you like true crime shows and are concerned about food production? This Netflix original documentary series is tailored especially for you then. Rotten focuses on the growing global food industry, exposing the corruption, waste and dangers of your everyday eating habits. “The food industry is under full-scale assault,” the trailer narrates. “The crisis is global.”

Episodes will look at the honey industry – a scam known as Honeygate that involved smuggling in inferior honey from China via Australia to the US – alongside the rise of severe food allergies, chicken farms, organic and unpasteurized milk, and regulation of the fishing industry. The show comes from the same production company that regularly collaborates with Anthony Bourdain.

“In a world where huge global supply-chains are increasingly intertwined and consolidated, this series starts on your dinner plate… and follows the money to the shocking consequences – intended or not – of regulation, innovation and greed,” Netflix’s official description for Rotten reads.

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How to access: Netflix Time commitment: 6 hours

Movies: Fight Club We’re going to talk about Fight Club (sorry). The film that gave the world’s youth endlessly-quotable lines, that gave the generation some good values and some screwed-up ones, and that inspired foolish individuals to start their own fight clubs, completely missing the point the film – directed by David Fincher, and based on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel – was trying to make.

For the unaware, Fight Club stars Edward Norton as the unnamed protagonist and narrator, who’s disgruntled with his white-collar job. He visits support groups for terminal disease patients just to have someone to talk to. He meets Brad Pitt’s soap salesman on a flight one day, and starts a “fight club” with him, where they organise bare-knuckle boxing matches for people like them.

Fight Club was one of the most controversial films of the year in 1999, and though it received polarising reception from critics, it has gone on to become one of the greatest films of its time. Pitt’s acting, Fincher’s work, and the anti-consumerism message make it a must-watch.

How to access: Amazon Prime Video Time commitment: 2 hours and 19 minutes

L.A. Confidential Two decades on, it’s still a surprise that L.A. Confidential – a brilliantly written, powerfully acted, and gritty depiction of 1953 Los Angeles mixing police corruption and Hollywood – lost most Oscar categories it was nominated in to Titanic. (If you love Titanic, please go away.) But it did pick up two very well-deserved awards, Best Screenplay and Kim Basinger for Best Supporting Actress.

Basinger plays a call girl who looks a lot like a popular film star, and she becomes central to an investigation into a multiple murder at a coffee shop after two detectives – Bud White (Russell Crowe) and Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) – discover ties to the call girl service operator. The film also stars Kevin Spacey as a “Hollywood” detective, so whether that influences your decision to watch it given the recent revelations, is up to you.

L.A. Confidential is one of the best films of its era, with a 99 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 90 score on Metacritic. It’s dark, cynical, pessimistic and twisted, and it manages to craft compelling characters and wade into their psychology, while still being a taut crime thriller.

How to access: Amazon Prime Video Time commitment: 2 hours and 17 minutes

Fantastic Mr. Fox Wes Anderson has a new stop-motion animated feature on the way, and his previous venture – a comedy based on Roald Dahl’s children’s book about a fox who steals food from three mean and wealthy farmers – is a fantastic (pardon us) family adventure all-around. It’s also got a terrific voice cast: George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe, and Owen Wilson among others.

Clooney and Streep voice Mr. and Mrs. Fox, who’ve built a peaceful life for themselves after time as thieves. But after 12 years, Mr. Fox’s animal instincts pull him back into his old life as a chicken thief, which puts not just his family but the whole animal community at risk. The farmers are determined to catch him at any cost, which forces the Foxes underground.

Fantastic Mr. Fox is a whole-hearted funny romp for people of all ages, full of personality, charm, wit and emotional undercurrents, and brought to life beautifully by set designers and animation directors, alongside a wonderful score by Alexandre Desplat.

How to access: Amazon Prime Video Time commitment: 1 hour and 26 minutes

Other mentions: For those who’ve seen every movie listed above, and want something more recent, there are a few choices on Blu-ray: the Tom Cruise-starrer American Made, based on the true story of a pilot who became a drug smuggler for the Medellín Cartel in the 80s; Emma Stone and Steve Carrell in Battle of the Sexes, which is loosely based on the 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs; and Ben Stiller in Brad’s Status, where he re-examines his life while on a college tour with his son.

If you’re on the lookout for more new TV, Showtime has a coming-of-age drama from Lena Waithe – Emmy-winner with Aziz Ansari for Master of None season 2’s “Thanksgiving” episode – called The Chi, with rapper Common as an executive producer. It’s set in the South Side of Chicago with Jason Mitchell (Straight Outta Compton) in the lead, who dreams of opening a restaurant. It starts Sunday in the US, and might be available on Hotstar in India, given the latter’s deal with CBS.

There’s also BBC One mini-series McMafia, inspired by journalist Misha Glenny’s book of the same name, which focuses on the British-raised son of a Russian mafia boss who’s trying to get away from the family business. You can watch it via BBC iPlayer.

Star Trek: Discovery, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, One Day at a Time, and More on Netflix in January

Beyond that, given it’s the start of the month (and year), all streaming services have added tons of new content. On Netflix, you can find the third season of Jane the Virgin; the first and only season of One Punch Man, the anime about a superhero who can kill anyone with one blow and how that depresses him, and both versions of Fullmetal Alchemist, the 2003 one that was made before the manga was complete, and the 2009 edition Brotherhood that’s more faithful to the source material.

Meanwhile, Hotstar now has every single episode of The X-Files, starting from the first episode in 1993 to the latest one that came out this week (as mentioned earlier). It has also brought back The Wire – one of the greatest series of all-time – in addition to all nine seasons of 24, and all 12 seasons of Bones.

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Your Monday Morning Roundup

It was a mixed bag this weekend.

The Phillies lost two of three to the Braves in Atlanta. Those losses were polar opposites of one another.

Let’s begin on Friday, where the Phils led 5-1 after five innings and 8-6 in the bottom of the ninth. Atlanta scored eight runs in the final four innings, three of them in the ninth to take a 9-8 walk-off win on a Brian McCann single (and his 1,000th RBI). You can blame Hector Neris for that collapse, allowing the game-winner with a 2-2 count. Two weeks ago, he gave up a walk-off homer to Will Smith in the Dodgers’ 4-3 win.

Saturday was better, as the Phils came back to beat the Braves. Josh Donaldson gave Atlanta a 5-4 lead in the bottom of the fifth on a three-run homer. But after a Scott Kingery single and Sean Rodriguez reached via a sacrifice bunt thanks to a throwing error, Cesar Hernandez drove home both runners in the top of the ninth to give the Phillies the lead. And unlike Friday night, Neris had a 1-2-3 inning to earn the save.

Sunday was a very bad day. If you didn’t watch the game, you did yourself a favor as the Phils got trounced 15-1. Atlanta scored runs in all but two innings (second and eighth) and scored multiple runs in those innings except for the sixth. Vince Velasquez, Cole Irvin, and Jerad Eickhoff all sucked. Sean Rodriguez was the team’s best pitcher. He pitched an inning, had a strikeout, and didn’t allow a hit.

This was a big series for the Phillies, but they’re now 2 1/2 games back of the Braves for tops in the NL East. There’s still plenty of pitching problems, especially with that fifth starter spot. Pat Neshek came off the injured list on Sunday, which should help the bullpen.

With that, the Phillies continue their long NL East stretch with a four-game set beginning tonight against the Nationals at 7:05 PM on NBC Sports Philadelphia. Jake Arrieta’s on the mound against Patrick Corbin.

While you wait, you can enjoy former Phillie Brett Myers’ new album if you want.

Before we continue, a word from our sponsors:

Stupid money. Spend it all. Shop now.

Fresh. The best meal delivery service, without question. Sign up for Hello Fresh now and get $40 off your first two boxes.

Amazon. If you shop Amazon, support your favorite website and use our link.

The Roundup:

Start the week off with the latest edition of the Crossing Broadcast.

Here’s another set of 50 hot takes for the Philadelphia sports fan.

The Eagles named Andy Weidl their new Vice President of Player Personnel. Howie Roseman got a new title and is officially a general manager again.

The Flyers made a couple of moves over the weekend. They traded away defenseman Radko Gudas to Washington for defenseman Matt Niskanen.

And they’re buying out Andrew MacDonald’s contract.

While the Raptors celebrated to Meek Mill, Sixers fans should have a “glass half-full” reaction to Toronto winning the NBA Finals.

But the Sixers are one of the betting favorites to win it all next year.

In other sports news, the Lakers traded for Anthony Davis. They’re also reportedly interested in Jimmy Butler and Kawhi Leonard. I mean who isn’t?

Gary Woodland held off Brooks Koepka to win the U.S. Open.

The US Women’s National team defeated Chile, 3-0, on Sunday.

Sorry for burying the lead, but our very own Bob Wankel was named the Inquirer’s South Jersey Baseball Coach of the Year.

In the news, 16 employees reportedly accepted buyouts at the Inquirer.

A fire occurred at a Sea Isle marina, and there’s now calls for a full-time fire department there.

The post Your Monday Morning Roundup appeared first on Crossing Broad.

Your Monday Morning Roundup published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/

[flauntpage]

Your Monday Morning Roundup

It was a mixed bag this weekend.

The Phillies lost two of three to the Braves in Atlanta. Those losses were polar opposites of one another.

Let’s begin on Friday, where the Phils led 5-1 after five innings and 8-6 in the bottom of the ninth. Atlanta scored eight runs in the final four innings, three of them in the ninth to take a 9-8 walk-off win on a Brian McCann single (and his 1,000th RBI). You can blame Hector Neris for that collapse, allowing the game-winner with a 2-2 count. Two weeks ago, he gave up a walk-off homer to Will Smith in the Dodgers’ 4-3 win.

Saturday was better, as the Phils came back to beat the Braves. Josh Donaldson gave Atlanta a 5-4 lead in the bottom of the fifth on a three-run homer. But after a Scott Kingery single and Sean Rodriguez reached via a sacrifice bunt thanks to a throwing error, Cesar Hernandez drove home both runners in the top of the ninth to give the Phillies the lead. And unlike Friday night, Neris had a 1-2-3 inning to earn the save.

Sunday was a very bad day. If you didn’t watch the game, you did yourself a favor as the Phils got trounced 15-1. Atlanta scored runs in all but two innings (second and eighth) and scored multiple runs in those innings except for the sixth. Vince Velasquez, Cole Irvin, and Jerad Eickhoff all sucked. Sean Rodriguez was the team’s best pitcher. He pitched an inning, had a strikeout, and didn’t allow a hit.

This was a big series for the Phillies, but they’re now 2 1/2 games back of the Braves for tops in the NL East. There’s still plenty of pitching problems, especially with that fifth starter spot. Pat Neshek came off the injured list on Sunday, which should help the bullpen.

With that, the Phillies continue their long NL East stretch with a four-game set beginning tonight against the Nationals at 7:05 PM on NBC Sports Philadelphia. Jake Arrieta’s on the mound against Patrick Corbin.

While you wait, you can enjoy former Phillie Brett Myers’ new album if you want.

Before we continue, a word from our sponsors:

Stupid money. Spend it all. Shop now.

Fresh. The best meal delivery service, without question. Sign up for Hello Fresh now and get $40 off your first two boxes.

Amazon. If you shop Amazon, support your favorite website and use our link.

The Roundup:

Start the week off with the latest edition of the Crossing Broadcast.

Here’s another set of 50 hot takes for the Philadelphia sports fan.

The Eagles named Andy Weidl their new Vice President of Player Personnel. Howie Roseman got a new title and is officially a general manager again.

The Flyers made a couple of moves over the weekend. They traded away defenseman Radko Gudas to Washington for defenseman Matt Niskanen.

And they’re buying out Andrew MacDonald’s contract.

While the Raptors celebrated to Meek Mill, Sixers fans should have a “glass half-full” reaction to Toronto winning the NBA Finals.

But the Sixers are one of the betting favorites to win it all next year.

In other sports news, the Lakers traded for Anthony Davis. They’re also reportedly interested in Jimmy Butler and Kawhi Leonard. I mean who isn’t?

Gary Woodland held off Brooks Koepka to win the U.S. Open.

The US Women’s National team defeated Chile, 3-0, on Sunday.

Sorry for burying the lead, but our very own Bob Wankel was named the Inquirer’s South Jersey Baseball Coach of the Year.

In the news, 16 employees reportedly accepted buyouts at the Inquirer.

A fire occurred at a Sea Isle marina, and there’s now calls for a full-time fire department there.

The post Your Monday Morning Roundup appeared first on Crossing Broad.

Your Monday Morning Roundup published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/

[flauntpage]

Your Monday Morning Roundup

It was a mixed bag this weekend.

The Phillies lost two of three to the Braves in Atlanta. Those losses were polar opposites of one another.

Let’s begin on Friday, where the Phils led 5-1 after five innings and 8-6 in the bottom of the ninth. Atlanta scored eight runs in the final four innings, three of them in the ninth to take a 9-8 walk-off win on a Brian McCann single (and his 1,000th RBI). You can blame Hector Neris for that collapse, allowing the game-winner with a 2-2 count. Two weeks ago, he gave up a walk-off homer to Will Smith in the Dodgers’ 4-3 win.

Saturday was better, as the Phils came back to beat the Braves. Josh Donaldson gave Atlanta a 5-4 lead in the bottom of the fifth on a three-run homer. But after a Scott Kingery single and Sean Rodriguez reached via a sacrifice bunt thanks to a throwing error, Cesar Hernandez drove home both runners in the top of the ninth to give the Phillies the lead. And unlike Friday night, Neris had a 1-2-3 inning to earn the save.

Sunday was a very bad day. If you didn’t watch the game, you did yourself a favor as the Phils got trounced 15-1. Atlanta scored runs in all but two innings (second and eighth) and scored multiple runs in those innings except for the sixth. Vince Velasquez, Cole Irvin, and Jerad Eickhoff all sucked. Sean Rodriguez was the team’s best pitcher. He pitched an inning, had a strikeout, and didn’t allow a hit.

This was a big series for the Phillies, but they’re now 2 1/2 games back of the Braves for tops in the NL East. There’s still plenty of pitching problems, especially with that fifth starter spot. Pat Neshek came off the injured list on Sunday, which should help the bullpen.

With that, the Phillies continue their long NL East stretch with a four-game set beginning tonight against the Nationals at 7:05 PM on NBC Sports Philadelphia. Jake Arrieta’s on the mound against Patrick Corbin.

While you wait, you can enjoy former Phillie Brett Myers’ new album if you want.

Before we continue, a word from our sponsors:

Stupid money. Spend it all. Shop now.

Fresh. The best meal delivery service, without question. Sign up for Hello Fresh now and get $40 off your first two boxes.

Amazon. If you shop Amazon, support your favorite website and use our link.

The Roundup:

Start the week off with the latest edition of the Crossing Broadcast.

Here’s another set of 50 hot takes for the Philadelphia sports fan.

The Eagles named Andy Weidl their new Vice President of Player Personnel. Howie Roseman got a new title and is officially a general manager again.

The Flyers made a couple of moves over the weekend. They traded away defenseman Radko Gudas to Washington for defenseman Matt Niskanen.

And they’re buying out Andrew MacDonald’s contract.

While the Raptors celebrated to Meek Mill, Sixers fans should have a “glass half-full” reaction to Toronto winning the NBA Finals.

But the Sixers are one of the betting favorites to win it all next year.

In other sports news, the Lakers traded for Anthony Davis. They’re also reportedly interested in Jimmy Butler and Kawhi Leonard. I mean who isn’t?

Gary Woodland held off Brooks Koepka to win the U.S. Open.

The US Women’s National team defeated Chile, 3-0, on Sunday.

Sorry for burying the lead, but our very own Bob Wankel was named the Inquirer’s South Jersey Baseball Coach of the Year.

In the news, 16 employees reportedly accepted buyouts at the Inquirer.

A fire occurred at a Sea Isle marina, and there’s now calls for a full-time fire department there.

The post Your Monday Morning Roundup appeared first on Crossing Broad.

Your Monday Morning Roundup published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/

[flauntpage]

Your Monday Morning Roundup

It was a mixed bag this weekend.

The Phillies lost two of three to the Braves in Atlanta. Those losses were polar opposites of one another.

Let’s begin on Friday, where the Phils led 5-1 after five innings and 8-6 in the bottom of the ninth. Atlanta scored eight runs in the final four innings, three of them in the ninth to take a 9-8 walk-off win on a Brian McCann single (and his 1,000th RBI). You can blame Hector Neris for that collapse, allowing the game-winner with a 2-2 count. Two weeks ago, he gave up a walk-off homer to Will Smith in the Dodgers’ 4-3 win.

Saturday was better, as the Phils came back to beat the Braves. Josh Donaldson gave Atlanta a 5-4 lead in the bottom of the fifth on a three-run homer. But after a Scott Kingery single and Sean Rodriguez reached via a sacrifice bunt thanks to a throwing error, Cesar Hernandez drove home both runners in the top of the ninth to give the Phillies the lead. And unlike Friday night, Neris had a 1-2-3 inning to earn the save.

Sunday was a very bad day. If you didn’t watch the game, you did yourself a favor as the Phils got trounced 15-1. Atlanta scored runs in all but two innings (second and eighth) and scored multiple runs in those innings except for the sixth. Vince Velasquez, Cole Irvin, and Jerad Eickhoff all sucked. Sean Rodriguez was the team’s best pitcher. He pitched an inning, had a strikeout, and didn’t allow a hit.

This was a big series for the Phillies, but they’re now 2 1/2 games back of the Braves for tops in the NL East. There’s still plenty of pitching problems, especially with that fifth starter spot. Pat Neshek came off the injured list on Sunday, which should help the bullpen.

With that, the Phillies continue their long NL East stretch with a four-game set beginning tonight against the Nationals at 7:05 PM on NBC Sports Philadelphia. Jake Arrieta’s on the mound against Patrick Corbin.

While you wait, you can enjoy former Phillie Brett Myers’ new album if you want.

Before we continue, a word from our sponsors:

Stupid money. Spend it all. Shop now.

Fresh. The best meal delivery service, without question. Sign up for Hello Fresh now and get $40 off your first two boxes.

Amazon. If you shop Amazon, support your favorite website and use our link.

The Roundup:

Start the week off with the latest edition of the Crossing Broadcast.

Here’s another set of 50 hot takes for the Philadelphia sports fan.

The Eagles named Andy Weidl their new Vice President of Player Personnel. Howie Roseman got a new title and is officially a general manager again.

The Flyers made a couple of moves over the weekend. They traded away defenseman Radko Gudas to Washington for defenseman Matt Niskanen.

And they’re buying out Andrew MacDonald’s contract.

While the Raptors celebrated to Meek Mill, Sixers fans should have a “glass half-full” reaction to Toronto winning the NBA Finals.

But the Sixers are one of the betting favorites to win it all next year.

In other sports news, the Lakers traded for Anthony Davis. They’re also reportedly interested in Jimmy Butler and Kawhi Leonard. I mean who isn’t?

Gary Woodland held off Brooks Koepka to win the U.S. Open.

The US Women’s National team defeated Chile, 3-0, on Sunday.

Sorry for burying the lead, but our very own Bob Wankel was named the Inquirer’s South Jersey Baseball Coach of the Year.

In the news, 16 employees reportedly accepted buyouts at the Inquirer.

A fire occurred at a Sea Isle marina, and there’s now calls for a full-time fire department there.

The post Your Monday Morning Roundup appeared first on Crossing Broad.

Your Monday Morning Roundup published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/

[flauntpage]

The Rise of HS Basketball Highlight Reel Factories and the Impact on Students

In April 2017, the Bristol Herald Courier, a newspaper in Southwest Virginia, named junior guard Mac McClung its boys basketball player of the year. The Courier said McClung’s games at Gate City High School “were standing-room only affairs.” In a town of roughly 2,000 people, McClung was afforded big-man-on-campus status while still maintaining a modicum of anonymity, at least beyond his tiny pocket of the state.

Then a curious thing happened. McClung became the poster boy for the burgeoning Internet era of high school basketball, leaping from local star to a national stage shared by other elite adolescent talents who have their every move documented on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. That’s because in May of 2017, someone at Ballislife, the crème de la crème of high school basketball highlights, caught McClung aggressively dunking on everyone in his vicinity at an AAU game. By June of 2017, McClung was hovering around 20,000 Instagram followers. His final year of high school ball turned into a complete circus, with more viral clips than one could possibly count. Now, McClung is headed to Georgetown, with a tad more Instagram followers: roughly 644,000.

It’s nothing new for basketball recruits to have fame bestowed upon them at an early age, though in the prep-to-pro era, most of the footage of future stars was limited to grainy mixtapes. That’s no longer the case. If you Google even fringe players from the classes of 2018 or 2019, you're certain to find a video with tens if not hundreds of thousands of views and an entire comments section dissecting every jump shot. Many of the videos aren't just highlights—they're mini-documentaries showing a day in the life of a 17-year-old.

“These kids are thinking about making sure they have the right Clif Bar in their locker for after practice,” said Dr. Jenelle Gilbert, a professor and graduate program coordinator for the kinesiology department at Fresno State. “They have very high school-centered needs, but they’re being thrust into an adult world very, very quickly.”

Ballislife founder Matt Rodriguez boasts on his LinkedIn page that Ballislife viewership jumped from 97.99 million across social media platforms in 2016 to 682.78 million in 2017. Overtime, which launched in Dec. 2016, says it has “20 million minutes of watch time each month” and, since the start of 2018, has received $9.5 million in Series A funding plus $2.5 million in seed funding. There’s also Mars Reel (25 million unique views per month as of January; they also landed $2.5 million in seed funding this year), EliteMixtapes, HoopDiamonds, and CityLeagueHoopsTV, which focuses on middle school boys and girls.

“This is something that’s completely new to us, and frankly [the channels] were almost expecting to have access,” said Archbishop Molloy High School athletic director and boys basketball coach Mike McCleary. He oversees a team in Queens, New York, that had three Division I prospects in 2017-18: UCLA signee Moses Brown, Georgia Tech signee Khalid Moore, and point guard Cole Anthony, ESPN’s No. 6 prospect in the class of 2019. “A lot of times [the videographers] would just show up,” McCleary continued. “They do a lot of communicating with the athletes themselves, and not as much communicating with me as necessary.”

Each of the channels has seen an eruption in popularity over the last year or so. Problem is, kids (and adults) don’t necessarily understand the drawbacks to this degree of outsized exposure. Concerns about players’ emotional well-being have been raised in the NBA, but the high school level has barely begun to grapple with the detrimental impact an industry eager to build on its bottom line could have on teenagers, who get a boost in name recognition in exchange for an entirely new set of stressors and expectations.

Gate City boys basketball coach Scott Vermillion, for instance, knows McClung was acutely aware of his newfound audience during his senior season, which ended with a 29-2 record and a Class 2 state title. “He felt pressure to perform because of all of the cameras. People are traveling from California to film our games and do highlights,” Vermillion said. “He attempted a couple dunks this year that didn’t go in, but I didn’t mind.”

At Archbishop Molloy, it’s Anthony who’s the biggest draw. He, like McClung, has eclipsed the six-digit Instagram followers mark. Both have cultivated a social media image that looks like it’s straight out of a public relations firm. Documentary-style videos provide glimpses into their personalities, but their Instagram and Twitter accounts rarely deviate from posting highlight-reel clips they’re tagged in.

McCleary and Vermillion have slightly differing opinions about the influx of high school basketball-dedicated channels. Vermillion believes they’re a net positive, noting that the “overall effect it had on our community, on our kids, on our region, on our team, on the game of basketball, far outweighs the negative parts.” McCleary was careful to note he had no ill will toward any one entity, and he’s all for “the kids getting some notoriety.” But he also felt the channels were a distraction, and wished he “would have put a few more stipulations” in place when they started showing up. On the whole, McCleary finds the channels to be a net negative.

One downside both coaches cited was how the spotlight messed with the other kids on their rosters. Said McCleary: “I think it does individualize a player when you’re trying to build a team. We had three very good players, all very nice kids—respectful, did what we asked them to do, and I think they were in for the team. But they’re getting the attention, and the other 12 kids aren’t.”

Unlike college or pro basketball, where there are clearly defined boundaries enforced between media members and organizations, there is no standard for high schools or high school basketball channels to adhere to. That’s partly a result of how the channels are set up, with some hiring professional videographers while others outsource contracted positions to people who happen to live in an area with a touted teenager. Coach Vermillion turned down video requests for the last few weeks of the season, but that was an arbitrary call based on how his team was handling the additional scrutiny. For now, that’s the only tangible protection.

Neither Vermillion nor McCleary thought their star players suffered significantly on or off the court as the cameras poured in. But from all indications, the coaches had their players’ best interests at heart, and kids like McClung and Anthony were cited as having especially strong familial support systems, which certainly isn’t the case for every prospect.

Dr. Frank Smoll, a sports psychologist, declined a formal interview for this piece because at this point, he feels talk is cheap. Instead, he suggested in an email that action is required from a large organization like the National Federation of State High School Associations to examine potential negative effects and put guidelines in place to protect teens. On its website, the NFHS says it’s dedicated to “building awareness and support, improving the participation experience, establishing consistent standards and rules for competition, and helping those who oversee high school sports.” In a statement to Vice, Bruce Howard, the director of communications at NFHS, didn’t indicate any policy positions were imminent.

“We would prefer the focus be on the team rather than sensationalizing individual players,” Howard wrote. “I think our schools and state associations will continue to monitor these type of sites to protect the players.”

High school basketball players deserve the opportunity to promote themselves, but like most situations involving young adults and athletics, the scales are tipped against them. They aren’t the ones making money off their likeness. Dollars aside, there are unexplored short- and long-term consequences of sudden fame for still-developing kids. (When asked to comment on the subject, the parents of athletes contacted for this story declined to make them available.) Unfortunately, there’s no break for anyone to take a step back and reassess—AAU ball is in full swing over the summer, and then it’s back to school. In other words, this is the new reality, for better or worse. Or, as Dr. Smoll signed off in one of his emails, “I'm sorry for being so pessimistic, but ‘it is what it is.'"

The Rise of HS Basketball Highlight Reel Factories and the Impact on Students published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/