Forever Yours, Faithfully: A Farewell to Glee

Tonight marks the endpoint of a cultural phenomenon that has had one of the oddest, most talked-about trajectories in modern television. Glee began as a bright, innovative, biting comedy, adored by critics and audiences alike. By tonight's finale, it accumulated enormous baggage and became almost abandoned entirely. Glee's legacy will be mixed, no doubt. But in some ways, if one looks past the controversial plot "twists," fractious fan wars, and increasingly off-the-rails storytelling, there is a real legacy of making the arts relevant and safe and even cool, especially embracing the quirky young people who saw themselves in Glee's wonderfully strange characters. And that's worth being proud of.

Flashback Friday: A Far, Far Better Thing

Today is the first Flashback Friday here at The Storyologist! I'm at a writers' conference this weekend, and since everyone is already overanalyzing this year's movie in anticipation of the Oscars on Sunday, I thought you might enjoy something about a snubbed movie from two years ago. I hope you enjoy!
The glut of superheroes in current pop culture has been well-documented and written about to an almost excruciating degree. So when I say that one of the most talked-about superhero movies of the past decade is, at heart, a comic-book-ization of a nineteenth-century British novel read by every high school student in the English-speaking world (and, let's be honest, subsequently forgotten by about 90% of them). When watching The Dark Knight Rises, I was really struck by the constant references- both explicit and subtle- to A Tale of Two Cities, and to Bruce Wayne as a modern-noir Sydney Carton. As a bit of a literary nerd, I thought perhaps this was worth a further discussion.

Hiatus and return

Hi all, just a quick note to let you know this blog isn't dead! I've just had to take a couple months off to deal with some health stuff that has prevented me from spending much time on the computer writing. I'll be back posting more regularly very soon!

~The Storyologist

Marvel's Agent Carter Matters- And Here's Why

If you're like me, you've almost certainly seen the ubiquitous ads for ABC's upcoming Marvel miniseries, Agent Carter. And if you're like me, you've also almost certainly found the early trailers a little bit irritating, or at the very least quite cliché. "The best man for the job... is a woman." Come on- that's the best they could come up with? In all seriousness, though, ABC's PR department might not be the subtlest, but they certainly know what to play up about this new series. After 10 films (and counting) and one TV series with male leads, directors, writers, et al., Agent Carter will be the first property in the multi-platform Marvel Cinematic Universe to feature a female lead- and a female-led creative team to boot. For a somewhat nerdy female writer like me, there could be no better news. But this show isn't just a milestone for a major synergistic story. It's a lot more than that.

Hayley Atwell in Captain America, (c) Marvel/Disney

Follow the Yellow Brick Road: Gender, Power, and the Megamusical in the Land of Oz. Part 2

In the first part of this series, we looked at the female characters in Oz and what they symbolize, both on a dramatic and musical level and a theoretical level. Now, let's take a look at these women's relationships and the remarkable (and unusual) use of female friendship to structure the show. But first, just to wrap up the gendered character analysis, let's also take a quick look at the men of Oz, particularly the men of Wicked.

Dear Broadway: Not Every Movie Needs To Be A Musical

If you've been paying any attention to Broadway these days, you might have noticed a few familiar titles. Or more than a few. In recent seasons, the theater world has been overrun by "new" musicals that are based on existing stories, particularly films. Some (Once) have been great. Others (Ghost, anybody?), not so much. Now, adaptation has been the bread and butter of book musicals since Rodgers and Hammerstein adapted Green Grow The Lilacs, a play with 64 Broadway performances to its name, into one of the most popular and groundbreaking musicals in theater history: Oklahoma! The difference is, the adaptations we're seeing today are not true adaptations of a story into something new for the theater. Instead, it feels like producers go down a list of popular movies and try to shoehorn them into a milieu that simply doesn't work. I love musical theater, but here's the thing: not everything should be a musical.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road: Gender, Power, and the Megamusical in the Land of Oz. Part 1

I thought I'd try something a little different for this post, something a little more academic. But not dry, I promise! The musical I love best in the world is Wicked, and I've always had a fascination with the world of Oz. As I've grown older and learned more about the story and its contexts over time, I wanted to do some research into the power and gender dynamics in the story. This particular commentary ended up pretty long, so I'm dividing it into sections. (Note: I'll put references at the bottom of each post in case anyone wants to take a look at some of my sources). First up: a character analysis of the ladies of Oz.
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