The Paralympic Games start in Paris, and Netflix's Worst Ex Ever

I have to say I've seen plenty of Olympics and Paralympics new Cycles over the years but Paris 2024 is just so good at creating genuinely magical moments the Paralympics just kicked off yesterday today on the podcast how Paris is creating absolute [Music] spectacles I'm alamin Abdul Mahmood this is commotion okay so as of yesterday the par Olympic games are underway in Paris I hope you caught the opening ceremonies they were so beautiful and sweeping they took place yesterday at a bunch of iconic venues in the city you had folks like Chile Gonzalez on the piano and then just a sea of dancers in red white and blue 140 dancers representing the conformists are confronted with 16 performers with disabilities known as the creative gang different approaches to life the theme is one of Paradox what we'll see play out as the two groups interact is societal behavior and ultimately a trend towards inclusivity Will emerge the men in charge of creating the opening ceremonies name is Thomas Jolie he said that he had designed them to challenge and reshape society's perceptions of people with disabilities that is a big goal that's a big ask of any opening ceremony to do John lepy is here to talk about how the opening ceremon is measured up and his hopes for the rest of those games John's is John is a former par athlete as well as a theater artist and journalist he's in Saskatoon John good morning good morning thanks for being here friend listen I want to start off by asking you maybe what was the highlight for you watching those Opening Ceremonies yeah I think two highlights for me if I may pick two you mentioned the art I worked in disability art and culture before this so huge fan of the art and this has been a theme all the way through there was some uh some hand dance sort of style projects earlier on in in the cycle before we even got to Paris um my favorite part of the opening ceremony is a a former par aete who now applies his trade as a journalist is definitely just seeing the breadth of the par Olympic movement I love when you see a uh a delegation come in and they say there's one athlete and this is the first time that this that this country is here and then the the willingness of the Paro Olympic movement the continued willingness to talk about barriers in particular countries for disable folks cuz it can be really easy to Think Through the Paro Olympics and the context of the country that we live in and certainly there are barriers here but looking at you know even something as simple as the equipment that folks are rolling walking and and otherwise ambulating in on um and seeing the disparities there um was one of the more interesting parts of the opening ceremony to me I'm glad you brought that up because you know you look at um the size of for example Canada's delegation about 125 25 athletes and Canada will be walking you know and then you'll see U suddenly um a country that as you said it's a country that has one athlete and one you'll be surprised some people will be surprised by the size of of of of the delegation being sent but then you get that additional factor of actually like no it's actually more significant than that this is the first time that this country has appeared um at the par Olympics uh I would say my favorite part of the the the opening ceremonies were just like all these sort of sweeping dance numbers I think like uh the one the one dancer African dancer musama Matha um that just like this large sweeping orchestrated um orchestrated dance that included some folks with crutches some folks with wheelchairs and and and and a lot of just very rapid movement that I was like my eyes don't even know what to focus on because was like this like giant elaborate display okay the state of goal of these ceremonies was to challenge our perceptions of people disabilities what do you think did they land the mission in watching that opening ceremony I think so I mean I think it's always you know a pebble thrown into an ocean in a way and you just hope that the Pebbles Mount up um but I certainly think you know you mentioned the sweeping movement certainly one where one of the dancers in chairs is being spun around um while standing like these moments really do challenge what uh you know disabled bodies can do um and and look like and be um and so I I think it certainly Sparks conversation not just in the Sporting Community but also in the arts and culture Community when you get to see disability art and culture put on display like that mhm okay I want to go to another moment of the opening ceremonies let's just play this real quick that moment you just got a sense of the Paradox that they're trying to show you could see the dancers around the the dancer in a wheelchair almost patting on the head saying oh good for you you're doing so good there dancing with the wheelchair when he's just saying look this is just who I am this is how I move a lot of paralympic athletes are used as inspiration and they have such inspiring stories and yes well that's true they're fierce competitors John that word comes up a lot in the par Olympics uh I think it comes up a lot in the Olympics in general but it comes up a little bit more um in the par Olympics you have that you have a complicated relationship with the word inspiring why are you what's what's the weariness um with the word yeah so there's this term that we use sometimes called inspiration porn it was coined by Australian artist still young and and the point is that often times the inspo people are it if it was if people were being inspiring for the fact that they are Elite athletes in the same way that just picking a basketball player that was at the Olympics LeBron is um inspiring or Jamal Murray is inspiring to the basketball players of of Canada you know that's one thing but it's when the inspo turns into oh these athletes are so inspiring because they got out of bed or they're so inspiring because they you know another key phrase they overcame these barriers and um you know it's sometimes when we talk about inspiration in the context of disability it can it can feel like we're talking about some kind of transcendent moment um when really we're talking about athletes you know being Elite at their Sport and that's not to say that they don't have barriers to get there and those stories are interesting um but when they dominate then we lose what is happening with the actual Athletics a lot of the time I was going to say John you have like a particularly unique perspective on this because you're a par athlete but also you're now a journalist and so there's this world where when you were an athlete how did you want journalists so the the thing that you do now how did you want people to sort of write and talk about the work that you did as a par athlete yeah so for context I got to go to two Canada games in wheelchair basketball I always jok that I got to go to a bunch of cool stuff but never anything super important um and I don't know if my athletic accomplishments were considered inspirational I think I made them look very very difficult in number of ways um you know I I wasn't the top player but I played with some people who are at the games now yeah what I will say is that you you know when you get to conversations about inspiring I didn't mind being called inspired inspiring by other disabled folks because I knew where that was coming from that's like I want to come to this level and these are the words that I have for it as opposed to you know somebody walking down the street going oh that's nice right that head padding the what we often and I have gotten this plenty of times the sort of random people coming up to you in the street and saying um you know if I had the experiences that you would I wouldn't be able to get out of bed go well that's a topic for a therapist some kind of mental health professional not a random wheelchair user in the street okay so based on that I want to talk a little bit about you know where the Paralympics just started you've got you know um a couple weeks of people watching the par Olympics how would you like journalists and people who cover the paral Olympics to talk about the games as they watch them I'd like folks to talk about the games as as an Elite Sporting environment and then figure out how disability intersects with that so for example you know we've seen pieces including from CBC Sports about classification that's um the the events that people are in the categories uh some folks compare them to weight classes in a way so that people the the idea and the ideal is that athletes um you know are are in their divisions with people with a same amount of disability same amount of the word they often use as empowerment you know classification is a really interesting topic that we need to talk about then how can we it's a funny word to use in this context but how can we integrate that into coverage how can we think about what the local context is of disabled athletes when they're here at home how can we get beyond the so and so is a par Olympian because they are really good at the sport um but we lead with was in the car Crouch or or whatever I want us to think about the sporting accomplishment first not that the disability can't come in it's going to naturally um and then from a purely sort of technical perspective actually asking the athlete something like do you prefer person first or identity first language you know do you see yourself within the broader Disability Rights Movement if that's where an interview goes really like we see with the Olympics connecting social change to sport because that's the state of goal of the Paralympics I should clarify for people uh the idea of person first or or or ability first like the idea of like a person with disabilities versus disabled person different people have different preferences when it comes to that uh joh I want to give you maybe just like last 30 seconds to tell us three sports that you're like these are the sports you got to watch um for accomplishment sure yeah so um the the three sports that I would pick out wheelchair rugby Canadian Heritage sport created in Manitoba in the 1970s we love a homegrown product nice um and then I love looking at the sports that don't necessarily have a really easy comparison to uh Olympic sports or stand-up sports or non-disabled Sports Able Body Sports whatever term we want to use um those would be bota and gold ball love seeing those Sports Canada dominating France this morning in the gold ball uh John I'm GNA sit with the the idea the poverty of language we don't really have a very broad variety of language to talk about uh the Paralympics and I'm going to sit a little bit with that but I really appreciate your time thank you for being here this has been a delight thank you so much thank you for having me yes of course John lepy is a former para aete and current journalist living in Saskatoon you can catch the par Olympic Games Live on CBC gem until September 8th you can also check out the BBC's dedicated Paris 2024 [Music] [Music] website I'm Alam ABD Mahmud this is commotion okay I want to talk about this new Netflix show it just hit the platform yesterday it is called worst X ever it's this followup to the True Crime U series worst roommate ever why don't I play you a bit of the trailer first actually I made it clear to him that it's it's over between us I thought that was it he obviously do not know how to take no for an answer she do whatever she could and get whatever she wanted he grabs me by the hair pulls me down to the ground and I am just thinking that this is probably going to be the day that I die that is worst X ever streaming now on Netflix Allison Herman and Nik Stratus are here with their thoughts on it and what we might be losing in this shall we say fast food era of the True Crime format Nico Allison welcome to the show thanks so much for me hello listen Allison I'm gonna start with you first we got worst roommate ever now you get worst X ever I think if you just hear the title a part of you goes oh like this is like a cheeky sort of reality show this is not that at all this is a true crime docky series through and through what is the premise of the show I feel like the best way I can describe it is that it's essentially an anthology series about domestic violence um sort of unlike when you're talking about a roommate which is a more flexible kind of situation when you're talking about an ex partner who has you know that relationship has gone wrong in some way you're inherently talking about intimate partner violence which is an incredibly serious issue but instead of getting more of an extended meditation we just get these bite-sized hourong here's a crazy thing that happened and then you move on to the next one immediately and there's no follow through or followup throughout these four episodes okay as we continue this conversation I want people to hold on to that idea of here's a crazy thing that happen because I think that's a very useful framing device for a lot of these documentaries I'm going to come back to that in a moment but Me Maybe Nico you can give us a little bit more of the sense of like okay so Allison just mentioned it's an anthology series four completely different true crime stories told in four separ episodes give us a sense of the type of Stories being told in the show yeah I mean as Allison said you know like these are all stories about intimate partner violence um you know uh the first the the episode that leads it off the first episode is you know an abuser who uh moves through multiple relationships abusing women in every relationship that he's in um there's a case of someone you know lying about their identity there is you know uh we see a male as a vitim of intimate partner violence which is uncommon in these sort of Anthology serieses and was was at least interesting to see that that was presented as because this is a real you know situation that happens and you know it's a lot of this sort of thing right like these stories that we almost come to expect with this kind of series is that sort of intimate partner violence between you know married couples or or you know people that have been dating or that are intertwined their lives in some way Alison there is a there's a certain I think stylistic approach the certain markers that we're used to seeing with a lot of these sort of docy crime shows like there's like the the darks sort of Moody lighting there's like the stone of the background music you know uh use of the animation of actors who reenact certain incidents when you think about the show how did you feel about the tone and style of a show like worst X ever it frankly felt a little sensationalistic um again the focus is very much on the extremity of the stories and not on the context um you don't learn anything about or you don't learn much in most cases about the sort of life stories that created the circumstances that led to these instances of violence you don't really get much in the way of what happened to the victims after this period of their lives it's kind of handwaved and then within the storytelling themselves you get these sort of head turning uh uses of animation for reenactment which it suddenly feels like you're in like an adult swim show instead of you know a story about people's lives some episodes incorporate body cam footage from actual police officers who are conducting their work um it's a sort of weird hodge podge of styles that don't seem to add up to something that treats the subject with the gravity it really deserves okay so I'm going to talk about the genre and the way that these sort of docy crime series have been organizing a lot of what we've seen lately but maybe Nico I think like one more word on worst X ever specifically which is there's been all this criticism that the True Crime shows that we've seen that have come out like lately um they do a lot to humanize a villain sometimes at the expense of taking Humanity away from the victim how do you feel worst X ever sort of fits in on that Spectrum I mean you know sort of like again echoing what Allison said about it you know it's very sensationalized and it's very like I understand that in order to do shows like these you need a hook and in order to have a hook you need to have a a a compelling person uh and unfortunately like even you know like I catch myself saying villain and it almost lets it off the hook because same villain sort of makes it feel like we're watching a Disney movie right and like these are abusers these are abusive people that are that have insinuated themselves into people's lives uh and you know like those people they are treated you know very compelling when I look at people's reaction to this all of them are looking up you know these abusive people to see what happened to them and where did they go and it's like I think we're losing something there in that you know there are very real victims here some of them are still alive and some of them are not um that are sort of only portrayed as victims whether that's through you know the talking head segments or whether we sometimes see them in the body cam footage which is really jarring when it's right next to pretty poorly done animation where it's just like you know we're moving through these Styles and you know it just sort of feels like they're just the victims and they're just there to move the story forward the story being about these abusive people the quote unquote worst X ever and like it's the here's a crazy thing that happened and you know like we're sort of the thread tying it all through together is these compelling Abus mhm Alison my anxiety is this as we sort of see the sort of this giant influx of these shows and they keep coming out you know and they come out so fast it's kind of like hard to even keep up with all of them I think we all know like the Best in Class like to me like the Jinx the HBO a jinx is like some of the you know is like the best in class when it comes to these things um but then there's a lot of uh shows that are really quickly turned around and when you watch the ones that are relatively quickly turned around my anxiety is this my anxiety is that these shows are using all the Hallmarks of a genre that we know and love and have and have like a an authority relationship to which is the genre of documentary in order to do the thing that you said earlier which is just say here's a thing that happened and no documentary has ever been here's a thing that happened the but the thing that makes a documentary a documentary is that we take the thing and then we push it further and say and that's what it says about us that's what it says about right now I I worry about the risk Allison of like when you we're turning around all these documentaries so quickly that we end up losing the the thing that makes a documentary a documentary which is to say it says something about us and instead instead just being instead becomes the thing that you said which is here's a thing that happened isn't that something I think that's a totally reasonable concern I mean to your point about speed the first episode The Assault that is used as sort of the inciting incident happened in January of 2023 which means this was turned around in like essentially 18 months which is mind-bogglingly fast in the world of documentaries especially if they're juggling with these other cases and in terms of the larger importance you get these kind of half-hearted stings that are like here's a domestic violence hotline like if you need help which doesn't really feel like it's the main thrust and I think you can get a rewarding contrast from putting this in conversation with something like like last year HBO made a really remarkable docu series called last call that was about a serial killer who was targeting gay men in the New York City area and it placed it in the context of you know AIDS panic and the nypd's failures when it comes to queer victims of crime and I think you know when you're watching worst sex ever there are multiple stories including really egregious miscarriages of Justice false imprisonment arresting the as instead of the as salent and it's kind of almost casual it's like oh this anomalous thing that happened that made the story more exciting or more frustrating but it's never expanded to the greater level of like how does law enforcement treat victims of domestic violence which is the true bre here and I felt that vacuum really acutely Nico before we started rolling you were saying um that this show give you heart palpitations I can only assume that's because it was degrading the quality of the documentary and you like I can't stand by this anymore that's is that what happened I mean to a degree sure and also look like like a lot of people I have called the police uh after an incident of of violence and how them not believe me like this is a very real thing and you see that right away right like Allison was saying there's no real critical analysis of like why is there a systemic failure on the side of law enforcement and and and you know the legal system to protect these victims and to you know improve these situations we don't really dive into that there's like this weird jack opposition between a show that shows you how calling hotlines fail and then giving you a number for a hotline like well the show that this is in front of you know tells me that often times like I may or may not be believed at all if I go to somebody with this information it's like so there's that there's that dissonance right I'm like this is an entertainment product about real people's lives and like you know the first episode you know there's body cam footage of very real violence that I was not prepared for and immediately I had to stop watching it and sort of like take a little walk and be like okay I'm ready to watch this again cuz I was not prepared prepared for that reality of something like Allison said you know from last year like very recent story that has been like turned around and turned into content and like you know at what point is there diminishing returns on how quickly we're turning around these people's stories I think that's I think that is that is a lot there and a lot to sit with all maybe Alison last word to you here American murder Lacy Peterson has now been number one on Netflix for a bunch of days so it's safe to say like this is kind of what people want this is the thing that people are turning into and these sort of crime dock shows are not going to go anywhere that said do you feel like there's maybe room for a healthier compromise between treating this as entertainment but also injecting a higher level of maybe journalistic Integrity with these shows do you feel like that's possible at all yeah I mean you praised the Jinx earlier which I found really interesting including the second part released this year I talked about last call I was actually just thinking about kind of a forgotten um Netflix Drew crime series the keepers which is about nuns in Maryland and is very much about the Catholic church and the Catholic Church's patriarchy and the sexual abuse that ran rampant in that institution and was really thoughtful and very considerate of the victims and the larger social context of the crime so I just think you know to your point earlier like true documentary journalism is intense and difficult and takes a long time and so I think just by definition when a Rose is popular you're always going to have the good version and then you're going to have a lot of the like cheap quick cash in version and that seems inevitable but it doesn't mean that it's not possible to execute it in a worthwhile way uh Nico maybe I'll give you the the opportunity to sort of land This Plane here how do you sort of compromise between the fact that like yes these are entertainment products but also that we they should have more journalistic rigor in their execution I mean we have you we've we've said multiple examples over the course of like chanting about this but like there is instances of doing these shows in a way where you're actually like you have a stated point of view beyond the entertainment beyond the like wanting it to be like a viral sensation or whatever like we can actually use these to have a conversation about these systemic issues but that requires a bit of journalistic Integrity that doesn't always feel like it's there more than that it is like a sensational thing to get a headline for a week and a half so like it's finding that ability to tell these stories with a little bit more intent and desire to you know actually like have a conversation about something very real and present and Urgent for a lot of people I think that the one example that comes to mind from Netflix that I can think of is what was it how to catch a murder I can't remember what it was called but it was the docu series about how basically police uh very quickly framed this one person and it became about the justice system and a larger indictment of the justice system and I thought this is sort of how you make you know these these documentaries in order to get us to think a little bit differently about how we've organized these systems Nico Alison I got to leave it there but I really appreciate your time thank you so much for being here thanks so much for having us of course Nico Stratus is a culture critic who writes the newsletter anxiety shark Allison Herman is a TV critic at variety you can catch if you must worst X ever streaming right now on Netflix my name is Alam ABD Mahmud this show is called commotion and we'll be back tomorrow I'll see you then