Thursday, August 23, 2007

Foxploitation this season

I've been seeing ads for Fox's new cop show, "K-ville." Set in New Orleans, featuring cops. Oh, joy. I so love it when mainstream television tries to capture the je ne sais quois of NOLA.

First, let me say, that although some communities refer to themselves as "Katrinaville," I've never heard anybody use the term "K-ville." So that's BS from the git-go.

I am not going to bother looking up the publicity on K-ville, but I have some predictions to make:

- There will be wild geographical inaccuracies every single episode.

- Hardly anyone will get the New Orleans accent right.

- There will be an abundance of terribly rendered rural Cajun accents, even though people who are NOLA natives do not have this accent.

- There will also be an abundance of terribly rendered Southern accents. Again, the NOLA accent is not Southern.

- Within the first 60 minutes of the show, the cops will have some important dudely cop reason to go have a drink in a titty bar on Bourbon Street. The camera will pan leeringly up & down the body of one or more strippers, stopping just below the chin, while the dudely cops talk about something entirely unrelated.

- Within the first 2 episodes, there will be a plot involving voodoo.

- Within the first 4 episodes, we will see drag queens. There will never be a plot involving gays and lesbians, however.

- By Christmas, an old civil rights murder will have been solved.

- By Christmas, there will probably have been a ghost story as well.

- By Mardi Gras, they will have staged a float parade smack through the middle of the French Quarter. Which, by the way, NEVER HAPPENS. Only walking parades are seen in the Quarter, only a few, and one of them features dogs.

- If they possibly can, they will get Harry Connick to guest-star in an episode. Failing that, they will recruit a local musical celebrity on the order of Kermit Ruffins to go busk in Jackson Square. This will be promoted as a shout-out for NOLA insiders.

- They will film exteriors of local clubs and then the interiors will be completely different places.

- Even though the city is now full of Mexican immigrants working in the construction trades and opening taco stands, there will be no Mexicans visible in the series. In fact, viewers will probably never see any Asians, either, despite a well-established Vietnamese community.

- Some dude with PTSD will carve up his girlfriend and eat her. Then he'll kill himself. Because Hollywood is out of ideas.

- Local residents and celebrities most likely to be courted by Fox for cameos: Sean Payton; Chris Rose; Angela Hill; Harry Lee; Drew Brees; and John Goodman. I make no predictions about whether they will appear or not, however.

- And, so help me, if the producers of K-Ville in any way fuck up my enjoyment of the Saints season or horn in on my Saints viewing in ANY WAY, I'm gonna get a drag queen voodoo priestess to shrink their testicles into tiny testicle-raisins by means of a bloody chicken sacrifice on the roof of the Superdome.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

That is a HILARIOUS post. Thank you for the laugh. Awesome!

Anonymous said...

Very funny, and probably accurate, except for the time frames. They're going to have to get those elements in quick, if they're going to get them in at all. Along with the jazz funeral procession.

Jezebella said...

You are so right: I TOTALLY forgot about the obligatory jazz funeral. It will probably start Uptown, turn a corner, and suddenly be in the Treme. And it'll take place within the first couple of episodes.

Robert Walker said...

Very funny! We have the same problems with soaps in Britain. There’s a very popular one called eastenders, which is set in London’s east end and all the cast are cheeky cheery white middle class people. Only problem is, the eastend has always been very poor and the eastend is mostly populated with those of afro-Caribbean decent.

It’s not just you guys that have to suffer poorly researched programs!

Jezebella said...

TV would be so much more interesting if they'd just get it RIGHT instead of just perpetuating Hollywood stereotypes, wouldn't it?