reflections #9: The Beauty
Does Ryan Murphy's The Beauty perpetuate the very ideas it seeks to examine?
I’m so happy to introduce a new look/logo to my newsletter! I highly recommend hiring Vancouver-based graphic designer Lillian Pham for all your design needs. I’ve been writing this newsletter for a few years now and it was time for a much-needed refresh. When we met over Zoom I was thinking a lot about how the “tvscholar brand” has evolved since I started posting on Instagram in 2019—at a time when I wanted this platform to be academic but accessible, informative and serious, a dissemination of what I was learning in grad school before I dropped out.
When I first had assets designed for this newsletter around then, I was so concerned about projecting myself as someone of expertise. The heavier forest green colour scheme and the straightforward text designs helped establish myself in those early days. Meeting with Lillian a few weeks ago, I just kept thinking of the word whimsy. Don’t get me wrong: You all know I treat television with the utmost seriousness as a medium, but over the years, I’ve embraced humour and playfulness and personal experience as core tenets of my writing and the way I move about this industry. When I posted about watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show for the first time I got the inevitable comment: “You haven’t seen this and you call yourself tvscholar?!” to which I replied: “Well, a scholar by definition is always learning.”
My group chat was concerned about my new logo’s legibility—that “tvscholar” wouldn’t be immediately readable upon first impression. But that is precisely why I adore this logo. It requires close reading. Many of you read and subscribe and some of you actually pay me (thank youuu I love you) for my thoughts on television because I favour the close read. Even my screenshot-taking practice is a kind of abstract close analysis. I love that the way this logo—floating in a deconstructed television set, attached to swirling power cables that are snaking out wildly for connection—prompts you to double-take and comprehend what you’re actually seeing. After all, as tvscholars, that is how we watch television.
Extra credit reading:
I think many of you will be interested in my thoughts on The Screener, a miniseries premiere I attended at Sundance last month. I hope the show gets picked up soon, I think it has a lot to say about Hollywood and screener culture inside the industry. I also hopped on a call with its creators, Jim Cummings and PJ McCabe. They told me they are not sending out screeners of The Screener (lol).
I had the pleasure of interviewing Sepideh Moafi, who I’ve loved watching on TV since The Deuce, for The Cut. She’s currently starring on The Pitt as Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi. Her answer to my last question had me crying with laughter on our call.
I wrote a bit about Steal (Prime Video), A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (HBO), and Drops of God (Apple TV+) for my Yahoo column. Since it’s Valentine’s Day I threw in High Fidelity (Hulu), too. It’s part of my 83-step plan to bring the show back.
Does The Beauty perpetuate the very ideas it seeks to examine?
This question has been bouncing around my head every week as yet another set of abs take up my entire screen on The Beauty, Ryan Murphy’s latest body horror drama based on a comic book series written by Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley.
