Patton, of course, is the mother who intentionally frustrated thousands a few weeks ago when she wrote to the Daily Princetonian urging every female Princeton undergrad to snag a marriageable man while in college and cling to him with her French-manicured nails for the rest of her life. The author was deservedly berated for her medieval values and blatant sexism, and for perpetuating the idea that a woman who graduates college at 21—no matter how high her grades, how good her job offers, how rich her experiences—has wasted her time and money if there’s no prospect of having a pricey ring on her finger in the near future.

Forget the purposeful offensiveness, the gross elitism, and the rehashed arguments about what it means to “have it all.” As a female college senior reading this article, my gut reaction was befuddlement—Get a husband in college? What a comically horrible idea.

This isn’t to say that marrying someone you date or meet in college is always a bad thing—I know there are plenty of happily married couples whose first meetings were over red Solo cups in sweaty apartments. But encouraging girls to find husbands puts additional pressure on the social lives of female students: Don’t meet people for the sake of meeting them, don’t harmlessly flirt, don’t pull a Taylor Swift and date a guy who you knew was trouble when he walked in. Between the ages of 18 and 21, you’re on a mission to find the father of your future Princeton-student children, and if you don’t then you’ve failed miserably.

Obviously, adding pressure to find a husband at a young age in a world where we live until we’re 100, more people are having children older, and post-grads (like Rory Gilmore) bounce across the country between jobs and grad schools seems both impractical and unnecessary. But the other thing which confused me about Patton’s advice stems from how, from my observations, college students really suck at relationships.

I have friends and acquaintances who fall onto all ends of the bad-at-dating spectrum: the cripplingly emotionally dependent, the too-obsessed, the narcissistic, the materialistic, the list goes on. But when you’re young, being bad at relationships is no big deal—you realize you’re unhappy/unhealthy, you break up, you cry about it, you move on, and you won’t make the same mistake the next time. But, if you follow Patton’s logic, there won’t be a next time. So that childish relationship which should be a learning experience becomes something a girl is scared to let go of, at risk of never finding something better. And that’s not to consider if the guy—who, paradoxically, has no such need to find a spouse in college—decides to explore other options. Then, in addition to heartbreak, our poor college girl is terrified that she’s been doomed to “Cat Lady”-dom, with a diploma on her wall and no man to show for it.

Of course, Patton was talking about a specific school in her letter, and there are many who would say that comparing the dating pool at Princeton to that at Georgetown is like comparing apples to much lower-caliber apples. But on the Hilltop, the attitude is strikingly similar; we’ve all heard some made-up statistic about the high percentage of Hoyas who marry other Hoyas (60 percent? 70 percent?). And, although they don’t say it on campus tours, somewhere deep in the Georgetown mythology there’s the idea that you’ll find your future-senator husband sitting next to you in IR, that you two will get married in Dahlgren Chapel with JTIII as the officiator and Jack the Bulldog as ring bearer, and you’ll finally become Mrs. Joe Hoya. Domestic bliss for the low price of $200k.

But perhaps the strangest part of Patton’s article to me is that, despite my gut aversion to everything she stands for, I see the effects of logic like hers on my peers. Within the past year or so, pictures of engagement rings have dotted my Facebook newsfeed, and it seems droves of people around my age are getting engaged like it’s going out of style—which, to be fair, it is. And while I can’t speak to every (or any) one of their situations, I wonder how many of those engagements are at least somewhat underlied by fear of becoming an old maid.

To those people, I suggest watching a few seasons of Gilmore Girls. Personally, I’d much rather be a cat lady than have to wind up with Logan.

The post Carrying on: Not ready to put a ring on it appeared first on The Georgetown Voice.

In theory, college is supposed to prepare you for “real life.” After almost four years of it, I can say with certainty that I have absolutely no idea where this theory gets its credibility. Aside from no longer living with your parents, the college world bears no resemblance whatsoever to the one where you have to get up for work every morning and come home every evening. There are no such familiarities as a spring/holiday/summer breaks, homework, and Georgetown Day, where pulling all-nighters and wearing lacrosse pinnies and using every even minor holiday as an excuse to get drunk off of vaguely festive liquor are no longer acceptable forms of behavior.

The interesting part is that, aside from the select few who plan on attempting to treat their graduate school experience as Georgetown round two, these changes are going to be there for all of us. But there’s a reason why the sighs about graduation and becoming a real-live adult aren’t heard from the masses who have already signed their hiring papers at PWC. Although we try to mask it under a fear of having to pay taxes and go to sleep at a reasonable hour, it’s not growing up we’re afraid of—it’s the unknown.

For the majority of the Georgetown senior population, up until now our lives have been pretty stable. At the beginning of every January, we could give you a rough outline of where we’d be during the next year. Sure, summer plans could sometimes be up in the air, but there were only a limited number of options, and come September we always knew we’d be back in a classroom.

Even during that hectic college application process—which, in retrospect, seems like a stroll through the goddamn park, with all of its hard deadlines and coaching from guidance counselors—most of us at Georgetown knew that we’d be going to school somewhere. It was just a matter of figuring out where. We were going back to school, just like we always had, and seemingly always will.

I learned quickly about this pervasive fear of the unknown when, in February, I turned down the first real job offer I got. There were a lot of factors that kept me from wanting to do it—a salary that was hardly livable for DC and far less than what many of my peers are going to be making, work that seemed cool at first but would doubtlessly get mundane in a matter of weeks, and the requirement of wearing horribly unflattering scrubs to work every day.

But, the decision took me weeks, and even after I’d realized all of the reasons why this job wasn’t the right fit for me, so many parts of my indecisive mind wanted nothing more than to take it. Taking it would mean being done with the nerve-wracking, time-devouring, confidence-annihilating process of applying and interviewing for jobs, in which you’re asked to tell somebody all of the reasons why you’re amazing and allow them to decide if you’re telling the truth. If I’d taken this job, I could be done with the application process. I could stop going to career fairs, stop refreshing Hoya Career Connection as frequently as I do Facebook, and start going to Tombs on Monday nights with the rest of the Blessed Ones. Wouldn’t that be the life?

The temptation was much stronger than it should have been, given that the tradeoff was three months of comfort followed by two years of boredom, frustration, and ramen-noodle dinners. But it was more than just a job offer—it was an offer of sureness, of knowing where I was going to be come August, just as I have for each of the past 21 years.

That lack of security in your near future is the real reason for fear of graduation. Because, from the looks of it, the real world doesn’t actually seem so bad. It’s a world of work, sure, but also of more disposable income than ever before, of no homework or papers or studying, of 5 o’clock happy hours without the guilt of weeknight drinking when there are things due the next day.

I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds a hell of a lot better than gossiping about who was DFMOing at Tombs last weekend. Maybe, once we all get over our fear of the unknown, we can be ready and excited to burst the Georgetown bubble open for good.

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But it’s not just the word that I think should be cut out of our dialogue. It’s the vast majority of the repetitive, trite, ridiculous dialogue that the word is constantly associated with, and the overarching, overblown connotations that accompany it.

Over the past year, we’ve seen even our top news outlets—see the New York Times’ ubiquitous January article about the “end of courtship” in an age when the kids would rather sext—hop on the millennial bandwagon. We’ve seen pages upon pages of commentary about the generation epitomized by Girls (which, as nobody seems to catch on, is largely satirical), a generation completely new and different because of social networking and a bad job market and new parenting techniques that coddled our self-esteem by eliminating such atrocities as soccer trophies and grades below 80.

I, for one, find it hard to believe the constant commentary from our news sources accomplishes anything other than pointing out the obvious, and then extrapolating and generalizing until it looks like a piece from The Onion. If you just look out your window at a 20-something or two walking down the sidewalk, you’ll notice that—provided you live in an area with a high enough average income—you’ll see a smartphone or two pretty quickly. They’re probably texting, or Facebooking, or Twittering, or maybe even all at once, and they might be wearing some fancy high-tech gloves that allow them to do so without drying out their hands in the cold weather.

All of these activities, along with different dating rituals, different means of communication, and a somewhat different worldview are characteristic and unique to the generation born in the late ‘90s/early 2000s, are drastically different from what our parents grew up with and how they saw the world back in their day. But do you know what other generation was different from its predecessor? Every single one.

That’s why we have the word “generation” in the first place—to highlight the cultural and behavioral shifts that occur when kids hit the age when they have the means and abilities to live and behave differently from how their parents did. And what’s so ridiculous about the amount of attention that millennials are getting is that the overarching idea seems to be that we’re so incredibly and irreconcilably different from the generations that came before us. This is false. Sure, our parents don’t understand why we choose to Snapchat instead of date. Just like our parents’ parents didn’t understand why their kids wore tie-dye and grew their hair past their ears, and our parents’ parents’ parents didn’t understand why their daughters wanted to wear pants.

This sense that we are the only ones to ever break the norms of our parents because of technological advancements and shifting priorities might be one that is legitimately unique to our generation, probably a symptom of collectively never being told “no” as children. And in many ways, the millennial obsession is a positive-feedback loop—articles are written about what the kids are doing these days, but said kids seem to be the main audience for these articles. Thrilled that The Huffington Post is offering us new insights into our own lives, we share them on Facebook and the Twitter machine with our millennial friends, and, seeing how many page views they generate, the news outlets hire small armies of urban, white 20-somethings to write more articles about the same thing. This self-absorbed generation has reached a peak of self-absorbency (self-saturation?), where we’re obsessed with reading about our own lives, because it makes us feel special, just like we’ve always been told we are.

Twenty years from now, when we’ve been usurped as the topic of our own fascination by our children—provided that the Times was wrong, and we’re capable of settling down long enough to have children—we’ll be just as lost as our parents are about how they use their technology and communicate in what feels like a foreign language. As special as we think we are now, we “millennials” are destined to become the un-hip older crowd that every previous generation has graduated to before us, and maybe by then the term and its surrounding non-hype will have finally died out completely. Until then, at least YOLO is officially done.

The post Carrying on: Talkin’ ‘bout my generation appeared first on The Georgetown Voice.

I’m not talking about the privilege they hammer into our heads from day one, the kind addressed in the convocation speech about multicolored dots and the infinitesimally small decimal of a percentage of people in the world with the opportunities we have as students on the Hilltop. I’m not talking about the kind that makes you swell with emotion when you overcome procrastination, enabling you to put on a gray shirt and yell “Hoya Saxa!” at the Verizon Center. This kind is a subtler, more cultural aspect, and it’s about how we spend our free time.

The first time I noticed this particular aspect of Georgetown’s student culture was upon returning to the Hilltop for my sophomore year. For the past four months I’d been living at home, working full-time as a waitress at a local country club, and hanging out with my high school friends who were all doing the same kind of low-skill, money-making work. When I told this to a casual Georgetown acquaintance of mine who asked how my summer was, he looked at me like a specimen from another world. “Wow,” he said. “It sounds so cool not to work behind a desk.”

This is the culture where Georgetown’s privilege becomes so apparent. The kind where 18- and 19-year-old college kids don’t spend their summers waiting tables or lifeguarding or stocking shelves, but at prestigious, largely unpaid internships. At least at their lowest level, these require less skill than working at Starbucks does, but look better on that all-important resume.

Unpaid internships are a privilege admitted to a tiny fraction of the population, maybe about half a purple dot. They mean that your parents are able and willing to cover your general living expenses, your housing, your food, and your beer money (these are college kids we’re talking about, after all). More than that, they’re emblematic of a culture that values professional achievement above all else, to the point that we’re willing to spend thousands of dollars on top of tuition getting a head start in the industries that 18-year-olds think they’ll want to work in after graduation.

It would be one thing if internships were branded as the domain of the privileged, like spending your summers traipsing around Europe. But their prestige is derived instead from the illusion of the intern being selected out of all possible candidates as the best and brightest, and the most worthy of the zero dollars that the company is going to spend to hire you. But the “unpaid” label alone thins the applicant pool a great deal. Think back to the college process—if a school had a $6,000 application fee, it’d be making sure that only a precious few bothered to apply.

This kind of prestige breeds one of the most epidemic and least tolerable qualities you’ll find on Georgetown’s campus: self-importance. Nothing turns a Hoya dude into a pre-professional gasbag quite like making him put on a suit and tie for work every morning at age 19. But do you know what can easily cure that king of the world syndrome, or even prevent it from starting? Wearing a uniform and an apron.

I’m not advocating for some kind of see-how-the-other-half-lives social experiment, nor am I suggesting that students let their talents and abilities go to waste by performing semi-skilled labor. I’m saying that working for money in a non-professional setting is a healthy and valuable way to spend at least a summer during college. It teaches crucial people skills and work ethic, and getting a paycheck every week is a healthy reminder of the value of your time and work.

The way I looked at it, I had my whole life to be in a career and spending some time at a job that keeps me active all day, even on weekend nights when I could be out spending my hard-earned cash, was an opportunity I didn’t want to pass up. This past summer, when I finally bit the bullet and took a (paid) internship in an office, I spent my days off picking up lunch shifts at the dear old country club for extra money and old time’s sake.

Of course, not applying for internships when virtually all of your peers are has its downsides. And as I apply for jobs, preparing for my inevitable lurch from college into the real world, I wonder if I might be better positioned if I’d spent those summers serving coffee for free in an office instead of for pay at a country club. But with any luck, my interviewers will realize that I’m just as qualified, if not more so, than my interning peers, and I’ll score the job of my dreams.

If not, then my club polo and black apron are still hanging in my closet at home. As long as I haven’t forgotten how to balance four plates at once, I’ll always be employable somewhere.

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It would be easy to be turned off by this monochromatic display, to turn around and withdraw into exhibits easier on the eyes and the mind. But to do so would be a mistake—A Living Man Declared Dead is ingenious, devastating, thought-provoking, informative, and unlike anything you’ve ever experienced in an art museum.

The concept behind the exhibit originated with a journey. Simon spent four years travelling the world, finding families from different cultures with stories that both compel and disturb. She took a photograph of each individual in the family, representing the deceased and those who could not be identified or declined to participate with photos of their clothing, teeth, bones, or a blank photo. The text is a genealogy and description of the family’s story, and the final panel displays artifacts related to that story, the three components combining the historical, cultural, and human elements of a familial line.

And while Simon is considered a “photographer,” what makes this exhibit so phenomenal is not her use of the lens, but her storytelling and knack for tapping into basic human emotions, namely empathy, outrage, and moral indignation.

The individuals Simon chose for her works are anything but commonplace or familiar by Western standards. In matter-of-fact language free from judgment or commentary, Simon effectively and powerfully outlines stories that are heartbreaking (a Scottish family plagued by birth defects from fetal absorption of thalidomide, including a woman with severely deformed arms and hands), horrifying (two Brazilian families in a feud that has lasted several decades and claimed dozens of lives), and deeply unsettling (a Palestinian woman whose description begins, “Leila Kaled hijacked her first plane at 13”).

The exhibit’s multicultural aspect often serves to highlight the singularities of cultures outside of the West, as exemplified by the massive family of a polygamous African doctor, who has nine wives, 32 children, and 63 grandchildren. While this is a harmless idiosyncrasy, other cultures are cast in a much more negative, terrifying light. In these cases, the additional artifacts on the final panels prove the most effective, particularly because of Simon’s apparent desire to shock and disturb her audience.

An African family dotted with albino individuals faces hardship from human poachers, who believe their skin and hair hold magical properties, and Simon includes a large photograph of a dead albino infant, armless and lying in a pool of blood. Although the photographer’s language never betrays any value judgment, the image is meant to distress on a basic moral level, and it is one of many impressions that will stay with the viewer long after leaving the gallery.

Interestingly, the photographs of individuals, which take up most of the exhibit’s space, are the least striking part. The one exception is a family of 32 Australian rabbits, all pictured in clear boxes on wooden pedestals, sniffing their surroundings or staring at the camera. While this seems cute and quirky at first, a glance at the final panel brings the crash morbid reality—the rabbits are being killed en masse due to overpopulation, and an overhead photograph of a single grave filled with 32 rabbit corpses provides a jarring contrast to the animated, lively bunnies.

Because of its sheer size as well as subject matter, A Living Man Declared Dead is mentally and emotionally exhausting. After experiencing the final chapter, the viewer would be wise to seek therapy with the Damien Hirst exhibit down the hall—the patterns of repeating dots won’t erase Simon’s message, but at the very least they include some color.

The post Taryn Simon dazzles and disturbs at the Corcoran Gallery appeared first on The Georgetown Voice.

Imagine how differently that scene, and that whole movie, would have played out if Cady had gone to an all-girls school. I’ll tell you one thing—it would have been a lot less dramatic.

The argument in favor of single-sex education has long been based around the sexual attraction between the genders; in a critical period of growing up, when hormones are raging and hemlines are rising, it’s best to keep them in separate cages. And this is true in many regards—Cady would have paid more attention if Aaron’s hair hadn’t been between her and the chalkboard, and everyone knows the average teenage boy’s attention span is inversely related to the number of boobs in the room. While this line of thought doesn’t hold water in many situations—think LGBT students—there are numerous other reasons why the best high school experience, particularly for girls, is one with single-sex classrooms.

There’s a stereotype we all know about genders and academics: Men are better at mathematics and hard sciences. But the idea that women can’t do math is one I had never considered, had never even heard of, before coming to Georgetown. Here, I’ve been asked what it’s like to be a girl and a Math major, if I feel outnumbered or intimidated by my male peers.

My ignorance of this harmful stereotype is all thanks to my high school, an all-girls, Catholic institution. In the single-sex environment, the dynamics are familiar: there are class clowns, popular kids, jocks, nerds, and the like. The difference is that every one of those roles is occupied by a girl. The kid who sat in the back and made snide remarks, the one who spent the whole period looking in a mirror, and the one who answered every question right were all teenage girls, all wearing sweaters, collared shirts, and hideous plaid skirts. There, I wasn’t a girl who was good at math; I was just good at math.

This may seem like a small distinction, but consider this: researchers at University of Arizona found earlier this year that female scientists—accomplished, talented, Ph.D.-holding scientists—felt less engaged with their research and abilities after conversing with male colleagues, and were much more likely to drop out of their programs than men.

Obviously, the real world is chock full of men, and nobody is advocating for same-sex workplaces or graduate programs. But in those formative high school years, when your ego, confidence, and sense of self are being established, it’s better in an environment where you aren’t constantly being reminded by peers, teachers, and administrators that being an intelligent, academically accomplished girl is at best unattractive and at worst impossible.

This is where Cady Heron becomes a cautionary tale. Yes, she’s fictional, but Mean Girls wouldn’t resonate as much as it does if it didn’t draw on the real American high school experience. Frankly, I felt the same way Cady did in interactions with a guy I was interested in, who also happened to be pretty awful at math. He asked me how I was doing in calculus, and suddenly I was embarrassed to tell him. How will he ever think I’m cute if I’m better at math than he is? Luckily for me, this guy wasn’t in my classes; I didn’t have to get Cs to impress him, and I didn’t waste my time trying get him to walk in on his girlfriend hooking up with Shane Oman in the projection room.

For those who worry that single-sex education might lead to a culture shock when, in college, suddenly those weird creatures with big feet and hair on their faces are not only sitting next to you in class but living next to you in your dorm, keep in mind that single-sex education doesn’t mean a single-sex life. I had a healthy number of male friends in high school, and my classmates never had a shortage of boyfriends/hookups/suitors to gossip about at the lunch table (I may not have done that well in the boy department, but that’s a different piece to write).

And that’s the beauty of single-sex education. In many ways, the nuns and the old-fashioned are right—teenagers and hormones go together like candy canes and Glen Coco. They’re going to date, they’re going to hook up, they’re going to cheat, and they’re going to get very wrapped up in lots of needless drama. But stereotypes aren’t axioms, they’re constructions, and if girls in their formative years avoid an attitude which tells them that they can’t or shouldn’t do something they’re good at, then our schools, our science programs, and our progress as a civilization will be better off for it.

The post Carrying On: Single-sex schools are so fetch appeared first on The Georgetown Voice.

I’m sure back then this was a pretty big deal, but these days, there seem to be an awful lot of people who can pull off resurrections, or at least temporary ones. For evidence, look no further than last week’s news about Girl Meets World, a spin-off of the beloved ‘90s teen sitcom Boy Meets World which Disney reportedly has in the works. The show will supposedly center on Cory and Topanga’s daughter, as she follows the same coming-of-age struggles that her parents did so many years ago.

Naturally, as they are wont to do in the presence of any ‘90s throwback, millennials flipped their collective shit over the prospect of this show. And I hate to play the Mr. Feeney to your Cory and Shawn, but guys, let’s think before we celebrate.

Revivals aren’t unique to television; they’re also common practice among films and Broadway shows. Leaving Broadway aside—I fell asleep during Phantom of the Opera and therefore have no credibility—film and television revivals generally fall into two cases.

In the first, the nostalgia factor doesn’t really apply. Think 2000’s Charlie’s Angels, the new Melrose Place, or any comic book franchise, including this summer’s The Amazing Spider Man. For a lot of these movies and shows, the revival is largely born out of laziness.

Sometimes this is a good move—it turns out that Doctor Who, like its titular character, travels through time pretty well. But in other cases, the conversation goes like this: “Well, we could come up with our own concept about a bunch of spoiled, attractive young people engaging in soap-opera-like behavior, or we could call it 90210, rely on name-recognition to get us off the ground, and count on the target audience being too young to have ever seen the original to call us out.” Boom, instant bad television.

The second is those, like Girl Meets World, for which success hinges on nostalgia. With a movie this is a fine approach, because you only need your audience to see it once. They go, they watch, they relive their childhoods for a few hours, and they go home and tell all of their former sixth-grade classmates to do the same.

TV, though, is a bit trickier. A TV show doesn’t just need an audience to watch the first episode; it needs them to be dedicated, to watch it week by week, to either engage with the characters or just with the show’s mindless entertainment value. When the target audience is the same as the original series, things can get hairy. On the one hand, the new Arrested Development is essentially picking up where the old one left off. Given that its adult or semi-adult viewers of yesteryear have the same sense of humor that they did when the show met its untimely demise, this resurrection will likely not be a problem.

Boy Meets World, however, ran its course in due time. Our generation grew up with the Matthews boys and their gang, watching them navigate and then graduate high school, turn down Yale to be with a guy (Topanga, your name is bad and your decisions are worse), get married, explore higher education, and the like.

But now, with Girl Meets World following the same general story arc, it’s abundantly clear that we are far too old to be consistent fans of a show set in the awkward teenage years. We’ll tune in for the first episode or two, but even if the original actors reprise their roles, the remake will be too different from the original and will quickly run out of nostalgia gas. And if it isn’t different or good enough to compete for the now-teenage audience in the oversaturated high school drama market, then the next generation of Matthews kids likely won’t ever get to graduate on-screen.

But maybe I’m wrong, and Girl Meets World will delight us 20-somethings in every way we hope it will. At the very least, it will be better than 2008’s attempted reincarnation of Knight Rider—I don’t think Jesus Himself could have saved that one.

The post Idiot Box: The return of the that 90′s show appeared first on The Georgetown Voice.

The semi-murderous rage we feel when someone ruins the big twist in a TV show—you might be feeling it right now, if you happen to be planning on watching the fourth season (and last one worth your time) of Dexter—is something that can destroy friendships and lead one into a hermetic lifestyle. There’s something about that moment when the shocker happens, whether you were completely floored or totally called it three episodes ago, that really gets us television-watchers going. And when someone takes that away from us, intentionally or not, it makes us wish we could selectively erase that knowledge from our brains just to get the experience the director intended.

Back in the day, when bread cost a nickel and toasters were a luxury, television was a shared experience. Sure, you could spoil movies and books, but TV shows aired at one time and one time only and everybody watched their plots unfurl simultaneously, making events like the death and subsequent reincarnation of J.R. on Dallas part of America’s collective memory.

Then came VCRs, DVRs, and finally Internet streaming, which allows anyone to watch any television show ever aired at whatever pace he or she feels like going. Suddenly, we’re all experiencing shows at different times, and unintentional spoiling becomes easier than ever; I had that Dexter finale ruined for me before I’d seen a single episode of the show, because some jackass television commentator had to rerun the scene where her body is found.

The reason why we hate spoilers is how they affect our viewership; rather than paying attention the way we’re intended to, we’re looking for clues about what we know is going to happen, we’re analyzing characters’ actions and relationships with that in mind, and we’re just not as overcome with emotion when the twist finally takes place. It makes the show less engaging, less riveting, and less worth the time it takes to watch it. Right?

Maybe not. Researchers from UC San Diego found earlier this year that people for whom short stories of various genres had been spoiled reported enjoying the stories more than those who didn’t know about the endings.

While this research may seem like an unbelievable twist in the tale of your enjoyment of books, movies, and television, think about your own spoiler experiences: I, for one, didn’t give up on Dexter once I knew about Rita, nor did I turn off The Wire during season five when I found out that Omar—okay fine, I’ll spare you that one.

Point being, we don’t watch television solely for plot; if we did, we’d read synopses online rather than spending hours actually watching the episodes. And granted, there are some shows structured a little like mystery novels, where the fun of watching them is trying to figure out who the killer/criminal/father (for you Maury fans) is—think about how much an episode of Law & Order sucks when you know who did it and what the verdict’s going to be. But for other shows, at least ones that are well executed, the story is just a small part of why we keep tuning in.

Television, unlike books or movies, is a multisensory, long-term affair, with plenty to engage us besides just plot. And unless it’s the series finale that’s been spoiled—in which case, at least you’ve had the whole rest of the show to enjoy it—ruining a TV twist isn’t like finding out the killer in an Agatha Christie book or that Batman doesn’t actually die at the end of The Dark Knight Rises. It might inform the way you take in the storyline for a little while, and then the twist happens and the show moves on. There will be more plot turns to come, and hopefully you’ve put enough fear into your roommate that she won’t tell you which Mad Men character kills himself at the end of season five.

Spoiler alert: It’s Lane.

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If you don’t recognize that name, follow these instructions very carefully: Put down this newspaper (or, more likely, close this window on your computer), go to the Internet, and start watching Parks and Recreation from Season 1. Thanks to the deluges of politicking, propaganda, and public relations that we’re currently drowning in, the show’s humor will be magnified.

Although it’s often lumped with the rest of NBC’s comedy lineup alongside Community, 30 Rock, and The Office (when it was still funny), Parks and Rec is unique in that, beneath its mockumentary sitcom veneer, it is at its core a satire of American life and politics. Pawnee, Ind., the tiny town whose Parks and Recreation department serves as the setting for the show’s action, is a hilarious microcosm of modern America—its obesity rate is absurdly high; its environment is polluted; its history involves the violent slaughter of native peoples,;and its people are ill-informed, hot-tempered numbskulls.

Trying to placate those people are our good friends at the Pawnee Parks and Rec Department, with a focus on now-City Councilwoman Leslie Knope, played impeccably by Amy Poehler, whose hysterical love for her town (and for sugar) and belief in her ability to become the first female president are the heart of the show. The writers keep her endeavors to protect Pawnee or further her career relevant and reflective of those facing the American people today.

Example: one episode in the show’s fifth and current season finds Knope attempting to pass a bill limiting the sale of large sugary drinks, à la Mike Bloomberg’s New York soda ban. A session with a woman from a local fast-food restaurant involves Poehler hilariously wielding soda containers big enough to bathe a small child—if blended—and criticizing the woman for selling “water zero,” which neither contains water nor has zero calories. Americans of every political affiliation can chuckle at this scene and relate it to the massive sodas they encounter in their everyday lives.

But with content like this, Parks and Rec could easily polarize audiences and turn off people like me who don’t want their sitcoms to taste like The Daily Show. As for weekly comedies that provide social and political commentary, it’s going to take a hell of a lot for any show to surpass South Park in its timeliness and willingness to tackle any and every subject, and a network office comedy should not and cannot assume that role—think about what would happen if Mr. Slave’s slut-off with Paris Hilton were aired on NBC.

And that’s where Parks and Rec succeeds best; its satirical elements come with a heavy dose of good old-fashioned funny. Nick Offerman, who plays Parks Department Director and übermensch Ron Swanson so well that I’m convinced they’re the same person, is genius as a government employee who hates government, and the ever-delightful Aziz Ansari steals almost every episode with his get-rich-quick schemes and romantic strikeouts. Poehler, as good as she is, couldn’t carry the show on her own, and the ensemble cast—complete with a rotating series of celebrity guests, including Megan Mullally and, in an upcoming episode, Christy Brinkley—provides the real impetus behind the show’s humor.

When the presidential election is over and the leader for the next four years has been chosen, certain factions of people, most of whom I’ve hidden from my newsfeed, will undoubtedly post the standard “I’m moving to [insert country that really isn’t all that perfect here]” statuses. If I had the choice, I’d escape this whole climate and move to Pawnee—the politics may be just as bad, but at least they have some fun in spite of it.

The post Idiot Box: Politics: Only okay if it’s on TV appeared first on The Georgetown Voice.

Back in January 2011, when PBS first decided to take Downton from its native BBC and into living rooms across the pond, it became a miniature phenomenon among, well, people who watch PBS. And I, who like to consider myself somewhat of the anti-TV snob TV snob—I love The Wire, but am not ashamed to admit that I’ve seen every episode of Flavor of Love—refused, somewhat on principle, to get into a show on the channel that airs a series about antiquing. A reference on an episode of Modern Family, where the pretentious Mitchell refers to “Downton Disney” instead of “Downtown,” and I figured the show, which, from what I gathered, was about a stuffy British family and their stuffy British servants, wasn’t for me and the rest of the American TV masses.

But those two episodes we watched in class had me changing my tune to something that sounded distinctly like “God Save the Queen.” And so I joined the subset of the population that is big enough for PBS to continue premiering the show into its third season, which opened to its largest audience yet on Sept. 26.

Downton is certainly not the first or only British import to enthrall American audiences, but it is unique in its distinct Britishness. Doctor Who would be a favorite among sci-fi nerds regardless of the characters’ country of origin, and Monty Python’s hilarity is based mostly on universal knowledge and sense of humor (who doesn’t love silly walks?). But Downton’s premise itself is one completely foreign to us Americans, who—and I mean no political statement here—aren’t familiar with the concept of aristocracy. But the trials of Lord Grantham and his family, as well as the servants with whom they are unexpectedly friendly and cordial, have entranced American audiences for reasons that go well beyond an affinity for cute accents and period costuming.

The biggest reason for this, if I may be so bold to say so, is Dame Maggie Smith. To members of our generation, this absurdly talented actress first crossed our screens as the beloved Professor McGonagall of all eight Harry Potter movies, a strict British schoolmarm who just so happened to be able to turn herself into a cat. But as Violet, the outspoken and old-timey grandmother of the Crawley family whose disdain for modernity and anything un-English drips from her every snarky, almost singsong-y syllable, Smith has made us all but forget those times she wore a pointy black hat. Week by week, her scenes are among the show’s best, as the septuagenarian outshines the fresh, beautiful faces of the show’s younger cast members.

But Dame Maggie is by no means the only reason why Downton is so captivating. Although audiences largely agree that the show’s second season lagged plot-wise—with Matthew and Lady Mary’s “will they or won’t they?” non-romance taking center stage in far too many episodes—the show keeps its audience’s intrigue with scandals that might not shock us right now, but which make the turn-of-the-century British aristocrat we all have living inside of us spill her tea in shock. Lady Sybil’s rebellious nature, culminating with an illicit romance with the family’s Irish revolutionary chauffeur, gripped our attention (or maybe just mine, and possibly because of a sizable crush on said chauffeur) almost as much as any heated conflict on The West Wing did. Lady Mary’s sex scandal, which the writers were savvy enough to include in the first season’s third episode, was shocking enough to the show’s characters that audiences don’t mind its lasting effects two seasons later, despite that any American show would credit it one episode’s reflection, maybe two at most.

And that, to me, is the most enticing thing about Downton and its goings-on. Because after watching an embarrassing number of seasons of Flavor of Love, it’s nice to enter a world where you’ll be scandalized by a good ol’ premarital affair.

The post Idiot Box: I’ve seen those English dramas appeared first on The Georgetown Voice.