"SENSE8 AND THE FAILURE OF GLOBAL IMAGINATION"

"Like many fantastical or science fictional premises,  Sense8’s premise is a wish fulfillment: not — as is typical of this genre and the Wachowskis’ earlier work — the wish fulfillment of the disempowered middle school nerd stuffed into a locker, but rather the Mary Sue desire of a mature, white American writer/auteur who has discovered that an entire world is “out there,” one that the maker doesn’t know how to imagine...

In Sense8  you see them finally taking the training wheels off and attempting to originate their own simultaneous, diverse-culture-unifying fictions.

It’s a beautiful vision, if you believe in universality. Let’s assume for a moment that you do. It’s a deeply worthy, exciting, and — dare I say it? — moral ambition. And it half-succeeds; which means it also half-fails...

To put it plainly: Sense8 ’s depiction of life in non-western countries is built out of stereotypes, and of life in non-American western countries is suffused with tourist-board clichés. The protagonist in Nairobi is a poor man whose mother has AIDS and whose life is ruled by gangs; in Mumbai we have a woman in a STEM career marrying a man she doesn’t love and engaging in Bollywood dance numbers...  I believe, quite literally, that the filmmakers primarily learned about these other cultures through their films, and considered that enough...

Bottom line: yes, watch it. Binge it. Its failure is far more interesting than the success of almost anything else happening at this moment. And it’s truly one of the most diverse shows on TV right now."

http://thenerdsofcolor.org/2015/06/10/sense8-and-the-failure-of-global-imagination/

I sort of want to watch this, but only if I'm watching it with someone who wants to critique it as we go.

I really enjoyed reading this critique and it feels super generalizable. Most non-white characters on TV or in movies are written either very poorly and are used like colorful sprinkles on the cake that is the rest of the show, or they are written like white characters who just happen to have Nigerian or Korean or whatever features. These characters can be developed and interesting but they don't get to talk about their life experiences that a white character wouldn't have (unless it's going to teach the white characters some important lessons). This is what makes Shonda shows special.