This week, Squid Game (Netflix) went from being an unknown drama to the hottest show on television. Once upon a time, foreign dramas were only seen by a small select audience on SBS, but now word of mouth and social media can turn a South Korean drama into the world’s number one drama thanks to the world’s biggest streaming site.
Squid Game is like It’s A Knockout crossed with Saw as a group of strangers, all of whom are in huge debt, find themselves playing childhood games that turn deadly. It lives up to its MA15+ violence rating but, like a Tarantino movie, it can also be quite stylish and inventive.
Conviction: The Case of Stephen Laurence (Paramount+) is about a black man who was murdered by a racist gang in 1993. Yet despite the police knowing who the thugs were, no arrests were ever made and the victim’s family blamed this on racism and police corruption.
This new 3-part ITV drama is based on the book Pursuit of the Truth written by DCI Clive Driscoll. In the mini-series, he is brilliantly played by Steve Coogan and the show follows him as he becomes determined to crack the case while family members watch on dubiously.
This is a tragic story of injustice and it’s important that cold cases like this get re-examined. Bringing these stories into the light is one of the positives of having more diversity in entertainment, and it’s also changing the mix of stories and faces in general.
Including more diversity has led to The L Word: Generation Q (Stan) airing a ground-breaking sex scene. In it, disabled lawyer Maribel (Jillian Mercado) initiates lovemaking with Asian-American trans man Micah (Leo Sheng) and as he lifted her from her wheelchair, she said: “Don’t act like you’re gonna break me, because you can’t”.
Jillian Mercado told Out magazine that she had never seen a sex scene with disabled persons on TV but maybe now she could “fill in the gap of that part of representation that people are very fearful of because you don’t see it”. Bravo to my brave namesake.
There is something else going on too, because when The L Word first premiered in 2004, it developed a reputation for nudity and explicit sex scenes. They are still pushing the boundaries, but now the actresses are keeping their clothes on rather than being nude. In particular, topless scenes have been replaced by bras or lingerie for today’s bedroom scenes.
It’s not just The L Word that is doing this, but it is also no accident that a show about lesbians has removed all traces of titillation for the male gaze. Generation Q has demanded that love stories be told a different way and more power to them.
Mediaweek dedicates today’s Mercado on TV to Jett the wonder dog!