TV News: Don’t forget the Macy’s thanksgiving Day parade airs with live audio description. Also, Happy Thanksgiving!
TV Shows Watched: St Dennis Medical: S1E4 (Peacock) with audio description, Cruel Intentions: S1E4 (Amazon) with audio description, Interior Chinatown: S1E6 (Hulu) with audio description, Colin From Accounts: S2E5 (Paramount Plus) with audio description, Get Millie Black: S1E1 (MAX) with audio description
Podcasts: None
YouTube: The Oscar Expert (Astro Nominee Reactions)
Movies Watched: Transformers One (Paramount Plus) with audio description, The Last Showgirl (screener) no audio description, The Room Next Door (screener) no audio description
St Dennis Medical revolves too much around visual cues this week, and reveals where the audio description was lacking. There’s a joke about parking too close to someone’s car, but without any reference, we don’t know how true that is. The later part of the joke does mention when, in recreating the segment, someone gets too close. like, crash close. Plus, another doctor is obsessed with being in visual ads for the hospital, and there’s a major subplot around him possibly being cycled out for a new replacement. And, there’s a third subplot that leans slightly in on a character who isn’t racist, accidentally falling into too many traps, but without knowledge of these actors from the beginning, all i got was that there was some Filipino culture being tossed in. no idea if this affected anyone else.
The new show on the block is Get Millie Black, which I hope has appropriately cast audio description, and mostly does fine with a standard crime procedural set in Jamaica. A lot of visual elements brought in, like someone’s face smashed in as a corpse, or watching security cam footage, all were well described. My note would be that this show, and its lead character, are very much drawing a line in the sand in terms of race. Millie is quite resentful toward “colonizers”, and there are lines like “behind every old white family is a dead slave”, so knowing where people are has a direct connection to how Millie speaks to them. there was an instance, actually with a corpse, where they went with “light skinned”, which in a show that is leaning so heavily, I’ve interpreted as their way of meaning mixed race. Though, Millie never seems to make any distinction about how she feels about lighter skinned black Jamaicans, leaving her ire for the Brits who come to stick their nose in, or the rich white people who live on the island. There’s LGBTQ representation here, primarily through a character named Hibiscus, and I’m needing the show to do more with her as a character than they are right now before making any huge statements about that level of representation either within the show, or the audio description. our lead, Millie seems to have a positive approach, though she does slip in the first episode and use Hibiscus’s former name. A pretty by the numbers crime is really punched up by a show that very much has something to say, and Millie Black is like the walking personification of being both the fire and the accelerant.
