February 2021: Teenage Bounty Hunters!!!!!
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Dear Kelsey,
Happy New Year!!! I can’t believe it’s the end of February and time to write our newsletter again. My maternity leave has flown by, but I am so excited to talk about our topic for this month.
It’s February (probably March by the time you’re reading this because we are perpetually late), which means we are in the thick of awards season, and I once again find myself reflecting on the utter nonsense of the structure of nominations and wins. More specifically, my beef lies with what the Hollywood elite considers prestige film, and how those works so often center the experiences of white men. For example, The Kominsky Method is essentially the same premise about aging and identity as Grace and Frankie, but starring white men. Although Grace and Frankie is far more groundbreaking in TV, The Kominsky Method has won 2 Emmys and been nominated 5 times, whereas Grace and Frankie has won zero Emmys and only 3 nominations. Nobody even watches The Kominsky Method!! But it’s about an acting coach in LA so it goes right in the pocket of the Hollywood voters. I hate it.
(Me, tired of stories about white men getting all the attention and accolades, per usual)
Awards committees are also incredibly biased when it comes to genre. It’s incredibly difficult for a comedy to win best picture; best actor and actress nearly always go to people who starred in biopics. It’s predictable, and frankly it’s boring. It’s time for the supremacy of awards shows (and the guilds that vote in them) to end so that the shows that get attention are the ones that are actually good.
This year is a prime exhibit in how nonsensical awards are. While we have films such as Promising Young Woman and Palm Springs (a movie I genuinely enjoyed) nominated for best picture, we also have Emily in Paris (???) nominated for best comedy TV show, along with a bunch of other shows that most of us have never heard of. Every time I read through the best actor/best supporting actor categories I only know like, one of them, and I consider myself a bit of a TV enthusiast. So you know it’s pretty bad.
This awards season is particularly bad, but every awards season fuels my pent-up fury about the boring and predictable choices that the Hollywood elite choose to make about which TV and movies are worth rewarding and gaining public notoriety. We deserve an awards season that actually represents good quality television that people watch and care about.
Okay. On to our topic. I am really excited about this month and our decision to focus on Teenage Bounty Hunters exclusively. TBH developed some critical acclaim, but went largely undiscovered by the broader public, probably because it came out around the same time as the (well-deserved) hype about The Babysitter’s Club was still at its peak, and Netflix dropped the ball on any real advertising for the show. Because of this, it was cancelled before it could receive a Season 2. I’ve been really disappointed by a lot of the decisions Netflix has made lately regarding which shows they renew and which shows they cancel. So much of their original content now is low-quality Riverdale-esque YA—I guess that’s what happens when the tastes of your audience completely guide what you create to the point that you refuse to fund risky and unique creative projects. (This is also why our movie and TV markets are oversaturated with sequels and remakes, but that’s a rant for another day.)
Some recap of the general plot: twins Sterling and Blair Wesley attend a small Christian private school in Georgia, where they struggle against the conservative Baptist culture around sex an dating both at home and at school. Meanwhile, they accidentally become bounty hunters (long story) and eventually discover that their mother also has some bonkers secrets of her own.
For a show that has very little on paper in common with Gilmore Girls except perhaps its target audience, I am going to talk a lot about Gilmore Girls. Lorelai’s self-protective humor that functions as a fragile cover for her vulnerability and many insecurities shows up in Blair, our resident “bad girl” (who isn’t really that bad by any standard but wants to be), whereas her twin Sterling has all the naivete and nerdiness of Rory. Sterling’s nemesis, April (**SPOILER ALERT** and eventual lover) is the show’s feisty and competitive Paris. “Rory and Paris, but make it gay” is something I always dreamed of but was too afraid to ask for and Y’ALL, THIS SHOW HAS GIVEN IT TO US. Enjoy some Very Good gif content below:
I cannot stop raving about this show. It’s great!! For us and our readers, many of whom are from religious backgrounds, this show is FOR YOU. It is still worth watching with only one season. I went to Christian private school for one year in high school, and this show *gets* conservative Christian culture—the corniness of the youth group activities, the incognito sex lives of basically everyone present but are all pretending to still be virgins, the one “rebel” (in this case, Blair) who wouldn’t be a rebel by any public school standards but ends up pursuing it intentionally because being edgy is her “brand”, and the surprisingly gay undertones of basically all of it.
This show really takes on the issue of performative southern white religiosity and nails home that no one is really what they seem—whether it’s the polished golden child of the youth group who is secretly gay, or the devoted wife and mother and respected church member who has a crime or two hidden in her past. The show rightly grasps that this concept of a hidden life is a feature, not a bug, in the way religious communities function, and that everyone has one, even the people who don’t want one.
In fact, the show’s portrayal of Christian education is not unlike Saved!, a movie that was basically a satire on Christian private schools. Both show the institution as woefully oblivious at best and actively harmful at worst. This same obliviousness, for example, allowed a kid in my grade to sell weed out of his locker for almost a year before getting caught.
There are so few mainstream pop culture creations that really understand religious life or evangelicalism, which makes glimmers of insight like this one feel so refreshing and rewarding to watch. Even though nearly 75% of the country identifies with a particular religion, very little pop culture reflects this, which makes shining moments of religious displays on television such as this show, or the episode on Ganesh Puja—a Hindu holiday—in Never Have I Ever, feel so insightful and mesmerizing.
Here’s to more witty and insightful commentaries on religious life for young women in America!
Love,
Hannah
Dear Hannah,
The amount of times I either yelled or text-yelled “TEENAGE!! BOUNTY!!! HUNTERS!!!” in my home while watching and since then is more than there are sprinkles in Yogurtopia. I know we are always saying “this show is perfect for us!” but this one might truly be…….the most?????
Before I get into it though, something NOT perfect for us but which we (or at least I; you have much better self-control in these matters) cannot stop engaging with: awards season.
The tricky thing about ~awards season~ is that a lot of the types of awards tend to be grouped together. Most unfortunately, the Golden Globes with awards of some actual repute. I mean, assuming awards have any repute, which is, indeed…...questionable, but the Globes have the least repute at all, but we all pay attention to them, for….some reason? I listen to a lot of podcasts about film and tv and pretty much every year the question returns: why do we care about the Globes?
The Globes aren’t part of the EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony), nor are they awarded by a voting body that overlaps with any of the preceding, or any of the guild-specific awards like SAG or DGA. They may have some overlap with various Critic’s Choice bodies, but no one really knows who or how much. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), who run the event and all the nominations and winners, are ostensibly a group of journalists who, according to the Wikipedia summary “photographers who report on the entertainment industry...in the United States for media...predominantly outside the U.S.” In a given year, there are approximately 80-90 members. By contrast, there are over 8,000 Academy of Motion Pictures members and over 24,000 Emmy award members. And, as a recent L.A. Times piece officially confirmed (to no great surprise) 0 HFPA members are Black.
No one really understands how the Golden Globes became the big deal that it is, or how they came to be televised, because even within the industry they’re kind of embarrassing. If you’re a film that has a Globe but not an Oscar, or a TV show that has a Globe but not an Emmy….that’s embarrassing! And yet the nominees go (usually) and accept their awards and smile for the camera, and a lot of us watch it and...why?
Mostly because of the nominees themselves. The HFPA have a reputation for chaos, but a couple things about them that you can hang your hat on are that they love to feel like they’re crowning the Hot New Thing (media or person) and they’re starfuckers. They want to feel important, so they invite the most important people (in their estimation) to the party and hope we’ll watch for that. They also loooove that they come before the Oscars. One of my favorite podcasts about this stuff, Little Gold Men, was discussing last year whether the outcomes at the Globes have any bearing on the Oscars, and one of the hosts made a point that really clarified things for me: the Globes want to have the appearance of influencing the Oscars, so often it seems like they’re predicting what they think the Academy will choose. And for the nominees, showing up is good publicity. Keeping their names and faces and speeches keeps them in the public eye in a season that’s driven largely by buzz.
Why am I talking so much about the Globes? Mostly because I accidentally got into rant mode and it’s a lot easier for me to dash off 483 words about something like this rather than the nuanced movie review I am supposed to be working on (sorry editors!) But also because they’re tonight (when I’m writing this) and I know that despite all the nonsense I will be watching them because here in month 11 of this pandemic I need an Event and I need to see hot people. So many of my celebrity crushes will be there tonight! My husband Steven Yeun! My wife Carey Mulligan! My other husbands Andy Samberg and Pedro Pascal and Jason Sudeikis! My husband and wife who are also husband and wife of each other Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell!
Maybe the thing I wish about awards shows and voting bodies — other than to see them become more inclusive and just generally...smarter? — is to see them be better contextualized in more mainstream media than a handful of niche podcasts and twitter corners. Because another problem with awards season, and this is something the Academy is particularly guilty of, is that to people who don’t have the interest or bandwidth to follow intensively follow media news and criticism, these awards shows get to brand themselves as the arbiters of good taste, no matter how out of touch or straight-up boring their choices are. And then people who just watch the Oscars are given the impression that if they’re not interested in the movies the Academy has chosen, “good movies” must just not be for them, which is such a bummer. But of course...when has Hollywood ever liked nuanced context???
Speaking of nuanced context….Teenage Bounty Hunters!!!!!!!
Did that segue make sense at all?? NO! Does my love for this show make a lot of sense, maybe TOO MUCH sense??? YES!!!!
Okay so I remember watching the trailer for this when it first came out and feeling divided between thinking it looked cool and thinking it looked like it could very easily be another same-y entry in Netflix’s content mill, so I decided to wait it out and see what people said about it. As you said, Netflix is shit at promotion, so a lot of people didn’t watch it, and I never heard anything more about it until it was cancelled. Then our mutual fave Kathryn VanArendonk watched it and loved it and that was my first clue I should get in on it, and then Appointment Television decided to do it for their TV Book Club and, as I think it I have made very clear in this newsletter, when it comes to TV they ARE the boss of me, and 30 seconds into the show I was immediately hooked.
I was very into everything you expertly described, and was just simply along for the wild, hilarious ride, but then midway through it started to feel……..extremely targeted???
Like, okay, we’re going to explore religious doubt through a death that hits confusingly hard?
Oh we’re going to get into realizing your sexuality is different than the church and heteronormativity lead to you believe it was??? AT A DEBATE TOURNAMENT???????
I don’t think the show quite hits it out of the park every time when dealing with the twins’ privilege, but I think that’s something that could really deepen in future seasons as we get to know the characters more intimately than we’ve had a chance to in just ten episodes. Those ten episodes do a lot of fantastic character work, but there did seem to be a bit of a rush to get a lot of stuff on the table right away (because that’s the way streaming TV works these days but THAT’S a rant for another day!!) and what I’m saying is Netflix: how much of my plasma do you need from me in order to give me more seasons of this show to really dig into those dishes??
I actually wrote a little bit about the finale of TBH over on my other newsletter, The Great The Americans Rewatch, but because I don’t want to spoil the show for you if you haven’t seen it yet and because I’m not above inflating my word count by transposing in something I’ve already written, I’m going to copy it in here. The lead up is a bit about how [okay this is kind of a spoiler sorry!!!!] the main characters have just revealed something massive about themselves to their teenage daughter, Paige.
Paige asks her parents to speak Russian. She doesn’t elaborate on her curiosity, or explicitly say “Prove it,” but her demeanor does. Elizabeth says, “We love you very much,” translated by Philip, and Paige has no more questions that morning. And part of me wondered if Paige might be wondering if the story they told her was a mask, a cover-up for something they want to hide even more, something even less bearable.
In the final episodes of Teenage Bounty Hunters we learn a lot about the mother of twins Blair and Sterling [the titular teenage bounty hunters], gradually unpeeling an onion of lies covering secrets covering more lies covering more secrets. We learn that the reason she doesn’t talk much about her past is that she’s still grieving her parents’ death. But actually that she’s a fugitive. And then that she’s a fugitive for bombing an abortion clinic, which turns out to be a cover story for the fact that she actually has an identical twin sister who actually bombed the clinic. This is a lot to take in, but none of it is as earth-shattering as the final reveal of the season (and, unless Netflix gets its act together, series) [seriously go watch it NOW before you read on]: that Blair and Sterling aren’t twins at all. They look at each other, devastated, and the credits roll.
Meanwhile, when the credits rolled I yelled out loud and then stomped around the apartment, livid that this show was cancelled and we’ll never get to see the fallout of that revelation. Sterling and Blair’s twinhood isn’t just baked into their relationship with each other, it’s baked into their own identities. In a show so much about how identity and relationship inform each other, particularly in a relationship as close as twinhood, what does it mean for the founding principle of each of those things to be blown up?
There are also so many fascinating directions the show could have gone as Blair and Sterling figure out what it means for their sisterhood to be chosen, rather than biologically determined. And, like The Americans, and like many other fantastic shows, TBH is so good at emotionally-driven storytelling that resonates because it feels true to our own experience. Most of us will probably not find out that we’ve been lied to our whole lives about who our siblings are, but all of us with siblings will find ourselves making choices as we grow into adulthood about what our relationship will be with those siblings without proximity as the defining factor. Those of us invested in the concept of “sisterhood” have a sacred responsibility to make sure that sisterhood is inclusive and dynamic rather than rigid and exclusionary. We all push up against society’s differing valuations of “biological” family versus chosen family.
Here’s to family every which way — may we all be held by those we care about and hold them well in return. Here’s also to peach fruitscato, which has sponsored how sappy and intense the last couple paragraphs have gotten.
Love,
Kelsey
p.s. here’s ALSO to Mean Women, featuring my personal Mean Woman of the Month: Kathryn Hahn, who probably is not mean in real life but plays a lot of them and I love that for her, and even more for me.