“I’m a good man in a storm. I love your daughter. And I protect the things I love.” - Arizona Robbins to Callie Torres’ father, Grey’s Anatomy season six.

“@Shondarhimes Figured out my irrational anger toward @JessicaCapshaw’s character. Uncle w/ PTSD did the same thing. #itsreal #heartbreaking” - @AnnemarieHauser

“We all do terrible things.” - Olivia Pope, Scandal.

The last quote is the thesis of Scandal. I am realizing that it just may be an underlying thesis of both of Shonda Rhimes’ current blockbuster hit shows. Despite many warnings from Rhimes and actress Jessica Capshaw, Grey’s Anatomy shocked fans of Capshaw’s character Arizona when the married character flippantly had sex with a woman who is not her wife and the other mother of her child. 

I was going to title this post Team This is Bullshit. Capshaw had set out in an interview a Team Callie/Team Arizona dichotomy and I wanted to choose a third Team, one that reflected my initial reaction to the plot point: that it was complete and utter bullshit. I was enraged. I was prepared to write a eulogy for Callie and Arizona’s romance because given Callie’s history of being cheated on by her spouse in her previous marriage, I felt she could not forgive Arizona who is aware of this history and whose actions are thus particularly callous. I felt that their entire relationship was irreparably over. In the eulogy, I was going to talk about how much their fictional TV ‘ship had made an impact on my life in the past two years. Their episodes got me out of depression on a daily basis for a long time, inspired me to write, to specifically write a novel and inspired a fundamental change in me from a passive to a passionate belief in equality for all. They’ve been almost as big a force in my life the past few years as my husband has been. So I was enraged that a single scene could kill all of that. 

I was not enraged at Arizona the character because she is not real. Nor was I enraged at Capshaw the actress because she did a perfectly good job of portraying the scene. No, I was mad at Shonda. Why? I took two main issues with the plot point. The first is unresolvable: it’s bloody repetitive. Callie has been cheated on before, by a morally-bounded, seemingly perfect character before. Callie and Arizona have broken up twice before. Arizona has begged to have Callie take her back before. She has also been casual about a break up before. They have recovered from traumas before. And finally, and most glaringly, infidelity is such a common device in Rhimes’ shows that putting yet another infidelity plot in her show is frankly lazy writing. The repetitiveness of the plot is a fact that can’t be escaped. It can be somewhat forgiven if they reference the past, most notably with a reference to George’s infidelity, but also with a reference to Arizona’s good man in a storm speech.

The second issue is resolvable: I found it highly unbelievable that Arizona, the good man in a storm, raised in a military family, so loyal and grounded in honour and morality, would act so carelessly, immorally and dishonourably. It made no sense for her character and seemed like a cheap device to maintain drama in an aging drama. I don’t buy the argument that only bad stuff happening to these characters is interesting. They could choose to have another child and the show could explore how a lesbian couple achieves that. That’s a perfectly interesting and hopeful plot to explore. I also don’t buy the argument that because they are a gay couple they should be challenged with the same exact challenges the straight couples on the show face to make them equal. By forcing equality of challenges on them because they are gay you are bringing attention to their difference and not their similarity. Besides, the show has given them plenty of challenges to work through that have honoured their equality without being forced upon them to make them seem equal. They are inherently equal. No thought into making them face equal challenges is required.  

One of those challenges was that Arizona lost her leg and it was her wife Callie’s decision to cut it off. Such a trauma changes people. We too often put victims of trauma on a pedestal and certainly before she was traumatized, pink and pretty, bubbly and sweet Arizona was on a pedestal of perfection and self-control. Arizona put herself on such a pedestal, a high pedestal she has now fallen hard and fast from. Sure she had broken up with Callie and hurt her deeply in the past, but otherwise she had yet to really fail in life. And this act of infidelity is failure, and a failure that’s not without precedent. People who go through trauma sometimes act out in horrible ways, even when they seem to have recovered from said trauma. I am not sure that the show has made clear how her trauma has fundamentally changed her but Arizona is obviously changed for her to act in this manner. But having been traumatized is no excuse. Individuals are responsible for their own actions regardless of the circumstances that lead to them. Arizona saw this coming, she saw what Lauren really wanted from her, and she walked right into her arms, fully aware of what they were doing. 

As for how she’ll defend herself, I’ll largely leave my response to Arizona/the writer’s defense of her actions until said defense has aired. But if she claims an underlying dissatisfaction with the marriage, due to being tied down and having had a kid too early, I’ll call foul. Arizona decided to come back from Africa for Callie, it was her decision to stay when Callie revealed she was pregnant, it was Arizona who proposed marriage to Callie, it was Arizona who, in a deleted scene, said the wedding was happening no matter what, it was Arizona who came crying to Callie that she needed a piece of paper that said that Sofia was hers too. She cannot claim that she reluctantly came into marriage and motherhood. She might claim that Callie no longer makes her feel special,  or supports her dreams, but in most marriages, that wears off after years of being together along with all the other novelties of new love. The fact that their marriage has been imperfect, with little dissatisfactions here and there, has made it a more realistic, relatable and thus an influential marriage. Regardless of how imperfect their marriage is/was, they were still married. Married! Her actions are in no way justifiable. 

But are they forgivable?

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New additions to the saltwater aquarium. One of three little red starfish poses with electric blue hermit crab. Frogspawn aka Octopus coral, Metallic Green Flowerpot Coral. Finally, Hermit Crab and Sea Urchin pose with the flowerpot coral. 

All photos taken by Becoming Lemonade with iPad and edited with Snapseed for iPad. 

The current inhabitants of my first saltwater aquarium. The button polyps, which are under the clownfish, were added just last night. 

All photos taken with iPad and edited with Snapseed for iPad by Becoming Lemonade. 

I’m starting to get quite tired of the patients on Grey’s Anatomy. Why do we have to waste precious regular-character time with one-off-character medical crises? I know why: because the show thinks it’s a medical show and not a family drama. But for many of us viewers, it’s just and only that, a family drama. It’s a show about a group of characters who have become so close to each other, they have become a family, both metaphorically and fictional-literally with marriages and babies. All I and most of the other viewers want is to see this family of characters live and love together as a family. Thus the home scenes and the surgery scenes—when they are not interacting with non-family members and are instead conversing about their lives with family members and moving forwards and backwards in those lives—are the coveted scenes. The patient dialogue scenes are the filler. I long for a shorter Grey’s season that cuts out the patient medical crisis filler. 

This tiredness with non-family characters got me thinking, if Grey’s is not really a medical drama and is actually a family drama, is there any program, with a recurring cast, that is not a family program? To be clear, I’m not talking about the show being appropriate for family viewing, but a show that is about a family. Twilight Zone could be said to be not a family drama because characters existed for one episode only. But every other show, over time, evolves into a family drama. It must to stay alive. Lost, The Walking Dead, ER, The West Wing, House, the CSIs, the Law & Orders (especially SVU and CI) can all arguably be classified as family dramas to some extent. Shows like Parenthood, Gilmore Girls and Friday Night Lights are so critically successful because they know what they and all television is—family programs—and they don’t let any procedural crap get in the way of those great characters and their relationships. 

Television show characters can’t be robots: they must interact and bond for them to be interesting and the characters must grow and evolve as individuals and in their relationships to remain realistic and thus have the viewers bond enough with them to keep tuning in. I’ve written before about how I believe we have a part of our brain that forgets that fictional characters are not real. The more a character has real relationships with other characters the more we forget they are not real and the more we bond with them and the show itself. Even a program as procedural as CSI had characters that mourned dead characters like family members. And when family members left the show, the show lost viewership. When new family members (ie. cast members) enter a show, we greet them with as much natural initial hostility as we would new strangers suddenly brought into our family. Only over time do we warm up to them and welcome them into the family. 

I am certain that there are people who tune into medical and crime dramas for the cases. I am not one of them. Never have been. A fictionalized version of medicine or crime does not interest me because more liberties with the story are taken due to the writer’s usual lack of emersion in the specialty. The human drama, the story of the characters, is more fluent to the TV writer and thus of greater strength, plausibility and interest to me. 

I theorize that all TV shows with recurring characters become family dramas and family comedies (or rather half-hour shows and hour-long shows since I would argue comedy vs. drama is a spectrum not a dichotomy…but that’s for another post) because the casts, writers and crews themselves become families and this is reflected in their creation. We the viewers become part of the family too. When a head family member—a showrunner—is replaced, the whole family mourns and has to find a new normal. Because of this long-term, collaborative nature unique to television, television is the only story-telling medium to be truly limited to a purely family genre. All stories are just characters but in television only, you always necessarily have more than one recurring character. If television requires a cast of recurring characters, then not only is all television story-telling character driven, but family driven as well. 

I challenge you to name a TV show with a recurring cast that is not, at its core, a family show. Workplace dramas and comedies are about the work family. Reality shows are about groups of people who are or become family. News programs are about work families of newscasters. Even The X-Files with its recurring cast of basically two, became a family show about those two characters becoming a family. 

In this week of marriage—and family—equality debate, I ask you not only if you can name me a show that is not about a family (and I’m sure you can…) but also ask you, if a family is just a collection of people who care about each other, why can’t we all be a family before the television audience and the law itself?

Much like a television show does, I will be going on hiatus from this blog for the next few months. The reason is that I wish to concentrate all of my writing attention on finishing the first draft of my novel, which now sits at 81,082 words. I’m targeting completing the first draft by this June. However, it is very likely that inspiration will strike me for a few posts to this blog along the way. After the first draft is complete, I will need to put it aside to rest for a few months and will focus my attention back on this blog. I hope to catch up on my TV writing over the summer. The best way to keep up with this blog is to follow me on tumblr or Twitter (@BeLemonade). On Twitter, I also post my increasing word count for my novel. I thank you for your patience and readership and hope you will continue to read this blog going forward. 

I hate the word hate, probably because my mother discouraged me from using it. So when the term “Hate Watching” surfaced in the mainstream enough for it to cross my path, I rejected it immediately. How destructive, how mean, how, well, hateful to watch a television program merely to hate it. Hate is a bad thing, no matter what it’s directed at, because it perpetuates a ruinous negativity in the world that is a real problem in a society with so much pain and dispensing of pain. 

I assumed the term Hate Watching had a literal definition: it meant that people watch TV shows just to hate them. I didn’t understand the allure of such a practice and found that it would be an insult to the people who work on the show and the show’s true fans. But then I discovered that Hate Watching does not necessarily have such a literal definition. Hate Watching can be used to describe watching a show critically, watching a show that you want to love, that has a premise that inspires you, but is falling short. Under this definition, you are not hating it but rather critically pointing out the reasons something that should be great isn’t working. When I discovered this definition of the term, it was liberating because I finally had a term to describe how I watch some of my favourite shows—Grey’s Anatomy, The Newsroom, 30 Rock, Parenthood—as well as other shows I love: Smash, Parks and Rec, Modern Family, American Horror Story: Asylum. (OK maybe “love” is a strong word for how I feel about Smash, but I do watch it and I do have conflicted feelings for it. Smash is a show I want to be able to love, and that is Conflicted Viewing.) 

But I still hate the term “Hate Watching.” So when TV critic Myles McNutt coined the term “Conflicted Viewing” on Twitter today I instantly embraced the more accurate, if less sexy term. Conflicted Viewing has a simple literal definition: viewing shows we have conflicted feelings towards. This describes most of my TV viewing as there are only a very small number of shows I feel are perfect (Breaking Bad, Community, Lost…yes Lost). Every other show I love, including my all-time favourite Homeland, I find fault and flaws in and thus feel conflicted about watching. 

Let’s use Hate Watching to describe its literal definition: watching merely to hate. Let’s use Conflicted Viewing to describe its literal definition: watching with conflicted feelings. Please. 

As part of my move to attempt to have shorter, more numerous posts on Grey’s Anatomy, I am moving my “random thoughts” into their own “column” I’m calling Appendectomies. 

Random thoughts on the most recent two episodes of Grey’s Anatomy: episode 11 “The End is the Beginning is the End” and episode 12 “Walking on a Dream”

• I really hated episode 11. The cringe-inducing plots and scenes were more numerous than was tolerable: vajazzling, a giant human hair ball and the emotional near-abuse that indirectly caused it, Bailey’s bad honeymoon sex, Webber’s “hall of horrors”, Owen accidentally feeling up an intern, the list goes on. In fact, even Jackson butting heads up against Arizona and Derek over changing Mark’s plans for a patient was cringe-inducing. Why such a confluence of cringe in one episode?
• I’m a little disappointed we didn’t get testimony from the five award-recipients. It would have been great to see five monologues expressing how the plane crash affected each of them and will continue to affect them in their own unique words. To see Cristina and Arizona and Meredith have to open up and be honest about how they have been impacted by it when all three of them have been tight-lipped. To see Callie and Derek talk about losing Mark. To see them all talk about how it has affected their marriages and their futures. Opportunity missed.
• It’s interesting that Owen hasn’t resigned but I suppose it’s not in his character to run away. It is in his character to face the consequences of his actions and see the hospital through the repair of his negligence. It’s a good contrast between his character and Derek’s. It was Derek’s actions that caused the shootings yet not only was this barely brought up, he resigned when the shooting was over. He ran away from it. Owen on the other hand has confronted his responsibility for his colleagues deaths and injuries and is not going anywhere at least until everything, and everyone, is fixed. What’s also interesting is that Derek seems to be the only one of the survivors that actually blames Owen yet Derek of all people should understand how as Chief you sign what’s in front of you without taking the time to analyze it. Arizona doesn’t blame Owen for her injury as is evident in episode 12 yet she has the most unrelentingly constant reminder of the crash.  
• I find it odd that Callie was in episode 12 so little when it featured her wife so much. Their recovery, individually and as a couple, has often been shown from one perspective or the other and rarely from both in the same episode. I would have liked to see Callie more in this episode, showing her perspective on what’s happening because surely she was aware that something was going on. You know your wife of three years enough to know when she’s hiding something from you. Of course, she’s not fully aware of what’s happening, but she knows Arizona is having pain at night. Showing multiple angles in one episode would have been a nice touch. 
• I am enjoying the fall-out for the hospital because serious fall-out for the hospital has yet to be explored in the show. I doubt and hope that the survivors don’t give their awards to the hospital to save it because that makes the entire plot redundant. Closing the ER is an interesting development that will change the show. Anything new for the show, at this point, is good. What is also interesting, is that it is essentially Arizona’s fault that the insurance can’t pay the awards (the insurance limits the plane passengers to two Attendings and when Arizona took Alex’s place, she voided that clause). Will she ever find out? And if so, how will she deal with that? And how will that affect her relationship with Alex and everyone else at the hospital for that matter?
• On that note, I loooooved that someone finally, after nine seasons, pointed out the ridiculousness of surgeons running the ER. Thanks! 
• I enjoyed Alex’s line “I should have been on that plane.” In the context, it’s a typical Alex statement saying if he’d been on the plane he would have gotten $15mill regardless of the trauma. But it’s also showing that he is guilty that he wasn’t on the plane in Arizona’s place. The line is also ironic: if he had been on the plane, the insurance would have paid the settlement for the plane crash but Alex does not yet know that. 
• I’ll say it again, why has a show with such a good memory completely forgotten it used to have a character named Teddy Altman work in its halls? She hasn’t been referred to even remotely all season. 
• I’m glad to see the Africa program continuing two seasons after it started. 
• I wish they had explained the mirror therapy and the stabbing the prosthetic foot as relief for phantom limb pain and how the two therapies work. It may have reigned in the unintentional humour of Owen ordering Alex to stab Arizona’s prosthetic. It’s not a funny situation but the way it was handled, it was over-the-top and I burst out laughing. I doubt that was what they intended. 
• Is it just me or does Derek have two modes: boring and cranky.

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Showrunner Shonda clearly doesn’t like endings. I watched the Private Practice finale last week, as a moderate fan of the show, but mostly I was curious how Rhimes would end one of her shows. The episode, both my husband and I remarked, was very much a typical episode with a couple major events (but, as TVLine.com pointed out, with oddly very little Addison). It felt more like a season finale than a series finale. But there are two aspects to the key it to being a true finale. First, Rhimes has said and as I suspected, the entire season was a finale, wrapping up each character’s storyline with their own central episode, a testament to the virtues of giving long-running shows the ability to take an entire season to wrap up the story-telling. So the Private Practice series finale was merely the last few sentences in the story. Second, it was clear that Rhimes did not want to end a series with a clear ending like many series do. Many series, Friends and this week’s 30 Rock come to mind, end a series by breaking up the band and having the characters go their separate ways. The idea behind this being that the story the series portrayed was a temporary one. It had a beginning, a middle and an end. But Rhimes wanted two things from her finale: first, to imply that the characters continue their lives working together and second, to imply that the characters are continuing these lives happily ever after. It’s an interesting way to non-end end a series. 

What can we Grey’s Anatomy fans glean from this? Well baring any major change in philosophy from Rhimes, we are likely to see Grey’s not have an ending but rather just an ending of our time with the characters. It’s likely that the hospital as it is in the final episode will be implied to continue to exist as it does. We can also hope that each and every character will have their implied happily ever after. We can hope that Shonda likes happy endings to her epic character sagas. 

As for when Grey’s will end, no one, including Rhimes and the network knows. I have heard that the network is unlikely to cancel the hit series for quite some time. I have also heard Rhimes say that she will run the show until she is no longer interested in running it (heaven forbid the network would want to continue the show without her….). The show is in terrific shape given its age. Shows like Bones and How I Met Your Mother have been on for roughly the same amount of time and the fan base is getting squirmy, wishing it will end and worried that the longer it continues, the more it will fizzle into nothing. I don’t feel such squirminess among the Grey’s fanbase, in fact there is deep fear that it will end soon. If you look at a show like ER, which went on for fifteen seasons, it was looking shaky by its ninth season and limped for several more seasons. Not only that, but by season nine, it only had retained one of its original cast members for the duration of the series to that point and had a constant revolving door of cast members. ER in its entire history had twenty-six main cast members. Grey’s on the other hand has retained by season nine, six of its original cast members and has in its history only lost eight main cast members out of nineteen. The show is strong and as long as Rhimes has stories to tell about doctors in Seattle, the show will go on. (So everyone calm down!)

Check in tomorrow for a final Grey Area of the week. 

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No One Ever Gets Over Anything. Someone said this to me recently, and it was a comforting notion. I have a hard time getting over things and it’s nice to know I’m not alone. But TV characters seem to get over things rather quickly and thoroughly, even on those Great Cable Shows. The biggest and most frustrating example of this that I can recall, and have likely discussed before, is when Sam Taggart on ER was over having been raped and shot her rapist, who was the father of her son, by the next episode. That was when I quit the show; I was furious that there was no emotional fall-out for her character. A more recent and frustrating example of this is Carrie Mathison’s ability to overlook what was done to her by Brody on Homeland (and that’s all I’m going to say because you should watch that show and not be spoiled!). 

Grey’s Anatomy excels at giving time for characters to recover outwardly from their many traumas in the long term and shows hints that they are not over it inwardly for seasons later. This week the LVAD wire cutting was brought up seven seasons after it occurred, a happy reminder that these characters have memories. Twelve episodes into the season, two characters this week had focused plots that involved their recovery from last season’s plane crash (Arizona and her phantom limb horrors; Meredith and her difficulty getting on a plane) while the whole hospital was dealing in this episode with the fallout in terms of the budgetary issues the plane crash has incurred. This has always set the show apart and is one of the main reasons I tune in nine seasons later: because what happens to the characters matters.  

But because Grey’s excels at the real world timeline recovery process, because it is a character show and TV is essentially (and only) a character medium, when that recovery process is imperfect, when beats are skipped, it becomes frustrating. This happened recently on Parenthood when the character of Victor accepted his new Mom as his new Mom but there were missing character beats, or steps, to this character change. I feel we’ve missed a lot of beats with Arizona this season in her process of coming to terms with her amputation. Setbacks are absolutely fine as they are real world, especially a setback as real world as phantom limb syndrome. But there were beats missing last fall in her emotional progression, beats made evidently missing by not having her express her viewpoint verbally or by the show not focusing on her perspective. For a plot as major as an amputation, these emotional beats needed more than a mere brief facial expression. These are issues that are under a hyper-microscope because the show is entirely character focused and because it excels at recovery progress storytelling. But the plane crash plot line is wonderfully still going and it will be difficult to fully critique it possibly for seasons to come. 

Check in tomorrow for more Grey Areas. 

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Yes. Every time Callie (Sara Ramirez) and Arizona (Jessica Capshaw) kiss, touch, share a bed/shower, refer to each other as their wife, cuddle their daughter, even fight, or pretty much share a scene together or mention each other, we get a little closer to a society where their genders is truly irrelevant to everyone on the planet. This is why I cheer every time any of this happens and frown any time they do not have very many scenes together in an episode. The fact that a plot line as complex and real-world as an amputation has been given to a lesbian character is exciting because we need to see more of this kind of representation of life’s complexities affecting every type of individual and couple that exists in the real world. The fact that Grey’s continuously represents minority characters as regular people not stereotypes, is indeed important and relevant and praiseworthy.

And no. I am sure that Arizona’s sexuality had no relevancy in showrunner Shonda Rhimes’ decision to amputate Arizona’s leg and indeed, with this plot line, Arizona and Callie’s sexuality is completely irrelevant. I have read multiple interviews with Rhimes, Ramirez, and the delightfully chatty Capshaw in which all three women say they never intend any political statement with their work. I have often wondered why there is so much talk, good and bad, in the media about other gay characters on TV but rarely more than a mention, if that, of Callie and Arizona. I think I finally figured out why: because their sexuality is not relevant anymore. What does this mean? It means that it no longer matters that they are two women any more than it matters that they are different races or that Owen and Cristina are different races or that Meredith and Derek have different coloured hair. The Grey’s couples’ races and genders have never really mattered. What matters is the characters are right for each other and are in love and that we like to see the actors portraying them work together. What matters is that they are interesting, complex and unique individual characters. Arizona’s decision in this most recent episode to remain Callie’s wife and avoid telling her about her phantom limb pain, although I would not do the same, was a decision she made motivated by wanting to protect her marriage and her wife. The fact that I just typed “her wife” is irrelevant to the plot line. The writers, the audience and the media has forgotten that they are a gay couple and only see them as a couple. Are they perhaps the first TV gay couple whose sexuality is no longer relevant? And by being the first gay couple whose gayness is irrelevant, does that paradoxically make them relevant again?

Check in each day this week for further Grey Areas. 

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Banana Chocolate Chip Caramel Croissant Bread Pudding I made on impulse last night. 

All photos taken by Becoming Lemonade. 

And it’s a divorce that will happen. Is already happening. 

I’ve been frustrated by the mis-leading official ABC Grey’s Anatomy promos for quite some time. They never properly represent the tone of the show, something that I think harms the show’s chances of gaining new viewers. The promos are always manipulatively over-dramatized in an attempt to create false hype but this over-dramatization only serves to over-sensationalize in a way that can be a turn off to many television viewers. The promos that air as commercials during other shows paint the show as hyper-melodrama, which ignores the delicate balance of humour and serious drama that the show is excellent in maintaining. Now of course over-sensationalizing is how all promos and trailers for even slightly dramatic movies and TV is done. But I feel it does Grey’s in particular a disservice. 

The most egregious crime of the promos, however, is that they lie to us. They can take a clip of dialogue out of context and more often than not, when the episode airs, with the context in place, the line of dialogue takes on a whole new meaning. An example of this includes Cristina saying “I want a divorce” in a promo but saying “You said ‘I want a divorce’” in the episode itself which takes on an entirely different meaning. A second example is Ben delivering the line “Do you love me?” in a promo which seems to indicate that he has doubts that Bailey loves him, but within the context of the episode the delivery again takes on an entirely different meaning (the question is meant to remind Bailey that she loves him and that’s what matters for the wedding).  

Another way the promos lie to us is in setting up plots that don’t actually happen in the episode. Here we come to the tweet that could not happen (yet). For the most recent episode of the series, there was heavy promotion of the idea that Callie and Arizona were going to have sex for the first time since the plane crash. I prepared a tweet in anticipation of this. It’s exciting because any time lesbian characters have sex on TV, our world inches a little closer to equality. Interracial, amputee lesbian sex? Even better for our diversity-obsessed popular arts culture. And the story of an amputee finding sexual confidence again is also an important one that I have been anticipating since the plot line began. Expectations were thus raised and when the characters did not indeed have sex as the promotions pseudo-promised, disappointment became the pervading emotion. However, on second viewing, one realizes that the Callie/Arizona storyline in the episode was in fact an affirmation that love in a marriage is not just about sex, a beautiful little story to tell that is equally important. But because the promos lied to us, it’s less easy to see that beauty through the lenses of expectation. I could not tweet about the interracial, amputee lesbian sex because it has yet to happen. 

So I have made a new vow: no more promos, no more spoilers.

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I hate horror. I don’t understand it. Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3D Whatever makes no sense to me. The phrase “torture porn” makes me nauseous and question humanity. But I do love TV and while I hate horror, I love crazy. I started watching American Horror Story Asylum (I have not seen season one) for a number of reasons: buzz over a scene last week that AV Club critic Todd VanDerWerff called the best he’s ever seen on TV, my curiosity over the show’s general buzz and why so many respected actors were drawn to be a part of the project, my curiosity over why horror is a genre at all, the fact that FX Canada was marathoning the show on Sunday so I could DVR it and watch it at my own pace and, finally, my recent low mood and creative rut (it sounded like the perfect misanthropic entertainment for the moment). I expected to hate it. I expected to watch an episode and nothing more. 

When the protagonist, previously trapped indeed in a Horror Story Asylum, closed the taxi door and finally escaped in the most recent episode, I noticed that my palms were quite sweaty. I cared for her and I realized I cared for the show. Why goshdarnit? Why? 

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The following are my very spoilery thoughts on Homeland, as a series so far, leading up to its second season finale. Only read if you are completely caught up on the show!!! Trust me, this is a show you do NOT want to be spoiled on.

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Our first Christmas tree. Decorations mostly hand made from a craft fair. Tree a live spruce. Merry Christmas. 

All photos taken by Becoming Lemonade.