I Like to Watch
Page 1
Copyright © 2019 by Emily Nussbaum
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Most of the essays in this work were originally published, in slightly different form, in New York and The New Yorker.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, for their permission to reprint an excerpt from “The Elder Sister” from The Dead and the Living by Sharon Olds, copyright © 1975, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983 by Sharon Olds. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Nussbaum, Emily, author.
Title: I like to watch : arguing my way through the TV revolution / Emily
Nussbaum.
Description: New York : Random House, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018055067| ISBN 9780525508960 (Hardback) | ISBN 9780525508977 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Television series—United States—History and criticism. | Nussbaum, Emily
Classification: LCC PN1992.8.S4 N87 2019 | DDC 791.45/750973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018055067
Ebook ISBN 9780525508977
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Caroline Cunningham, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Anna Kochman
v5.4
ep
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Author’s Note
The Big Picture: How Buffy the Vampire Slayer Turned Me into a TV Critic
The Long Con: The Sopranos
The Great Divide: Norman Lear, Archie Bunker, and the Rise of the Bad Fan
Difficult Women: How Sex and the City Lost Its Good Name
Cool Story, Bro: The Shallow Deep Talk of True Detective
Last Girl in Larchmont: The Legacy of Joan Rivers
Girls Girls Girls
Hannah Barbaric: Girls and Enlightened
Big Gulp: Vanderpump Rules
Shark Week: House of Cards and Scandal
The Little Tramp: Inside Amy Schumer
Hello, Gorgeous: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
Candy Girl: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
Confessions of the Human Shield
How Jokes Won the Election: How Do You Fight an Enemy Who’s Just Kidding?
Breaking the Box
Love, Actually: Jane the Virgin
Return of the Repressed: The Comeback
Shedding Her Skin: The Good Wife
Castles in the Air: Adventure Time
Depression Modern: The Leftovers
Swing States: The Middle
Smoke and Mirrors: High Maintenance
What Tina Fey Would Do for a SoyJoy: The Trouble with Product Integration
In Living Color: With Black-ish, Kenya Barris Rethinks the Family Sitcom
In Praise of Sex and Violence
To Serve Man: Hannibal
Trauma Queen: Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
Graphic, Novel: Marvel’s Jessica Jones
L.A. Confidential: Behind the Candelabra
What About Bob?: The Jinx
The Americans Is Too Bleak and That’s Why It’s Great
Riot Girl: Jenji Kohan’s Hot Provocations
A Disappointed Fan Is Still a Fan: Lost
Mr. Big: How Ryan Murphy Became the Most Powerful Man on TV
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Author
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a book celebrating television, but it’s not a Top 10 list—or a Top 20 list, or any other kind of rating system. In other words, it’s not a book about my favorite shows. (If it were, it would surely include an essay on Slings and Arrows.) I like some of these shows, I love others, and a few are not my cup of tea. These reviews are simply the ones that I thought held up the best as criticism—and also, the ones that most effectively made my argument about TV.
THE BIG PICTURE
How Buffy the Vampire Slayer Turned Me Into a TV Critic
What happens when your side wins the fight, the drunken cultural brawl that you’ve been caught up in for nearly two decades? And then the rules change, midway through? That’s the crisis that I’m currently facing, when it comes to the beauty and power—and lately, even the definition—of television as an art form.
When I first began watching television, there didn’t seem to be much to argue about. Like many children of the seventies, I grew up sitting cross-legged in front of a big console in the living room, singing along to The Electric Company while my mom made Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. I dug Taxi, I loved M*A*S*H. In my teens, I memorized Monty Python sketches with my friend Maria. But I also regarded TV the way that Americans had been taught to, since the 1950s. Television was junk. It wasn’t worthy of deep thought, the way that books or movies might be. It was something that you enjoyed, then forgot about. It wasn’t until my thirties that I had what amounted to a soul-shaking conversion, on the night that I watched Sunnydale High School principal Bob Flutie die, torn to bits by hyenas.
At the time, in the spring of 1997, I was a literature doctoral student at NYU, foggily planning on becoming a professor, maybe a Victorianist, but anyway, somebody who read for a living. Every morning, I woke up, flopped onto the sofa, and opened up yet another 900-pager. Across the room was an old-fashioned console TV, a dinosaur even for the era, with a broken remote control, so in order to watch my first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I had to physically walk across the room, then click the circular dial over to Channel 11, The WB, a brand-new “netlet,” and then walk all the way back to the sofa.
Walking across the room to change the channel was still a normal thing to do, in 1997. It had been nearly sixty years since the first television (spookily nicknamed the Phantom Teleceiver) launched at the 1939 World’s Fair, and yet the medium was—with a few advances, like the addition of color and the still-tentative expansion of cable—not that different from what it had been in the 1950s, when families gathered to watch Milton Berle. Shows aired once a week. They were broken up by ads. When the ads were on, you peed. When they ended, someone in the other room would yell, “You’re missing it!” and you’d run back in. If you loved a particular show, you had to consult the elaborate grids in the print newspaper or in TV Guide to know when to watch: “ALF (CC)—Comedy. ALF is upstaged by a loveable dog that followed Brian home, so he gives the pooch away to a crotchety woman (Anne Ramsey).”
The main thing, though, was that television went away. It was a disposable product, like a Dixie Cup. Although scripted television hadn’t aired live for many decades, it still felt live. You could watch rental movies on your VCR (and for a few years, they were everywhere) but most people I was friendly with didn’t regularly pre-program theirs to record much TV, because doing so was such a pain: spinning three plastic dials, for the day, the hour, and the minute. Each videotape held only a few hours of programming; rewinding and fast-forwarding were clumsy processes (and pausing might break the tape). There were no
DVDs yet, let alone DVRs. Even if you were an early Internet adopter, which I was, dialing in was a grindingly slow, unreliable process—and when you did connect, with the hostile shriek of static that we optimistically called a “handshake,” no videos showed up, just a wall of blinking neon fonts. Nothing, ever, arrived “on demand.”
This glitchy, ephemeral quality, and the ads that broke up the episodes, were a major part of TV’s crappy reputation. This part may be hard to remember, even if you lived through it. But just before the turn of the century—nearly universally, by default, and with an intensity that’s tough to summon up now—television was viewed as a shameful activity, as “chewing gum for the eyes,” to quote drama critic John Mason Brown. This was true not only of snobs who boasted that they “didn’t even own a TV”; it was true of people who liked TV. It was true of the people who made it, too. TV was entertainment, not art. It was furniture (literally—it sat in your living room) that helped you kill time (it was how to numb lonely hours while eating a “TV dinner,” shorthand for a pathetic existence). TV might be a gold mine, economically speaking, but that only made it more corrupt. If you were an artist, writing TV was selling out; if you were an intellectual, watching it was a sordid pleasure, like chain-smoking. People still referred to television, with no irony, as “the boob tube” and “the idiot box.” (Some people still do.)
This is not to say there were no good shows. Critics praised (and, often, overpraised) the grit of Hill Street Blues, the nihilistic wit of Seinfeld, yadda yadda yadda. In the mid-’90s, there were several major breakthroughs in the medium, among them the teen drama My So-Called Life and the sci-fi series The X-Files. But among serious people, even the best television wasn’t considered worthy of real analysis. This was particularly true among my grad-school peers, the thinky guys whom I had privately nicknamed “the sweater-vests”—the men who were also, not coincidentally, the ones whose opinions tended to dominate mainstream media conversation. For them, books were sacrosanct. Movies were respected. Television was a sketchy additive that corporations had tipped into the cultural tap water, a sort of spiritual backbone-weakener.
The scripture for this set of thinkers was an essay by the writer George W. S. Trow, “Within the Context of No-Context,” which people recommended to me so frequently that it started to feel like a prank. A masterwork of contempt, “Within the Context” was a trippy string of koans that was initially published in 1980 in The New Yorker. It came out in book form in 1981, then got rereleased in paperback in 1997, the same year that Buffy the Vampire Slayer debuted. As Trow saw it, television was a purely sinister force. It was a mass medium whose mass-ness was its danger, because it conflated ratings with quality, “big” with “good.” The vaster television got, the more it ate away at the decent values of mid-century America—back when viewers were people, not demographics; adults, not children; capable of intimacy and proportion. “Television does not vary,” he wrote. “The trivial is raised up to power. The powerful is lowered toward the trivial.” Also: “What is loved is a hit. What is a hit is loved.” It was an elitist screed, nostalgic for an America that had never really existed, but it had a penetrating, pungent force.
On Charlie Rose in 1996, novelists David Foster Wallace, Mark Leyner, and Jonathan Franzen struck an only slightly less apocalyptic note, spending nearly half of what was advertised as a panel on “The Future of American Fiction” denouncing television as “a commercial art that’s a lot of fun that requires very little of the recipient.” Their worries about television’s “kinetic bursts” were a precursor to the pseudoscientific rhetoric (“dopamine squirts”) that would later greet the Internet, once that stepped in as a cultural bogeyman. But then, they were part of a long tradition. In 1958, newscaster Edward R. Murrow had warned about the propagandistic dangers of the medium in his brilliant “box of lights and wires” speech. In the 1970s, popular jeremiads like Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television and Marie Winn’s The Plug-In Drug diagnosed TV as an addiction. In the 1980s, the slogan “Kill Your Television” was a hip bumper sticker. At the turn of the century, watching TV was still widely seen, in the much-quoted (although possibly apocryphal) words of nineties comic Bill Hicks, as a spiritually harmful act, like “taking black spray paint to your third eye.”
There were occasional exceptions to this mood, among them Chip McGrath’s 1995 cover story in The New York Times Magazine, “The Triumph of the Prime-Time Novel,” in which he praised ER and Homicide: Life on the Street for their “classic American realism, the realism of Dreiser and Hopper.” But as his title indicated, McGrath’s argument was just the flip side of the one made by the Charlie Rose panel. TV might, in fact, be worth watching—but only when it stopped being TV.
* * *
—
This was the value system that I was soaking in, Palmolive-style, on the night that I watched my first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Even more than most television of that era, the show sounded like a throwaway. It had that silly title. It was based on a campy movie, created by a little-known writer/director named Joss Whedon. It starred a soap opera actress, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and an actor from a Taster’s Choice ad, Tony Head. And if you tried to describe the plot, it screamed “guilty pleasure”: It was a horror comedy about a superpowered cheerleader leading a double life. By day, Buffy Summers flirted with boys and flunked her classes. By night, she was “The Chosen One,” stabbing vampires in the heart with pointy wooden stakes. The credits opened with a wolf howling, wild riffs of hard-rock guitar, and shots of Buffy herself doing kung fu. It looked like a good way to kill time before getting back to analyzing themes of the public woman in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.
Instead, I fell into a trance of joy. Now to be clear, the episode I was watching is not only not one of the standout episodes of Buffy, it is also not an episode that most—or really, any—Buffy viewers consider to be much good. Instead, it’s a first-season story that fans tend to remember as “Wait, that one with the hyenas?” In “The Pack,” a clique of high-school bullies gets possessed by the wild beasts that Buffy describes with disgust as “the schmoes of the animal kingdom.” The villain is a resentful zookeeper, straight out of Scooby-Doo (long story short, he wanted to be possessed by a hyena himself, but misfired his spell). And yet “The Pack,” for all its schlocky affect, was the one that hooked me, hard. In one scene, in which the bullies strutted in slo-mo through the high school courtyard, I got chills. In another, in which Buffy’s friend Willow wept, my eyes welled up. The show had a peculiar tonal blend, at once bleak and goofy, formulaic and anarchic. It had a fascination with sexual violence—including the threat of “nice guys,” like Buffy’s hyena-possessed friend Xander—but it folded those dark themes together with screwball banter and fun pop-culture references (“I cannot believe that you, of all people, are trying to Scully me”).
Then, just before the second ad break, the plot took a grotesque turn: The bullies gobbled up a live pig, Herbert, the Sunnydale High School mascot. A few scenes later, the hyena-possessed kids surrounded, taunted, and then literally ate the school principal, Bob Flutie, a character who had been, up until he was eaten, a significant part of the ensemble. “Crunchy!” snickered the pretty ringleader. Flutie’s death was a fabulously macabre twist—one of many such twists in a series that had no interest at all in Dreiser-like realism—but it wasn’t exactly a joke. Once Flutie got eaten, he stayed dead.
Cannibalizing a high school principal probably sounds like small potatoes in the era of Game of Thrones. But in 1997, the moment felt bracing, particularly on a fluffy teen comedy on an off-brand netlet. Still, what really got me was the show’s peculiar originality, the ways in which it felt stealthily experimental beneath its conventional surfaces, which were low-budget and, aesthetically, nothing special. As he would often explain in interviews, Whedon had taken the bimbo victim of every exploitation film—the eye candy, tottering to her death down a da
rk alley—and let her spin around and become the avenger. Thrillingly, Buffy treated this one girl’s story not as something trivial, but as a grand, oceanic metaphor. It made her story mythic, not cartoonish. Like plenty of teenagers, Buffy believed that what was happening to her was the end of the world. But she was right; her demons were real. The fact that the show was silly, too, that it was sexy and playful, that it riffed off TV formula and had cheesy cliff-hangers and close-ups and sitcom “buttons,” didn’t make the show dumb. It made it smart.
During the commercial break, I called a friend, the one who had recommended the series, and, because cellphones barely existed, I had to use a landline, coiling the spiral cord around my arm. I said to him in fascination, “Did you see that guy get eaten before the ad break? This show is wild.”
I’d never finish my doctorate. Instead, Buffy spiked my way of thinking entirely, sending me stumbling along a new path. My Buffy fanhood was not unlike any first love. It was life-swamping, more than a bit out of proportion to the object of my affection, and something that I wanted to discuss with everyone, whether they liked it or not. I’d been an enthusiast before, but not a fan in the stalker-crazy-obsessive sense. I had other work to do, teaching and editing and, eventually, working as a magazine journalist, but for several years, the only thing I actually wanted to do was analyze Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In practice, this meant that I was online a lot. When “Earshot,” an episode about a school shooting, was pulled from the airwaves because it was too soon after the Columbine massacre, I found a stranger up in Canada who sent me a bootleg videotape. One time, someone set me up on a blind date because the guy liked Buffy the Vampire Slayer, too. It didn’t last, but the setup struck us both as entirely reasonable.