Broadcast Dates (part one)

These are the initial broadcast dates of the shows. It includes when they started, how soon after 9/11 they aired (again) and how obvious the representation of September 11 are.

Sex and the City (started in 1998)-
Season 4. Started on 6/3/2001. (June 3)
Was mid season when 9/11 ocured.
Came back with 'The Good Fight' on 1/6/2002. (January 1) (delayed six months)
Aired 'I Heart NY' (effectively a tribute episode to the city) as season finale on 2/10/2002 (Febuary 2)

24 (started in November 2001)
Less than two months after 9/11 (Season one was assasination attempt. NOT Islamic terrorism) (11/6/2001)
Season Two (just over a year after 9/11). Had time to react. About terrorists attempting to blow up a Nuclear bomb. (10/29/2002)

West Wing (started in 1999)
Special 9/11 episode, was an acknowledgement of 9/11. - 'Isaac and Ishmael' 10/3/2001
Season Three, regular episodes, return on 10/10/2001.(Later episodes of series three reflect the political climate of the time, but from a left view point. Had terrorism at center)

Battlestar Galactica (started 2003)
Intial episode was totally 9/11. End of the world feeling.
Season Three, Iraq insurgency (10/6/2006)

Sex and the City and Love

Sex and the City was obviously always about the quest for love, from its very first episode in 1998. However, when thinking about the final episode (that did have some sort of longing for New York prominently in it, that I suspect may have not be so obvious were it not for the feeling of empathy among New Yorkers for each other after September 11) the idea of complete and utter love was reoccurring. This reminded me of hearing the recordings of the passengers on the United Flight 93 calling their family and friends, knowing that the end was imminent professing how much they loved each other. That idea became somewhat a theme after the event, with love becoming so important with the sudden realisation of mortality.
Perhaps Sex and the City could only ever end in love for all of them, but, the style of the final episodes contain themes so relevant to the mood after 9/11 that it seems the outcome of the series (particularly in the words of Carrie with the 'all consuming love') must have been influenced by the events.

-harry

The Torture of Gaius Baltar

Battlestar Galactica is easily the most post 9/11 of all the shows I am looking at. This video is of human betrayer Gaius Baltar being tortured by the Cylons. In a confusing way it is extremely unclear who is who. Are the Cylons Americans or terrorists? Is Gaius an Iraqi in Guantanamo, or an American kidnapped by insurgents?



-harry

Nations on the Enterprise

Star Trek (Enterprise) isn't a show I had previoulsy thought of doing, but it is an example of a show that fared less sucesfully in a post 9/11 world. It did try a Battlestar Galactica 'end of world' act of babarism, but in particulaly Star Trek way (i.e. nothing too violent, at a time when Americans had become accustomed to death).

The logic of representation in Star Trek implies a kind of domination as well,
yet one marked by an increased abstraction. Representation involves a higher
level of mediation than the direct management of corporeality. In the
represntational world system, representation, like a virus and with little
regard for purity of form, dominates through colonization and conceals its
parasitic nature by asserting older forms of domination and replaying them over
and over, welding them together, creating fantastic, contradictory hybrids.
Captain Kirk's bravado, then, his aforementioned regression, might be taken,
then, as a feature of the concealing logic of representationalism itself: a
re-telling, an attempt to hold what is decayed and gone--a sense of a unified
nation in America in the 1960s-- and the barbarism that presupposes it in the
face of the internationalizing, levelling impulse of the universal broadcast.
The logic of representation invites us to substitute 'thought-
transmissions' or representations for concrete existence. In practical terms,
the moment at which we accept 'thought-transmissions' in the form of the
televisual is the moment at which identity as such-- both national and
individual--becomes unimportant and simply a moment in the unfolding of Western
representationalism/capitalism and the moment, therefore, in which nationalism
becomes merely an anachronism and therfore itself a fiction.

- Concerning Star Treks ideas of no nations, and no racial differences, and whether that by watching we invariably accept these ideas.

-harry

[link:http://cinemaspace.berkeley.edu/Papers/Walden/walden.toc.html]

Mass Linkathon

Here follows are the links I have collected in anticipation of this blog. Other links will either be either posted as I get them, or will be on the sidebar (called 'Interweb Linkage').

1. Does Battlestar: Galactica support the Iraqi insurgency? - By Spencer Ackerman - Slate Magazine
Questioning who t he characters represent, and what the political message is.
2. Harlan Ellison Interviews Ronald D. Moore on Why "Battlestar Galactica" is So Damn Good
Interview with Ron Moore, he does discuss staging it in a post 9/11 world briefly.
3.Rebecca Cusey on Battlestar Galactica on National Review
A review of Galactica that talks about ethics and 9/11.
4.'24': Television for a Post-9/11 World
Entire piece on why 24 is post 9/11 TV.
5.Increased Use of Cigarettes, Alcohol, and Marijuana among Manhattan, New York, Residents after the September 11th Terrorist Attacks
Not directly linked to media. But themese in Television shows can be linked to this. PDF for download...

-harry