{"id":2062,"date":"2013-03-01T10:00:05","date_gmt":"2013-03-01T18:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/?p=2062"},"modified":"2013-03-01T06:55:20","modified_gmt":"2013-03-01T14:55:20","slug":"mark-watches-husbands-season-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/2013\/03\/mark-watches-husbands-season-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Watches &#8216;Husbands&#8217;: Season 2"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Y&#8217;all, I&#8217;m so glad there is more of this. I would seriously watch this if it were a real show! Well\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 wait. Okay, it <i>is<\/i> real! I meant that if it were on the television! Regularly! With full episodes! Like a real show! Anyway, let&#8217;s talk about the second &#8220;season&#8221; of <i>Husbands<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->This was commissioned by Anna! <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dropbox.com\/s\/y2dg5hc7gjsbda5\/husbandsS2.mov\" target=\"_blank\">The video for the entire season is located here<\/a>. All my Mark Watches videos are now indexed in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dropbox.com\/sh\/xx9l6nxutvo9mo3\/1IyIM77u_L\" target=\"_blank\">this Dropbox folder.<\/a><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Okay, so I sort of have a <i>thing<\/i> for cameos? Like, I totally understand if they&#8217;re not <i>your<\/i> kind of thing. They can be distracting! I get that! I&#8217;m pretty sure this preference of mine came from my obsession with <i>The X-Files<\/i>. Pretty much everyone who is anyone has had a guest\/cameo spot on that show. Luke Wilson. Giovanni Ribisi. Jack Black. Kathy Griffin. Michael Emerson. Terry O&#8217;Quinn. (IN THREE DIFFERENT ROLES WHAT THE HELL.) Mark Sheppard. Tea Leoni. No, seriously, the Luke Wilson episode of <i>The X-Files<\/i>, called &#8220;Bad Blood,&#8221; is one of the greatest things in the history of the universe.<\/li>\n<li>So, yeah. To say I enjoyed the cameos in <i>Husbands<\/i> is an understatement. OH MY GOD, AMBER BENSON AND MEKHI PHIFER AND JOHN HODGMAN AND FELICIA DAY AND JOSS AND EMMA CAULFIELD <b>AND THE BEST CAMEO BETWEEN DICHEN LACHMAN AND TRICIA HELFER EVER EVER EVER<\/b>\u00c2\u00a0 <i>H E L P<\/i>.<\/li>\n<li>Like the first &#8220;season,&#8221; season two follows the sitcom format <i>while<\/i> being quite emotional at the same time. I&#8217;ve never been one to watch sitcoms, actually! I don&#8217;t know, I guess they never have held my interest before? I mean, I&#8217;ve watched <i>Arrested Development<\/i>, but that show never <i>felt<\/i> like a sitcom. I watched the first two seasons of <i>How I Met Your Mother<\/i> before I bailed on that ship. (Which is not a judgment on the show. It just never grabbed me, personally, so it&#8217;s a matter of taste, not quality.) I <i>did<\/i> grow up on <i>I Love Lucy<\/i>, which has always felt like the pinnacle of an American sitcom to me. So, this is all a very longwinded way of saying that it&#8217;s pretty significant for me to enjoy a sitcom-styled show because it&#8217;s so rare that this happens.<\/li>\n<li>At the heart of this season is an exploration of the dynamics of a gay couple and how they relate to society&#8217;s expectations of gender. While this show is sometimes making a joke of it, it shows how this <i>is<\/i> something a lot of gay folks have to deal with. Internalized homophobia and misogyny leads to a really toxic environment for the community, and we see that manifested in <i>how<\/i> the general public perceives Cheeks and Brady&#8217;s relationship. Obviously, this is a satire that pokes fun of the absurdity of this idea, but it&#8217;s also based in a real struggle. I remember the first time I started dating guys and my college buddies would ask me point-blank if I was the man or the woman in the relationship. The gender binary was so drilled into these dude&#8217;s minds that they couldn&#8217;t comprehend the idea that two butch men or two feminine men could be attracted to one another. Now, there&#8217;s a bunch of shit that intersects here, too, and a lot of it goes back to misogyny. As we see in Cheeks&#8217; example, his outwardly feminine behavior is openly criticized by Wes, who tries to be &#8220;professional&#8221; about his prejudices. As long as Cheeks is abiding by prescribed gender roles and acting like a &#8220;man,&#8221; then he&#8217;s acceptable. The same goes for the fact that Cheeks can&#8217;t hide the fact that he is gay.<\/li>\n<li>That&#8217;s the basis for this disaster, which I admit was EXTREMELY ENTERTAINING TO WATCH. It&#8217;s a very classic story of an exaggerated understanding, but it&#8217;s done so well because Brad Bell and Sean Hemeon are a riot to watch. Seeing them transform themselves into caricatures of one another is just SO LOVELY.<\/li>\n<li>I was stoked to see the addition of the character Mark!<\/li>\n<li>I love that this episode doesn&#8217;t even address the absurdity of this &#8220;live&#8221; interview in this format. Like WHO DOES THIS. What show devotes a half hour to a couple? The real question is WHO CARES? It&#8217;s so wonderful.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I hope there is more of this show. IS THERE? SOMEONE TELL ME.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Y&#8217;all, I&#8217;m so glad there is more of this. I would seriously watch this if it were a real show! Well\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 wait. Okay, it is real! I meant that if it were on the television! Regularly! With full episodes! Like &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/2013\/03\/mark-watches-husbands-season-2\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/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":[200],"tags":[433,457,468],"class_list":["post-2062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mark-does-stuff-2","tag-commissions","tag-husbands","tag-mark-watches-husbands"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2062"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2062\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<!-- WP Super Cache is installed but broken. 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