The Killing on AMC premiered last night. I didn’t watch it. I went to bed early because I was beat from waiting tables at brunch, going to the park, and generally being needed by everyone all weekend. My husband, however, came to bed around 1 am telling me about the most amazing show he had just watched. He started in the middle and was so intrigued he had to stay up for the encore so he could see the beginning. I sort of heard everything he said, and I may have replied something incoherent, as I tend to do when we see each other between 11 and 2 in the morning.
It isn’t often that my husband gets that excited about a show before I have seen it. Fortunately, my cable provides this show to me On Demand the next day, so instead of watching horror this afternoon I was able to catch up on this gruesome, honest, and incredibly dramatic crime show—one of my favorite things in the world aside from cheese, beer, and new pens. As it turns out, this show takes place right here, in my very own city of Seattle. How heartwarming to see the dreary, grey, fly by footage of the Space Needle. But there are a few things a person has to notice about a show specifically set in their home town.
The first, the constant torrential downpour they show in almost every scene. I admire their spirit, trying to make the city live up to its stereotype, but it really isn’t like that here . . . (except for today—and most of last week, but this is irrelevant). The fact is, no one in this city carries an umbrella. I actually wore my flip flops out in the rain today, and I don’t own a raincoat, although this year I did purchase some trendy rubber boots, but I have mostly worn them on days without puddles. On television it really does rain in Seattle the way everyone thinks it does (My friend points out to me that in this scene there has to be someone with a hose pointed directly at a window). I suppose this publicity is good for our city, because if they were to show everyone how amazing the trees and the water is when the sun comes out, everyone in the world would want to live here.
The second interesting thing is the way that they sometimes pronounce the names of our outlying cities. On this show one kid pronounced Tukwila,” Tuk-wee-la.” Which is wrong, in case you were thinking in your head “What’s wrong with that?” Plus, this kid was supposed to be from Mercer Island, and I am fairly certain no kid from Mercer Island is going to hang out at a bar in Tukwila. Especially not The Blue Moon, because that is in the University District. I will be keeping tabs on the show in its forthcoming episodes for any of these discrepancies, mostly because it makes me laugh when people on television pronounce Puyallup, “Poo-yall-up.”
I’m sure there are other things that I found egregious perpetuations of Seattle stereotypes, but overall the show was pretty spectacularly spot on. They had some beautiful scenes of Puget Sound, Shilshole Marina, Discovery Park (if it wasn’t discovery park I was fooled), and they did an excellent job portraying punk kids hanging out on the streets of Capitol Hill. I like this show, and just like the television promotions said, “You will be angry at the end of every episode.” I assume they mean because you don’t want it to end.
No comments:
Post a Comment