With "When We Rise," ABC gives viewers a noble if uneven portrait of the ongoing struggle for LGBT..

[DonViejo]

With “When We Rise,” ABC gives viewers a noble if uneven portrait of the ongoing struggle for LGBT rights

It's not a knockout, but ABC's serviceable miniseries bringing a vital part of history to the broadcast audience

MELANIE MCFARLAND

“When We Rise,” like most bold swings, is wide and inconsistent. But if there were ever a time for network television to answer legislative attacks on equality and human rights with a haymaker, it is now. Even if ABC’s eight-hour, four-night miniseries isn’t quite a knockout, its victory is in its very existence if not its execution.

“When We Rise” airs in two-hour installments on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday starting at 9 p.m. each night. Its message, conveyed through a patchwork of biographically inspired vignettes spanning from 1972 through 2013, rings with the piercing clarity of an alarm bell. Every generation is charged with confronting a conflict that tests its moral mettle, the main character points out as the first part begins. The necessity to fight for and defend our rights is perennial.

“When We Rise” was in progress long before Donald Trump was in a position to reverse protections on transgender students, as he did Wednesday via executive order, or threaten to roll back enforcements of LGBTQ rights in the workplace. That makes the miniseries’ scheduling less than a week after the former occurred a depressing coincidence, one that might just work in its favor.

Although the limited series has made a comeback (albeit redefined) on cable television, the true miniseries — that is, multi-episode one-shot stories with a definitive ending — fell out of favor on broadcast television years ago. Networks and studios get a better financial return on content that can generate aftermarket revenue.

With “When We Rise,” ABC is airing scripted content that serves the interest of the audience, something of an outdated concept these days among companies that broadcast on publicly owned airwaves. It’s tough to recall the last time a network carved out nearly a week’s worth of prime-time slots for a civics and history lesson.

more
http://www.salon.com/2017/02/26/with-when-we-rise-abc-gives-viewers-a-noble-if-uneven-portrait-of-the-ongoing-struggle-for-lgbt-rights/

--------------------------------------------

Cleve Jones on Harvey Milk, ‘When We Rise,’ and Fighting for LGBT Equality Under Trump

Cleve Jones saw his mentor Harvey Milk’s dead body, and has been a passionate activist for 40 years. Now mainstream stardom beckons thanks to ABC drama When We Rise.

TIM TEEMAN

02.22.17 1:10 AM ET

Cleve Jones still vividly recalls the moment on Nov. 27, 1978, when he saw his friend and mentor Harvey Milk’s dead body at San Francisco City Hall.

Jones had heard Mayor George Moscone had been shot, but didn’t know by whom, or much else, as he raced to city supervisor Milk’s office. Police crowded the corridors. The 48-year-old Milk—a pioneering and uncompromising LGBT and civil rights campaigner and now a beloved icon—and Moscone had been assassinated by former board supervisor Dan White.

That day still has such a nightmare, unreal quality to it for Jones that in his brilliant memoir, When We Rise: My Life in the Movement, these moments are conveyed in italics. “It became an ongoing, recurring nightmare for me,” he tells me. “The way I remember it has dream-like quality to it. I had never seen a dead person before, and I do remember quite directly and vividly that when the police officer removed him, his head rolled back.”

There was blood, bits of bone, brain tissue, and Milk’s head was a “hideous purple.” With Milk’s body lying there in his secondhand wingtip shoes, Jones and others listened to the now-famous tape he made 10 days prior to his death in anticipation of his assassination.

Milk—his voice sounding tired and reflective, probably after a long day—knew that somebody disturbed or upset by him might try to kill him (White was certainly both). He was high-profile, out, proud, and uncompromising. He beseeched, as he had in so many of his speeches, gay people to come out, which would “do more to end prejudice overnight than anyone could ever imagine… only that way will we start to achieve our rights.”

more
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/02/22/cleve-jones-on-harvey-milk-when-we-rise-and-fighting-for-lgbt-equality-under-trump.html