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Contents
Fall 2016
20
No, The TV Business
Isn’t Dead Yet 10
Julia Greenberg
Meet Symphony,
The Company that
tracks Netflix’s
elusive Ratings
K.M. McFarland
13
14
HELLO,
FRIEND
Jen Hedler Phillis
Sense8 and the Failure of the
Global Imagination
Claire Light
28
Modern
Marvel
Jason Tanz
34
42
42 Reviews
Blackish, cleverman, &
transparent
48
TV’s More Inclusive,
But It Has a Long
Way to Go
Jason Parham
Issue
V.1
the
emmys
issue
Cover: Tatiana Maslany
Photography: BBCAmerica
What Orphan Black
Can Teach Us
Alenka Figa
DIMENSION 3

3:47 PM
Nearly 10,000 reported
killed by China quake
2:37 PM - 12 May 2008
dtan
@dtan
Following
EARTH QUAKE in Beijing?? Yup... @kese
I felt it too!!
The 2008 China Earthquake. First On

5:55 PM
An earthquake struck China today with
early reports that 7,600 people died in
Sichuan province alone
8:55 PM
Thousands dead in Chinese quake

Letter
from the
Editor
Award shows don’t always keep pace with the television
industry — many, if not most these days it seems, receive
well-deserved criticism for falling out of touch with audiences
and creators alike. At Dimension, we rarely feel
the need to add to the wealth of related media coverage.
Our mission is not to keep up with the latest news, but
to publish journalism that pushes us to think critically
about the narratives the television industry is putting
out in the world.
However, this year’s Emmy Award winners reflect
a long-overdue (and far from complete) shift toward
diversity in the television industry. Rami Malek, Tatiana
Maslany, Aziz Ansari, Alan Yang, Sarah Paulson, Sterling
K. Brown, and Courtney B. Vance were all handed Emmys
this season, and two of the white men who picked up
awards — Louie Anderson and Jeffrey Tambor — won
for their sensitive and thoughtful portrayals of female
characters. But Tambor’s acceptance speech set a tone not
of self-congratulation, but of necessary forward momentum,
in his passionate and self-sacrificing plea for trans
actors to play trans characters, “I would not be unhappy
if I was the last cisgender male to play a trans female on
television. We have work to do.”
Here at Dimension, we believe that work is important.
The stories we tell change the way we think about the
world we live in, and who we choose to tell those stories
is as important as what stories get told. As the television
industry pushes to portray a more complete and meaningful
picture of modern cultures, it’s important to step back
and reflect on both its successes and its failures.
The Emmys reminded us of the breadth of narratives
at our fingertips this year. This issue of Dimension takes
a closer look at what the shows we’re celebrating have
to say, how they’re saying it, and what that says about us.
Photography: Alex Hewitt
Editor
Copyeditor
Contributors
Graphic Designer
Photographer
Creative Director
Published by
Jenni Sands
Kassy Rodeheaver
Alenka Figa
Julia Greenberg
Delia Harrington
Claire Light
K.M. McFarland
Jason Parham
David Pierce
Jen Hedler Phillis
Jason Tanz
Jenni Sands
Alex Hewitt
Jill Vartenigian
Seattle Central
1701 Broadway
Seattle, WA
dimensionmagazine.com
Dimension Magazine is a Seattle Central College Printing
publication issued 4 times a year. Reproduction in whole
or in part without written permission is strictly prohibited.
All manuscripts, photos, video, drawings, and other
materials submitted must be accompanied by a stamped
self-addressed envelope. Dimension Magazine cannot
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are available for $35.00 per year for US addresses
and $50.00 per year for Canadian addresses.
Single price is $11.99. Contents are copyright © 2016 by
Jenni Sands, except for all articles and photography,
which are used for educational purposes only.
Jenni Sands
Founder & Editor
6 DIMENSION

Nope,
the TV Business Isn’t Dead Yet.
Far From It, Really.
Over the past few years, media
analysts have bemoaned the End
of TV. Some have wondered, as
ratings tumble year after year,
why would advertisers continue
to buy ads? Meanwhile Facebook
and Google’s ad businesses have
exploded, even though marketers
aren’t spending drastically more
than they have in the past. But
the traditional TV industry is not
dead just yet.
This fall, CBS, 21st Century Fox, and Time Warner
all reported advertising revenue growth. CNN and
Fox acknowledged they’ve seen higher ratings (and
ad revenue) thanks in part to the election. And,
sure, CBS had the Super Bowl this year. Even so,
the company says its ad revenue is “the strongest
we’ve seen in a long, long time.”
The media business runs on ads. But since the
birth of the web, the ad business has been changing.
Analysts expect brands to spend $68.8 billion
dollars this year on digital advertising, according
to eMarketer. Even so, TV has remained the single
biggest recipient of marketers’ money. As more
people abandon traditional TV for streaming services,
YouTube, and social media, broadcasters will
have to fight to keep advertisers coming back. But
by then, the dichotomy between TV and digital
may not mean much anyway.
“It’s definitely a complicated picture,” says senior
analyst Paul Verna of eMarketer. “But it’s not easy
to say digital is killing TV.”
Protecting the Business
In its own way, TV is still pretty unique. The internet
dramatically changed the newspaper, magazine, and
radio industries. Many advertisers are no longer
willing to pay top prices (or advertise at all) in those
places as the audience shifted online.
8 DIMENSION

“
“There’s a lot more inertia in television than there was
in the media that succumbed more quickly to disruption
from the Internet,” says Andrew Frank, a longtime analyst
at Gartner who follows the marketing industry.
How have major broadcasters and cable networks held
onto their dominant share of the public’s attention? Well,
for one, people still watch a lot of TV on TV. Major sporting
events, like the Super Bowl and the Olympics, draw
millions of viewers. And yes, electoral politics still largely
play out on television. “TV still has massive scale, it has
that cachet,” Verna says. “If it’s on TV, it’s important.”
And advertisers want to be where they can reach people.
Even for those who don’t watch TV in the old-fashioned
way, many networks have developed their own websites,
It’s definitely a complicated
picture, but it’s not easy to say
digital is killing TV.
”
apps, and digital services. Advertisers consider ads on
websites and apps “digital spend.” For networks, however,
it’s all ad money coming their way.
Take Fox. Advertisers can buy slots during The Simpsons
on its broadcast station or The Americans on basic cable.
They can serve ads during full episodes streaming on its
website, streaming apps, and Hulu. (During last week’s
earnings call, 21st Century Fox’s CEO James Murdoch
called the going rate for ads for Fox’s shows on Hulu “very,
very attractive.” Fox owns Hulu in a joint partnership with
Disney–ABC and NBC Universal.)
But when advertisers are spending money for ads attached
to TV streaming on the internet, they don’t think of it as TV.
“Hulu, Roku, Apple TV. Is that television? No, it’s not.
It’s consumed on a big screen potentially in your living
room, but we consider anything delivered by an IP device is
not linear TV,” says David Cohen, the president of Magna
US TV vs. Digital Ad Spending
in billions of dollars
Global in North America, a major ad-buyer that works
with companies like Coca Cola and Johnson & Johnson.
In other words, networks are getting advertisers’ money
both ways, which for the moment seems to have led to an
overall bump. But Cohen predicts marketers will begin
to see more of the distinction blur. “In the short term, I
think it’s not outlandish to think that a billion dollars
will come out of the linear television market this year and
move to digital video.”
Time of Transition
And yet that doesn’t mean that the future for broadcasters
and cable networks is ultimately secure. Analysts with
eMarketer estimate that more money will be spent on
digital advertising than TV by next year. Ad buyers and
marketers are frustrated with the fact that TV ads continue
to increase in cost even as ratings, for the most part,
continue to fall. “Why as marketers have we agreed to pay
more for that decline in audience is exactly the question,”
Cohen says. Magna, for its part, said last week that it
was moving $250 million from its TV budget to YouTube.
As the basic cable bundle comes apart and viewers
get more options to pay for fewer channels in so-called
“skinny bundles,” Frank believes that less popular channels
may struggle as advertisers shift dollars to digital
content people actually watch. But digital advertising is
also complicated. Facebook and Google may dominate
when it comes to competing in the digital space. But the
ads still have to be shown to be effective, which is easier to
demonstrate through “apples-to-apples” comparison. This
is why YouTube, with its TV-like pre-roll ads, has thrived.
Over time, ad tech will get better at helping marketers
understand who you are, where you’re watching, and
what you want, whether you’re on Facebook, YouTube,
or just watching plain old TV. And that may help save
traditional TV simply because advertisers will be able to
show couch potatoes more ads for stuff they really do want.
Television may be changing. But evolution is, if nothing
else, a survival strategy.
$71.29
$72.09
$72.72
$82.86
$74.53
$93.18
$76.02
$103.39
$77.93
$113.18
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
Source: eMarketer, Sept 2016
9

Meet Symphony
the Company That Tracks Netflix’s Elusive Ratings
By K.M. MacFarland
During an otherwise routine panel at the Television Critics
Association Winter press tour, NBC research president
Alan Wurtzel dropped a bombshell: He knew — or at least
had an idea — how many people were watching Netflix’s
original series. It was a sit-up-and-pay-attention moment.
The head of research for a broadcast network was pulling
back the curtain on viewership numbers that had long
eluded TV reporters everywhere.
It’s no secret that television networks have long wanted
alternatives to the traditional Nielsen ratings. What
Wurtzel revealed was that NBC had found one — Palo
Alto-based Symphony Advanced Media, which had viewership
numbers for Netflix and others. It drew the data
from tech that was still “in beta,” Wurtzel said, but it
nonetheless showed Jessica Jones averaging 4.8 million
viewers aged 18–49 while Master of None had 3.9 million
adults in the same group.
Until now, no one has been able to approximate the
audience for shows available exclusively on streaming
Instead of the set-top box
that Nielsen families use,
Symphony created an app
that tracks what users are
watching in much the same
way Shazam identifies a
song playing at a party.
services. Netflix’s numbers — other than subscriber figures
it reports each quarter — are shrouded in secrecy, even for
show creators. As it stands, Netflix will share data on its
successes — noting that Beasts of No Nation was viewed 3
million times in its first two weeks of release, for example,
or that The Ridiculous 6 is the most-watched film in Netflix
history — but not much beyond that. Symphony — which
touts Charlie Buchwalter, who spent 13 years at Nielsen, as
its president and CEO — helps put an unofficial number
on streaming viewership.
Collecting Data, Shazam–Style
Symphony launched its VideoPulse service in September,
with NBC, Viacom, Warner Bros., and A&E as beta testers.
Buchwalter says the system was designed to catch the
“30–35 percent of viewership actually happening beyond”
the live-plus-seven rating (L+7) that tracks a program’s
viewership during the seven days after it airs and is the
standard used to determine advertising fees. VideoPulse
then tracks the mobile streaming habits of users, who
are paid $5–$13 based on how many devices they set up,
to calculate viewership.
VideoPulse’s sophisticated audio recognition technology
lets the software run passively on a mobile device,
identifying a television program through its microphone
to log viewing habits. Instead of the set-top box that
Nielsen families use, Symphony created an app that tracks
what users are watching in much the same way Shazam
identifies a song playing at a party.
“We have a partner that has access to all 210 national
channels in the US,” says Buchwalter, “and every piece
of content that comes over those channels has an audio
fingerprint included in them, which has to do with a
particular episode of a particular program on a particular
network.” When the service launched, it tracked all
broadcast and cable programs. But throughout October
DIMENSION 11

and November, Symphony added tracking for high-profile,
critically-acclaimed streaming service shows like Orange
Is the New Black, Transparent, and Master of None.
For streaming shows, Symphony’s app tracks the number
of people who watch any episode of a particular series over
a 35-day period, then averages that total to determine a
per-episode rating. For example, Narcos averaged 3.2 million
viewers aged 18-49. Amazon’s Man in the High Castle,
which has been identified as the highest-rated Amazon
Prime original, averaged 2.1 million viewers.
Symphony is one of a few companies attempting to fill
the perceived gaps in how Nielsen collects viewer data.
And right now it’s going about it by forming a diversified
user base from which larger demographic information
can be extrapolated. “We have our own panel of around
15,000 mobile device users,” says Buchwalter, who also
notes that Symphony’s app works with cell phone and
Wi-Fi networks, as well as a GPS component to note
where users are accessing media, whether it’s “at home,
in the car, or in the parking lot of a Target.”
Looking Inside the Black Box
Frustration with Netflix’s secrecy about viewership numbers
runs deep among TV executives, and Wurtzel, however
obliquely, smashed the streaming service’s black box viewership
with his TCA presentation. To be fair, television
executives have long complained that Nielsen ratings
aren’t accurate and Symphony’s numbers are still in beta
testing, but given how long everyone’s been wondering
many people are watching Netflix and Amazon original
series, any data at all is eye-opening.
Symphony’s panel of about
15,000 mobile device users
tracks media consumption
where users are, whether
that’s at home, in the car, or
in the parking lot at Target.
Netflix, for its part, remains unconcerned. A company
spokeswoman declined to comment on the data Wurtzel
mentioned, but said in an email that “generally speaking,
these kinds of traditional ratings don’t matter in a world
where success isn’t measured by specific time slot. They are
especially irrelevant on a subscription service that doesn’t sell
ads. We measure success by subscriber numbers and hours
people watch, and we do release those figures quarterly.”
You could argue Netflix needn’t worry about ratings
because it doesn’t have to worry about setting advertising
pricing. But other subscription networks — HBO,
Showtime, or Starz, to name a few — receive Nielsen
ratings, which are a barometer of how their original
content is received. Those numbers justify the cost of
producing original programming. And considering Netflix
has said it hopes to double the number of original series
in the next year, it will be valuable to know whether or
not the company is investing shrewdly in content, or just
producing an endless stream.
Netflix’s Most Viewed Shows of 2016
by millions of viewers
Fuller House 8.79m
Source: Symphony Advanced Media
Orange is the new black 7.18m
Marvel’s Daredevil 3.6m
House of cards 3.26m
Marvel’s Jessica Jones 2.83m
unbreakable Kimmy schmidt 2.79m
F is for Family 1.81m
Master of None 1.27m
Narcos 1.14m
Grace & frankie 1.09m
12 DIMENSION

HELLO,

MR. ROBOT
ASKS THE RIGHT
QUESTIONS ABOUT
HOW, EXACTLY,
WE’RE GOING TO
CHANGE THE WORLD.
“Hello, friend.” That’s the first line of Mr. Robot, as
its protagonist, Elliot Alderson — a cybersecurity engineer
and hacker — hails the viewer before launching
into his manifesto:
What I’m about to tell you is top-secret. A conspiracy bigger
than us all. I’m talking about the guys no one knows about.
The guys that are invisible. The top one percent of the top one
percent. The guys that play God without permission. And now
I think they’re following me.
These opening thirty seconds establish Mr. Robot’s two
centers of gravity: the 1 percent are destroying the world,
and our narrator can’t always discern reality from fantasy.
FRIEND
BY JEN HEDLER PHILLIS

WHAT I’M ABOUT TO TELL
YOU IS TOP-SECRET. A
CONSPIRACY BIGGER THAN
US ALL. I’M TALKING
ABOUT THE GUYS NO ONE
KNOWS ABOUT. THE GUYS
THAT ARE INVISIBLE. THE
TOP ONE PERCENT OF
THE TOP ONE PERCENT.
THE GUYS THAT PLAY GOD
WITHOUT PERMISSION.
AND NOW I THINK THEY’RE
FOLLOWING ME.
Sam Esmail’s Mr. Robot came as a surprise when it
premiered last year: not only does the series stand out
from the USA Network’s typical programming — handsome
men in nice clothes either enforcing or evading the
law — but it also asks viewers to root for an anticapitalist,
drug-addicted protagonist, who may or may not be imagining
most of what happens to him as he attempts to take
down one of the world’s largest corporations and seriously
disrupt “the system” in the process.
Mr. Robot took revolution prime time, and the Left
should pay attention to what it has to say.
IF TYLER DURDEN WERE A HACKER
On a basic level Mr. Robot functions as political allegory,
indexing progressive movements’ failure to enact large-scale
change. The first season broadly explores two methods for
achieving social transformation as Elliot (recent
Emmy winner Rami Malek) and his
childhood friend Angela (Portia Doubleday)
work independently to get revenge on E Corp,
a multinational corporation too big to fail.
They hate the company because it caused
a chemical spill that killed Elliot’s father
and Angela’s mother. The corporate players
have, of course, done no time and paid no
settlements, and their surviving victims are
drowning in medical debt that E Corp,
conveniently, also owns.
In the first episode, Mr. Robot (Christian
Slater), recruits Elliot to join a hacker collective
called fsociety, which is preparing to break into E
Corp’s files and delete all its debt records. There’s something
off about Mr. Robot: no one speaks directly to him except
Elliot, and, when Mr. Robot speaks, characters often
respond directly to Elliot. Although viewers picked up
on this immediately, it takes Elliot most of the first season
to realize that Mr. Robot is his very own Tyler Durden.
The tension between the audience’s suspicions of Mr.
Robot’s reality and Elliot’s unwillingness to acknowledge
this makes fsociety’s plan to rid the world of debt feel
hallucinatory: we cannot trust anything we see on screen.
Elliot’s drug addiction contributes to the sense of unreliability.
He goes cold turkey just before breaking into
E Corp’s server farm to install a raspberry pi that will
corrupt the plant’s thermostats and destroy their data.
The withdrawal-induced dream sequence calls into question
whether the heist actually happened or if it is another
of our narrator’s fantasies.
Meanwhile, Angela is busy trying to convince a lawyer
to reopen the wrongful death lawsuit against the company.
She gets an outgoing executive to testify to his participation
in the spill; and, impressed with her negotiating skills and
fearlessness, he recruits her. Believing she can leverage her
position within E Corp to get justice for chemical-spill
victims, Angela takes the offer and joins the public relations
department — just when fsociety successfully completes it
mission, throwing the corporation into a tailspin.
Season two finds the main characters in defensive
positions: rather than intensifying their assault on E Corp,
fsociety hacks the FBI to stay ahead of their investigation.
16 DIMENSION

Angela has since positioned herself in E Corp’s risk management
department, but her boss knows that she was
involved in the lawsuit and won’t trust her with damaging
company information. She finally steals the data she
needs, only to discover that the government regulators
are E Corp pawns.
As we follow the exploits of Elliot and Angela, the
show encourages us to connect Mr. Robot’s plot elements
to real-world corollaries. Fsociety is Anonymous and
Occupy; E Corp’s logo is identical to Enron’s, and the
computers it builds, the insurance it sells, and the banks
it runs makes it interchangeable with Apple, Lehman
Brothers, and Wells Fargo.
In the second season, the production team re-cuts,
splices, and dubs over news footage to update us on the
state of the world post-hack. We see Barack Obama say,
“The FBI announced today that Tyrell Wellick and fsociety
engaged in this attack.” (No, the media-friendly president
did not record the clip himself.) Images of riots and strikes
appear in news reports about the ongoing crisis. Edward
Snowden gives his take on the FBI investigation.
The integration of actually existing political figures into
the plot of Mr. Robot heightens its hallucinatory feel. Mr.
Robot’s world is our world, shifted just a few degrees.
This allows Esmail to dramatize the two lines of attack
taken up by the American left in recent years — protest
and change from within — and how they have been diverted
or captured by the combined power of capital
and the state.
Both fsociety and Angela find themselves more directly
at odds with elements of state power than their real target —
financial capital — mirroring what happened
to both the Occupy movement and
the Sanders campaign. After all, Occupy
wasn’t cleared by Goldman Sachs; it was
the police, under the cover of public safety.
Attempts to reoccupy the park and build
permanent camps have been blocked by
police, not capital.
Likewise, it’s business as usual at the
DNC. Listening to Hillary Clinton’s
campaign speeches or considering her
bland vice presidential nominee, you’d
never know that a social democratic insurgency rocked
the party this year. And while hope remains for downticket
candidates, the trouble that plagued Our Revolution’s
launch underlines the difficulty of enacting change from
within a capitalist party.
But treating Mr. Robot as a show that bears a one-toone
resemblance to contemporary life misses the point.
The bleak picture Esmail paints of contemporary revolution
isn’t designed to depress us, it’s designed to force us
MR. ROBOT TOOK
REVOLUTION PRIME TIME,
AND THE LEFT SHOULD
PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT
IT HAS TO SAY.
17

MR. ROBOT IS DESIGNED TO
FORCE US TO CONFRONT
HOW WE ENGAGE WITH
POLITICS, CAPITAL, AND
OUR BEST (AND WORST)
UTOPIAN IMPULSES.
to confront how we engage with politics, capital, and our
best (and worst) utopian impulses.
MEDIATION IS THE MESSAGE
Mr. Robot is made from popular culture. While Fight
Club and American Psycho are its most obvious forebears,
it also draws on Lolita, Back to the Future II, V for Vendetta,
Taxi Driver, Raising Arizona, Breaking Bad, Fringe, Alf,
and a hundred others.
Culture critics call this pastiche — a type of representation
Frederic Jameson famously decried as “blank parody.”
Jameson argues that pastiche removes its cultural references
from their historical moment, erasing history — and therefore
politics. The recycled surface of pastiche blocks the
audience’s capacity to engage politically with works of art.
Reasonable people can — and do — disagree with
Jameson’s assessment. Mr. Robot certainly offers a compelling
counterexample: its use of pastiche doesn’t mask the
relationship between viewers and politics,
it reminds them that this is, in fact, how
they encounter capitalism everyday.
The final moments of the first season
drive this point home. We discover that
Whiterose, the leader of the Chinese hacker
group Dark Army, works with E Corp CEO
Phillip Price. As they discuss fsociety’s success,
Price admits, “of course” E Corp knows who
pulled off the hack and that they will “handle
that person as we usually do.”
The scene establishes two things: it reveals that
White rose operates at the highest levels of both
the anticapitalist hacker movement and the business world.
It also shows the extent of E Corp’s power: they know
who is responsible for the attack, hinting that they perhaps
even knew it was coming. This seeming
omniscience underlines how “the guys that
are invisible,” whom Elliot references at
the beginning of the season, have remained
invisible: there’s another layer of power
behind the one fsociety just took down.
This scene handily sets up season two:
new villains, new plots, a broader, more
global perspective. It also plays into our
cultural obsession with conspiracy theories.
Across the political spectrum, frustrated
people devise improbable explanations for
the world’s problems. Whether it’s Alex
Jones’s New World Order, the Illuminati
mess, or 9/11 truthers, everyone — right,
center, and left — finds comfort in having
a faceless enemy to blame. But we don’t
need a conspiracy. In life, as in Mr. Robot,
something does stand between us and the
real players, protecting people like Price
and Whiterose from the underclasses.
In a financialized economy, we increasingly
deal with virtual wealth — money,
stocks, bonds, mortgages — more than we
do with material. This doesn’t mean that there was ever
a time where capitalism wasn’t mediated — the money
form as a general equivalent, in Marx’s words, has been
with us all along.
But these representational instruments have, in recent
decades, exploded. To give just one example, the 2008
crisis was brought on by financial products that shed
their connection to the thing itself: a house becomes a
mortgage, which is sliced up and repackaged with other
slivers of homes, and sold. These assets then get sliced up
even further, and resold at inflated prices,
while investors get in on the game buying
and selling insurance.
The levels of mediation spiral higher
and higher until we are no longer dealing
with the thing itself, but — as in a pastiche
— recycled material that is completely
disconnected from the object it was designed
to represent.
It’s nearly impossible to represent this;
much easier to show Price and Whiterose
pulling the strings. Mr. Robot’s second
season increasingly uses these shady powerbrokers’
scheming to move the story along,
presenting them — and not the structure
of the economy — as Elliot’s real enemy.
This ultimately dulls the political intervention
Mr. Robot might make — at least on
the level of plot.
But as long as Mr. Robot underlines and
illustrates that something always mediates
our relationship to power, the show’s politics
will be worth thinking about, and,
indeed, engaging in.
18 DIMENSION

CAN AN INSURGENT
COLLECTIVE REALLY
CHANGE THE WORLD?
SILENT OBSERVERS
From the moment Elliot addresses the audience as “friend,”
viewers are implicated in the actions that unfold onscreen.
Season two takes the audience’s involvement a step further:
as Elliot is forced to listen to a tertiary character ramble
on, his voiceover implores viewers to tune out the speech
and search his apartment for clues to Mr. Robot’s plans.
The camera obligingly moves up to ceiling level and
slowly scans the set.
Elliot asks us to intervene, to help him figure out what
his alter ego has in store. We should do as he asks and
apply our answers to our world.
Granted, these answers aren’t easy coming. The show’s
political takeaway isn’t always clear, and it hesitates in
showing the hack’s human costs. We hear from news
reports that the attacks devastated the economy, but Esmail
doesn’t give viewers much more. Elliot questions whether
the revolution had positive effects, and we are shown long
lines for an ATM and a massive swap-meet that seems
to have popped up as an alternate economy.
None of this seems to touch the main characters however
— all of whom are engaged in high-end service- and
creative-sector work like cybersecurity, sales, and public
relations. At worst, they have to wade through a protest
before enjoying their expensive dinners.
The characters’ position in the economy, on the one
hand, gives them access to some of contemporary capitalism’s
most important nodes: Elliot can plant viruses directly
in corporate servers; Angela can access E Corp’s files to
document their malfeasance.
But their failure to enact positive and meaningful change
raises questions about the limits of the creative class’s
political and economic engagement. Can an insurgent
collective really change the world?
Esmail raises this question when Angela encounters an
old friend of her father’s. He criticizes her for joining E
Corp and implies that she traded sex for promotions. She
responds angrily, throwing his working-class status in his
face: “You’re a plumber. Right, Steve? You had what, sixty
years at life? And that’s the best you could come up with?”
Neither character looks great after this exchange — he’s
a hateful misogynist; she’s a smug classist. The audience
isn’t meant to side with either.
So far Mr. Robot has refused to decide if the fsociety
revolution is good or bad. And that’s not a bad thing. By
relentlessly presenting us with popular-cultural representations
of capitalism and resistance to it, it demands that
we think through what new shapes a radical challenge to
capitalism might take.
Should we organize only those who have a “direct”
relationship to production? Should we follow Kim Moody
and focus on logistics? Is there hope for an insurgent
campaign within a capitalist political party? Can a horizontal
organization like Occupy do anything more than
temporarily inconvenience the bankers? Should we all
don masks and learn to code?
Mr. Robot doesn’t offer answers. But for a network whose
biggest hit before this was a legal drama called Suits, we
should welcome every cultural product that raises these
kinds of questions, pushing economic inequality, corporate
malfeasance, and the cozy relationship between business
and politics into the light. Even if Esmail isn’t interested
in his characters’ politics, his viewers are.
19

Sense8 and the failure of the
global
imagin
ation
by claire light
How do you imagine a life you could never live? Though not really
a theme, this problem is at the heart of Netflix’s new original
series Sense8, created by the Wachowskis and J. Michael Straczynski,
and heavily influenced by Tom Tykwer. Like many fantastical or science
fictional premises, Sense8’s premise is a wish fulfillment: not — as
is typical of this genre and the Wachowskis’ earlier work — the wish
fulfillment of the disempowered middle school nerd stuffed into a
locker, but rather the Mary Sue desire of a mature, white American
writer/auteur who has discovered that an entire world is “out there,”
one that the maker doesn’t know how to imagine.
The premise in a nutshell: humanity has evolved a new subspecies,
the “sensate,” who can share the thoughts, feelings, memories, skills,
and experiences of other sensates. A sensate can “give birth” to a group
of adult sensates, tying them together into a “cluster,” that can and
does access each other without having to come in physical contact
first. The cluster must be composed of eight sensates who were all
born at the exact same time, which necessarily means that they are
scattered all over the world. They can use each other’s languages,
knowledge, and skills, and experience each other’s experiences firsthand.

You can see already how incredibly attractive these
abilities would be to Americans who wish to depict
a new global status quo, but grew up monolingual in
an imperialist center.
I’m describing, of course, the Wachowskis, who share
entire writing and production credits with J. Michael
Straczynski, but are the obvious spiritual core and
drivers of this piece. Very little of Straczynski’s earlier
work in superhero cartoons, space opera, and short-arc
TV drama shows up here, except his expertise with the
television format. Don’t get me wrong, I’m impressed
with his light touch. You don’t see his hand in this at
all, and I give entire credit and blame for this series to
the Wachowskis, whose vision shines through. (Much
more apparent is the influence of Tom Tykwer, who
only directed two episodes, but whose pacing and
elegiac grittiness is felt throughout.)
The Wachowskis step onto the stage here as fully
developed aesthetic internationalists, embracing the
equality of diverse world cultures, and espousing the
universality of the human experience. You can see
the Wachowskis’ development into this — philosophy?
— throughout their oeuvre, pushed by a desire
to depict true diversity.
It’s something you can see in the Matrix trilogy already,
which was limited by the Wachowskis’ extremely
limited white American perspective. The works they
adapted subsequently (V for Vendetta, Speed Racer,
Ninja Assassin) were training wheels: the developing
Wachowski worldview refracted through international
pop culture artifacts. Cloud Atlas feels like a culmination
of this growth, the moment they discovered where they
really wanted to go: towards a philosophical simultaneity
through extremely diverse global cultures. In
Sense8 you see them finally taking the training wheels
off and attempting to originate their own simultaneous,
diverse-culture-unifying fictions.
It’s a beautiful vision, if you believe in universality.
Let’s assume for a moment that you do. It’s a deeply
worthy, exciting, and — dare I say it? — moral ambition.
And it half-succeeds; which means it also half-fails.
There should be word for the exhilaration of a halfsuccess
coupled with the glowing disappointment of
the half-failure, that two-sided coin. People who don’t
speak German would say that there must be a longass
German word for it. There isn’t, but German has
the virtue of allowing someone to make a half-assed
attempt at coining it. Ehrgeitzversagensschoene? I
mention this, because this is one of the primary failures
of the show: it attaches itself to Americans’ perceptions
of how things are in other idioms, as much as,
or more than, it attaches to how things actually are.
To put it plainly: Sense8’s depiction of life in nonwestern
countries is built out of stereotypes, and of
life in non-American western countries is suffused
with tourist-board clichés. The protagonist in Nairobi
is a poor man whose mother has AIDS and whose
life is ruled by gangs; in Mumbai we have a woman
in a STEM career marrying a man she doesn’t love
and engaging in Bollywood dance numbers; in Korea
we have a patriarchally oppressed wealthy corporate
woman who also happens to be a kickass martial artist;
in Mexico City we follow a telenovela actor. London
and Reykjavik are filmed using tourist locations
and anonymous interiors.
Worse, the filmic clichés of each country are brought
to bear on the production in each location — each
organized by a different director: Nairobi is sweaty,
garish, earth-toned, radiantly shabby; Mumbai is
multicolored, and Hindu iconned, full of the jewelry,
silks, flowers, and jubilant crowds that burst out of
classic Bollywood; Seoul is clean to the point of sterility,
with little patches of grass and mirrors and windows
everywhere, a grey, hi-tech aesthetic; Mexico City is
jewel-toned, rife with skulls, full of melodrama deliberately
reminiscent of the telenovela; etc. I believe,
quite literally, that the filmmakers primarily learned
22 DIMENSION

about these other cultures through their films, and
considered that enough.
And finally, the pop-cultural elements of the show are
all American. There’s no evidence of local or national
culture influencing how the non-American characters
view themselves or live their lives. The Kenyan sensate
idolizes Jean-Claude Van Damme (who is, granted, not
American, but known for his role in American action
films). The German sensate claims Conan the Barbarian
quotes as his personal philosophy. The Icelandic DJ
in London puts on 4 Non Blondes’ hideous anthem
“What’s Goin’ On?” and infects the entire cluster with
a dancing/singing jag. Where there’s no American
cultural lead — in Korea and Mexico, and even in
the Ganesh-worshipping Indian sensate’s life — the
characters’ life philosophies are a blank.
The Wachowskis take advantage of the apparent
international ascendancy of American pop culture to
unify disparate cultures, when the way American pop
works on non-western cultures is often counterintuitive
to Western minds. Sense8 also displays a profound
lack of recognition of local pop cultures even when
they would definitely have influenced such characters.
In the show, American pop is specific, non American
pop is generalized and clichéd, as in the Bollywood
dance, or entirely absent.
The universality being promoted here is a universality
of American ideas, American popular culture,
American world views. It’s like Stephen Colbert’s
idea of freedom of religion:
“I believe that everyone has the right to their own
religion, be you Hindu, Jew, or Muslim. I believe
there are infinite paths to accepting Jesus Christ as
your personal savior.”
If the entire show were an even spread of such thin
notions, I could dismiss the show, or even enjoy it as
as a guilty or problematic pleasure. But Sense8 has two
great counter virtues.
The first is in the depiction of the San Francisco
sensate, which is the best representation both of the
city and of that particular community that I’ve ever
seen on TV. Nomi, a trans woman, is first seen wandering
through a very locally-informed San Francisco
cityscape during Pride weekend. At every level, the
limning of Nomi’s character and the study of San
Francisco are intimate, layered, nuanced, and above
all, specific. Nomi doesn’t fall off a bike somewhere
in San Francisco, she falls off a motorcycle in the
Castro during the Dykes on Bikes parade, which she
rides in every year with her girlfriend, a gesture of
extreme importance to her identity. She doesn’t meetcute
her girlfriend in a random park; she remembers
The universality
being promoted here
is a universality
of American ideas,
American popular
culture, American
world views.
23

a key moment early in their relationship where her
girlfriend stands up for her against a hostile TERF
during a picnic in Dolores Park.
It’s the specificity that rings true to this San Franciscan,
and that signals to all viewers that this world
is real, and the character is alive within it.
It’s a vision of how the entire show could have been,
if the Wachowskis could have figured out in time
how to bring this level of intimacy and specificity to
their depiction of all the characters, and all the cities.
Because Tom Tykwer, himself a Berliner, directs the
Berlin sequences, you see a little bit of this familiarity
in the locations chosen for that city and in the character
of Wolfgang — his East German origins, his family’s
Slavic name and orthodox religion, etc.
But none of the other sensates, including the idealistic
Chicago cop, bear anything close to the level
of intimate knowledge or specific detail that Nomi
or Wolfgang have. In fact, pay attention and you’ll
see how generalizing the locations and incidents are.
For example: in Nairobi, the sensate’s bus is robbed
in what the characters themselves call “a bad area,” i.e.
they don’t refer to the district by its name.
But even this failure in the rest of Sense8’s world is
countered somewhat by its second great virtue, which
is that it commits totally to its clichés and rides them
out to their conclusions. Thank the slow pacing for
this. The entire 12-episode first season covers a story
arc that would generally be covered in the first two
episodes of any other show (the sensates are introduced,
discover each other, start to learn the rules of their
condition, meet their antagonist, and finally successfully
pull off their first combined action). The very
deliberation with which the story unfolds forces the
writers to unpack details of each character’s life and
situations that bring a kind of life and reality to the
clichés they’re embedded in. Details are forced into the
narrative — one by one in each character’s arc — and
each character eventually becomes rooted in these
details, even though they often come late in the season.
For example, Kala, the Indian sensate in Mumbai,
is characterized over simply at first: she is to marry a
man she doesn’t love, and she is a dedicated worshiper
of the Hindu elephant god, Ganesh. We don’t actually
learn more large details about her, but in drilling
down on these two things, we learn a great deal of
anchoring detail: the marriage is not arranged, but
a “love match;” with her boss’ son; whom she met at
work; at a pharmaceutical company; where she works
as a chemical engineer; because she has a master’s degree
in chemistry. She worships Ganesh; not because
she’s a benighted third world person but because she
sees no conflict between science and spirituality; and
because she had an experience of being lost as a child
and then discovering a literal new perspective of the
world through the eyes of a papier maché Ganesh
parade float; as a consequence, she takes her sensate
role in stride because she trusts that she is still seeing
the world through Ganesh’s eyes.
All of the characters get drilled down into in this
way, to varying degrees, and all start to take on life
and verisimilitude. The main problem with forcing
this kind of life into characters is that the audience
cannot trust its, for lack of a better word, authenticity.
To return to Kala: we see her more than once visiting
the temple of Ganesh where she has out loud, private
conversations with the god, a la Are You There, God?
It’s Me, Margaret. I don’t know whether or not Hindus
are taught to converse vernacularly with their gods in
their temples, but the extreme Americanness of the
depiction warns me that the Wachowskis probably don’t
know either. My suspicion is that they transposed an
American Christian moment into an Indian Hindu
one, without really finding out if the translation held.
Moments like this are sprinkled throughout.
The Wachowskis fail to examine characters in the
characters’ own context. These are some of the basics
of fictional world building and character development:
you create the rules of the world, create the
Sense8 commits
totally to its clichés
and rides them out to
their conclusions.
24 DIMENSION

worldview, situate the character in
this worldview, pick out notes of
the worldview for the character to
hold as a personal philosophy, motivate
the character according to that
personal philosophy, and have the
character act throughout the story
in accordance with these motivations.
Missing out on any of these
layers — especially the first, broadest
layer of cultural context — leaves
you with a character that may or
may not be alive, but whose motivations,
worldview, and context are a
blank. And most of Sense8’s characters
are laboring within blankness.
Again, they gain a certain amount
of rootedness, but not one that is
trustworthy, because they are rooted
in this same cultural absence.
Again, we need that fictional
German word, to describe how
I feel about what I can only call a failure of global
imagination. The fact that the makers conceived of
having a global imagination in the first place is, in
itself, a triumph. The fact that they attempted to
embody a global imagination in a television show is
breathtaking. Given their approach, their failure to
achieve that global imagination was inevitable.
Because the very act of conceiving a global imagination
is itself a function of the specifically American
imagination. I “assumed” earlier that we agreed with
the Wachowskis’ philosophy of the universality of
human experience; but do we? Universality is a deeply
western humanist idea that attaches particularly well
to the US’s brand of Darwinist individualism. We
all have — or should have — the same opportunities,
the same basis. What we make of this is a function of
our individuality. Culture is just happenstance; what’s
important is our actions, our choices, etc. It’s a familiar
refrain, and much of American anti-racism and social
justice is based upon the idea of the even — the universal
— playing field as an ideal to aspire to.
But how universal is human experience, really? How
empathetic can we be? We don’t really know how
deep culture and environment go in the psyche. We
don’t really know how different people can be. Our
sciences — and especially our “soft” sciences, which are
tasked with these questions — have barely scratched
the surface of any answers, eternally stymied by their
own deep-seated cultural biases, and the cultural bias
of “science” itself. And the very idea of universalism
is — o, irony! — too often a culturally imperialist idea
imposed from outside upon cultures that share no such
understanding of the world.
The characters discuss their choices with one another,
but nowhere is there any cultural misunderstanding
of each others’ choices. Yes, they can each feel what the
others are feeling, think what the others are thinking.
But does that free each of them from their cultural
context? Wouldn’t, instead, each of them be having
profound identity crises based on the deepest sort of
culture clash anyone has ever felt?
“Universalizing” everything under an American
idea — an American set of choices — is a contradiction
in terms; one the Wachowskis underlined in Sense8
through their collaborative process. All five directors
who worked on the show are white men, except the
Wachowskis. All are American except Tykwer, who
has been working in Hollywood for years. All episodes
in all locations were written by the Wachowskis and
Straczynski — again, a white man and the Wachowskis.
There seems to have been no thought of reaching out
to, much less collaborating with, writers and directors
from the cultures here represented.
The great irony of this show is that it failed to
do what the show itself depicts: allow people from
disparate cultures to work together, influence each
other, clash with each other, and to live moments of
each other’s lives.
In a discussion before I wrote this piece, disagreed
with a friend about the handling of language in the
show. I really appreciated the choice of having all
characters speak English without forcing them all
to speak English in cheap versions of their “native”
accents. And, given that this was an American TV
show, I didn’t expect the makers to force American
audiences to read subtitles. My friend, however, pointed
out that it would have been… well, less hegemonic for
everyone to be actually speaking their own languages.
Upon reflection, I have to agree that having the
dialogue in non-English speaking countries translated
would have offered the translators an opportunity
for input about the content of the dialogue. And if
the Wachowskis had hired writers from each culture
to translate not merely the text but also the entire
culture and idiom — up to and including changing
plot points and points of view to better fit with the
local culture of that character — this could have solved
their whole problem.
Whether or not you believe in the universality of
human experience — whether or not you believe in
25

The great irony of this
show is that it failed to
do what the show itself
depicts: allow people
from disparate cultures
to work together,
influence each other,
clash with each other,
and to live moments of
each other’s' lives.
a single global imagination — the only way to attempt
to depict a true global imagination would be
to create — in the writers room and on the directors’
chairs — a facsimile of a sensate cluster. Just imagine
it: eight equal auteurs, each in their own physical
location and cultural context, striving together — and
frequently pulling apart — to achieve a single, complex
story on film. Even the failure of such an enterprise
would have been far more ambitious, far more glorious,
far more Ehrgeizversagensschoen, than the Sense8
we actually got.
There are four more seasons to go on this show,
if the Wachowskis get their way. Season 2 completed
filming this summer and all episodes are slated for
release on Netflix in December 2016. Let’s hope that
in the future their globalism is more than just an
aesthetic decision.
Bottom line: yes, watch it. Binge it. Its failure is far
more interesting than the success of almost anything
else happening at this moment. And it’s truly one of
the most diverse shows on TV right now.
26 DIMENSION

modern
marvel
why netflix’s
Luke cage is
the superhero
we really
need now
Cheo Hodari Coker wanders
the aisles of Midtown Comics, a two-story
megastore just east of New York’s Hell’s
Kitchen. Despite the muggy July morning,
he’s wearing a hooded sweatshirt, and
he mops the sweat from his forehead as
he peruses the new releases and graphic
novels. After a few minutes he adjusts the
messenger bag on his left shoulder, pads
silently up to the second floor, and gets to
the real reason he’s here — hunting down
back issues of Luke Cage. One of Marvel’s first African
American superheroes, Cage was introduced in response
to the blaxploitation films of the 1970s. A New Yorker
like virtually every other earthbound Marvel character,
he lived in Harlem, just a couple miles north of this very
store. While he never achieved the blockbuster, iconic
status of some of his mask-and-cape-wearing brethren,
Cage enjoyed a cult following for decades.
But Coker is coming up blank. Midtown Comics doesn’t
carry many classic Luke Cage graphic novels. They don’t
have Luke Cage #5, the first appearance of supervillain and
Cage nemesis Black Mariah. Ditto Marvel Premiere #20,
which introduces Cage’s frenemy, the cyborg cop Misty
Knight. The store had some Luke Cage action figures, but
it recently ran out of them.
“Well, I’m happy to see he’s selling out,” the man tells
an apologetic staffer.
“I guess it’s because they’re promoting the TV show
coming out in September,” the staffer says.
“Yeah, yeah, no doubt,” the man says, in a voice that hints,
“Please ask me who I am and why I seem so invested in
this character.” The staffer does not bite, so he never learns
that, in fact, the man standing before him is the writer
and showrunner bringing Luke Cage to the small screen.
As with most Marvel properties, comics fans have
pored over any scrap of information they can find about
the forthcoming show; they know that it comes to Netflix
on September 30, and they know that Mike Colter will
play the title role — a wrongfully imprisoned ex-convict
with bulletproof skin — but not much else. There’s a part
of Coker that’s dying to shed his anonymity, to expose
the secret identity beneath his burly frame, Muhammad
Ali T-shirt, and Stanford hoodie, to pull the laptop out of
his messenger bag and show the rough cut of the trailer
he has just received from Netflix’s marketing department.
Instead, Coker picks up some books for himself — a Black
Panther compilation and a new Power Man and Iron
Fist — and shuffles out of the store.
TV viewers first met Cage as the on-again off-again love
interest in Jessica Jones, Marvel’s previous collaboration with
Netflix. That show didn’t just reinforce that comics could
profitably extend into the world of premium television; it
expanded the very notion of superheroism itself. Led by
creator Melissa Rosenberg, it revolved around a PTSDsuffering,
borderline alcoholic PI facing down her rapist,
a supervillain who could control his victims’ thoughts and
actions. The plot touched on gaslighting, victim-blaming,
abortion, and an almost literal case of testosterone poisoning;
it all suggested a world in which heroes didn’t have
to save the universe. Just being a woman amid the many
varieties of male vanity and violence was heroic enough.
Cage’s heroic journey is similarly personal. His mission
isn’t to track down Doctor Doom like he did in the ’70s
but to accept his responsibility to help defend Harlem
from the many forces that threaten it. Coker says he was
inspired to serve as showrunner when he realized the
ramifications of a series about a black man with impenetrable
skin and how that might empower him to take
on both criminals and crooked authority figures. “The
main reason people don’t speak out, their main fear, is
getting shot,” Coker says. “So what happens if someone
is bulletproof? What happens if you take that fear away?
That changes the whole ecosystem.”
Along the way, characters wrestle with their use of
the n-word, sing the praises of the ’90s-era Knicks, and
discuss the impact that urban planner Robert Moses,
the Cross Bronx Expressway, and US senator Daniel
Patrick Moynihan’s policy of “benign neglect” had on
New York’s black community. The script name-checks
such black cultural and political figures as Ralph Ellison,
Donald Goines, Zora Neale Hurston, Adam Clayton
by jason tanz

REPEAT DEFENDER
Luke Cage has long been a mainstay of Marvel
Comics’ all-too-human street-level roster.
1972
VICTORIA TANG
Hero for Hire
In this original issue, an
innocent Carl Lucas lands in prison, where a
botched experiment gives him superstrength
and bullet proof skin.
1974 Defenders
After breaking out of prison,
Cage gets roped into this “non-team” to stop
bad guys like the unabashedly racist supervillain
group Sons of the Serpent.
1978
Power Man and
Iron Fist
Cage rebrands himself and partners with martialartist
Iron Fist to provide superhuman security
and investigative services.
2001 Alias
When Cage and Jessica
Jones have a one-night stand, the P.I. gets
pregnant. The two ultimately wed and become
parents to a baby girl.
2010 Thunderbolts
Captain America puts Cage in
charge of his own group of crime-fighters, which
operates from a maximum-security island prison
and rehabilitates supervillains.
COURTESY OF MARVEL
Powell Jr., and Crispus Attucks. There have been African
American super heroes on our screens before — such as
Wesley Snipes’ titular turn in Blade — but Luke Cage is
the first to be surrounded by an almost completely black
cast and writing team and whose powers and challenges
are so explicitly linked to the black experience in America.
“I pretty much made the blackest show in the history of
TV,” Coker says, laughing.
Not that he’s rebooted Do the Right Thing, exactly.
Luke Cage is fundamentally a four-quadrant-seeking,
crowd-pleasing, big-tent affair, like Empire, Power, or
the Thursday-night Shonda Rhimes–fest on ABC. The
success of those shows suggests that we may have finally
entered a new epoch in the 21st century’s golden age of
television. For years, the nascent medium of prestige
TV drama was defined by what author Brett Martin has
called difficult men — grimly captivating white guys like
Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and Walter White, struggling
to find a foothold in a culture and economy that
were leaving them behind. That was before Netflix and
Amazon and their respective breakout hits, Orange Is the
New Black and Transparent, proved that hit dramas could
move beyond straight white men.
In part, this is a happy consequence of the TV wars. As
a glut of competitors have pumped out a steady stream
of compelling shows, executives are more motivated than
ever to find programs that will stand out from the crowd.
Subscription-based digital platforms, eager to reach into
global markets and unburdened by skittish advertisers,
are more willing to gamble on series that traditional
networks might consider too risky. In the meantime,
three decades of boundary-pushing television has created
a more sophisticated audience, willing to watch
characters that previous generations may have found
alienating. “It evolves, but incredibly slowly,” says
Jessica Jones’ Rosenberg. “I think we are beyond
overdue for both Luke Cage and Jessica Jones.”
Compared to his big-screen Marvel counterparts,
like Iron Man and Thor, Netflix’s
Luke Cage might seem like a low-stakes
superhero. He isn’t out to save the universe,
and he doesn’t wear a flashy costume; he
rarely even uses his superpowers, which
are presented more as a behavioral
30

quirk than a defining characteristic of his personality. He’s
deeply flawed, haunted by his past, and, as Colter says,
might pick up women at a funeral. But that’s precisely
what makes him so heroic. He’s working on it, struggling
to accept himself in the face of a world that keeps pushing
him toward invisibility. “So many times, black protagonists
have to be holier than thou, but he’s not an angelic figure,”
says John Singleton, the Boyz n the Hood director and a
friend of Coker’s. “It’s the right time for this kind of hero.
He’s so needed in the world.”
WITH COKER’S COMIC-GEEK background
underpinning his years of experience in TV and film,
the role of Luke Cage showrunner fits him as snugly as
a Spidey suit. But where Marvel’s superheroes tend to
stumble into their powers by accident — radioactive spider
bites, misbegotten nuclear tests — Coker didn’t have to
wander into a malfunctioning laboratory to acquire his
skills. He’d been actively accumulating them for decades.
Coker started reading fantasy novels after his parents
divorced and his mother went back to college and then
law school. She usually brought Coker with her to the
library, enforced quiet time that sparked a love of reading.
When Coker was 10, a friend showed him a copy of
Wolverine, the beginning of a seminal story arc written
by Chris Claremont and arted by Frank Miller. The story
starts with Wolverine sadly killing a grizzly bear, then
goes on to depict a battle between the superhero and his
fiancée’s yakuza father — a saga of regret and doubt, not
just Technicolor beat-’em-up. Coker keeps all four issues
of the series in his LA office for inspiration. “They were
saying yes, this is an adolescent pastime, but that doesn’t
mean we can’t imbue it with a sophisticated worldview,”
he says of its creators.
Comics didn’t just provide great stories but also a target
for Coker’s obsessive tendencies, a wealth of back issues,
in-jokes, and cross-references to hunt down and untangle.
He had a similar response when his cousins introduced
him to hip hop in the mid-1980s. Over time he came
to think of it as superhero music. “It’s the attitude,” he
says. “When I heard the Wu-Tang Clan, I always saw
Captain America and the Avengers assembling as the
camera swoops in.”
Coker had his first chance to meet some of his heroes
as an undergraduate writer for The Stanford Daily,
where he conducted interviews with rappers like Ice
Cube, KRS-One, and Ice T. Before he graduated, he was
writing freelance articles for The Source, Vibe, and others,
becoming an acclaimed and prolific member of the first
wave of hip hop journalists. Over time, Coker began to
see more parallels between the rappers he covered and the
comics he loved. Like Marvel superheroes, rappers often
had to navigate between their public personae and their
private selves. During an interview for Vibe, Christopher
Wallace told Coker that he lived a double life even before
he became the rapper Notorious B.I.G.; to his mom he
was “Chrissie-poo,” an innocent homebody, but when
he sneaked out to sell drugs on the street corners, he was
known as “Big Chris.” He even kept a spare outfit on the
roof of his apartment building so he could change out of
his school clothes without his mother realizing — a detail
that reminded Coker of Spider-Man’s efforts to keep his
superhero identity a secret from his aunt May.
Eventually, Coker took
up screenwriting. He was
inspired in part by his uncle,
Richard Wesley, who
wrote the scripts for such
landmarks of black cinema
as Uptown Saturday Night
and Native Son. Together,
they wrote a fictionalized
version of Tupac Shakur’s
murder, called Flow. The film never got made, but it won
Coker attention. Soon he was adapting Unbelievable, his
biography of the Notorious B.I.G., into the feature film
Notorious. That led to other work, including a job as a
writer and coproducer for the Peabody- winning series
SouthLAnd, under legendary showrunner John Wells, and
later a stint as coexecutive producer on Showtime’s Ray
Donovan; he calls the respective experiences “my graduate
degree and my PhD.”
It was around 2014, when Coker was doing a round of
touch-ups on the screenplay for Straight Outta Compton,
that Marvel started looking for a showrunner for Luke
Cage. From the beginning, says Jeph Loeb, head of
Marvel’s television division, the company was looking
for someone who could not only entertain but also address
issues of race: “What is going on in this country for blacks
and whites, and how can we tell that story through the
eyes of a superhero?” Marvel was in the midst of expanding
its roster of nonwhite superheroes, including introducing
a Muslim Ms. Marvel and a Latino Spider-Man.
The company has since hired Ta-Nehisi Coates, author
of the best-selling Between the World and Me, to pen the
newest adventures of Black Panther, the supergenius ruler
of a fictional African nation. (That character will soon
appear in a film directed by Ryan Coogler, who helmed
Fruitvale Station, about a victim of police violence, and
Creed, the heroic saga of Apollo Creed’s son.) Still, this
was Marvel’s first attempt to create a series or film with
a black protagonist at its center, a responsibility that Loeb
took very seriously. “If we can get one person to watch
the show and to think differently about what it is to be
a hero in the present day, and what it is to be a black hero,
then that’s a victory,” he says.
At his first meeting with Marvel, Coker brought a photograph
of his grandfather, a Tuskegee Airman who had
been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. “I talked
about him being from Harlem,” Coker says. “Walking
up the boulevards, you’d see Duke Ellington and Chick
Webb and Lionel Hampton, just walking around. You
saw superheroes every day.” Initially, Coker saw Luke
Cage exploring a similar dynamic, the pressures of a
known superhero operating in the real world, but Marvel
wanted Cage to grow into his role as a superhero, not to
The main reason people
don’t speak out, their main
fear, is getting shot. So what
happens if someone is bulletproof?
What happens if you
take that fear away?
DIMENSION 31

start out as one. Coker went back to work and developed
a new story about an unfairly arrested prison escapee
living anonymously in Harlem — until he finds himself
unable to resist the responsibility to help his community
that his superpowers impose on him. Coker packed his
story with colorful characters and midseason plot twists.
And he suggested a soundscape that leaned heavily on
early ’90s hip hop.
The resulting series is many things. A comic-book
adventure. A neo- blaxploitation epic. An urban drama.
An addition to the Marvel metaverse. But it also looks
suspiciously like the product of a personal fever dream,
a synthesis of Coker’s many obsessions, woven into one
narrative. It’s not hard to picture a teenage Coker poring
over comic books while listening to hip hop and talking
to his grandfather about Harlem, imagining the series
he would finally create decades later. At least that’s how
Coker sees it. “I finally have these heroes,” he says, “these
images that have been in my head for the past 20 years.”
OUTSIDE A STARBUCKS in Studio City,
California, Mike Colter is eating a grilled chicken salad
out of a Tupperware container and plotting out his plans
to survive Comic-Con. Colter will head there in two
weeks to promote Cage, and while he’s not exactly looking
forward to the onslaught of superfans, he’s trying to stay
optimistic. “If I were going to be there for four days, it’d
be a bigger deal, but if you don’t go to the parties and if
you’re not there for that long it’s OK,” he says. “I can eat
room service for 36 hours. That’s fine.”
Like the man he portrays, Colter is a reluctant superhero.
Unlike Coker, when he heard about the opportunity to
audition for the role of Luke Cage, he wasn’t instantly
enthusiastic. Colter, who built a career playing solid
32 DIMENSION

supporting roles in shows like American Horror Story and
The Good Wife, worried that helming a Marvel franchise
would destroy what remained of his personal life. He
wasn’t much encouraged when he picked up copies of the
1970s comic to find Cage decked out in a tiara and bright
yellow shirt unbuttoned to the navel, spouting lines like
“Step aside, jive-mouth!” and “Sweet Christmas!”
It was only after reading early versions of Rosenberg’s
Jessica Jones scripts that he started warming to the idea.
This version of Luke Cage wasn’t just a jive-talking caricature
but a flawed, nuanced, fully fleshed character. He
wore street clothes, not garish costumes. The screenplay
was filled with long, pensive silences and expressions of
remorse. “He doesn’t profess to know everything,” Colter
says. “He’s a work in progress.” Once he started seriously
considering the role, Colter says, he sat in front of a mirror,
staring at his own face, trying to find the vulnerable
hero inside himself that would allow him to connect
with the character.
After finally accepting the part, Colter sat down with
Loeb and Marvel’s chief creative officer, Joe Quesada, who
impressed upon him the importance of bringing their
first black superhero to the
A black man in a hoodie
isn’t necessarily a threat.
He might just be a hero.
screen. “He means more to
his fans than some young
man who was bitten by a
radioactive spider,” Loeb
says. “We have a responsibility,
more so than with any other character we’ve had
so far, to make sure that we get it right.” Even before
shooting began, Colter says, people began stopping him
on the street to tell him how important Cage was to them.
“They didn’t have any other character they could relate
to, an American black guy from the streets,” Colter says.
“That became important to me.”
So did the opportunity to work with a team of black
producers and to address — even symbolically — issues
of importance to the black community. At several points
during the series, including during some of his most heroic
moments, Cage can be seen wearing a hooded sweatshirt.
To some extent, this makes sense for the character, who
is on the run and trying to lie low. But it is also, Colter
says, a nod to Trayvon Martin and the Black Lives Matter
movement — and the idea that a black man in a hoodie
isn’t necessarily a threat. He might just be a hero.
As Colter tells me this, it’s less than 48 hours since the
shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, making
them the 116th and 117th black men to die at the hands
of police so far this year. In the national mourning that
has followed, it’s naive to think that Luke Cage will do
much to change that grim trajectory. But that’s not to say
it can’t be meaningful in its own way. When I spoke with
Coker, he told me about the first time he saw the trailer
for Captain America: Civil War with his twin sons. “It was
the first moment they saw Falcon” — another African
American character — “and I looked at how they reacted.
I still get emotional about it. When you come from the
culture that you see onscreen, it inspires you in different
ways. I grew up loving Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones
and Rocky. But they don’t look anything like me. They’re
universal, and you get past that, but I can’t imagine what
it would be like to be Italian and see Rocky. And when
I saw my sons’ reaction to Falcon, that’s when I realized
the importance of what we’re doing.”
Back in Studio City, Colter and I are wrapping up our
conversation. We talk about Game of Thrones and ’90s hip
hop — like Coker, he’s a fan, and he was thrilled to learn
that a pivotal scene in an early Luke Cage episode would
be set to a Wu-Tang Clan song. (A Tribe Called Quest’s
Ali Shaheed Muhammad scored the series, along with
composer Adrian Younge.) “As soon as he told me about
the sounds he wanted to use,” Colter says, “I was like, ‘I’m
in.’” Then he gets up and heads into the Starbucks to pick
up a coffee for his wife before heading home. The place
is full, but nobody bothers Colter. Perhaps they’re being
polite, but it seems more likely that they don’t recognize
him, don’t realize that, beneath the mirrored shades and
Under Armour workout gear, Marvel’s newest superhero
walks among them. At least they don’t yet. But, with any
luck, it’s just a matter of time.
33

What Orphan Black
can teach us about
Writing
Women
by Alenka Figa
IN ORPHAN BLACK’S FIRST EPISODE, OUR CON-ARTIST
HEROINE FINDS HERSELF IN A DANGEROUS SITUATION.
She’s stolen a woman’s identity, and that woman’s big, burly boyfriend comes home
early and begins pelting her with questions. The tone of the scene is tinged with domestic
violence; Sarah, wearing nothing but her underwear and a Clash t-shirt, looks
vulnerable, and Paul has her cornered in, of all places, the domestic cliché-loaded
kitchen. In a flash, Sarah flips the script: she smooches Paul out of the corner, shoves
him backward, and has sex with him on the counter.
Everything about this scene puts Sarah in control: she handles most of the disrobing,
she chooses the venue — Paul says “bedroom” but she responds, “right here” — and
she’s on top. In this moment, Orphan Black’s creators signaled their intention to do
something powerful and radical: in the midst of a media culture that gratuitously uses
rape as plot points and character development for men, Orphan Black has put sexual
power in the hands of women.
Beginning with Sarah and Paul on the kitchen counter, sex scenes — or even the
implication of sex — indicate that a female clone is in control. Alison’s first scene in
bed with Donnie involves a very stereotypical, old-married-couple moment in which
she slaps his hand away to spurn a sexual advance. She proceeds to sleep with her best
friend/suspected monitor’s husband, and doesn’t have sex with Donnie until he quits
monitoring and declares his loyalty to her. (In what I like to think of as Orphan Black’s
writers telling the Women in Refrigerators trope to suck it, they have sex on top of a
chest freezer that stores Leekie’s cut up body.)

When monitors become
fully aware of their
roles, they must make
important decisions
regarding how they
feel consent should
work between women
and institutions
A similar scenario plays out with Cosima and Delphine.
After they have sex for the first time, Delphine searches
Cosima’s belongings. This act is a clear betrayal, but Delphine
promptly shows the first signs of vowing loyalty to Clone
Club when she hides Kira’s existence from Leekie. Even
Rachel — who has been self-aware all her life — maintains
S/M sexual relationships with her monitors, and uses her relationship
with Paul to hurt Sarah.
When the women aren’t using sex as a weapon, they are still
engaging in consensual sex, whether it’s Sarah getting back
together with Cal, Allison and Donnie celebrating their wacky
business success, or Cosima finding comfort in her relationship
with Shay. (The exceptions to this are Krystal and Patty, but
we’ll talk about them more in part two!)
That the women hold control over their sex lives is crucial
not only because it empowers them, but also because their
sexual partners are often their monitors. In season one this
consistency feels coincidental — Alison suspects Aynsley is her
monitor, after all — but by season three it is clearly purposeful.
After Rudy and Seth kill Krystal’s boyfriend, Dyad immediately
produces romantic interests: “There are a three candidates vying,”
Dr. Neelan tells Delphine in episode 8, “Ruthless in Purpose,
and Insidious in Method.” “We’ll see which one she picks.”
If Dyad never explains why monitors must be romantic
partners, it’s because the show’s writers, not Dyad, are the ones
pulling the strings. Orphan Black is creating these complex
relationships to prod viewers into thinking about consent.
Neelan’s conversation with Delphine in episode 8 also confirms
36 DIMENSION

that the clones maintain the right to choose their partners.
However, the existence of a monitor reminds the viewer that
there is an ever-present consent issue in Clone Club’s interaction
with Dyad, a medical research institution. Sarah consents
to sleep with Paul, but she does not consent to be examined
by sketchy scientists in her sleep, nor does she consent to an
oophorectomy. When monitors like Paul and Donnie become
fully aware of their roles, they must make important decisions
regarding how they feel consent should work between
women and institutions.
Season three more openly examines the question of consent
on both individual and institutional levels. The institution that
intends to use the clones is now the military, led by Virginia
Coady. To Coady, the Leda clones are just bodies; Sarah, Helena
and Krystal are walking piles of biology capable of healing the
Castor men and advancing Coady’s research. Rudy and Seth
are arms of the institution, but on an individual level they are
also a serial rapists. Sex clearly factors into Castor’s plans, but
it’s also a piece of the puzzle that leads to their downfall: for
Sarah’s final plan to work, Gracie has to have a consensual,
sexual relationship with Mark.
To take out Castor, Sarah needs Mark and his bloodied up
face. However, when Felix kicks in the door of his motel room
and demands he help, Mark doesn’t jump at the chance. Gracie,
however, has experienced incredible character development
over the course of the season: she tricks her father’s confederate
flag-owning friend, gets drunk, has sex with Mark, and
saves her husband-in-distress from the military by betraying
Leda. By the final episode Gracie has developed her own moral
code, as well as a sense of loyalty to Leda. When she wraps
her arms around her husband and tells him to help, it’s as if
consent and sexually empowered women are scoring a point
against rape culture.
Rumor has it that Orphan Black will have a five-season run,
and I suspect that the remaining two seasons will continue to
put sexual power in the hands of women. However, what the
show has accomplished thus far is a triumph on its own. There
is little more satisfying on television than a moment like Rudy’s
death scene, in which Helena compassionately pets his head
but names him as what he is: a rapist. Orphan Black, please
keep doing good work!
In “Ruthless in Purpose, and Insidious in Method,” the
eighth episode of Orphan Black’s third season, Felix sits across
a table from Krystal, another Leda clone. Krystal has just given
Felix a manicure, an act she considers to be healing. In a moment
of raw empathy and honesty, he takes her hands in his
and says, “The only thing you need to know is that you are
one of a kind. You’re a survivor, Krystal, and you’re not alone.”
Perhaps more than any other, season three is about family
and community. Sarah spends much of her time chasing down
Helena, Siobhan and Felix take in Gracie, and Alison takes up
politics and drug dealing to keep her kids in school. However,
Orphan Black has long been crafting a radical example of
how communities can look and function by outlining several
principles that guide Clone Club. As Cosima does with Seth’s
brain, we can dissect each of these to learn Orphan Black’s recipe
for a successful community.
Clone Club Is Stronger Together
Communities often stay together because their members believe
in the group’s collective power. However, buy-in to a community
also requires trust, and many of Clone Club’s members justifiably
have trust issues. In season three, the sestra who needs to
work through those trust issues is Helena.
Helena has a habit of running off on her own and subsequently
getting captured. Her penchant for solitude is understandable;
Tomas raised her to believe she was the only clone worthy of life,
and Henrik Johanssen violated her trust and her body. Helena
has her own style of vengeance, as evidenced when she viscerally
maims Johanssen and burns down his farm. (In addition to
giving sexual power to women, Orphan Black also calls out and
punishes perpetrators.) Helena has clearly cultivated survival
mechanisms that allow her to fight alone, another of which we
meet in season three: Pupok.
Pupok is a small scorpion that Helena hallucinates to survive
desperate situations. The creature is merciless; it keeps her awake
when she is drugged, pushes her to forge through the desert, and
keeps her focused when she wakes up in a tiny box. When Sarah
arrives to save Helena, Pupok reacts according to its nature and
repeatedly tells Helena not to trust her.
For our favorite food-loving sestra, the only way to change
is to literally eat her doubts: Helena consumes Pupok. Her
subsequent journey back to the Castor base is not just a physical
feat but also a psychological leap, one from which she
immediately benefits. Rather than having a lonely, painful
trek home, Helena enjoys a comfortable vacation spent eating
and fist fighting in a tavern. Her role in Sarah’s final plan is
pivotal, and completes her journey. Helena gives her strength
to her sisters, and together they accomplish much more than
she could have alone.
All Members of Clone Club Have
Rights to Their Own Bodies
As a community constantly fighting for bodily agency (see part
one), members of Clone Club naturally should respect each
other’s rights. However, Siobhan violated this principle by giving
Helena to the military, an act that Sarah succinctly explains
was, “NOT YOUR BLOODY DECISION!” Appropriately,
Siobhan’s character development in the third season surrounds
her failure to respect Helena’s agency.
Since the day she took in foster children, Siobhan has been
fighting to protect what she considers her family: Sarah, Felix,
and Kira. Kira’s safety especially takes priority, and turns
Siobhan into a broken record: trouble’s brewin’? Run away
with Kira! Dyad wants stem cells and body gunk? Run away
with Kira! Creepy boy clones appear? Run away with Kira!
Ironically, Siobhan shares Helena’s issue: she’s spent so much
time making “wartime decisions” that she doesn’t trust Clone
Club. Had she reached out to Cosima, she could’ve learned
about the pencil scheme and helped in a way that didn’t involve
37

offering Helena up for yet more involuntary medical research.
When season three opens Siobhan is benched while she recovers
from a physical beating, but she must also heal her trust
issues. The Siobhan that arrives in the Mexican desert to face
Helena is a woman who has chosen to respect all people’s bodily
agency, and to face her mistakes. Her re-entry into Clone Club
brings us to the third principle:
Clone Club Grants Forgiveness
Sometimes people need forgiveness not because they consciously
made a mistake, but because they unknowingly caused
harm. In season three, the character who requires such forgiveness
is Gracie.
Like Helena, Gracie has suffered horrible physical violations.
Her mouth is sewn shut, her father impregnates her with his
own child, and the Proletheans force her to sit through her
miscarriage so they can pray over her bloody body. Gracie
undeniably needs Clone Club’s support, but she also assists
both the Proletheans and Castor in their attempts to use
the Leda clones as animals to be bred, studied, and used
as biological weapons.
Felix especially struggles to welcome Gracie, but his quick
acceptance of her signals that the rest of Clone Club will follow.
Felix is an important pillar for Clone Club; he provides
resources including his own home (and his bathtub, when body
disposal and corpse dissection are necessary) and is a constant
emotional support. Where another community would write her
off—Castor, for example; to Virginia, Gracie is just an entry
in Mark’s logbook—Clone Club recognizes that she was on
the wrong side by circumstance, and forgives her. Supporting
Gracie benefits everyone. Gracie orders Mark to participate
in Sarah’s plan to take down Virginia, and most importantly,
Clone Club establishes itself as a support for people in need.
Everyone Gets a Chance at being
a Part of Clone Club
“If your family is suddenly bigger than you expected and your
house gets too crowded, do you tell your family that they need
to find a different place to live?” asks Alison in her School
Trustee candidacy speech. The answer is a resounding no:
“You make room. You adapt. You find creative solutions to
keep people together.”
Alison and Felix’s willingness to open their homes is not
just an example of Clone Club’s readiness to forgive, but also
their desire to be inclusive. The very pastel family dinner at
Bubbles is a perfect, picturesque image of inclusivity, but two
people are missing: Krystal and Beth.
Krystal needs Clone Club just as much as Gracie; she has
been sexually assaulted, and she’s starting to see all the terrifying
clues that lead to a big, bright, neon sign that says “CLONE.”
When Felix and Sarah set out to steal Krystal’s identity, Felix
repeatedly argues that they should tell the truth. He is right;
Krystal deserves the chance to be part of Clone Club even if,
like Alison, she chooses a less involved role. By denying her this
right, Sarah leaves Krystal in danger, and Rachel drugs her and
imprisons her in Dyad’s hospital.
Beth is another sestra whose absence haunts Sarah. In seasons
one and two, the audience has learned about Beth solely
through stories told by others and tiny snippets of video. When
she appears in Sarah’s delirious dreams, Beth is a more fully
formed person than ever before. She is argumentative, stubborn,
and takes ownership over her suicide. When Sarah toasts
Beth at the family dinner, it’s as if the show’s creators are nodding
at the clones whose names, IDs or medical data are only
briefly mentioned. Even Patty, a minor character, is given time
to call out the police for improperly handling her rape case,
and to let us know she has a son, and a life. No woman on
38 DIMENSION

No woman on Orphan
Black is just a body
or an object; all
are individuals
Orphan Black is a just a body or an object; all are individuals
deserving of Clone Club’s love and support.
A Family & Community That Stands
Solely for Itself Cannot Survive
Clone Club didn’t adopt these principles by sitting down together
and writing out a community agreement on chart paper;
they developed them while fighting for their lives. This final
principle, however, was taken up by choice.
When Sarah is imprisoned in Castor’s military compound,
she and Paul ponder an unsettling question: what makes Leda
different from Castor? Both communities view themselves as
families fighting for their survival. Both sides harbor murderers;
Paul rightfully points out that Helena has quite a bit of blood
on her hands. If Leda is using violent, ruthless methods to reach
their goals, what separates them from Castor?
The answer lies in the difference between Mark and Rudy.
Mark and Rudy are the only two Castor clones given personalities;
Seth doesn’t get enough time before he dies to distinguish
himself beyond a mustache, Parsons is a barely-alive example of
Castor’s cruelty, and Miller rarely speaks. Where Leda gives us a
plethora of fully realized individuals, Castor gives us opposites:
Mark versus Rudy, respect versus violation, human versus robot.
Mark has a respectful partnership with Gracie whereas Rudy is
a rapist, and fittingly Mark is unaffected by the Castor “disease,”
a robotic glitch that highlights their inhumanity.
Appropriately, Mark alone shows Clone Club his humanity.
In an incredibly emotional, vulnerable moment, Mark tells
Sarah about his childhood as she pulls a bullet out of this leg.
Once the bullet is out, Sarah and Mark rest their foreheads
against each other and breathe together, almost as if they’re
saying, “we’re real, we bleed, and we’re both human.”
Rudy and Helena mirror this moment when Rudy lies dying
in Alison’s garage. However, everything is opposite: Helena is
harming, not helping, and where Sarah looks for Mark’s humanity,
Helena names Rudy as what he is: a rapist. This is the
difference between Castor and Leda: Castor, like Rudy, fights
selfishly and without compassion. Leda considers everyone’s
humanity, and fights for a cause larger than itself: bodily agency.
The principles of Clone Club are not just useful in the sci fi
universe of Orphan Black. Just as Leda’s struggles bear a relevant
urgency that mirrors real life battles for rights like access to
birth control and legal abortion, these principles are useful to
real communities. We can learn from Clone Club because we
too are not alone, and we are stronger together.
39

Black-ish
Photography: ABC Studios
Episode tackles
police brutality
with wit and
wisdom
Pilot Viruet
“Hope” is an episode that Black-ish was built for.
It’s an episode that was always building because it’s an
episode that Black-ish simply has to do. Black-ish is primarily
a show about seeing the world and the world’s
injustices through the eyes of a black/mixed race family.
And if you’re black, then police brutality, systemic racism,
and the always-increasing number of black deaths at the
hands of police officers is a part of your world and a part
of your life. There was never any question that Black-ish
would hedge an episode on this heavy topic; it was only
a question of how it would handle it.
The details of the deceased, McQuillian, are not important
because McQuillian represents every black body lying
on the street, slumped in the back of a police car, found
dead in a jail cell. The episode begins after his death as
(most of ) the Johnson family await the news of whether
or not the police officer involved will be indicted. It’s the
way black families watch television in 2016: piled onto a
couch staring at the news coverage. There’s something so
heartbreakingly telling about the way that the Johnsons
struggle to detail the specifics of the overwhelming amount
of similar cases; there are too many to count, too many
to keep straight. It’s also heartbreakingly true; recently, a
friend and I found ourselves struggling to remember the
name of a particular murdered-by-police death and kept
reeling off various names until we finally got it. As Pops
and Dre know, police beating up on an unarmed black
man isn’t a new story. It’s been happening forever — the
“only thing new is that people are recording.”
As expected, the family finds themselves on different
sides, with different reactions, and different opinions. Dre
says “the police are damn thugs” while Bow chimes in
with “not all police!” (Dre concedes that only 92 percent
are; the other 8 percent are advisors on Law & Order.)
Andre claims to have a more nuanced view: He knows that
the police have a place in society but he’s always aware of
how they abuse their power. Zoey, true to her character,
seems generally uninterested in anything outside of her
phone. Pops and Ruby — from different eras of the same
shit, but also with firehoses and dogs — know what’s up.
Jack and Diane are confused and oblivious because their
parents can’t decide if or how to tell them. It’s a common
debate within black families: When do you have “the
talk” with your children? When do you tell them about
the harm they face because their skin is darker? When
do you tell them what to do if they’re pulled over by the
police (Ruby knows the important words: Yes, sir. No, sir.
Thank you, sir.)? When do you tell them that they could
do everything right and sometimes it still won’t matter?
Bow doesn’t want to introduce Jack and Diane to how
cruel and unfair the world can be because they’re children.
Dre believes that the twins need to know because they’re
black children. But that’s all null and void because — in a
great and funny moment — the twins overhear everything
because they are sitting only a few feet away from the
yelling adults. “Kids are dying?” “We’re kids!”
As the family discusses and debates, the news rolls on.
We learn that the cop will not be indicted — surprise! We
learn that there is protesting happening. We even get the
nail-in-the-coffin statement that the victim was “no angel,”
reflecting how the media can quickly ”turn” on a murdered
kid by talking up his flaws or mistakes as a screwed up way
to justify the police officer’s or officers’ actions.
Even as the episode keeps the humor going, it manages
to take the time to tackle the heavier stuff without
breaking its stride. There are discussions about how we
should have faith in the justice system, prompting Dre
to exclaim, “When has it ever worked for us? When do
we ever get a win?” Dre explains that Bow’s instruction
to “make sure you live to fight your case in court” doesn’t
even mean anything because you’re still not safe in the
police car (Freddie Grey) or jail (Sandra Bland). “Hope”
shows off the intelligence and commitment of Black-ish’s
writers room and how they refuse to pull punches on this
42 DIMENSION

topic. They drop names and statistics. They get Ta-Nehisi
Coates. They explore all the sides. They write explicit lines
like, “Kids are dying in the street” and “The system is
rigged against us.” They make Dre and Bow’s polarizing
viewpoints — a staple in the show, which often results in
When do you have “the
talk” with your children?
When do you tell them
about the harm they face
because their skin is darker?
multiple scenes of watching a couple squabble — seem
necessary and 100 percent compelling here.
And then they bring up President Obama’s inauguration.
One of the reasons I fell so hard for Black-ish was
because it was depicting elements of black culture that I
hadn’t really seen on television, because it was inserting
music cues that you wouldn’t get anywhere else, because it
was name-dropping the black cultural leaders that other
shows weren’t (tonight: Malcolm X, James Baldwin, and
Ta-Nehisi Coates). Of course, you pick any current television
series out of a hat and they’ve probably mentioned
Obama at some point, but this was entirely different. This
was so hyper-specific and so achingly real, perfectly capturing
the up and down emotions we — black people — had.
“Remember when he got elected and we felt like maybe,
just maybe, we got out of that bad place and maybe to a
good place? That the whole country was really ready to
turn the corner?” Dre asks, referencing the elation and
optimism of seeing our brown skin — the skin that we’ve
been punished, beaten, enslaved, and murdered because
of — seeing that same skin on the goddamn President of
the United States. But then he references the downside,
the way in which our joy can so quickly turn to fear or
(rightful) paranoia because that’s what history has taught
us. “We saw him get out of that limo and walk alongside
of it and wave to the crowd. Tell me that you weren’t terrified
when you saw that. Tell me that you weren’t worried
that someone was gonna snatch that hope away from us
like they always do.” In that scene, Black-ish articulated
something that I felt during the inauguration — this
overwhelming fear that something would happen to
Obama because that horror and fear is ingrained in my
DNA — that I had never said out loud, let alone seen
reflected on a Wednesday night ABC sitcom.
In “Hope,” there is no explicit conclusion because there
is no conclusion to this ongoing problem in real life. It
ends with them going to join the protest together, in solidarity
with each other and in solidarity with their black
brothers and sisters. It ends with the only thing this black
family — this black community — knows what to do: stay
together and love each other fiercely.
So, yes, I am entirely biased when it comes to this
episode. There is no way I would grade it anything but
an A. There was no expectation that I would watch it
without crying, and that I wouldn’t immediately restart it
the second it was over. Television is personal, sometimes,
and that’s a good thing. We need it.
REVIEWS 43

cleverman
Photography: ABC Australia
First episode
turns Indigenous
Australian lore
into something
supernatural
and political
Jack Latimore
After months of media buzz and critical acclaim
following its preview at the Berlin International Film
Festival, Cleverman has arrived. Created by the Indigenous
Australian Ryan Griffen, with an 80% Indigenous cast,
the show draws on traditional Aboriginal culture and
lore, repurposing it into a superhero show.
As a Goori from the Birpai nation in New South Wales,
I was prepared to cringe at Cleverman: the Kadaitcha
(Clevermen) and the Hairymen, presented as superheroes
here, are seriously heavy figures in our lore.
Having 60,000 years of backstory to cover, episode one
has a lot to get through. First we see a crew of mouthy yobs
on a bus harassing a lone, young, dark-skinned woman
(Miranda Tapsell) who is reading a book. In self-defence,
she pulls up the sleeve of her jacket. “She’s a Hairy,” one
of the yobs warns. “You shouldn’t be outside the Zone, you
filthy rug,” another sneers, moments before his cheek is
opened by a single swipe of the woman’s hand.
For Australian audiences, the context of the scene is immediately
familiar: bigoted ranters targeting marginalized
people on public transport has become prolific viral-outrage
fodder over the past five years. For Indigenous viewers, the
scene announces that we’re definitely not relegated to the
back of the bus on this ride.
Cue the slick titles, featuring a breakbeat audio track
with Indigenous hip-hop performer (and Cleverman cast
member) Adam Briggs laying down over Top End folk
artist Gurrumul, and a montage of images evoking science,
the environment and Aboriginal spirituality.
The political parallels continue as we encounter a government
minister delivering a statement to a scrum of
reporters the following morning. He’s spinning the bus
attack as confirmation that the Hairies are “dangerous
subhumans” that need to be segregated and contained
securely within an area known as “the Zone”. The parallel
with the Australian government’s policy approach to
asylum seekers is obvious. But there’s a more historical
reference at play here too: the experiences of First Nations
people during the White Australia era. It could also be an
allegory for the political situation surrounding the influx
of refugees into Europe, or Trump’s border wall rhetoric.
Next we’re in the Zone with the series’ protagonist Koen,
and his business partner and mate Blair. Koen and his
“bruz” are about to engage in a spot of human trafficking.
The Hairy family helped by the pair provide our first good
look at the special effects that come courtesy of the Weta
Workshop, who worked on the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
I, for one, welcome the Teen Wolf-likeness of the Hairies.
There’s plenty going on elsewhere. The fact that the
Hairies speak the traditional Gumbaynggirr language,
for example – the use of which was officially discouraged
until relatively recently. There’s humour, too, like the short
exchange between Koen and the father of the Hairy family
— “Listen Bundy …” “Boondee” “Yes. Boondee” — much
like Frank Drebin in Police Squad, and the banter between
Koen and Blair as they wait for the family to appear.
It turns out that the entrepreneurial pair have been
double-dipping, ratting their resettled clients out to the
Containment Authority (CA) for a lucrative reward. This
double-cross appears to be in financial aid of their bar
venture – an establishment which may or may not be the
Criterion referred to by the yobs as they boarded the bus.
With the CA’s “retrieval process” under way, we glimpse
one of the series’ international stars: Iain Glen, star of the
Jack Taylor series, Downton Abbey and Game of Thrones.
Glen’s character, Jarrod Slade, is a media mogul. Tipped
off about CA’s impending retrieval, he assigns one of his
reporters, Belinda (Leanna Walsman), to get a human
angle on the story. It turns out that she’s involved with
Cleverman’s secondary Indigenous protagonist, Waruu,
who is married and works in the Zone. This series isn’t
shy about sex and nudity.
Rounding out this hectic exposition is the confrontation
between the militaristic CA and the Hairy family who
44 DIMENSION

were ratted out by Koen and Blair. As the CA attempt
to separate them in a basement carpark, the eldest son
Djukura retaliates, overpowering half of the force with his
superior speed and strength before being subdued with
For Australian audiences,
the context of the scene
is immediately familiar:
bigoted ranters targeting
marginalised people on
public transport.
a Taser. As if to punctuate the melee, a CA guard then
shoots the family’s youngest daughter dead. Belinda’s news
crew are recording, and footage of the event is broadcast
across the city and (uh-oh) inside the Zone.
Indigenous elder and actor Uncle Jack Charles makes
his first appearance as Jimmy in Koen’s bar, where he
bestows a warrior’s club (known as a nulla nulla or waddi)
on his nephew. Koen arrogantly dismisses the gesture
and is warned: “This is not a game. It’s time you decided
what tribe you belong to.” Later on, Uncle Jimmy is seen
inside a morgue passing life force into the frozen corpse
of an Indigenous girl.
The same night, Uncle Jimmy — now on a beach — lights
a campfire and summons something that arrives like
a meteor from the sky. It splashes into the water just
offshore; strangely satisfied, Uncle Jimmy opens his shirt
to welcome what looks like a giant beast surging through
the water towards him. Next, we hear the predatory squeal
of something large and unmistakably bitey.
Over at the city morgue, Waruu investigates the corpse
of his late uncle — whose left eye has turned white — and
immediately recognizes the work of a Namorrodor, which,
he tells his wife, “turns up when things are out of balance”.
Waruu learns who is behind the people smuggling, and
takes his henchman Harry to visit Koen at the bar. He
describes Koen as a “Judas leech-sucking vermin of halfbrother”,
right before Harry rips off Koen’s petulant
middle finger. It grows back almost immediately, and
Koen’s blood-filled left eye turns blue.
Koen demonstrates his new regenerative healing powers
to Blair and Ash by slicing his arm open with a barman’s
friend, and heads to Uncle Jimmy’s funeral to flaunt his
newfound powers to Waruu. Moments earlier, Waruu
had announced that he looked forward to inheriting
Uncle Jimmy’s abilities – which appear to have gone to
half-brother instead. Awks, but it sets up the next confrontation
between the two of them rather nicely (and
maybe attracts the Namorrodor?).
It’s a solid first episode, albeit heavy going with a lot of
ground to cover. The pacing is right, but how deeply can the
series cover some of these weighty themes in six episodes?
Also, why have the Hairies only appeared in the last six
months, after 60,000 years of existing almost unseen?
REVIEWS 45

transparent
Photography: Amazon Studios
Season 3 is
rewardingly
lost in
translation
Ben Travers
After you’ve done the impossible, what’s next?
The question functions as a central thesis for Transparent
Season 3, as Maura Pfefferman — who came out to her
family in Season 1 and fell in love during Season 2 — wonders
why she’s still unhappy despite having “everything.”
This kind of morose existentialism has been a marker
of outstanding television of late (The Leftovers, BoJack
Horseman, and Jay Duplass’ Togetherness, just to name
a few), but perhaps the more interesting aspect of the
question itself derives from why Jill Soloway is asking
that question here and now.
Transparent Season 2 was a creative barnburner — alive
with intensity from scene to scene as Soloway not only
made crucial adjustments to the character dynamics established
in Season 1, but introduced a time-jumping theme
that built to a sensational crescendo of emotions. It was,
in reductive terms, the best it could possible be.
So, what’s next?
While it’s easy to say Season 3 is a bit of an artistic
sidestep to the very question it poses, embracing more
traditional storytelling without losing its verve, Soloway’s
examination of a family searching for answers to some of
life’s most unanswerable questions — primarily, “What
is happiness?” and “Will I be OK?” — remains a valuable
discussion-starter. What few answers can be derived from
the 10 disjointed episodes are appreciatively inspiring, if
not inspired, while the season overall still manages to
forge new ground thanks to a bevy of fresh voices.
The opening episode, “Elizah,” literally follows Maura
on her search for purpose. After complaining to Davina
(Alexandra Billings) about her inescapable discontent,
Maura volunteers at an LGBT help line and receives
a call that unsettles her. After the call gets away from
her, Maura heads out on a hurried expedition to help
a suicidal young girl in South L.A., but Maura’s good
intentions are put into question as her white guilt leads
to some unfortunate mishaps.
Even if though the episode isn’t as independently satisfying
as last year’s “Man on the Land” (similar in construction
and directed by Soloway), it’s encouraging to see the creator
respond to complaints about racial discrimination within
her inclusive-minded series, and the episode stands out for
more than just how Maura’s identity is deconstructed in relation
to her privilege. Raquel, the rabbi played by Kathryn
Hahn, opens the episode with a sermon she’s practicing,
and we see shots of her wandering through the woods as
Maura searches for Elizah and Elizah searches for help.
Raquel quickly becomes an aptly prominent figure
given her positioning in the premiere. After splitting
with Josh ( Jay Duplass) last season, it was unclear how
she’d continue to be integrated into the family, but it was
just as clear she had to be. Hahn’s performance alone
warrants it, but Raquel’s path has become essential to
the series’, and it’s often better defined than a few of
the other core characters. (Sarah, for instance, spins her
wheels a bit this season.) I say “often” because Raquel’s
self-exploration after suffering a miscarriage is depicted
in a nuanced, surprising and utterly honest manner — to
a point. Season 3 ends without revisiting Raquel, which
becomes a slightly frustrating pattern.
After getting a bit lost in its big questions, Transparent
Season 3 doesn’t find a strong resolution for all its characters.
Maura is given just enough closure to establish a
definable arc, and Jay Duplass does a lot with a storyline
that repurposes elements from last season (though one
episode basically turns Josh into a tool used to discuss topical
issues). But Raquel, Sarah and Ali (Gaby Hoffmann)
are all left hanging in the wind. It’s reassuring to know
we’ll get to learn more about them next season, but it’s a
bit disappointing to spend so much time exploring their
relationships with Josh, Len (Rob Huebel) and Leslie
(Cherry Jones) and then be left waiting for conclusions.
But if sacrificing their endings meant providing one
for Judith Light’s Shelly, it’s very nearly worth it. Pushed
46 DIMENSION

more and more outside her family’s inner circle, Season
3 finds Shelly trying whatever means necessary to work
her way back in. Early on, she’s immediately identifiable
as the uncool mom desperately seeking her children’s affection
(and her ex-husband’s), but the fresh motivations
for seeking that love are made as clear to the viewer as
There are things in this
world that are certain and
unshakably real to these
characters, things that can’t
be seen with the naked eye.
they are unclear to Shelly’s kids. There are cringe-inducing
moments of disparagement that feel like they’re building
up to something incomparably painful, but — without
spoilers — let’s just say Shelly’s resolution is broad enough
to justify her difficult journey, if not profound enough to
cover the rest of the family.
When Shelly curtly refers to her ex’s “sex change,” she’s
rebutted with the preferred term: gender-confirmation
surgery. In that moment, season three hits upon a crucial
theme. There are things in this world that are certain
and unshakably real to these characters, things that can’t
be seen with the naked eye: Maura’s gender, or the faith
of Rabbi Raquel (Kathryn Hahn). Then there are the
preoccupations and quick fixes that encircle Shelly, Sarah,
Josh, and Ali, things like a capricious relocation or an
epiphany induced by nitrous oxide. It’s these things that
isolate and alienate the younger Pfeffermans, especially
when they attempt to equate the lies they tell themselves
with the truth someone else knows.
And watching them tell those lies is damn compelling.
Light, playing a character whom Transparent is more
frequently laughing at than with, is both ludicrous and
deserving of sympathy in Shelly’s single-minded pursuit to
mount a one-woman show, titled To Shell And Back. The
guilt-trip-wielding martyr she plays is easily caricatured,
but Light brings such earnestness to Shelly’s creative
ambitions, seeing her actually performing To Shell And
Back is practically euphoric.
Soloway and her team of writers — including her sister,
Faith Soloway, Season 2’s discovery Our Lady J (who
penned a telling flashback episode in Season 3) and a bevy
of women as talented as they are diverse — should be applauded
for daring to explore broadly relatable existentialist
questions in relation to gender, race and forms of identity.
Much of what they uncover is immediately gripping and
relevant, even if its long-term effect is less revealing than
past seasons. Yet perhaps what’s most admirable about the
third season of Transparent is that it’s distinctly different
than the first two: More formally daring than Season 1
and less structured than Season 2, Transparent continues
to push boundaries in rewarding ways.
What’s next? We still can’t wait to find out.
REVIEWS 47

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Sure, TV’s More Inclusive Now,
But It Has A
Long Way to Go
By Jason Parham
When I think back to growing up in 1990s Los Angeles, a
handful of impressions remain sharper than others — the
killing of Latasha Harlins, the ’92 rebellion (what the
media referred to as “riots”), the ’94 earthquake, the O.J.
Simpson trial — but often, when I reach back, it’s the
cultural touchstones I land on first. Of those, none remains
quite so vivid as in 1996, the year after the upstart United
Paramount Network launched. UPN couldn’t match the
budget of rivals like NBC, but it was the only one of the
Big Five that devoted a considerable slate of programming
to investigating black lives. Even more important,
somehow it found an unprecedented breadth in its focus.
It was a postboom era for black TV — by now pioneering
comedies like Good Times and The Cosby Show seemed
like relics of a more conventional time — and over the
course of 11 years, UPN’s show creators and staff writers
rendered black Americans in full, vibrant strokes. These
were not tales of the exceptional but of the mundane. On
sitcoms like Moesha and The Hughleys, the rigors of teenhood
and family life were made plain in episodes dealing
with financial security and substance abuse. Malcolm
& Eddie, which followed two friends in Kansas City,
introduced the peaks and valleys of black entrepreneurship.
With The Parkers and Girlfriends, the image of the
Black Woman morphed and expanded before viewers’
eyes — she was loving, she was witty, she was vulnerable,
she was free. These shows were disruptive by virtue of
their very perspective: Blackness was the default, not the
subject matter. These were people I knew.
And UPN wasn’t totally alone. Major networks like
NBC, ABC, and FOX featured an array of shows devoted
to working-class angst (Roc), brotherhood (New York
Undercover), and social integration (The Fresh Prince of
Bel-Air, The Steve Harvey Show). Still, UPN seemed like an
outlier among a patch of networks more concerned with
safer and whiter narratives. And in spite of show ratings,
which were never anything to brag about, the message was
palpable: These stories — our stories — mattered.
It’s been two decades since UPN first aired those sitcoms,
and the landscape of television has changed in large
measure thanks to the introduction of online streaming
hubs like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime. The sweep
of shows across legacy networks, scrappy cable channels,
and streaming services is as robust as it’s been in decades.
There’s Jane the Virgin, the CW’s modern revamp of the
telenovela format for American audiences; The Carmichael
Show, a wonderfully quarrelsome family comedy; John
Ridley’s potent serial drama American Crime. Outside of
the traditional networks, Amazon’s Transparent tackles
trans identity and ageism with compassion and quirkiness;
Netflix boasts Orange Is the New Black and Narcos. On
Oprah Winfrey’s OWN, there’s the megachurch drama
Greenleaf, with Ava DuVernay’s Queen Sugar set to arrive
this month. All of these shows, in varying ways, tap into
the rich and complicated palette of daily life. Even Issa
Rae, who was able to broker her hit web series, The Mis-
Adventures of Awkward Black Girl, into a TV deal, created
and stars in Insecure, a show premiering on HBO this fall.
Yet for all the inclusion the streaming revolution has
cultivated — across gender, race, sexual orientation, and
religion — roadblocks persist, both in front of the camera
and behind it. According to a March 2016 report
from the Writers Guild of America, West, minorities
account for 13 percent of television writers and “remained
50 DIMENSION

under represented by a factor of nearly three to one.” Even
worse: Among scripted TV creators on broadcast networks,
minorities are underrepresented 11 to one. The realities are
that much more troubling when you consider the TVwatching
growth in households of color: According to a
Even Aziz Ansari’s Master of None, which debuted on
Netflix last year to near unanimous praise, was criticized
for its “marked absence of South and East Asian American
women.” America’s middle class is rapidly dissolving, yet
few shows engage the country’s working poor. Despite
Among scripted TV creators, minorities
are underrepresented eleven to one.
Nielsen poll, African Americans and Asian Americans
have both become a larger share of the viewing audience
— and one in five viewers overall are now Hispanic.
This increased viewership among people of color arrives
at a moment when companies are offering money
and opportu nity in unprecedented amounts. Out of this
cornucopia, online streaming platforms like Amazon
Prime and Netflix have emerged as the new gatekeepers,
holding the keys to a more idyllic television topography.
It’s time to ask ourselves what new stories should be told
and how creators will go about telling them.
Progress isn’t solely a matter of narrowing the color
gap on TV but of widening the types of stories that reach
us. A Colombian-American friend recently mentioned
how shows like Jane the Virgin and Telenovela, which
cultivate experiences from Latin perspectives, failed to
offer a window into those worlds outside of the melodramatic
telenovela structure. “They haven’t learned how to
speak to Latin Americans beyond that format,” she said.
Similarly, shows like Empire and Starz’s Power, traffic in
a one-sided notion of black affluence: Their protagonists
acquired wealth through illegal means — selling drugs.
TV’s current gold rush, shows fail to portray the full
plurality of our day-to-day existence.
In 2015, Shonda Rhimes — creative architect behind
ABC’s Thursday-night scheduling block of Grey’s Anatomy,
Scandal, and How to Get Away With Murder — gave a
speech at the Human Rights Campaign gala in which
she voiced her contempt for the way we describe shows
that offer more radiant interpretations of the human
experience. “I really hate the word diversity,” she said. “I
have a different word: normalizing. I’m normalizing TV. I
am making TV look like the world looks.” When I think
of Rhimes’ speech, I think back to UPN and the crop of
shows that, to a young black kid growing up in Southern
California, felt like the world — my world. And I have to
wonder how this era of television will look to us in another
two decades. Will it seem as inclusive in hindsight as we
professed at the time? Or will it prove, like the UPN-led
surge of the ’90s, to have been a momentary gain? The
burden shifts to all of us: not just the networks but the
creators — and, as those whose support ultimately dictates
a show’s success, the consumers. After all, a renaissance is
only as meaningful as the art that defines it.
51

TELEPIZZA
ON YOUR VIDEO ON DEMAND
IT’S NOT FICTION