zuisa,

excellent. you are well set up and prepared. There are a few HSQ in season 3, but since you are properly in the Fringe world, you might not be surprised too often. Around Season 3 I decided I was along just for the ride.

Scrappy, I read the interview too, but there was nothing in it that really redeemed the quote Nora posted above, which is clearly not just about household decorating:

"Well, the world is vastly counted in favour of men at every level - except if you live in a civilised country and you’re sort of educated and middle-class, because then you’re almost certainly junior in your relationship and in a state of permanent, crippled apology. Your preferences are routinely mocked. There’s a huge, unfortunate lack of respect for anything male."

I don't know whether or not to take that quote at face value, and obviously I don't know the first thing about his marriage, but it seems to reflect a pretty sad view of men, women, and relationships that I strongly disagree with.

I sorta thought it was a continuation of what we was saying in the previous paragraph with an interjection from the Interviewer in between:

But it was his first meaningful relationship in ages that inspired Coupling. When he and Susan started living together, he says he was confronted with a "completely different set of life priorities": suddenly there were cushions everywhere. Or, as his alter ego in the show puts it: "Tiny picture frames, toilet-roll holders, toilet-roll ... "

I'm not really sure how one would explain away this quote:

"I don’t know how well women come out of Coupling," says Moffat, the son of a headmaster, who taught English in Greenock before following his original writerly instincts and scoring his first success with Press Gang. "There’s this issue you’re not allowed to discuss: that women are needy. Men can go for longer, more happily, without women. That’s the truth. We don’t, as little boys, play at being married - we try to avoid it for as long as possible. Meanwhile women are out there hunting for husbands."

Jesus Christ.

But the men are all idiots on Coupling, and only two of the women. Was that not on purpose?

"There’s this issue you’re not allowed to discuss: that women are needy. Men can go for longer, more happily, without women. That’s the truth. We don’t, as little boys, play at being married - we try to avoid it for as long as possible. Meanwhile women are out there hunting for husbands."

And yet that's the premise of half the new sitcoms scheduled to air next fall! I hardly think that's something nobody is allowed to discuss -- in fact it's so completely implicit in western gender relations that it doesn't need discussing. The forbidden thing is to challenge those assumptions, not validate them.

Man, this pisses me off. I wanted to like Moffett.

Also? I never played at being married. Fuck you, Moffett.

Are there only three women on Coupling? I can only remember Susan, Sally, and Jane.

ETA- nevermind, I was remembering 4 men, but that is because Jeff was replaced.

I don't really care what he says in interviews - just watching the awfulness of gender relations on Coupling was enough for me to get very nervous when he took over DW.

On the whole, I thought his first season of Who was pretty good and not that sexist. But this season, oy. Having Amy be so horribly violated (separated from her body, denied the experience of her body and her pregnancy) and then get rescued by two men just horrified me. Not to mention the idiocy of making the question "who is River Song?" just be about her parentage and not about who she is as a person and what her story is - (plus, the Doctor is going to seek her out as a girl and then fall in love with her as an adult?) well, that just made me think that Moffat's version of Who is getting really boring and really creepy at the same time.

So is anyone else watching Falling Skies?

I'm 4 or 5 eps in. It's all a bit Manly, and the women still have ridiculously good hair and makeup. It's set outside Boston, which is kind of amusing (although sometimes laughably wrong).

But they do seem to give a damn about actual tactics and long-term strategy when dealing with an oppressor they can't hope to understand, or even communicate with.