This season, it’s Marnie who walks straight into the spider’s web. Fired from her art-gallery gig, she finds a “pretty girl” job where she caters to rich men. She meets a scornful art star she’s got a crush on, and he locks her into one of his installations and bombards her with violent videos. She staggers out like Patty Hearst, gasping, “You’re so fucking talented.” But he’s a pompous jackrabbit in bed—he makes her stare at a doll the entire time—and after their awful sex she bursts out laughing, with a surprising, loose, lovely spontaneity. Grim as their date is, the experience also seems cathartic, even liberating—it’s a bad time that’s a good story. Maybe not now; maybe in twenty years. For now, she smiles in the bathroom, and texts Hannah, telling her where she is.
As Elaine Blair wrote last year in The New York Review of Books, in pretty much the only essay on the show worth reading, “For all of its emphasis on sexual and romantic experience, Girls never suggests that a smoothly pleasant sex life is something worthy of serious aspiration. The ultimate prize to be wrung from all of these baffling sexual predicaments is a deeper understanding of oneself.” For some, this is bleak viewing. But for others, the harshest of these stories can be thrilling, because they make private pain public (and embarrassing stories funny), and also because they work as a sly how-to, on ways to thicken one’s skin. In its first season, Girls captured how sex can be theater—not just faking orgasms but faking coolness, kinkiness, independence. There’s power in gulling men, which is Jessa’s stock-in-trade. (One of the best plots this season involves Jessa’s husband’s eyes being opened: “You’re my worst nightmare,” he announces, almost in awe, as their marriage collapses in a Williamsburg loft.)
Still, the most significant thing about Girls may be that it’s not a book, a play, a song, or a poem. And not a movie, either; since women rarely control production, there are few movies of this type, and even fewer that have mass impact. Girls is television. It’s in the tradition of sitcoms in which comics play humbled versions of themselves: Lucy, Roseanne, Raymond, Seinfeld. But it’s also TV in a more modern mode: spiky, raw, and auteurist. During the past fifteen years, the medium has been transformed by bad boys like Walter White and sad sacks like Louis C.K. Girls is the crest of a second, female-centered wave of change, on both cable and network, of shows that are not for everyone, that make viewers uncomfortable. It helps that the show’s creator has her own roguish, troublemaking quality, a Molly Brown air that lets Dunham wade into controversy without (at least, so far) drowning.
Like every “concern troll”—the Internet term for one who ices her sneer with dignified worry—I may be making Girls sound like a dissertation. It’s a comedy: a slight one, an odd one, an emotional one. The show isn’t perfect—it’s got cartoonish bits—but then most interesting art isn’t. And, unlike previous versions of this story, which arrived complete, Girls, like Hannah, also isn’t done: Because it’s television, it’s being built in front of us, absorbing and defying critiques along the way. It lingers and rankles and upsets. It shows the audience something new, then dares it to look away. Small wonder some viewers itch to give the show a sound spanking.
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Girls airs on Sundays, the same night as another HBO series with an off-putting female protagonist, one that’s received too little attention instead of too much. Now in its second season, Enlightened is an anxious, jubilant comedy created by Mike White, starring Laura Dern as Amy Jellicoe, a corporate employee sent to rehab in Hawaii after she has a nervous breakdown. When she returns to L.A., she’s banished to the company’s basement to work among the data-processing drones, one of whom is the nerdy Tyler, played by White himself. If Hannah mirrors Louis C.K., Amy is a sister to Larry David. She wants to be peaceful, brave, and decent, but her needy personality makes everyone she meets want to claw off his or her own face—and this season, when Amy becomes a corporate whistle-blower, her egotism and her idealism are indistinguishable.
This might be unbearable, if it weren’t for Enlightened’s highly original and humane comic engine: It’s a satire of feminine New Age do-gooderism that shares the values of all it satirizes. Like Parks and Recreation, Enlightened bridges the comedy divide between warmth and smarts; it makes me cry more than any comedy I’ve seen. If Girls teaches you to thicken your skin, Enlightened advocates emotional openness, even when it hurts.
The third episode of the season, which aired two weeks ago, focused on Amy’s ex-husband, Levi, who goes to the same Hawaiian rehab center, at her urging. Instead of her narration, we hear his. Like many smart addicts, he takes in his surroundings with blighted insight: “They say to live in the moment. But what if the moment is endless? It’s headaches and phlegm and farts and whiners whining about every fucking thing that ever happened to ’em.” He bonds with the bad kids in the rehab, sliding first toward ecstatic freedom, then disillusionment, then emptiness. In the end, he’s saved only by thoughts of Amy and her refusal to see him as a lost cause. “You saw something in me that didn’t exist,” he says. “Or maybe it did. Maybe you’re my higher power.”
In the next episode, we’re back to Amy, who’s flirting with an investigative journalist who describes Internet activism as a way for nobodies to become important. This idea hits Amy like a jolt of electricity, and what follows is a provocative, visually artful meditation, directed by White, on the temptations of the digital world. (Other directors this season include Nicole Holofcener and Todd Haynes.) Amy attends a glamorous party of the global digerati; a montage draws subtle links among hacked emails, a CEO watching YouTube footage, and laptop-tapping strangers at a café. In her intoxication, Amy has begun to imagine the Internet in spiritual terms: “I can hear its angels humming.” Like her brand-new Twitter feed, Enlightened can seem unnerving and out of control. But you should follow.
BIG GULP
Vanderpump Rules
The New Yorker, May 23, 2016
One of the SUR ensemble tweeted a winky-face emoji to me after this piece came out.
Beyoncé’s sumptuous adultery opera Lemonade came out the week I began watching the Bravo reality series Vanderpump Rules, and it turned out to be an oddly appropriate soundtrack for the show. “What’s worse? Looking jealous or crazy?” Beyoncé croons in the video, swinging a baseball bat labeled “Hot Sauce.” “I really don’t want to cry off all this makeup I just put on,” a waitress named Scheana says on Vanderpump Rules, struggling to compose herself for a photo shoot. “Something’s telling me I may or may not have a fake friend,” Ariana, another waitress, seethes, glaring over at Scheana.
I’d downloaded Vanderpump Rules onto my phone so I could watch the show’s four seasons more efficiently: on the F train, in line at the supermarket, and while drifting off to sleep, an approach that felt less like binge-watching than like inserting an IV of sangria. A humble spin-off of the sprawling Real Housewives multiverse, Vanderpump Rules revolves around the employees of SUR (an acronym for Sexy Unique Restaurant), a West Hollywood venue owned by Lisa Vanderpump, a longtime cast member of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, which ended its sixth season last week. I’d fallen so far behind on that show, I’d never catch up. Rather than approach the intimidating portal of the original franchise, with its decadelong cross-series feuds, jail sentences, lifestyle brands, divorces, and handbag lines, I would sneak in through the servants’ entrance.
When the Real Housewives franchise debuted in 2006, set in Orange County, I was a deep devotee of the reality genre. I was a Big Brother Web-watcher and a Real World completist, and caught up on shows from The Amazing Race to Wife Swap. Yet The Real Housewives left me cold. It rankled me in a way that earlier shows—even schlock series like Joe Millionaire—had not. The few episodes I saw felt like misogynist vaudeville, with cast members monetizing the world’s ugliest ideas about women, in a type of auto-drag, humiliating rather than quasi-celebratory. Over the years, I’d developed a private theory about the fra
nchise’s appeal: When the New York version became an enormous hit, around 2008, it seemed to me to be a cultural conspiracy to distract the world from the almost universally male villains of the financial crash. Rather than satirize rich white men in suits, the show put the bull’s-eyes on their trophy wives, painting them as vain parasites, symbols of greed—consumerist gargoyles who might absorb the fury that was more logically directed at Wall Street itself.
That seemed plausible, and maybe it was a little bit true. But, then again, I’d never really watched the Housewives. For one thing, the women weren’t married to any hedge-fund quants. It’s always easier to condescend to a reality show before you start watching it—and watching it, and watching it. This is true of almost all reality soaps: The pleasure is less in the show than in the bubbly, cathartic, alternately cruel and tender talk that surrounds it, with its Wikipedian rabbit holes and weirdly therapeutic reunions and aftershows, the fizzy in-jokes of a largely queer and female audience. Watching Vanderpump felt less like watching TV than like becoming a sports fan. One minute, the show was a grim slog, a repetitive ritual that threatened to drag on forever, like baseball. The next minute, it was aggressively fun—the kind of thing that makes your heart leap whenever a fight breaks out, like hockey! To enjoy it, you just have to ignore the potential brain damage for the players once the game ends, like football.
The premise of Vanderpump Rules is simple enough: A group of hot people work at a restaurant that is run by a wealthy woman with a taste for neon pink and small dogs. Early on, the employees are mostly dull couples, but invariably they cheat, break up, and re-form into new friendships and romantic pairings, absorbing once-excluded newcomers and icing out former BFFs. Lisa Vanderpump comes off as the Aaron Burr of The Real Housewives, elegant and inscrutable; as Lin-Manuel Miranda might put it, she sexts less, smiles more. The members of her waitstaff, in contrast, are weepy and easily enraged, and despite the show’s contrivances, the milieu is not unrealistic. Maybe they wouldn’t crash quite so many engagement parties, but the characters—part-time models with vague plans to be ultra-famous—aren’t that different from other L.A. waiters. It’s a reality show about the types of people who are most likely to agree to appear on a reality show.
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One of my favorite current series is Rachel Bloom’s musical comedy, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, on The CW, which does a wonderfully empathetic job exploring what it feels like to be a female magnet for chaos—self-destructive and longing for love. And yet I’ve never entirely understood one of the main relationships on the show, the toxic romance between the surfer-bro Josh and his fiancée, the hot yoga instructor Valencia, who nags and bullies him nonstop. Vanderpump Rules helped me get it, because that show is pretty much a Neapolitan dessert made up entirely of Joshes and Valencias. The same conflict recurs over and over, the sympathies shifting, in a drama you might call “the betrayed princess”: A sexy, bossy girl dates a man who barely has a job. Then things blow up when—take your pick—he cheats in Las Vegas, reveals a pill addiction, or steals sunglasses in Hawaii. These betrayals are both real and imaginary: It’s hard for a viewer to be disturbed when it’s unclear which emotions are genuine and which have been scripted, an ambiguity that protects you from destabilizing empathy.
And yet there’s something legitimately poignant about the show’s Lemonade-flavored blend of grandiosity and fragility. There may not be any potential Beyoncés at SUR, but there are many girls who think of themselves, not unreasonably, as vulnerable public brands. When you believe you’re the show’s romantic lead, it’s extra-hideous to realize that you’re the dupe in a low-rent sex comedy, breaking into some guy’s iPhone to find shady Uber receipts. Or, as Beyoncé sings on “Hold Up,” “I’m not too perfect to ever feel this worthless.”
At times, the SUR universe can seem as creepily misogynist (and as thrillingly stylized) as the ballet world in Black Swan—put on those painful shoes and, lady, someone’s going to bleed. Slutty girls call other girls “skanks.” Skanky girls call other girls “pathetic.” All of them pretend to be chill babes who don’t mind their boyfriends taking a guys-only trip to Vegas—but, eventually, most of them end up nagging for a ring. As it went on, Vanderpump Rules began to remind me of an old saying: that, after straight couples break up, all ex-girlfriends are “crazy,” while all ex-boyfriends are either “confused” or “assholes.” Meanwhile, the men engage in a conspiracy of “bro-code,” which is broken so often that it’s more of a bro guideline. Perversely, the worst thing you can accuse someone of is being “judgmental.”
The cast members themselves are somehow both memorable and interchangeable. There’s Stassi, who is basically a grown-up version of the nasty little girl in the Free to Be…You and Me fable “Ladies First,” the one who gets eaten by tigers. Stassi’s ex-boyfriend, Jax, is pretty much a sociopath: He’s an admitted thief who cheats and lies. (“He’s had three noses in one year,” Lisa Vanderpump observes. “He doesn’t understand the word ‘commitment.’ ”) There’s a selection of sulky brunettes, including Katie, “the Shakespeare of rage-texting.” Black waitresses tend to get sidelined, treated as sexless confidantes or silent extras. (There’s a lot of weird racial stuff in the mix, as the nearly all-white cast gossips about who qualifies as a “ghetto bitch” or a “ratchet whorebag.”) There’s also a nudist trickster named Lala, and Ariana, a hipster comic who startled me when she complained—during yet another fight over whether a boyfriend should go to Vegas—that she hated “heteronormative fucking bullshit.” The nice men are hard to tell apart, since half of them seem to be named Tom.
It’s easy to make fun of these characters—the show is designed to encourage it—but, to judge from the aftershow, they’re often in on the joke. And it’s not as if anyone who has been through a bad breakup hasn’t been there, pathetic/judgmental/skank-wise. But there are hints of darker themes, especially when it comes to sex. A couple gets engaged, then never, ever gets laid. After a breakup, each partner denounces the other for carnal acts committed on a cursed IKEA-ish sofa—or, alarmingly often, while they’re so drunk that they have a debate about whether anything even happened. Ugly details like this surface, then get abandoned, or treated as a joke, because the show is contractually obligated to party on. The true climax of Season 4 was a tiny moment when a minor character, a waitress who’d just hooked up with a busboy/DJ, yelled for her jealous ex to remove his microphone. It was the rare indication that anyone knew they were on TV, a titillating exposure that felt sexier than pixelated D-cups could ever be.
Many years ago, I wrote a profile of a new bar in Los Angeles that was run by Mike “Boogie” Malin, one of the villains of an early season of Big Brother. Back then, he was still licking his wounds, confused by his ruinous experience on the show; a few years later, he won one of the All-Star competitions and was back on top. But he was just one of many former reality stars floating around Hollywood, disrupting the ecosystem of fame. They were thirsty, to use the modern term; they wanted it too much.
The truth is, the most nuanced perspective on reality may be found not in the shows themselves but in parodies of them, like the champagne-bubbly satire The Hotwives of Orlando on Hulu, and the behind-the-scenes drama Unreal on Lifetime, which returns for its second season in June. These shows capture the genre from the inside, exploring the vulnerability of those who keep trying to beat a system that, like a casino, rarely lets any player win for long. I still sometimes have the urge to critique the reality machine; it’s certainly asking for it. But it’s also true that reality is where the action is. It’s an easily mocked mass artistic medium that’s corrupted by half-hidden deals, but it also provides a magnetizing mirror for the culture, dirty and mesmerizing. It’s television’s television.
SHARK WEEK
House of Cards and Scandal
The New Yorker, February 25, 2013
This is the second piece I wrote about Scandal.
The first column was about the first seven episodes; it argued that a not-great network drama with an African American heroine was still a meaningful breakthrough, maybe a bigger one than a great show. But by the second season, the series transformed, or maybe I changed—maybe it was both of us—and I turned into a full-on Scandal superfan, live-tweeting on TGIT (Thank God It’s Thursday), and arguing about Fitz versus Jake. I ended up writing about the show more than once.
Ironically, life began imitating Shonda Rhimes around the time Trump ran for president. Eventually, Scandal had to rework a plot in which the Russians hacked the election. Too on the nose.
House of Cards is an original release from Netflix, a DVD-distribution and streaming company that has decided, after several years of selling tickets to the circus, to jump into the ring. Adapted from a British political thriller and produced by David Fincher, the series stars Kevin Spacey as a mercenary Democratic House Majority Whip and Robin Wright as his wife. This prestigious résumé has turned House of Cards into big news—not least because Netflix has cleverly released all thirteen episodes at once. As a model of TV production, it’s an exciting experiment, with the potential to liberate showrunners from the agony of weekly ratings. It suggests fresh possibilities for the medium, feeding an audience that has already been trained to binge on quality TV in DVD form.
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