I Like to Watch

by Emily Nussbaum

  But when, as the years passed, TV began to warp—as comedies got sadder and dramas funnier; as primetime stories absorbed the serialized daytime model, allowing characters to change and stories to take bigger leaps; as dramas began to wrestle with worldly subject matter—TV didn’t abandon those tight, seemingly repressive genres. Instead, it worked off their restraints. It both resisted them and exploited them. In the 1970s and the 1980s, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and Soap at once mimicked and mocked the cliff-hanger-heavy style of soap operas, expanding the way that stories could be told. In the early aughts, The Wire critiqued the police procedural; it also was a police procedural. The British version of The Office emerged as a caustic satire of reality television, a form of resistance to a cheaply made new genre that threatened the primacy of scripted television, but it also repurposed the visual tools of reality (the confessional, the peek through the blinds, the quick flashback) as a fresh way to be funny.

  On Charlie Rose, David Foster Wallace had marveled at how many TV shows made fun of TV, something he argued reflected viewer contempt. In his manifesto “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” the novelist warned that the boob tube was infecting literary novels with this empty self-loathing, passing on a strain of nihilistic irony like some aesthetic tapeworm. He wasn’t wrong about a certain shift in the zeitgeist (although he did, oddly, assume that all viewers shared his own response to TV—that they were in danger of hipster detachment, not heartfelt fanhood, my own pitfall). But the fact that television continually responded to television meant something different to me: It was the medium talking to itself as it grew, developing the spiky, affectionate self-consciousness native to any newly energized art form—a sign of growth but, also, a formal quality that was way more interesting to write about than whether TV could ascend and become more like a movie or a book.

  The second big thing about television was that it was built by more than one person. More than one writer, yes, but also, multiple directors, many producers, a bunch of editors, and so on. Again, this was for pragmatic reasons. Networks demanded twenty-two new episodes a year; even on cable, a season was eight or ten hours long. No one creator could oversee so much material, the way you could, theoretically, singlehandedly make a movie or a book. What’s more, no one, ever, had been truly free to create their own television show, without interference—instead, “notes” (that were really demands) rained down from above, from executives and advertisers (who, in TV’s early years, were the same people). Working under these factorylike conditions, TV makers had, early on, adopted something like a blue-collar blend of pride and shame in their own labor. Like contractors, they built to someone else’s specs, often anonymously. Making television meant making something you’d never own.

  This aggressive collaboration, like television’s reliance on formula, was a big part of why people had so much trouble seeing TV as ambitious art: It was harder to assign genius to a group. As the medium changed and more “auteurist” shows got green-lighted, and as “showrunner” became a term of art, turning television writers into celebrities with their own fan bases, shows that could be traced to one clear creator often got more credit from critics—a bias that tended, among other things, to favor drama over comedy. To quote BoJack Horseman: “Diane, the whole point of television is it’s a collaborative medium where one person gets all the credit.”

  TV was also, historically, a writer’s medium, where words counted more than images. Even once that was no longer true, in the post-HBO era, TV directors were still mostly hired hands, popped in weekly, bossed around by the head writer, the inverse of the Hollywood hierarchy. The writers’ room was where artists learned to compromise, to pour their voices into someone else’s vision. For TV-makers, the existential question had always been whether it was possible to wrestle something truly original—challenging and strange, idiosyncratic rather than formulaic—from a system so synonymous with groupthink. It was probably no coincidence that television had produced so many workplace shows, often about a brilliant boss struggling to harness a team of eccentrics. They were fun-house reflections of the writers’ room itself, TV’s primal scene.

  Finally, more than nearly any other artistic medium, television took place over time—it took time to make, it took time to watch, it happened over time. A director films a movie, then later, people watch it; a novelist writes, then readers read. But television takes weeks, seasons, years, even decades. A fan had to keep inviting her favorite show back in. The result was a messily intense feedback loop between viewers and creators, a sadomasochistic intimacy that both sides craved and resented. Later seasons of television were altered by how audiences had responded to the show early on, an issue that was heightened by the presence of vocal fans gathering on the Internet: Showrunners could play to audience demands or angrily push back at them, but they couldn’t ignore them. Television was an art form that was somehow permanent and ephemeral at once, a record of its own improvisational creation.

  And, of course, the person who writes a TV pilot isn’t the same person who writes a finale a decade later, if only because writers themselves are changed by time, too. Television ends, often unpredictably. Sometimes it gets canceled; sometimes it gets to play out those final days in a foggy, sentimental economic hospice, tolerated until it expires. Either way, the finale carries a weight no other episode does. I wanted to write about that, too.

  This became my working definition of television, the model that I cherished, and, also, the tool that I wielded when arguing in favor of shows that I saw as misunderstood or condescended to, as Buffy the Vampire Slayer had been. Television was episodic, collaborative, writer-driven, and formulaic; it was gorgeous not despite but because of its own wonky elasticity, the way it altered with time, in conversation with its own history. It had to be appreciated for its variety, from moody dramedies to stylized network melodrama, without being squashed into a top ten list, reduced to a status-addled hierarchy. Yet there’s a level at which I can’t entirely explain my adoration for television, my sense of it as not subject matter but a cause. There was something alive about the medium to me, organic in a way that other art is not. You enter into it; you get changed with it; it changes with you. I like movies, but I’m not a cinephile; you’ll never catch me ululating about camera technique, for better or worse. I love books, but I have little desire to review them. Television was what did it for me. For two decades, as the medium moved steadily from the cultural margins to its hot center, it was where I wanted to live.

  In a way, compiling this book of essays has been a process of grieving a certain model of television, even as it transforms into something new. After all, in the two decades since “The Pack” first aired on The WB, every one of television’s defining qualities—the same ones I was so eager to illuminate for unbelievers—has shifted. When a streaming network releases an entire season at once, ad-free, it does feel more like a novel. (Just as many novels themselves were originally printed chapter by chapter.) When Sundance airs a nearly silent Jane Campion crime drama, like Top of the Lake, full of gorgeous New Zealand vistas, it is much more like a movie. When a small cable channel produces a short-run show, directed by one person, for a niche audience, with two years between seasons, solo creativity is no longer an illusion. What classic TV genre is a show like The Leftovers riffing off? None, maybe. Meanwhile, time itself has bent: Among other things, we’ve gained access to archives of older shows, putting the context of no context back into context. There’s probably a whole essay to be written about the seismic impact of the “Pause” button alone, the simple invention that helped turn television from a flow into a text, to be frozen and meditated upon.

  Some days, the one thing that feels stable is the episode, that flexible slice, the wave inside the ocean, the part that has to double as the whole.

  * * *

  —

  None of these changes has made me love television less; they’ve made me love it more
. I’m drowning in it, of course. We all are. Every year, the waves roll in faster. John Landgraf, the CEO of the cable network FX, once warned about a phenomenon he labeled “Peak TV,” a fit of overproduction that, he predicted, had to end soon. I felt a sneaky flash of relief: Now, no television critic could claim to be comprehensive. I could drop the shows that bored me.

  That was in 2015. Just three years later, with Netflix dropping several new series daily, Landgraf’s peak seems like a tiny hill off in the distance. My children rarely watch TV, except with me; they watch YouTubers play Minecraft instead. Some days, when the neck-snapping changes in my favorite medium feel particularly hard to grasp, I pull down an old copy of Playboy magazine from 1976. In it, there’s an interview with Norman Lear, back when he was overseeing half a dozen sitcoms, a kingpin of a showrunner, when that job was still called “executive producer.” Lear wasn’t universally adored back then, as he is now. 1976 was a fraught year, for all his success: He hadn’t been able to place the cutting-edge Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman with a network, so that show was running on independent stations, at odd hours. His latest sitcom, The Dumplings, would be a flop. Meanwhile, he was suing both the networks and the FCC, institutions that had conspired, to Lear’s frustration, on a brand-new “family hour,” a time-slot policy that the writer regarded as “a gutless give-in” to priggish activists. “It’s hard to talk through a muzzle,” he groused, calling the current prime-time lineup “bland opposite bland opposite bland.”

  Yet Lear also models, in the midst of these complaints, something inspiring: a blend of pugnacity and optimism, along with an insistence that television is great even when it fails to achieve that greatness. Back when no one believed they were in a Golden Age, Lear shrugged off the way that his native medium had always been “a convenient whipping boy” for American malaise. It was the networks who thought small, he argued, and who were condescending to their viewers: “I’ve never seen anything I thought was too good for the American people or so far above them that they’d never reach for it if they had the chance.” To Lear, TV was still all potential, particularly an untapped potential for variety—it just needed to “replace imitation with originality as the formula for success.” He envisions cross-medium experiments: “How do they know there wouldn’t be as large an audience for a John Cheever or a Ray Bradbury drama as there is for a Norman Lear or a Mary Tyler Moore show?” He defends his own sitcoms against critics, arguing that they aren’t coarse or loud, but honest, showing real, loving fights in real families. With an almost startling prescience, he agitates for industry changes that were many decades away: creators taking breaks between seasons, or switching styles; limited-run shows and fewer commercials. He’s confident that television will land in the right hands, someday: led by creators, not admen.

  In 2019, at ninety-six, Lear is still out there producing TV, merging an old-fashioned sitcom with a newfangled distribution model: His reboot of One Day at a Time, now set among Cuban-American immigrants, is currently streaming on Netflix. He seems immune to status anxiety. “As far back as I can remember, I have divided people into wets and drys,” he told Playboy back in the 1970s. “If you’re wet, you’re warm, tender, passionate, Mediterranean….If you’re dry, you’re brittle, flaky, tight-assed, and who needs you?” That’s rude, but that’s Lear. It also happens to be a decent definition of fanhood, the kind of passion that expresses itself in a rolling debate, as if television itself were worth fighting for. That’s my model of criticism, too. It’s about celebrating what never stops changing.

  THE LONG CON

  The Sopranos

  New York magazine, June 14, 2007

  The day after The Sopranos aired its divisive finale, my boss at New York magazine, Adam Moss, asked me to write something ambitious—but also, to write it fast. This was the result, my first substantive TV analysis, after years of reviews, recaps, and columns. It was also my first serious attempt at writing about what became a personal obsession, the role of the audience as a collaborator in TV. The first line is a little over-personal.

  David Chase, you sadist. We trusted you, and then you turned on us—and maybe we deserved it.

  Since The Sopranos’ premiere in 1999, critics have preached that it was like nothing else on television: It was novelistic (Dickensian!), cinematic (Fellini-esque!), iconic (Is there any other show where most viewers still watch the opening credits?), a metaphor for Bush’s America. The implication has always been that, at last, TV was playing way out of its league.

  But HBO’s slogan aside, The Sopranos was TV—and great because of that fact, not despite it. Chase was the first TV creator to truly take advantage, in every sense, of the odd bond a series has with its audience: an intimate dynamic that builds over time, like any therapeutic relationship. Unlike a novel, a TV drama is not invented in some solitary genius’s cork-lined chamber. It is a collaboration, with viewer response providing a crucial feedback loop—a fitting dynamic for a mob story, a genre predicated on a certain level of bloodlust in those who consume it. For eight years, the characters themselves obsessively watched (and quoted and analyzed and emulated) GoodFellas and The Godfather, and we obsessively watched (and quoted and analyzed and emulated) The Sopranos, and all along, Chase was out there watching us watching them. As the show became more popular, the characters more beloved, the fans more openly excited by the violence, one got the distinct sense that Chase did not always like what he saw.

  But he was willing to give us what we didn’t want. There are many breeds of TV auteurs: the great mythologizers, Buffy’s Joss Whedon and Lost’s J. J. Abrams and The X-Files’ Chris Carter; the quirky dialogists, like Gilmore Girls’ Amy Sherman-Palladino and Ally McBeal’s David E. Kelley; deadpan formula craftsmen like Dick Wolf and sadomasochistic visionaries like Tom Fontana and California dreamers like Alan Ball. There are the utopian solipsists (okay, just Aaron Sorkin). But they all share an essential love for their characters—a natural side effect, one might imagine, of building one story for many years. Their protagonists suffer, but they rarely corrode.

  In this sense, Chase was a true iconoclast, a prophet of disgust. He seemed determined to test TV’s most distinctive quality, the way it requires us to say yes each week. To be a fan, we needed to welcome Tony Soprano again and again into our homes, like a vampire or a therapy patient. Chase gave that choice a terrible weight.

  Now that it’s over, no longer a work in progress, we are finally free to criticize it for real or praise it as a whole, and despite some missteps (A gambling problem, really? And what was that Furio-Carmela thing back in Season 4?), I do think the show will reward rewatching. It was, in fact, truly revolutionary, but not because it was adult or novelistic. The Sopranos was the first series that dared us to slam the door, to reject it. And when we never did, it slammed the door on us: a silent black screen, a fitting conclusion to a show that was itself a bit of a long con, that seduced us as an audience, then dismantled its own charms before our eyes.

  When we first met Tony Soprano, he was a mess, but we loved him, we couldn’t help it. Underneath that bulk (and James Gandolfini was significantly smaller at the start, almost light on his feet), he was a hurting bad boy. Smart despite the malapropisms, Tony struck many viewers as simply an extreme variation on the midlife baby boomer: He was struggling with aging relatives, mouthy teenage kids, and that old work-life balance. His deepest desire was to be a better parent than his own (an ambition that was aiming low). He was terrified of death. And his greatest enemy was the most brilliant strategist of them all, his mother, Livia, a villain who crushed her enemies with the illusion of powerlessness.

  Those early episodes are jauntier and broader than what came later, with a stylized quality strongly reminiscent of GoodFellas—Chase’s master influence, he’s said. The first moment of violence is practically a dance sequence, a loopy action shot in which Tony’s cover story to Dr. Melfi (“Then we had coffee”) is contrasted with a slaps
tick beating in daylight, scored to a doo-wop song. (On the DVD commentary, Chase says it’s the one musical choice he regrets: “I think it’s hackneyed, silly, and I’m sorry.”) Carmela is a broader character, too, and knows more about Tony’s business—she hides money in false Campbell’s soup cans, and even brandishes a gun.

  But if the show was playful, it took one thing seriously: Tony’s therapy sessions with Melfi. He’d gone to her for help with panic attacks, but their meetings quickly became something stranger and deeper, an experiment in self-knowledge. The show’s central question was simple and bold: Can this man change? It’s no wonder Slate assembled a panel of shrinks to weigh in. Back then, The Sopranos could be viewed without irony as a drama of human potential, however dark-humored and extreme.

  Not that Tony himself welcomed the challenge. “Nowadays, everybody’s got to go to shrinks and counselors and go on Sally Jessy Raphael and talk about their problems,” he raves during his first session. “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper, the strong, silent type? That was an American. He wasn’t in touch with his feelings. He just did what he had to do. What they didn’t know is that once they got Gary Cooper in touch with his feelings, that they wouldn’t be able to shut him up! And then it’s dysfunction this and dysfunction that and dysfunction va fangul!”

  And yet, like Portnoy, he began. His rants were denial, the necessary pushback before committing to such painful work. Early episodes are containers for baseline psychoanalytic insights. In the first, Tony discovers that “talking [helps]. Hope comes in many forms.” In the second, he learns that if he doesn’t admit to his rage at his mother, he will displace it onto others. Next, he struggles with whether he is a golem—an empty self, a monster for hire. And by “Pax Soprana,” he confesses his love to Melfi and she tells him about transference. “This psychiatry shit, apparently what you’re feeling is not what you’re feeling,” he explains to Carmela. “And what you’re not feeling is your real agenda.”