Like Desperate Housewives, this drama series represents Whites pretending to look at their own culture in a knowing way while actually celebrating a culture that they simultaneously love and hate. As usual the characters here are semi-intelligent types whose only real goal in life is the tail-wagging-the-dog one of avoiding hard work and replacing it with an office career that is just as soul-destroying. Only high pay, endemic White supremacism and gynophobic sexual-promiscuity make their mediocrity tolerable – at least to themselves.
Amusingly, the White actors here are playing caricatures rather than flesh-and-blood characters; revealing the lack of genuine depth of this drama. And you find yourself amazed that any advertising person could ever believe that any true creativity was involved in their work. And that the lack of creativity here could possibly be the basis for the creative drama that this most definitely is not. The actors portray only their characters' personae and not their actual characters; how they appear on the outside, not who they are on the inside. This is not acting, it is mere self-conscious pretending – appropriately enough, the kind you find in a tv commercial!
The problem for the characters here (like that of the dramatists!) is to sell products people do not need; while creating the want for them - even if they are harmful to health, like nicotine. This proves the lack of genuine innovation in Western culture that leads to the need to constantly resell peplum as if it were "New and Improved". An odd drama that celebrates a time, a place and a still-existing set of attitudes that Whites refuse to drop in the present: Self-conscious knowingness as a substitute for insight or wisdom. It is easy to be rueful about the past since the time for useful knowingness is long past and, thus, less painful. It would have been a revelation if Whites had made a tv series about the present that would serve a useful political purpose rather than the one here of pretending how different Whites were then to what they are now. A drama about this simple fact would have been far more profound, far more enjoyable and far less prone to the commercial needs of its sponsors.
The quality of the acting is compromised by the lack of any genuine thematic content that could possibly reveal the essence of reality. In this, it is the advertising man's dream about how to dramatize reality rather than a proper dramatist's vision. One senses White culture as a kind of emptiness that dramas like this refuse to explore the rationale behind: A celebration of political and ethical superficiality and the inability to connect to objective reality. The other dramatic problem here is the implied belief that only White culture exists and, therefore, matters: White Men Behaving Badly; making it difficult to relate to the non-existent characters.
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