OMG Bad Sisters - the brother-in-law is so vile, it's so specific and so right on the edge of plausible-deniability where you just know that he's spent years building up the exact trigger-points for everyone he interacts with. It astounds me how much I want him dead.
In a different but also fun vein, I very much enjoyed the first episode of The Serpent Queen. I've read a lot about Catherine D'Medici and that time in French history and I just want to see Samantha Morton crush all her enemies.
Is this the Claes Bang character? I've really enjoyed his work in the handful of things I've seen.
I didn't know that there was show about CdM, and I'm super interested in that hypothetically; unfortunately, I can't watch Samantha Morton... good actress, but something about her face distresses and unnerves me too much. Bummer.
Re: the FLDS, I might have mentioned this before, but my husband did his early grad work based out of Jacob's Lake, right down the road from FLDS central in the 1990s and it permeated the culture. He said it was almost indescribably creepy...the small towns resembled a cross between Stepford Wives and a pedophilic cult. One of his field techs did manage to score one date with a young FLDS woman, though. Everyone assumed she was rebelling like a mo-fo.
Ooh, crazy.
The thing I'm enjoying about the series is that I've read all of these books written by women who left, but the show has a huge amount of interview footage with the men who left, who have very different insights.
Warren basically kicked out anyone who mattered when he took over. Literally every threat to his power was excommunicated. So this means there are tons of his siblings and fellow leaders in the community who can comment on how the sausage was made, so to speak.
I've always heard about Warren Jeff's rise to power from the women's perspective, and he was extremely powerful and domineering over them from the beginning. But the way the men tell it, Warren was a weasely little loser that none of them ever took seriously. he had power over the women because he ran the school, but he had no power over the men until his sweeping takeover, which is why he needed to kick them all out.
The show is also helping me understand the economics of it all better. Again, the perspective of the women didn't really give insight into the business side because they weren't involved in it, but the excommunicated men were the people running the businesses.
I didn't realize that they used the boys as free labour, and that's why they were able to build such massive construction businesses because they could undercut all competitors prices and still have massive profits. They pull the boys out of school, work them to the bone as literal children, and then kick them out when they get old enough to be sniffing around the girls.
The girls are having babies starting at 15, so the supply of free labour is never ending, and overhead stays freakishly low.
I finally get it how they're worth 9 figures despite being a total clusterfuck mess of an organization.
