{"id":519,"date":"2004-01-06T04:40:05","date_gmt":"2004-01-06T12:40:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2004\/01\/06\/angels-in-america-a-flop-according-to-iwf\/"},"modified":"2004-01-06T04:40:05","modified_gmt":"2004-01-06T12:40:05","slug":"angels-in-america-a-flop-according-to-iwf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=519","title":{"rendered":"Angels in America a flop, according to IWF"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been reading the Inkwell<\/a>, the IWF’s (Independent Women’s Forum) new weblog, faithfully. So far it seems to be a cookie-cutter Republican blog; “the party line, the whole party line, and nothing but the party line.” Despite the connection with the IWF, the Inkwell doesn’t seem especially focused on women or on (anti-) feminism.<\/p>\n

One thing about the Inkwell is unexpected: the writers seem obsessed with Tony Kushner, gleefully reporting “low” ratings for Angels in America<\/i> over <\/a>and over<\/a>, and expressing hopes <\/a>that Kushner’s new musical (Caroline, or Change<\/i>) will be a flop.<\/p>\n

Does anyone else find this strikingly petty? There are many artists and novelists whose politics are too right-wing for my tastes, but I don’t sit around saying “boy, that Sarah Michelle Geller is a Republican – I sure hope her next movie flops miserably!” That would be ridiculous.<\/p>\n

By the way, The Inkwell used a biased standard in declaring Angels <\/i>a flop: they compare it to stuff like a CBS Christmas special and Fox’s The Simple Life<\/i>. But that’s meaningless: aside from the fact that serious drama isn’t expected to match the ratings of fluff like The Simple Life<\/i>, there’s also the obvious fact that many fewer households receive HBO than receive CBS and FOX.<\/p>\n

The actual measure of success is: How did Angels <\/i>do compared to other made-for-cable movies? According to the December 11 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel<\/i>:<\/p>\n

The first installment of HBO’s much-praised miniseries, “Angels in America,” was seen by 4.2 million viewers Sunday — making the first half of the six-hour drama the year’s most-watched made-for-cable movie.<\/div>\n

That’s not even including HBO’s broadcasting of the same material in six one-hour segments. Overall, HBO estimates that 7.8 million viewers watched Angels <\/i>in its first week (New York Times<\/i>, 12\/22\/03), putting Angels miles ahead of any comparable made-for-cable movie in 2003.<\/p>\n

So, unsurprisingly, the IWF folks are once again “factually disabled.” But that’s beside the point – to sit around wishing failure on an artist because you don’t like their politics is ugly, and would be ugly even if they had gotten their facts straight..<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been reading the Inkwell, the IWF’s (Independent Women’s Forum) new weblog, faithfully. So far it seems to be a cookie-cutter Republican blog; “the party line, the whole party line, and nothing but the party line.” Despite the connection with … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[95],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anti-feminists-and-their-pals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}