Hacker Cinema
Queer as Folk
1999 · TV series · 32 min episodes · 2 seasons
Created by Russell T Davies
Stuart Jones has got it all. He's rich, drop-dead gorgeous and always the centre of attention. He can be forgiven the arrogance because he's pretty close to perfection. His best mate Vince Tyler is funny, adorable and definitely a babe but, unlike his friend, has zero confidence in himself. Since time began, Vince has carried a torch for Stuart but his love remains firmly unrequited. They're both 29, hitting Canal Street every night, stalwarts of the scene but just starting to wonder where else their lives may be going. Then along comes Nathan Maloney. Young, wild and coming out with a vengeance, he crowbars his way into their world and once he arrives, nothing is ever the same again.
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2 comments on Hacker News
It was created specifically under Thatcher to serve otherwise under-served audiences, and that inevitably means it's controversial, because if what it showed was not controversial it'd be on one of the channels all those well-served audiences are watching.
It's most reasonably criticised for making too "easy" controversial choices, not really challenging for an audience, not really telling anybody anything they didn't know, just going for outrage - something like let's show people having sexual intercourse on TV but with medics explaining what's going on, rather than satire like Brass Eye that demands a bit more of the audience.
So for example Queer As Folk, now considered a pretty tame TV series (and indeed since rebooted for a wider audience) about young gay characters in Manchester was sufficiently controversial when Channel 4 first aired it that right wing newspapers of course insisted it should be banned. Arguably this was "too safe" but on the other hand it's not as though other broadcasters were doing this at the time.
"Let us summarize what our algorithm achieves. Given a user's /public/ IMDb ratings, which the user posted voluntarily to reveal /some/ of his (or her; but we'll use the male pronoun without loss of generality) movie likes and dislikes, we discover /all/ ratings that he entered /privately/ into the Netflix system" (em. orig.)
One's "political orientation maybe revealed by his strong opinions about "Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times" and "Fahrenheit 9/11," and his religious views by ratings on "Jesus of Nazareth" and "The Gospel of John." Even though one should not make inferences solely from someone's movie preferences, in many workplaces and social settings opinions about movies with predominantly gay themes such as "Bent" and "Queer as folk" (both present and rated in [one individual's] Netflix record) would be considered sensitive"