You might have thought Netflix showcased the greatest miscarriage of justice in American history with the screening of Making A Murderer, but it appears the tv network is about to go a whole level deeper into the world of psychological entertainment with a documentary called Audrie & Daisy. The film tells the story of two teenage girls who were sexually assaulted and depicts the intense emotional trauma they receive from public shaming in the aftermath of their attacks.

In hindsight I feel this film should come with a viewer warning, as it peels back the paper thin layers of a sensitive fifteen year old girl, Audrie Pott, who hangs herself without leaving a note, and before your tears dry it travels through every fibre of your body as it retells the story of Daisy Coleman, who at the age of fourteen was raped and left for dead by senior high school students.

Prepare to be emotionally outraged, you are about to relive a young girls last breath, to shoulder the cross of blame culture in America, this film will make you question your faith, if you have a teenage daughter you will crumble in fear for her safety. 

The documentary is such a compelling watch it will have you stomping the dust at your feet like a bull in a rodeo, it will prod you into an intense fury before leaving you helpless and at an absolute loss as to why the law doesn’t protect minors from rape the way it should.

It will leave you wanting to reach out to the victims of cyber bullying and suicide. Screenshots of social media messages such as “Kiss my closing eyes, help me sleep” express the anguish and suffering these young girls endured, messages which will break your heart.  

There are many lessons to be learned from this film, such as young girls like to gossip, that you should never drink from the bitch cup, and that all victims of rape need to be heard. They need to be heard and supported. Their voice needs to be so loud that men, be they adolescent or otherwise, know that there is no excuse for attacking, abusing, or shaming women. Their voice needs to be carried by all those who want their daughters to feel safer than Liam Neeson’s first child.

“We can’t ignore an army of voices, the words of our enemies aren’t as awful as the silence of our friends” Daisy Coleman
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Illustration by Jesse Lenz

Ch4’s decision to develop a sitcom about the Irish Famine is the most distasteful and unimaginable insult to the Irish people since the death of Bobby Sands.

Famine historian and author Tim Pat Coogan is less than enthusiastic about the prospect of such a series being released.

“It does seem an unsavoury thing, with such agony, and it being such a horrendous thing that still has a bad effect on relationships between Ireland and England,” said the multi-award winning historian.

“You really would have to be talking about making jokes about Belsen and Auschwitz and the gas chambers to make it an equivocal thing in our lifetime.”

“Murder, genocide, people dying, retching with their faces green from eating weeds, their bowels hanging out of them- no passage of time will make that funny,” said Mr Coogan.

The Irish famine has been described as the greatest demographic catastrophe of 19th-century Europe. More than a million people died in the Famine, and 1.5 million fled; by 1901 Ireland’s population had dropped from 8.2 million to 4.5 million.

Set to be titled Hungry, the series remains in writing stage.


(Pic below : Burying the Child, by Lilian Davidson)

In recent years shows like ‘The Sopranos’ and ‘Breaking Bad’ have caught our attention with gripping story lines which voyeuristically depict the darker side of human nature, all set in a modern urban landscape. We have been fascinated by the protagonists in these shows, wondering how they will continue to evade the law and avoid the gruesome death which seems inevitable given the environment they live in. Stories with criminal leads are not a new phenomenon, many films like ‘Scarface’, ‘Pulp Fiction’, ‘Trainspotting’, ‘City of God’ and ‘American Gangster’ have all represented socially corrupt individuals whose escapades capture our allegiance to the end. But it’s not just gangsters with guns we are seduced by. One of the most lauded movies in recent times was ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’, a story about one man’s rollercoaster journey of hedonism at the cost of society and with little regard for the law. The film features a smart talking stock broker who teaches his employees how to take advantage of people’s desires and embezzle their savings for the broker’s gain. The movie’s lead, Leonardo Di Caprio later commented ‘to me, this attitude of what these characters represent in this film are ultimately everything that's wrong with the world we live in’.

Surely if we were to stand over our own ethical principles we should detest these villains, but the problem is that the characters lives are glamorised, their decadence is always the center of focus with total disregard for the impact their actions have on others, very similar to a blockbuster disaster movie like Transformers not considering how society is possibly going to repair an entire city after a late night robot scuffle. In effect cinema and copy cat tv programmes no longer offer themselves as a platform to educate and have been consumed by their prime purpose to entertain.

The end result is that society has been desensitised to criminal behaviour, we’re no longer outraged by white collar crime, murder, political corruption or drug trafficking. Newspapers have resorted to publishing stories about Justin Bieber, x-factor gossip, and celebrity tweets to maintain readership.

What’s more upsetting than society losing its moral compass is that these programmes closely associate drugs and drug use with power, wealth, sex, success, and a general easy path to the high life (pun intended). Although we may laugh at the use of quaaludes and accept Tony Montana quantities of cocaine abuse as standard movie practice, I think it’s time we start asking ourselves questions when heroin abuse suddenly becomes common place entertainment, especially in shows like ‘The Sopranos’ and ‘Breaking Bad’. If we are going to hold these programmes on a pedestal as the greatest shows on television perhaps we need to understand what they actually represent and re-evaluate our own ethical mindset. The following videos all depict heroin use in some of the movies & programmes mentioned and the final video is a very clever explanation of exactly what heroin addiction is. This isn't a post that intends to advocate censorship but hopes to raise awareness that if the only education we get on drugs is from the entertainment industry then we are going to learn the wrong message.