"Cinderita"

I realize that when you are writing five times a week, even though the subjects can be a bit varied, there is always the likelihood of going back and revisiting a topic -- not always intentionally -- and saying the same thing again.

But I guess if the same topic is raised in the news, or in some recent happening, that causes a revitalization of the topic, it might be worth a revisit regardless.  That's one reason we had several gun-control pieces last week, and why we're talking about ... yes, theatrical casting, yet again.

You might as well go read the first piece on it, which was this one from back in 2015.  The point is that when theater, or TV or movies, are done at a professional level, you need to do everything possible to suspend the disbelief of your audience so that they stay in the story.  And casting people who don't fit the audience's expectation introduces disbelief you don't need.

Television in 2017 is rife with that, of course, particularly in its desire to appear hip and with-it and, God forbid, decidedly not racist.  You would think that 90% of couples today are mixed-race, if you extrapolated from TV depictions.  But at least we know that the producers are not racists, which is all that matters, except when you get to the self-congratulatory award ceremonies and there are not enough non-white nominees.

In that piece, of course, I posed the silly notion that Matt Damon should have auditioned to play Martin Luther King when the movie Selma was done, just to help show that Hollywood is race-blind.  As silly as that notion is, I pointed out back then, the TV show "Once Upon a Time", which is based on the humanization of fairy-tale characters, had seemed to do that far too often to maintain the suspension of disbelief any show requires (my example was the odd casting of a Hispanic-looking Honduran-Canadian actress to play the English fictional character Maid Marian, of the Robin Hood tale).

Well, "Once Upon a Time" has officially done it again, except they went even farther.  This time, the the character was Cinderella, and the performer is the Dominican actress Dania Ramirez.  Now, Dania Ramirez is a perfectly fine actress to play any number of characters.  But not only have the producers decided to have a visibly Latina actress to play the part, she has a Dominican accent as well and does not suppress it.

Now, there probably is not a "right" answer as to what Cinderella (or, in this case, I guess, "Cinderita"), is supposed to look like.  OK, there is no right answer.  She is, after all, fictional.  I get it.  If the whole fairy tale were staged in a Latin environment, it would be perfectly fine.

But the rest of the characters are clearly, for lack of a better term, Anglos.  So not only do the producers get questioned as to why they would mix race and accents in a confined, if fictional, realm, they have made the Latina a stereotypically servile young woman, so they kind of messed up there too, at least from the PC side.

Now, I have already pointed out that the producers have already mixed accents all over the place, from American to many flavors of English and Scots accents, some of which are nearly incomprehensible.  That's pretty distracting on its own.  Why they feel the need to muddy the suspension-of-disbelief waters by adding racially-odd casting to verbally-odd accents is beyond me.

I don't know how this will play out.  I don't know, because we have taken the show off our recording list.  

Astonishingly to those on the left, it has nothing to do with that casting, nothing to do with race, nothing to do with suspension of disbelief.  That was only one story line, and we've watched the show for years with story lines we didn't enjoy (or couldn't follow).

It is simply that, presumably having run out of new realms to explore with the cast this season, they have let half or more of the principal actors go (or the principals got tired and left; don't know and don't care), and have gone off in a strange direction with the plot.  The main character is now the son of the former main female character (the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming), grown up, and since he wasn't even a fairy-tale character in the first place, who cares?

It is no longer interesting enough, nor easy enough to follow, to where it is worth an hour of our time.  It has, in the classic TV parlance, "jumped the shark."

I wish them luck; surely they are all good people trying very hard.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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