Television, drug of the nation

Mayor of Kingstown

Hard no from me. On the plus side, it explores a part of the U.S. justice system in what's probably a much more realistic way than U.S. television or film has ever seen. On the other hand, it's representation of women is fucking rank.

The show does a hell of a lot of lampshading, showing the sleazy exploitation of women superficially as a way of saying things are sleazy, but really for titillation.

Almost every woman in the show is a prostitute or a prisoner (which they basically treat the same as prostitutes), with the few exceptions being wives and mothers (somebody or some people writing this show has/have a huge Madonna-whore complex ), plus one woman who ostensibly has a responsible job but is just there so the protagonist can fuck her in public toilets. Any women who isn't in a mother/whore role gets about 5 seconds of screen time (and the mothers don't get much more). A lot of scenes happen in strip clubs, with women bumping and grinding in the background or foreground, some just bit parts, some major characters. There's a whole lot more of that than is necessary. We don't even have to have the whole "sex workers deserve respect even if the industry they work in doesn't respect women" conversation, because the women doing the lap dancing aren't sex workers, they're actors being shat on by the TV industry. Most of them are low-paid actors , some of them are playing key characters, all of them having to accept that this is what women typically have to go through just to get a role in TV/film.

There are themes in the show that I was interested to see, but I walked away because of this absolutely rank, depressing shit. Fuck that show.