Taken Down [RTE]

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

It's a quote by Margaret Atwood outlining how creating a boring "women good, men bad" dichotomy in fictional writing for political reasons results not only in weak fiction, but also weak feminism.

By portraying all of the female Gardaí as hardworking, diligent detectives, and all of the male Gardaí as either bumbling eejits or lazy pervs, the show is trying so hard to ram an agenda down peoples' throats that the agenda itself falls apart - and takes the fiction with it.

This applies to all storytelling IMO, not just TV and not just RTE. Well written fiction displays the range of human behaviours across its different characters without assigning who the "goodies" and "baddies" are purely along demographic lines. Even if you take something like Harry Potter, while the central conflict in the story comes down to pure blood elitism vs half blood inclusivity, there are good and bad people on both sides of it - Voldemort is an evil half-blood, the Weasleys are good pure bloods, etc. In Love/Hate, almost all characters are morally ambiguous, even the Gardaí (the three undercover lads beating up Chunky, Moynihan attacking Nidge in rage, etc). Breaking Bad is mainly lads, but Skyler in Breaking Bad is an incredibly complicated character as the show goes on and can't easily be put into a "good" or "bad" box based on the sum of all her actions throughout the show, and Lydia is overwhelmingly one of the baddies.

Most good fiction has examples of this - where the demographic divide as to whether characters are antagonists or protagonists is essentially random and thus doesn't jump out as an attempt at subliminal ideological messaging.

With both Acceptable Risk and now Taken Down, the "all the lads are going to be scumbags, all the women are going to be heroes" trope was easy to spot from the second episode at the very latest. Acceptable Risk in my view jumped this particular shark entirely when it was revealed that

Ciarán, the deceased whose murder sparks the entire mystery of the show, was also a negative male stereotype of "can't hack that his wife makes more than him, so gets involved in dodgy behaviour as a result"

, that was when it became obvious for a lot of us here that the show was determined to paint all of its male characters as either villains or deeply flawed caricatures of "toxic masculinity", while all of the female characters are fundamentally good, wholesome people apart from the retired Garda, and the spat between the main character and her sister over keeping secrets.

Let me put this as an analogy: If someone made a show or story in which every black character was one of the "baddies" and every white character was one of the "goodies", or vice versa, it would similarly be glaringly obvious that the people writing it had some kind of chip on their shoulders and were writing their characters in this way deliberately. When you take what RTE is doing in the context of what's happening in the wider world of fictional writing over the last three or four years, Occam's Razor suggests that it's deliberate message-pedalling.

And fundamentally, a lot of people - not all, but a lot - don't like to be preached to or "lectured" when they're trying to immerse themselves in a fictional universe.

As I say, I was trying to ignore this and not bring it up in case it was just my own bias (I'm fairly jaded by this trope especially after the dumpster fire that was House of Cards Season Six) but seeing as several others have mentioned it, it's pretty clear that I'm not imagining this. And while I can still enjoy a show for its storytelling, I find it essentially breaks the fourth wall - it's so jarringly obvious that this is a plot device, that it takes one out of their immersion into the story when it happens.

FrancieBrady wrote: »

Your treatise on violence is just so wrong, I don't know where to begin.

It isn't in the style of the drama to give graphic illustrations of violence in the way L/H did. That is it's own style, it isn't a cop out.
The violence is very much there though, the fecking series centres around a horrible murder.
Have you ever heard of allowing your imagination to work?

Deleted User wrote: »

Are you some disgruntled former Late late show camera man or whats the story?..

"RTE in crap tv shocker!!"

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

This is essentially because RTE spam-hyped the absolute sh!te out of it, and yet most viewers feel that it's nowhere near living up to the level of gushing that it's getting from the showbiz establishment. This inevitably leads people to question whether the aforementioned gushing is due to external socio-political factors and not the actual quality of the content.

castletownman wrote: »

Just on the accents, the actress playing Abeni is Senegalese-French, so you would have to assume English isn't her native tongue.

And if anything, it adds to the storyline as it's a fairly accurate portrayal of African's speaking english over here. They may learn some 'Irish' phrases and colloquilisms (ending sentences with 'like' as an example), but it will be done with their natural inflections etc. It's often hard to understand what the African characters are saying-but that's good as it is representative of real life.

The problem arises with the Irish cast. Some of their accents are ridiculous, particularly Don Wycherely's seargeant character, and a few more of the over-emphasised culchie/Dublin accents among the gardai. It is either one extreme or the other, nothing 'normal'.