TV News

Jared Padalecki, Fans Surprised by News of "Supernatural" Prequel

The star reported feeling "gutted" by the news...but not as badly as he was gutted by Anna in season 5.

After 15 seasons and a seemingly endless amount of monstrous, ghostly, biblical insanity, the CW's Supernatural finally came to an end in 2020... or did it?

According to star Jensen Ackles (Dean Winchester), "After Supernatural wrapped its 15th season, we knew it wasn't over. Because like we say in the show, 'nothing ever really ends, does it?'" So when he and wife Danneel Ackles (who played the second incarnation of the demon Ruby starting in season 4) started their own production company, Chaos Machine Productions, they got to work in secret, developing a spin-off prequel series.

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TV News

Whose Man Is This?

New pictures of Jensen Ackles in Amazon Prime's "The Boys" have been released and we don't know how to feel

via Amazon Prime

The Boys, the standout series from Amazon Prime, is gearing up for Season 3, and fans are eagerly awaiting each sneak peek as they come. The most recent teaser featured its newest cast member: Jensen Ackles.

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TV

Can We Please Stop Casting Bland White Guys as Lead Characters?

Netflix's "Daybreak" features its blandest character

Netflix's new series, Daybreak, sells itself as a post-apocalyptic teenage Rashomon (the Japanese classic told in divergent perspectives), with a sequence of characters in the trailer each claiming to be the real protagonist.

At its best, the show does capture some of this appeal. It almost makes up for the lack of believable dialogue, compelling world-building, or competent portrayal of youth culture by having a diverse array of vibrant characters—like Wesley Fist, the gay black samurai whose story is narrated by Wu Tang's RZA. But ultimately, the claim that these characters have equal weight is undermined by the show's insistent focus on Colin Ford as "just Josh."

He's the bland white guy at the center of the story, because that's something Netflix thinks we need. Prior to the apocalypse, he was just a C-student, a recent transfer from Toronto who claimed to only like food from The Cheesecake Factory. He's continually mistaken for "tennis Josh, little Josh with the big truck, gay Josh, and other gay Josh," to which his friends respond that he's "just Josh." His love interest, Sam Dean (a deliberate nod to Colin Ford's stint on Supernatural?) describes him as "terrifically uncomplicated."

After the bombs drop and all the adults are wiped out, Josh's wilderness skills make him a hot commodity, but it all just reads as an excuse to cast the blandest possible white guy and force all the more interesting characters into orbit around him.

As a bland white boy myself, can we please just stop?

There's no need to plaster on a confused approximation of wokeness (no, Daybreak, you can't say "Todd Altman self-identifies his gender as a seahorse" in a hip, accepting way…) and qualify your main character's bland whiteness by saying "but he's supposed to be boring!" What you can do is skip all that by ditching the bland white guy character in the first place.

While Sam Dean—a blonde, sex-positive Pollyanna with an English accent and a heavy dose of damsel in distress—is a shade more interesting than "just Josh," they could both be removed from the show without losing much value. But nope. Daybreak makes them the center of the whole world.

I mean, there's a turf war for control of hellscape-LA, with cliquish tribes—a la The Warriors—all vying for power. That's pretty fun. And, oh boy! There are even a handful of novel, dynamic characters who are engaging enough to warrant a focus in that unfolding war. Yay! But no. The show insists that Josh's quest to rescue Sam is the really important story.

Why? Josh just sucks. He feels bad that, pre-apocalypse, he called Sam a sl*t, and he wants to save her so he can win her back. Why should we root for that? He called her a sl*t because she's too cool for him—and she's barely cool. He's the blandest flavor of cottage cheese in a toxic-masculine shell. Even if Colin Ford delivered a stellar performance, it's hard to see how this sh*tty character would be salvageable, let alone worthy of the central role. And Colin Ford is faaaar from stellar...

So, Netflix. Do better. You seem to have the freedom to green-light whatever you want, so why keep centering your stories on the same lame characters? Why is a WASPy half-nerd white guy still the default? Speaking on behalf of us all, even we're bored of us by now.

Culture Feature

Fandom for the Faithless: How Pop Culture Is Replacing Religion

From Star Wars and Harry Potter to My Little Pony and Supernatural, fan communities develop their own ethos, codes of behavior, and networks of peer-mentoring that turn art appreciation into worship.

University teams play quidditch, the game of Harry Potter books fame

Photo by Sergei Bachlakov (Shutterstock)

In January 2019, President Trump's ban on transgender people serving in the military was approved by the Supreme Court, which meant the worst had happened: Albus Dumbledore would be ashamed of us.

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Top Stories

The Top 10 Scary Stories to Listen to This Halloween

Revive yourself with a good scare, even if it means sleeping with the lights on.

Remember the childhood thrill of spooky stories told around a campfire or whispered in the dark at a slumber party?

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