Comment on Anon watches Malcolm in the Middle
starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works 2 months agoWait really Bones did this? I thought I remember an episode where Bones says “you just need to work hard, my life was hard too but I didn’t end up like that” and learned by the end that wasn’t a fair judgment. Maybe I’m misremembering?
aredditimmigrant@feddit.nl 2 months ago
Bones had a lot of subtle things … Each character has some weird quirks that almost always has the future conservatives would tell them.
(Spoilers for a 10 year show)
If the top of my head …
starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Hmm I may actually re-watch it and keep an eye out for these but you are more correct than I remember. I would say Bones does seem a little bit autistic, and some of the people in power are women, but it’s in a little bit of a hamfisted way (look at these badass women!).
I think the episode where one woman got pregnant with someone else’s kid she was thinking of not keeping it but got convinced to keep it by her husband (fiance?), the message still being “them keeping it obviously good.”
Seems like the writing was mostly fine but sometimes very conservative-coded when the director wanted to insert some spiel about life values. I appreciate the examples, I think I immediately forgot about those episodes specifically because of the weird messaging.
aredditimmigrant@feddit.nl 2 months ago
Oh, bones is def ok the spectrum, but that’s explained away by being caused by her upbringing… Since she was in the adoption system due to her dad iirc.
She’s also rich due to her stubbornness and “pulling herself up by her own bootstraps”.
She also is drawn to Booth, a childish man who constantly makes fun of her peers, and has a derogatory nickname for people in her profession (squints), but he’s an old values man (reads the paper with his coffee and prefers it to bones’ iPad, sleeps around pre-bones but loves every woman he does sleep with, he basically rebuilds their house himself, is a company man who regards the bureau above all else, and he likes guns but keeps his safe like a model citizen should)… and is hot.
There’s also an embarrassing amount of obvious product placement in the show (the cars, the diff apple products they use and comment on throughout the show) that I’m pretty sure they were self aware of it and making fun of it later on. …
The woman who is in charge s2 and later is not nearly as smart as any of her subordinates, meanwhile the guy who is in charge during season 1 always seems to have more respect given to him than his successor. Other women who are in charge also usually turn out to be the big bad at the time.
I don’t remember the woman deciding to keep her baby. Was that one of the one-episode people who are adjacent to a victim?
Sorry. Went down a rabbit hole here. But yeah, as a kid I was always curious how such a conservative leaning news channel like Fox could have such shows that are either super liberal or super raunchy… Turns out a lot of them have a lot of conservative coded messages. The writing was pretty standard for a crime procedural.
Still trying to figure out how such a gay friendly show like X-Men got made…
starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
I think the reason I didn’t see booth as conservative-coded, is because he seemed to be portrayed (or maybe just regarded by bones) as foolish and outdated (and usually also wrong) for basically every reason you said, but he was a good guy who always showed up and did the right thing. Though I definitely remember some times where he was doing some “hard working man protects the woman” stuff and that was seen as “good” which I thought was very out of place, especially bones reacting to it positively… Maybe the times he looked foolish were meant to be serious and they just couldn’t make it not sound ridiculous lol
Hearing this makes me really want to re-watch it as I wasn’t thinking about any of this… hmm…
bones.fandom.com/wiki/The_Proof_in_the_Pudding here’s the episode, Angela is pregnant (thinks she is pregnant) with Wendell, but is dating (?) hodgins, who tells her to keep it. I guess maybe this is still a bit conservative coded? Hard to say maybe it’s pretty neutral