I Like to Watch

by Emily Nussbaum

  As a television show, however, House of Cards is not so revolutionary. This isn’t to say it’s bad, or not worth watching, or unmemorable. (Certain lines, such as “Twitter twat, WTF?,” might become catchphrases—for all its elegant contours, the show is marbled with camp.) Over a recent weekend, House of Cards acted something like a scotch bender, with definite highs and lows. I found the first two episodes handsome but sleazy, like a CEO in a hotel bar. Yet by Episode 5, I was hypnotized by the show’s ensemble of two-faced sociopaths. Episode 8 was a thoughtful side trip into sympathy for Spacey’s devilish main character, but by then I was exhausted, and only my compulsive streak kept me going until the finale—at which point I was critically destabilized and looking forward to Season 2.

  Sensually, visually, House of Cards is a pleasure. Its acrid view of political ambition is nothing new (that perspective is all over TV these days, on shows like HBO’s Veep and Starz’s Boss), but the series has some sharp twists, with an emphasis on corporate graft and media grandstanding. There’s also one truly poignant plot about a working-class congressman hooked on drugs. Yet, in the days after I watched the show, its bewitching spell grew fainter—and if House of Cards had been delivered weekly, I might have given up earlier. Much of the problem is Spacey himself, as Francis “Frank” Underwood, a wheeler-dealer who is denied the job of secretary of state and then conspires, with his steely wife, to go even higher. Spacey’s basilisk gaze seems ideal for the role, but he’s miscast by being too well cast—there’s no tension in seeing a shark play a shark. It’s a lot easier to buy his opposite number, the investigative blogger Zoe Barnes (the awesomely hoydenish Kate Mara), who strikes up an affair with Underwood in return for access. Her hair slicked down like a seal, her eyes dead, and her T-shirt sexily V-necked, Barnes is like some millennial demon from the digital unconscious, catnip for condescending older men. You could criticize the show’s portrayal of female reporters as venal sluts in black eyeliner, but it’s hard to object too much, since Mara’s performance, which has a freaky, repressive verve, is the liveliest thing in the show. Robin Wright is regal as Claire, Underwood’s charity-running wife, and Sakina Jaffrey makes a quiet impact as the president’s chief of staff, a restrained professional who, in this lurid context, feels downright exotic.

  Fincher’s Washington is full of eerie imagery, such as a homeless man folding a twenty-dollar bill into an origami swan, and it’s magnificently lit (although I don’t understand why a sought-after journalist like Zoe lives in a flophouse full of spiders). But eventually the show’s theatrical panache, along with Spacey’s Shakespearean asides to the camera, starts to feel as gimmicky as a fashion-magazine shoot, with melancholic shots of Claire jogging in a graveyard. The show may be made of elegant material, but it’s not built to last—it’s a meditation on amorality that tells us mostly what we already know.

  And, honestly, the more I watched, the more my mind kept wandering over to Shonda Rhimes’s Scandal, on ABC—a series that’s soapy rather than noirish but much more fun, and that, in its lunatic way, may have more to say about Washington ambition. Scandal, which is inspired by a real-life political “fixer,” started slowly as a legal procedural blended with a Rielle Hunter–flavored presidential affair. It took a season to shed its early conception of Kerry Washington’s PR bigwig Olivia Pope as a “white hat.” But once it did—whoa, Nelly. Popping with colorful villains, vote-rigging conspiracies, waterboarding, assassinations, montages set to R & B songs, and the best gay couple on television (the president’s chief of staff, Cyrus, and his husband, James, an investigative reporter), the series has become a giddy, paranoid fever dream, like 24 crossed with The West Wing, lit up in neon pink. Last week’s episode was such a #GameChanger—that’s the hashtag the show’s creator used to advertise the episode—that Twitter exploded with exclamation points.

  Because Scandal is so playful, and is unafraid to be ridiculous, it has access to emotional colors that rarely show up in Fincher’s universe, the aesthetics of which insist we take it seriously. Like Underwood, Jeff Perry’s Cyrus is a Machiavelli who cozies up to the president, but he’s got rage, wit, and a capacity for passion, not just oleaginous asides. During last week’s episode, he and his husband faced off, naked, in a fight about Cyrus’s crimes. (They’d stripped to demonstrate that they weren’t wearing wires.) The scene was absurd, but also genuinely intimate, with all the daring that House of Cards lacks.

  Rhimes’s show is made under the opposite circumstances from Fincher’s: nearly twice as many episodes, ratings pressure, constant threat of cancellation, a ravenous tweeting audience. These forces wreck other network dramas, and Rhimes’s previous shows have at times flown off the rails, but Scandal has only gotten stronger. It’s become more opera than soap opera, as the critic Ryan McGee observed online. Like much genre fiction, Scandal uses its freedom to indulge in crazy what-ifs: What if everyone but the president knew that the election was fixed? What if the president tried to divorce his pregnant wife? What if—well, I don’t want to spoil everything, but you might consider jumping in at the beginning of Season 2. It’s a different kind of binge-watch.

  THE LITTLE TRAMP

  Inside Amy Schumer

  The New Yorker, May 11, 2015

  I had been waiting for a column in which I could find an excuse to talk about my beloved copy of the 1970s feminist humor anthology Titters.

  “I really need to stop making so many white girls,” God, played by Paul Giamatti, groans on Comedy Central’s Inside Amy Schumer. In this sketch, the blond ditz “Amy Schumer”—a self-lacerating version of the comedian who plays her—finds out that she’s got herpes from a hookup. Her irritated Creator notes that this is the first time she’s prayed to him in years. Schumer explains that she’s a role model now, so young girls shouldn’t see her buying Valtrex. God says that he’ll have to destroy a village in Uzbekistan to cure her; she’s cool with that. However, she refuses his demand that she stop drinking. “Can I just blow you?” she whines. “I’m gay,” he replies, disgusted.

  Raunchy, rough, a destabilizing mixture of daffy and caustic, Schumer’s series debuted under the radar in 2013. A blend of stand-up routines, mostly about sex; person-on-the-street interviews, also about sex; and satirical sketches about sex, the series had an unusually high hit rate for a new comedy show. But this spring is clearly Schumer’s breakout moment. She’s on the cover of Entertainment Weekly in a parody of the poster for American Beauty, blond curls splayed, lying on a bed of minibar liquor bottles rather than rose petals. In July, her romantic comedy Trainwreck, directed by Judd Apatow (who has unexpectedly blossomed into female comedy’s fairy godfather), will debut. The show’s new season, its third, has a higher profile, too: It’s more star-studded and also more overtly political. The show has always had feminist streaks; now it’s letting those roots grow out. The first episode, which aired two weeks ago, yielded two viral hits: one a perfect Friday Night Lights parody, in which Josh Charles plays a football coach who outrages his town with a “no raping” rule, the other a sketch about Hollywood double standards called “Last Fuckable Day,” starring Tina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Patricia Arquette.

  The two skits were timely and also very funny. (“Football Town Nights,” in particular, was a sharp interrogation of football culture, featuring earnest jocks so confused about the coach’s new rule that they pepper him with questions like “But what if my mom’s a DA and won’t prosecute?”) That said, there’s a risk to Schumer’s rise: When you’re put on a pedestal, the whole world gets to upskirt you. Now comes the hype, the lash, and the backlash, and the backlash to the backlash, the hero worship, and the red-hot fury—no pressure, Amy Schumer! It’s happened again and again to the new wave of female TV creators, the Tinas and Mindys and Lenas, whose fans want role models as well as artists—a demand that many female comics embrace but that’s more rarely required of men. And yet it’s hard to deny the effectiveness of the speec
h Schumer gave at a Ms. Foundation event last year, in which she described, in raw detail, a cruddy college sexual encounter. It woke her up to how far she’d sunk—and the way that the world’s focus on “fuckability” can throw her right back into self-hatred. “I say if I’m beautiful. I say if I’m strong,” she told the audience, delivering a sort of mission statement for her show, in which she dredges the wreckage of that younger self.

  There’s nothing new about comedy with a feminist bent: One of my most prized possessions is a humor collection called Titters, whose cover features a busty woman in a tight T-shirt. Published in 1976, and edited by the few female writers of Saturday Night Live, it was the “first collection of humor by women,” with contributors ranging from Phyllis Diller to a pre-Huffington Arianna Stassinopoulos. Like many classic humor anthologies, it’s largely dated and dumb, aside from some bits that are hilariously mean. (If you think feminist infighting is new, check out the parody of Nora Ephron’s “small breasts” essay, which turns that body part into “sharp elbows.”) But it’s a useful relic of a time when feminists were libeled as humorless, a smear that persists. The truth is, the polemicists of the seventies, from Bella Abzug to Flo Kennedy to Valerie Solanas, with her SCUM Manifesto, were often outrageously funny, using gonzo cracks to express anger. Anti-feminists have always disguised their insults as jokes. (“Can’t you take a joke?”) But a joke can be the slickest response; it’s an expression of savoir faire in the face of hatred.

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  Comedy with a message can also easily turn didactic—or, worse, it can turn smug. Luckily, Schumer’s show feels built to withstand this pressure, even as it expands its reach, touching on subjects like reproductive rights and equal pay. (Credit is due to the show’s writers, including Jessi Klein, Tig Notaro, and Schumer’s sister, Kim Caramele.) This is mainly because of the grotty, chaotic persona that Schumer has developed, allowing her to poke just as hard at young single women, in their blinkered vanity, as she does at the toxic messages that surround them. In Schumer’s stand-up, she’s one of them: “sluttier than the average bear,” a binge drinker who knows that blacking out isn’t cute anymore. Her target is the ugliness of urban heterosexual hookups: Plan B, money shots, and other hassles of the age. In this iteration, she’s smart but self-destructive, the sadder-but-wiser girl, who knows how easily desperation can masquerade as freedom.

  In contrast to that knowing girl, the one whom Schumer satirizes in her sketches is brutally clueless. She’s the subject of every op-ed on “girls today”—a needy narcissist, all bravado and entitlement. This Amy is the “dumb slut” and the “whiny white girl.” She’s the bad bridesmaid, the chick who gives out blow jobs like handshakes, who is so obsessed with taking the perfect selfie that she hires a team of stylists. She’s the Whoo! Girl, out at Coyote Ugly with her posse, fake-twerking, then weeping at 3 A.M. In some of these sketches, that alternate Amy is a self-obsessed monster, but in others, she’s vulnerable. In one great early routine, she gets a booty-call text and keeps writing and deleting replies, from “I am so lonely all the ti—” and “I would love another shot at giving you a blo—” to “Tell me what all my remotes do.” (When the guy sends a dick pic, she replies, “I love pugs!!! Is it a rescue?”) When she’s a secret agent, her code name is Butterface. When she agrees to appear in a children’s animated film, her character turns out to be a meerkat with exposed labia, who defecates onscreen. Her only line in the script is a growled catchphrase: “Wooorms.”

  This sort of self-mockery could turn into masochism, but so far, that hasn’t happened, in part because the sharpness of the jokes is itself a form of self-assertion. In the first season, Amy recommends “porn from a woman’s POV,” then shows footage with angles staring up a guy’s nostril; in another sketch, she announces that, as a feminist, she’s hosting a gang bang (sponsored by Sea Spray), “to prove that women aren’t objects.” A murderously funny ad for plastic surgery asks, “Don’t you owe it to yourself to look like you fell into a tank of chemicals while fighting Batman?” Such sketches satirize a degrading culture, but they also take aim at women’s gameness to prove that they are, to quote one recent sketch, “cool with it.” Some of the best scenes involve a circle of female friends competing to put themselves down, such as one in which the women are so competitively self-deprecating that when one accepts a compliment all the others commit suicide.

  This subject matter isn’t Schumer’s alone, of course. It would be easy to put her in a category with female comedians who talk dirty: the lacerating Sarah Silverman; that defiantly dead-souled essentialist Whitney Cummings; Lena Dunham, our era’s greatest op-ed magnet; the satirical narcissist Mindy Kaling; the funky Laverne & Shirley of Broad City, Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer; the flamboyant boozehound Chelsea Handler. They follow in a tradition that extends back to Mae West and Moms Mabley, and outward to comic artists like Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Julie Doucet, creators inspired by female abjection. Such comparisons can be a trap: They suggest that female artists exist only in the context of one another and must be compared, so that some may be deemed insufficiently radical. But there’s something to be said for an “All boats rise” moment. The haters (an actual set of people—I’ve met them) dismiss Schumer’s act as “guy humor,” talking dirty to please men. But graphic sex talk is what gets Schumer to uncomfortable places, including rare candor about the underside of a porn-soaked world. There are moments when Schumer’s comedy verges on Dworkinesque, nailing some girls’ willingness to eat shit, just to be liked.

  Even better, just as she hits the mainstream, Schumer is increasing the number of her targets. The most ambitious material in this season’s first three episodes is a half-hour, black-and-white parody of the movie 12 Angry Men. It begins as a reboot of an earlier sketch on the show, in which an all-male focus group debates whether Amy is hot enough for TV, but this one is much more ambitious. A remarkable cast, which includes Jeff Goldblum, Vincent Kartheiser, Kumail Nanjiani, and a fuming Giamatti, begins by rating Amy’s looks, but as the conversation expands the men start to fight about the roots of sexual attraction, the rise of female comedy, and just whose tastes count as normal. This somehow leads to dueling dildos, which replace the knives from the movie. By the end, the sketch feels like it’s an investigation of the fury of men online, the ones who fill every comment thread about Schumer—or any other female comic—with scathing judgments. It’s a comedic method as old as grade school: She’s rubber, they’re glue.

  HELLO, GORGEOUS

  The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

  The New Yorker, December 24, 2018

  A pan as harsh as the one for True Detective, but for whatever reason, I got mostly love notes in response. Many were from people who agreed with me about Maisel, but others were from fans of the show who still thought I made some reasonable points. This matches up with my general experience: Pan an antihero drama, you’ll get threats; pan a relationship series, you’ll make friends for life.

  It took two minutes of Season 2 before someone said the words: “Gosh, you’re amazing.” The speaker was one of Miriam (Midge) Maisel’s colleagues at the B. Altman switchboard, but, really, it might have been anyone: a genius painter at the Cedar Inn, who says, “It’s like Vermeer painted you! Or you swallowed a light bulb”; a Johnny Mathis–esque crooner at a telethon; Lenny Bruce; Jane Jacobs; Midge’s estranged husband, Joel, who is still stuck on her; her boyfriend, a choosy doctor who prefers Midge to the vapid gold diggers in the Catskills; her devoted agent, Susie; or even some Parisian drag queens, who dub her Miss America. Is there anyone who doesn’t love Midge?

  Me, as it happens. Last year, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel was a boffo hit for Amazon and for its top-hatted creator, Amy Sherman-Palladino. The series swept the Emmys. It sent shivers of delight up the spines of vintage shoppers everywhere. Lusciously art-directed, from Midge’s classic six to her kitten heels, the production landed at an ideal moment, tappin
g into a desperation—particularly among women—for something sweet and inspiring. No more Handmaid’s Tale, no more pussy-grabbing. Mrs. Maisel offered a bright-pink escape hatch from 2017.

  I craved such an escape myself—but I was also mystified by the show’s reception, because the first season struck me as both treacly and exhausting. This was true despite its having a premise so far up my alley it was practically chopping onions in my kitchen: A Jewish girl does stand-up comedy in the late 1950s in New York, when Joan Rivers first rose to fame. And, in fact, the show’s heroine, played by Rachel Brosnahan, is—exactly like Rivers was—a college-educated rich girl in her twenties, who is forced to move back home after her marriage blows up. When Midge enters show biz, her shtick—just like Rivers’s was—is to dress for a date, in a black dress and pearls, then free-associate truths about women’s lives. As with Rivers, the radical “sick” comic Lenny Bruce is Midge’s inspiration—and, in the show, Bruce (Luke Kirby) becomes her mentor. (In real life, after Rivers once bombed, Bruce left her a note: “You’re right, they’re wrong.” She kept it in her bra, for luck.)

  But The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel makes two major adjustments. First, it gives Midge kids, a baby and a toddler. It also makes her a winner. Whereas Rivers was an alienated oddball, a loner fueled by rejection, gagging onstage at her own “ugliness,” Midge is popular and pretty. She’s skilled (and brags of her skill) at everything from sex to brisket. When Joel, a wannabe comic, cheats with his secretary, Midge gets drunk and jumps onstage, and, right away, she kills. She keeps on killing—at cocktail parties and dive bars, even at a Washington Square rally, where she awes Jane Jacobs with a speech about how women “accessorize” the world, as a multiethnic crowd cheers. “Oh, that’s good, write that down,” Jacobs tells her assistant.