Steele Obsessed With You: Remington Steele Re-watch (Episode 1)

We are two steele-hearted females from the American Midwest ... Miranda and Bad Wolf, 80's & 90's kids respectively ... collaborating to honor our most sacred and "ancient" common ground. Here's to making the relic of Remington Steele REAL again to another generation (or just like five potential readers).

Season 1: Episode 1. License to Steele 

(see here for summary)

No one in this first episode is who they seem to be. Everyone is pretending  to be (and/or being mistaken for) someone they're not.

This ambitious dedication to different versions of the long-con ultimately brings international man of mystery Richard Blaine/Remington Steele (Pierce Brosnan) and detective Laura Holt (Stephanie Zimbalist) together in a common quest to maintain public image status-quo; while they secretly indulge in their mutual addiction to excitement and deception.

Also, we learn that sexism is as ugly as the 80's day-player characters who thrive on it.

Feminism Rating: Episode 1

                                        Feminist Points Awarded: 5/5                                           

Laura as the backseat driver. Brilliant visual metaphor. 

1. In an episode with murder and international crime and rampant deception from all sides, it is sexism and that annoying "good-old-boy" mindset which receive the blackest ethical marks. 

2. In a merciless fashion, this episode sets up Laura Holt's central (feminist) problem: that she is a genius entrepreneurial private eye going completely unrecognized and unsought-after just because she is a woman. Unrecognized, that is, until she creates a fake, perfect boss called Remington Steele. Then her cases come rolling in. What she doesn't expect is having to deal with a real life person "impersonating" the perfect Mr. Steele . . . an imposter that gets (and will continue to get) all the credit and glory (while she does most of the work). Note: this first episode paints such a frustrating picture of Laura's situation that we found it a hard re-watch. 

3. This show did "socially conscious female detective" way, way before Veronica Mars. Even from this first episode, it manages to mix the wit and wisdom of fast-talking dames from the screwball era, the noir tropes of Raymond Chandler & and his ilk, AND the "new" awareness of women's struggles in the workplace. We'll talk a lot about HOW the show does all this in future episode posts.

Fashion Flashback

Laura won in this episode, fashion-wise. Nobody else could hold a candle to her style, especially when she was wearing the red-number at the car-unveiling/Remington Steele unmasking party.

Sorry for the blurriness, but this is one of the only full-length moments we get of this fabulous, gravity-defying (how DOES Laura's chest stay up?) dress. 

Also, this smart, Lauren Bacall-reminiscent suit from the beginning of the episode:

Ok, Ok. There was this, too. 

Relics! 

Steele/Pearson's car. The blue Mercedes.

We don't think it shows up again after this episode (it was probably stolen anyway), but we love it. Not as much as LATER cars that we will document ad nauseum, but a fine beginning nonetheless. [Miranda: My SUV is jealous anyway. . . ]

Also, a makeshift developing room. How quaint.

Classic movie reference of the week: 

Wittiest Response

Corporate ass to Remington: I thought you'd be older . . .

Remington: Oh, I can age on demand.

Relationship Road 

Ok, so if you've seen this show, you know that it's about feminism, neo-noir, throwback 1930's comedy, and the will-they-won't-they/power struggle-oriented relationship between Remington and Laura.

And this was really a "set-up" episode in every sense of the word. Laura and Remington's future struggles were accurately foreshadowed in a couple of lines like this one:

And this one directed at poor, brotherly Murphy:

Yay for a constant barrage of double entendres! Also, for a pilot episode, the dialogue is first class.

Final Questions

"Is it just me, or were people uglier in the 80's? Or maybe it was just a nationwide Burt Reynolds hangover."
~Miranda

"What the heck is a Magnum?"
~Bad Wolf

Exotica: Chinese symphonic fixations

The worst thing about this rather addicting orchestral adaptation of a pop song . . . is that I have yet to find it available in an MP3 download. I could just rip it off of YouTube, but, I'd feel bad, considering everything YouTube has done for me. I need to find more fabulous stuff like this. I've always loved culturally specific orchestral styles. (Let's be honest, I should probably call my obsession with marrying of Eastern and Western symphonic styles what it is . . . Exotica made palatable.)

One Night in Beijing. Performed by the Central Conservatory Orchestra. 

My favorite kind of London, Part I

British Television probably first got to me as a six or seven-year-old, watching Jeremy Brenner's Sherlock Holmes declaim and diction and opiate his way through each mystery.

But as much as I loved the show . . . as much as certain episodes haunted me, like Copper Beeches with its creepy house and red hair fetishization (Doyle's Red Headed League features this strange fascination as well), or The Hound of the Baskervilles with its Gothic moor motifs (I'm a sucker for things Gothic and moor-based, and my guess is that a lot of other people are as well, considering that this is the one story which almost no incarnation of Sherlock has been able to screw up) . . . there was one unwavering bit of awesomeness in the series that no single episode could top:

The intro theme (composed by Anthony Gower)

That virtuosic, haunting, darkly humorous, and supremely poignant violin piece that began every episode. And not only was the music perfect, but the sepia-toned bustle of Baker's Street, the waifish Irregulars, the mud under the carriage wheels, and the smooth camera pullback to the perfect profile of Brett's Sherlock Holmes in the window--as the Observer Extraordinaire--all of it perfectly captured the side of London I love the best. Whether this side of London--the foggy, curious, imperialistic, dominating, adventurous, and "scientific" bastard of the 19th century--appeals to me primarily because of early exposure to this telly marketing . . . or because of some combination of other factors and inborn tastes, I will never know. I can't peel back those layers of causality now. All I can say is, that while the rest of my female friends read and re-read Austen, and while my literature teacher mother was pouring over Shelley and Keats and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, I was more likely to be found reading Verne or Conan-Doyle.

Sure, Austen and the great poets were, well, great, too. But, let's face it, if you had to brave the mud and the manners of London of the 19th century, it was better to be a man. And if you won the lottery and got to be an educated white man, it was best to be the fabled detective of Baker's Street.