I Like to Watch

by Emily Nussbaum

  Still, there matters might have remained—as a hobby, not a life plan—were it not for the near-simultaneous emergence of another television show, HBO’s mob drama The Sopranos, in 1999. The Sopranos was my other favorite. Like many viewers, I got hooked after watching the first-season episode “College,” the one in which Tony strangled a snitch with a length of wire, midway through a tour of New England colleges with his daughter, Meadow. And yet loving The Sopranos was a very different experience, at the turn of the century, from loving Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The Sopranos was a show for adults, something to brag about, not apologize for. It was the series that defined the twenty-first-century model of “prestige television,” a category that doubled as a social-class distinction and an intellectual one. After the first season finale, Stephen Holden, in The New York Times, called the show “the greatest work of American popular culture of the last quarter century.” Not the best television show, or the best cable drama; after one season, The Sopranos had already escaped the orbit of its lowly medium entirely. It was real art, which meant that it was worthy of real criticism.

  This response made some sense, given that The Sopranos was produced and distributed by HBO, a velvet-rope pay cable network whose new slogan was “It’s not TV. It’s HBO.” HBO, with its fat budget and its breakthrough reliance on subscriptions rather than ad minutes, could take risks that the networks could not. And, in fact, The Sopranos did have qualities that were unlike most television that came before it. It had no ad breaks. It had no cliff-hangers. Because it didn’t have to play to nervous censors, it overflowed with cursing, violence, and the bouncy boobs at the Bada Bing. It also looked fantastic. Visually, the series was what people tended to call “gritty”—not realistic, precisely, but authentic, with a sense of place (specifically, a sense of New Jersey) that distinguished it from most other TV series. Filmed on location, with a budget that helped it look almost good enough to play on the big screen, The Sopranos emphasized imagery over action, characters over plot, letting threads dangle and themes build. It felt like a book; it looked like a movie. Its hero was someone viewers took seriously, a towering symbolic figure: Tony Soprano, the first of the great middle-aged white male antiheroes who would dominate TV for nearly a decade. These characters were, very often, created by men who were cut from a somewhat similar cloth, insofar as they were working out their own issues with authority—including the authority of television itself, that collaborative, formulaic, culturally derided medium that they worked inside.

  I watched The Sopranos every Sunday on my newly installed cable box, and then, as an early adopter, on my first-generation TiVo, hitting “pause” to admire all those perfectly composed shots of Tony’s massive kitchen island, rewinding to get the dialogue. In this book, you’ll find an essay about what made The Sopranos so great—which was, in part, how thoroughly David Chase’s masterwork punished its own audience for loving it too passionately.

  But the split in critical response bugged me. Even when Buffy won praise, as it began to take big swings—a musical episode, a silent episode, the Christ-like death of the main character at the end of the fifth season—the series was still slotted, culturally, as optional viewing. It was a girl show. It was a teen show. It was geeky, jokey, romantic, juvenile, and formulaic. It was disposable—a Dixie Cup. The Sopranos was the canonical stuff, the keeper: It was masculine, literary, weighty, bleakly challenging, a rule-breaker. It was more like an original vinyl copy of Blood on the Tracks. (And this impression seemed true to people even when it wasn’t true at all. The Sopranos was frequently hilarious, while Buffy the Vampire Slayer could make you sob.)

  The genre that The Sopranos had critiqued and cannibalized—the mob drama—was considered a serious one, tied directly to the Best-Film-Ever, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. The genres that Buffy mashed together (teen soaps, vampire horror, situation comedy, superhero comics) were not. Buffy was disco; The Sopranos was rock. When you were watching The Sopranos, you were symbolically watching side by side with a middle-aged man, even if you were a teen girl. When you watched Buffy, your invisible companion was a fifteen-year-old girl, even if you were a middle-aged man. From my perspective, both of these shows were equally radical interventions into their medium: One of them was a mind-blowing mob drama about postwar capitalism and boomer masculinity, the other a blazing feminist genre experiment about mortality and sex. But only one of these shows transcended television. The other one was television.

  Superficially, this split masqueraded as lowbrow versus highbrow. But the more that I argued—and I found myself fighting about these subjects again and again, eventually arguing my way into my dream job—the more the divide felt profound. Crucially, it felt tied to the problem of TV’s deep, historically grounded, seemingly intractable case of status anxiety, its sense of itself as a throwaway, a bad habit. When I proselytized for Buffy, or debated my fellow graduate students about Sex and the City, the fight felt like a way to hash out other questions—questions of values, which were embedded (and, often, hidden) in questions of aesthetics. Centrally, these were arguments about whose stories carried weight, about what kind of creativity counted as ambitious, and about who (which characters, which creators, and also, which audience members) deserved attention. What kind of person got to be a genius? Whose story counted as universal? Which type of art had staying power?

  None of these arguments were new, of course. Fights about art had always doubled as fights about what the world takes seriously—which is another way to say, they were fights about politics. They were fights about power. I wasn’t a fan of heavy-handed, pedantic TV, which had its own tradition in the medium (part of television’s legacy as a public resource, the aqueduct that everyone’s kids drank from). But even shows that weren’t polemical, that didn’t feature “very special episodes,” had a different sort of politics, the type that soaked through everywhere, disguised in the look and feel and structure. As a mass medium, TV was our public square. It was where the rules got enforced. It was also where we hashed out the news as it happened, where we looked for our reflections. Critical contempt for television was like refusing to look into the mirror.

  In the two decades that followed Buffy and The Sopranos, this status anxiety has continued to shape the critical consensus around television, often invisibly so. Long after that show’s divisive blackout finale, The Sopranos was considered the default for television ambition; other shows might be good, but never great. There had to be a No. 1 show, always: often a grim drama, but sometimes a nihilistic comedy. That show might be nowhere as good as The Sopranos. It might be glum or sadistic or pretentious. But, the consensus held—even once television had begun to warp and alter—that a show like The Sopranos would always be the real stuff, the adult stuff, which meant the hard stuff, in several senses. If it was punishing to watch, it was better. Viewers who craved other visions of creativity, other styles of filmmaking, or a different brand of funny or beautiful, felt that pressure, too; we felt it from without (in media messages that certain art was less important) but also from within. It was hard not to internalize these rules, even when you resisted them, even when they excluded your story.

  By the time I began to write about television in earnest—for a column called “Reruns” in The New York Times, then at New York magazine and The New Yorker—television was in a state of radical reinvention. A sparkling multiverse of cable networks had begun branding themselves around one show or another, just as The WB had done with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and HBO with The Sopranos. DVDs and then DVRs turned TV into a collectible, a text that could be analyzed, and also easily shared. In 2005, YouTube launched, followed in 2007 by Hulu; in 2013, Netflix began to stream original content, entire seasons at a time. As the technology changed, and along with it the economics and distribution of television, the artistry altered as well.

  The old rules of what the audience could tolerate began to break down: Shows got slower (Mad Men), faster
(Scandal), denser (The Wire), and more dreamlike (The Leftovers). The wall between comedy and drama fell so far into disrepair that Orange Is the New Black got nominated in both categories at the Emmys, on alternate years. Auteurist creators remade the sitcom in their own images; marquee-name directors arrived from Hollywood, and so did movie stars, for whom TV had previously been a career-wrecker. Reality TV emerged, becoming the television of television, as my colleague Kelefa Sanneh has written —the source of a cavalcade of brand-new moral panics. There were new genres, new structures, new production models, and eventually, at last, in a burst of oxygen, an influx of fresh, more diverse voices (female, black, brown, young, queer)—shockwaves of innovation to a medium that was notorious for repeating itself.

  Some days, it seemed like my favorite medium had changed so much that it was barely recognizable. Even as I edited the introduction to this book, the arguments that I’d been making, so grouchily, with that ancient 1997 chip on my shoulder, seemed at times to be slipping into the conventional wisdom—or maybe it was that the terms had changed, as the brash antihero fell out of favor once one was elected president. The only thing that everyone seemed to agree on, these days, was that there was simply too much television, and no way to keep up. Luckily, I liked to watch.

  * * *

  —

  This book is an account of a two-decade-long argument about television, in the form of the reviews and profiles I’ve written—and because it’s a collection, it traces my thinking as I’ve changed and as the medium has changed. Criticism is a lot of different things: It’s a conversation and it’s a form of theater. It’s a way of thinking out loud, while letting everyone overhear you, which means risking getting things wrong and, on occasion, being obnoxious. But what unites these essays and profiles is my struggle—and, over time, my growing frustration—with that hidden ladder of status, the unspoken, invisible biases that hobbled TV even as it became culturally dominant. Often, these biases involve class, gender, race, and sexuality, disguised as biases about aesthetics. (Green/gray drama, serious; neon-pink musical, guilty pleasure. Single-cam sitcom, upscale; multi-cam, working class.) Sometimes those biases have been mine, too—and several essays show me wrestling with them, sometimes more successfully than others. (Like anyone constructing an anthology, I tried not to include the terrible ones, but you make the call.) There are a few pans in the mix, but not many. This collection is not in any way a list of my favorite shows: It’s mostly the pieces that reflected best on my main argument about television, the case that began to cook when I watched “The Pack.” Criticism isn’t memoir, but it’s certainly personal, so you can consider these essays to be a portrait of me struggling to change my mind.

  When I first started writing about television, it was an excuse, as a new journalist, to write about what interested me. Being a critic was never my goal, however—and in fact, it was a path that I’d deliberately stepped away from. Not long after graduate school, I’d taken some freelance gigs reviewing poetry for The New York Times Book Review. But as exciting as it felt to get published in the Times, I started turning those assignments down, because they made me miserable. The problem was structural. Poetry was an “elevated” art form. But while everybody respected it, no one read it. One person wrote each book—and even if that book was a hit, the writer made very little money. Under these conditions, the stakes were at once ridiculously high and very low, making even a mixed review feel cruel. If you can’t pan art, you can’t be a critic.

  The minute I started writing about television, however, something clicked. Television, it seemed to me, was the opposite of poetry. While poetry was respected and rarely read, television was, as Franzen had observed on Charlie Rose, what nobody respected and everyone watched. It made money; it was created collaboratively; the people who created it made good money, too. But the default response to TV was condescension—a pat on the back when it did anything even faintly impressive, because it seemed more like a product than an art form. Historically, a lot of TV coverage hadn’t really been arts criticism at all: It was written by industry reporters, whose beat blurred the distinction between a hit and a quality series; or by intellectuals like Trow, who used the medium as a backboard for potshots at American culture; or by academics, who analyzed it as sociology. Writing mixed or negative television reviews struck me as a brand of cruelty that I could get behind: Even the harshest pan was a way of praising TV itself, by insisting that it could and should be great, by treating it as art.

  And what was television, anyway? What made television television, distinct from other art forms? It became an obsession for me to try to understand its unique qualities, to help forge a critical rhetoric unique to the medium, one less bogged down by invidious comparisons to Dickens and Scorsese. I had no scholarly background in TV or in cinema studies: At The New Yorker, especially, I tried to sneakily assign myself essays—on advertising, say, or the history of the cliff-hanger—that would give me an excuse to self-educate. Knowing that history helped me shed the lazy presumption, which I held in my early years, that TV always moved forward and eternally got better. I learned more about the early days of television, during the first so-called “Golden Age,” back when TV was a live medium based in New York, a platform for sketch comedy, opera, and Paddy Chayefsky teleplays; and then about the aggressive shift to television as a mass commercialized industry, the big cheap box that families watched together (and that babysat the kids). I revisited the Norman Lear–era breakthroughs of the 1970s, when creators smashed through standards and practices to reflect the world around them, and the Reaganite retreat into escapism; the one-step-forward-two-steps-back struggle for sexual and racial inclusivity; and the glide, during the 1990s and into the early aughts, toward greater seriality and complex narratives, a move that happened parallel to the emergence of fans gathering online, eager to mob-solve any puzzle.

  Somewhere along the way, I read the full context for that 1961 quote from then-FCC chairman Newton Minow, the one in which he called television “a vast wasteland.” It was more of a lament than an insult: Minow hated that TV pandered so hard, that it was such coarse, exploitative, repetitive crap, under the thumb of its sponsors. He wanted a more wholesome, patriotic slate of shows—and that’s not what he got, in the long run. But decades later, it was TV’s “vastness,” the same enormity that had so disturbed George W. S. Trow, that released its capacity for originality: Once there was less pressure on every show to please every viewer (and also sell every product), creators took risks.

  And I began to think of my job, with a grandiosity that was motivational but frankly a little nuts, as a mission. Television deserved a critical stance less hobbled by shame—a language that treated television as its own viable force, not the weak sibling to superior mediums. I wasn’t especially young, but I was part of a cohort of writers—many of whom had come of age online—who shared these values. Some of my peers were part of a TV-loving generation of print critics; others wrote more “unofficial” types of criticism, which proliferated in digital spaces. Some wrote recaps—summaries of individual episodes—or fan fiction. Others participated (as I had, anonymously, back in those Buffy-fever years) in thousand-post-long debates with strangers about the minutiae of a single scene of Felicity. Others—okay, also me—watched Big Brother live on a webcam, then held debates about its sociopolitical impact and weird aesthetics on reality-TV discussion boards.

  My inspiration was less Pauline Kael and Roland Barthes than the fizzy, bratty community on the discussion boards of the website Television Without Pity, which, from 1998 to 2007 (before it was bought up by Bravo and turned into a zombie version of itself), hosted threads about nearly every series. You could describe TWoP as a fan site, except that it was full of haters, too. It had started out as a website called Dawson’s Wrap, which was devoted to mocking the pretentious teen soap opera Dawson’s Creek. That site’s creators, Sarah D. Bunting and Tara Ariano, had in turn been inspired by Da
niel Drennan’s hilariously digressive “wrap-ups” of Beverly Hills 90210, early recaps that were posted, initially, on the online community ECHO (for East Coast Hangout.) I’d joined ECHO in the late 1990s, too. Both environments were aggressively geeky, which is to say, obsessive, rudely funny, and unconcerned with sounding normal. For newspaper critics, a one-time negative review of Dawson’s Creek might suffice. Online, commenters felt obliged to drop by every single day in order to debate why the show wasn’t getting any better. (It was a point of pride that I got kicked off TWoP for too vehemently defending another Joss Whedon show, the Fox space Western Firefly, against a particularly contemptuous recapper. Like any troll, I changed my name and got a new account.)

  Over the years, a basic definition of the medium began to emerge in my thinking, a map of what made television television. On the most obvious level, it was an episodic art form. For most of its history, television had been served up in evenly sliced segments, generally one per week. A half-hour show was, conventionally speaking, a comedy; an hour-long show, most of the time, a drama. For decades, a set of genres had grown, like coral, around the gulfs that the advertisers demanded: the sitcom, the police procedural, the soap opera. (Along with the game show, the news hour, the talk show.) In TV’s earliest years, these genres were inspired by radio and theater—not so much movies or books. They were also, by design, formulaic. Because TV got repeated, then run out of order in reruns, any viewer who changed the channel needed to know what to expect. The only true “serialized” storytelling showed up in daytime soaps, which were regarded as the most lowbrow, and, not coincidentally, the most feminine genre, designed to sell soap to housewives.