What’s on TV?

“Hard N.O.C. Life” is back for its second episode!

Keith welcomes fellow NOCs Raymond Chow, Julie Kang, Shawn Smith, and Jason Sperber to preview the upcoming Fall television season.

Today’s show topics include:

• The Big Two are now competing on TV as Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (on ABC) takes on DC Comics’ Arrow (on The CW) for superhero show supremacy. What will the portrayals of characters such as SHIELD‘s Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen) and Arrow‘s Amanda Waller (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) mean for audiences looking for complex depictions of strong women of color?
• The Legend of Korra returns to Nickelodeon, and everyone is excited! But Is the animated Avatar universe an empowering racial allegory or an exploitative orientalist fantasy?
• The FOX network is debuting a couple of intriguing high-concept genre series with African American co-leads this fall in Sleepy Hollow and Almost Human. So what do these shows have to do with Alexis de Tocqueville and V.I.C.I. from Small Wonder?
• Finally, the Nerds compare and contrast nerd culture authenticity as depicted in The Big Bang Theory (on CBS) versus Community (on NBC).

Watch this space every Friday for new episodes of “Hard N.O.C. Life” and go to our YouTube channel to subscribe!