Bad Girls Season 8 Disappoints Lesbian Fans

http://afterellen.com/TV/2006/10/badgirls.html

:)

Wow, it's like the author of that article read all our discussion threads on S8. I couldn't agree more with every point she made, and I'm glad someone is writing about it in the press.

maybe she has.
Just a small observation: for me S8 wasn't bad just because there wasn't a gay character or a gay storyline, it was bad in general. But seeing that the article was written for afterellen, it makes sense that the emphasis was on the absence of the gay thing :)

Oh, I totally agree--it was bad in general, not just because of the lack of lesbian visibility or emphasis. Well, actually, I'd still stand up for the first half of the season, which I thought was pretty good. But the second half it all fell apart, which made me feel like they didn't know what they were doing when they set everything up in the first half.

and to waste such an opportunity as having Amanda Donohue as gov!
it feels as if the writers are bored with this, as if they made it like that so it wouldn't be comissioned for another year. I know it's not like that but it's a pity that exactly when the subject of HMP is such a hot political issue BG is leaving the scene.

They need characters like Nikki and Yvonne; topdogs who don't need to bully everybody to achive their status.

Ohh wouldn't it be nice to have Nikki and or Helen back....

They've got one! Her name is Pat. Now if only they'd actually give her some decent material like they gave Nikki and Yvonne, I think we'd all be much happier. And munky, I couldn't agree more about how much they wasted Amanda Donohoe. Although I don't know if the writers are bored so much as lazy. I think they needed to go back to their source material (problems in UK prisons) and look for storylines there. Instead, they're just making up soapy storylines, copying every other show out there (including earlier incarnations of their own show).

Great article! And so true!! Now I'm straight, but I was disappointed with this series - which shows that it was a disappointment in more ways than one.

This post has grabbed my interest but the AfterEllen post is temporarily down.

I've read the piece at last and the highest compliment that can be paid to it is that there's hardly anything to add to it. They got the sense of it spot on and in particular the deficiencies of the series. This is especially good since it is unlikely that their reviewers are in the position to specialise on BG. I'd stick up for the Elmira opening episodes a bit more than they have but that's all I can say.
It's nice that our debates have independently reached similar conclusions but it makes me feel good that there is that level of perceptiveness out there.

While agreeing with all you say, Richard, I have to come to a slightly different conclusion which is a shade less rosy; it's easier for people to agree when something's objectively bad. There's never been that much agreement in the press about BG when it was objectively great. :/ (We often agree on the board, of course, but we're a self-selecting part of the audience; belief in the show's excellence [S1-3, can we just stipulate in all future posts when I say "the show" I mean these seasons? please...?] is what brought us here in the first place.)

I can understand what you're saying, ekny, but the review also got the sense that Series 8 started off with a lot of potential and threw away their chances. There was quite a bit of enigmatics half way through the series which wasn't the sort of ambiguity to better make a dramatic point or to latch it into some vital moment but that it sort of fizzled out.
For example of this , I know the Di Grayling bitchiness in Series 5 isn't everyone's cup of tea, but, in terms of strength of storyline, Shed deployed it well in terms of the critical moment when Karen was finally dumped on and sacked, bleak watching though it undoubetly is, certainly for me.
I certainly agree that the greatest challenge to any of us is where both good and bad are untidily wedged together for no apparent reason and the duty for honest and genuinely balenced criticism is at odds with your loyalty to the show.

yeah, amen to that. I wrestled for quite awhile before admitting to myself there was very little coming back from the end of S8. I do think the article was entirely fair though, was just speaking of us as a sort of separate fan-based phenom. The same dilemmas but from a different angle.