I still haven’t seen this, I hear it’s basically “Star Trek: The Next Generation” but with Seth McFarlane jokes?
From the article: The original Star Trek , after all, made waves with the first on-air inter-racial kiss.
Ars Technica; with a handle like that, I would have thought they could do the easy research and get it right:
It is the first interracial kiss on American TV… that’s not insignificant, considering how regionalized TV was on the early days.
This from the wiki article:
The first interracial kiss on U.S. television was broadcast in a 1960 episode of Adventures in Paradise.
ST’s ‘1st IR Kiss’ happened 8 years later.
Still not insignificant…
The wiki lists I Love Lucy first, but of course that gets into fundamentally subjective distinctions of what counts as “interracial,” which is not only unscientific to begin with but varies by “degree” depending on who you’re asking and the racial combination of the participants. For example, many racists seem to be more bothered by the idea of a black man starting a family with a white woman than, say, a white soldier patronizing an East Asian prostitute.
One thing I think we can say about the Kirk/Uhura kiss is that it was one of the first times, possibly the first time, that a nationally syndicated primetime TV series in the United States depicted a white person and a black person sharing full-on lip contact.
Bluntly put, it boils down to the old “we can f__k your women, but you can’t f__k ours”. For many years, this was the Hollywood framework for inter-racial romance movies. White male directors and writers living out their fantasies… and defining social limits on their terms.
Yes, that kiss definitely was a depiction, but in what sense: William Shatner long ago revealed that, at the request from network people, actual contact could not take place, and so did not take place, while, per the wiki article, Nichelle Nichols says that full contact took place. I’ll go back to my ST:OS dvd and check again, but I recall Shatner’s lips by the slimmest margin hovering above Nichelle’s. Heck, even as a kid, it looked weird to me, like, who kisses like that?
This is waaaay too nitpicky. It was depicted in the show itself. That’s what people were shown.
Or maybe we should say that Star Trek was a show about people on Earth, in a room, having adventures encountering other humans, also on Earth.
It’s like Star Wars + Star Trek. Some episodes are overly optimistic, some are overly pessimistic about human nature and the universe. VERY good show, nonetheless. The last episode took a lot of elements from Star Wars, they accidentally changed the time line and it seemed more like the stand alone Solo movie, than traditional Star Trek. Previous episodes ranged from First Contact with an alien species to interacting with super intelligent robots to rescuing someone from certain doom who turned out to be a collector from the future determined to sell the Orville to the highest bidder in the 26th century.
I haven’t seen the second season but enjoyed the first season. If I recall correctly the first episode or two were heavier with his shtick and then they eased off of that.
I recall as the season progressed there were some episodes that genuinely surprised me in good ways. it’s been awhile so I’m short on details off the top of my head. I do recall really enjoying the episode where the away team affects a civilization and then with some cleaver science fiction we get to see the effects.
Going in my expectations were verrrrry low. But I had fun watching it.
I liked season 2 but there was way way too many episodes focused around Bortus and his people. Too often it was the go to for making the same points about gender equality/ LGBT issues. I don’t mind TV shows that go there, but it seemed kind of lazy to do it so often for cheap sensationalism.
Its Star Trek-The Cosplay version. But in a good way. Its not a comedy, but aims to deliver a laugh of two once in a while.
That explains it, I watched the first couple of episodes, thought it was forgettable dreck, and assumed it would be cancelled mid-season. Was rather shocked when later on started hearing people saying it didn’t suck.
I think I had read in advance that they adjusted the writing after the first two. That’s not to say his joke count goes to zero but it does find a balance. While the details are a bit foggy due to time I do recall appreciating the since fiction leading to ethical questions (rather than just being eye candy). The show also if I recall correctly attempts to be a bit more inclusive/progressive and not so straight male focused. I recall at certain scenes thinking incel nerds must be screaming at their screens because the show doesn’t just constantly push the hetero male hero to the center of every story and also doesn’t always paint them as the one that is right.
I’m not saying it was a perfect show. If I re-watched it I’m sure I could nit pick things. But it did have some nice moments.
For me, the last few years have driven home the point that it’s important to seperate fact from fiction, and that’s all I’m doing here.
There have been articles out there proclaiming that ST:OS showed the first inter-racial kiss, those saying that it wasn’t the first to do so, but saying a kiss actually took place, and others saying that an actual kiss did not take place. Even Nichol’s and Shatner’s opinions vary on that. Regardless, I know what I saw, and that’s where I stand.
As to the degree of significance of whatever happened, well, that’s up to the viewer. But, fake kiss or not, in the 60s, the ST:OS kiss, although not the first (and that was the main point I was making in my earlier posts) was still a big thing back then, but it would have been an even bigger thing if it clearly, actually, was a full on kiss with nothing held back, and especially because it would have gone against the network’s wishes.
Maybe an overstatement as far as my argument, but It’s one thing for Hollywood to throw out ‘dog-bones’ such as a pre-Obama fictional film depicting a black US president, but I can assure you that reality gave me a rush that fiction couldn’t.
It’s a kiss. It was scripted. It looks like a kiss, intended to be a kiss. It’s not off in the background. People weren’t confused in any way about whether it was a kiss.
I don’t feel like speculating why anyone would call this “a fake fictional kiss”, or count the seconds of proximity of what is clearly a kiss in the script, the plot and appearance. It was rehearsed as a kiss, and performed as a kiss. There were multiple takes, of kissing.
I also don’t want to know why someone would try to diminish the moment as it was culturally, or Nichelle Nichols role in it.
And whatever it said in that ghost-written book, Shatner says they were lip-to-lip, and that he made sure the only takes had kisses.
I’d bet my house that the rehearsals had actual kissing.
No one involved is currently denying that there was much kissing, in rehearsal or on-screen. Your house is completely safe. Nichols and Shatner both say there was one take without actual kissing, that they spoiled on purpose, that wasn’t used. Every other take, including the one that aired, had kissing.
