Kicking it off with some TV news. Peacock has abandoned their planned reboot of Battlestar Galactica, meaning all you have is the excellent last version of it to watch over and over. Life certainly is tough.
TV Shows I Watched: In addition to today’s feature, I also watched Tim Bandits: S1E3 (Apple Plus) with audio description, Sunny: S1E5 (Apple Plus) with audio description, The Daily Show with Ronnie Chen: Tuesday’s Episode (Paramount Plus) with audio description, and Cheers: I don’t know what season, but I’m into Kirstie Alley’s run (Paramount Plus) No audio description.
Podcasts (All Through Apple Podcasts, Listened To With Speed Modification)- Lewis Black’s Rantcast (rant/current affairs), and The movies That Made Me (an interview with Casey Affleck).
YouTube: Adam Does Movies (Reaction to Robert Downey Jr Casting) and Deep Focus Lens (Deadpool Vs Wolverine review). I highly recommend both of these YouTubers. Adam is entertaining, and Deep Focus is very knowledgable on her approach to the art form.
Movies: None.
Todays Feature:
Women In Blue: S1E1 and S1E2 (Apple Plus)
Apple’s newest show is a fully Spanish language show that takes place in 1960’s Mexico City, focusing on a serial killer named The Undresser that has the citizens worried. The trust in the police force is very low, and to try and mend the fences with the community, the police finally open their doors to women. This story is about the first group of women who sign up, while a serial killer is on the loose, for a variety of reasons, and focuses on four of them (though they do choose more than four women). In the background, we still see that the killer is at work, though this is not a scary series by any means. It actually aims to tackle gender norms and the restrictive conservative views of the time that often kept women at home cooking and cleaning. Four different stories help to shape how men view women in this period, as they not only experience various obstacles in the workplace, but also in their home lives.
What I Look For In The Audio Description: I’m going to separate one of my biggest concerns, which is about dubbing, and leave that alone here. I think Apple paid for a dub voice cast, instead of the audio description company providing one. There are too many characters who need different voices, and I think this is more like Pachenko in that regard. So for the English audio description track, this is important to note, it is the English Audio Description track, it will likely be used by people not as familiar with the way things worked in Mexico in the 1960’s, or what it looked like, and I think the audio description really could help bring that out. Also, while I don’t expect the show to tackle racial/ethnic definitions, as diversity is different in every country, I do think that by the cast being “Mexican’, that leaves more room for deeper character descriptions in terms of facial expressions, hair styles, and clothing choices, again especially to help bring out the period. Even the cars are different, with the description of one car being specific to the plot. I’m assuming this killer is mostly gore free, only because this show seems only lightly to use him as a background player, and when a body is found, it isn’t sensational in the way that it is positioned or dismembered. They just find a dead body that is naked, which is why the killer is called The Undresser.
What It Does: There’s some character description here, but I never really felt pulled into a time capsule. Other than the shows abhorrent treatment of women, there’s nothing really to suggest this couldn’t be in a different era. In fact, the biggest indicator of time period doesn’t come from the description, but the fact that the women on the force aren’t given anything to police with, except change to call male police officers. from pay phones. If the series was 2024, they would at least have cell phones, even if pay phones still are a thing in Mexico. Or even… a radio. Again, I’m guessing the dead bodies are basic, because the show doesn’t sensationalize, but also because the audio description does nothing to support that anything abnormal has happened to the body other than them being naked… and dead. There’s a fairly large cast here, surprisingly so, with the four leads each having their own home life, with other characters to support it. plus, there are the other male officers they work with, and then we still have the killer, his victims, and even sometimes the family/friends of the victims. Over two episodes, it did a good job of tracking these characters and helping the audience build that bond between them, but it could really do more to describe them as people. And also, continue to evolve them, especially as our four leads have a work life and home life. Moving forward, is there anything that the audio description can do to support the uniqueness of each story, and how that woman in blue is feeling the chasm that is growing between her and her loved ones as she continues to follow her independence outside the household, or conversely, can it support possibly even a change on closing that gap should any male character in here have an awakening?
Final Thoughts: The dub cast is terrible. I’ve been watching so much international, or quasi international content recently, and we are whitewashing a lot of stories by being so concerned with the crispness and clarity, that these characters sound like the most basic dull lifeless choices. I know there’s such this weird thing with dubbing, where directors hate it because they assume everyone can read subtitles. So, we in our community have very little chance of getting the fully well rounded experience. I have heard it, and I’ve seen it. All Quiet On The Western Front, Society of The Snow, and a handful of other titles really try to bring out the characters. Dubbing like this is why people hate dubbing. I do believe Apple has a dub cast, and the audio descritpion was put on top of it. They didn’t do that for Land Of Women, because it was half in English. Here, it is a bit like Pachenko. Not only can we perhaps try to act, but representation please. The great thing about international cinema is getting stories unlike your own, and to just find the cast of the Real housewives of wherever to dub suddenly diminishes that cultural exchange. For purposes that some people might find it offensive, the series does use an outdated way to refer to someone with a mental disability, which might turn people off. Though, you should be far more bothered by how they used to treat women in general as people who feed people, and that’s it. I would like the series more if the dub cast was better, but at the same time, bad acting pisses me off less than doing an audio description track for a film where the narrator has to do every single thing. At least women are voicing women here, and men voicing men. I just wish they could act, or someone would allow them to.