July 17, 2011

2020 –

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2020 - 

AJ & the Queen
The decade kicks off with a lovely, campy Vassar reference in this RuPaul-headed show.

Thanks, inexplicably, to Sean Dacey, for catching this. 

The Boys (2 episodes)
This dark satire of superhero movies/media and the culture around it, has a tv magazine update on one douchebaggy superhero, who fell out of favor and ended up getting sucked into a church that sounds quite a bit like Scientology. The church is helping him get back on his feet and has arranged a bride for him. She turns out to be quite the power behind the scenes and helps him back to prominence, and in a later scene, he wants to expand their relationship in a terrifying way.

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina
One of the late episodes in this coming-of-age supernatural show has the teenage witch running for school president, and considering her future plans.

Thanks to Lauren Goldberg '11 for this find.

 

Ordinary Joe
This probably to be short-lived NBC show takes you through three possible lives of our protagonist, one as a cop, one as a nurse, and one as a music star.  The wiseass little Vassar-as-sexually-libertine joke is as tired as everything else.


 

Work In Progress
This Showtime showcase for comedian Abby McEnany has an episode where she, a white woman, is tasked with writing her company’s “Black Lives Matter solidarity statement,” our exhausted protagonist journeys into her own mind, and visits with her college self listening to a police safety lecture.


Best Sellers
Aubrey Plaza is a young book publisher who is on a book tour with Michael Caine, a cantankerous old author in an effort to save her company. His drinking and dissolution finally gets the better of her. 


Godfather Buck
Some male bonding at a hunting lodge among brothers brings up Vassar, nothing much to see here.


Sex Lives of College Girls
Mindy Kaling's HBO Max show was shot at Vassar, though set at a fictional college, and follow four roommates from very different backgrounds as they adjust to college life. I've selected a few scenes from the first episode that are fairly representative for how the college is shown throughout the series; I included a few interiors though I'm fairly sure those are sets (though they do look like the college, so if they're sets they paid attention to the detail).


Minx (6 episodes)
The lead character of the HBO Max show about the first erotic magazine aimed at women in the 1970s is a graduate. In the second season, she travels to Vassar to accept an award and ask her former professor to write the foreword for her book, and the entire plotline is very Vassar-centric; the Night Owls appear (and sing! and since this is set in early 70s, let's agree to assume one of them is Meryl Streep), dorms are mentioned, and much else that rings true for the sexually liberated 70s. It wasn't shot at Vassar (though there is one stock establishing shot) but this is lots of fun.I've extracted the full 2nd-season plotline here into the second video.




Gossip Girl (2021) 
Some drama is happening using college applications for one character to get close to another.

Shrinking
The new streamer starring Harrison Ford and Jason Segal has Vassar in a not-uncommon list of good schools being looked at by a high school student.




Sharper
This is a slight spoiler so don't read much more if that would bother you. This is a slick, smart con-artist movie co-written by alum Alessandro Tanaka '96. In an early scene, our main character reveals herself to be lying when she tells a woman she went to Vassar -- she'd told her boyfriend in an earlier scene she's an NYU student. We come to learn she's conning him, and in a later scene we get a flashback to see her getting trained in her craft.


The Watchful Eye
A positive twist on the Vassar as sexually free trope, and timely for 2023.




The Night Agent
Popular streaming thriller of spies and counterspies, Vassar arises in an irrelevant aside as character backstory.

City on Fire
 Poorly reviewed streaming series, based on the 2015 novel of the same name and produced by the same team that did the original Gossip Girl. Our character Regan is noted in this scene as "just down from Vassar" but she's also married, divorced, has kids, and has the life of someone older than that description, so...it's confusing. Not too much here, but always nice to see John Cameron Mitchell. The novel also has her as a Vassar grad.


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