I Like to Watch

by Emily Nussbaum

  Still, there’s a tricky tension in the show between its family-time warmth and its fascination with sex itself, a subject that it has examined seriously, and increasingly graphically, in a way that many theoretically adult shows do not. Jane is respectful to the devout Alba (wonderfully portrayed by Ivonne Coll), who crumpled a flower and told Jane that that was her virtue, if she gave it away. But it’s also an advocate for moving past shame. In that same perfect episode, the one in which Jane and Rafael finally get it on, there’s a story in which Alba confesses the real reason that she ended things with her boyfriend, once he proposed: She’s frightened of sex, having not had it for thirty years. “You get used to things—or not having things,” she tells her granddaughter, in a moving, simple sequence. Jane argues that her abuela isn’t, as she sees herself, “broken”—but her solution is not to tell Alba to jump in bed with a man but to take her shopping for a vibrator and some lubricant. In that montage of three sexual awakenings, the septuagenarian gets one of them. Refreshingly, the moment is not played for laughs: In Jane’s world, sex, like love, is a bright color that everyone deserves to see.

  RETURN OF THE REPRESSED

  The Comeback

  The New Yorker, November 17, 2014

  An unappreciated minor miracle of a show that taught me a lot about TV-making.

  HBO’s The Comeback, which was co-created by Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King, ran for one razor-sharp season, in 2005. Luckily, largely owing to HBO GO, the series outlived its cancellation. Among comedy cultists, it gained a reputation as the great lost cringe comedy, at once hilarious and heartbreaking, with Kudrow’s Valerie Cherish, a washed-up sitcom star, the peer of Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm and David Brent in the British version of The Office. Like those two shows, The Comeback was done as fake cinema verité: It purported to be the “unedited footage” of a reality show that documented the production of a sitcom, Room and Bored, that Valerie hoped would make her a star again. Instead, she finds herself cast as Aunt Sassy, a dirty-joke sidekick. As the writers turn against her, Valerie steps into trap after trap, until, by the finale, she’s so desperate to be liked that she stage dives into humiliation, signing vomit bags for reality fans.

  Then, last year, a miracle happened: a resurrection. Nearly a decade after canning the series, HBO agreed to produce a comeback of The Comeback—a second season with the same core cast. The result, which debuted last weekend, is as spiny and audacious as the original, but very different, because it isn’t aimed at “celebreality” or network sitcoms, now dated targets. Instead, King and Kudrow go for something with more cachet: the auteurist pay-cable antihero series. In the first episode, as Valerie prepares to pitch a new reality series to Bravo, she discovers that there’s already a show in development based on her life—Seeing Red, an HBO dramedy, created by her former nemesis, the sitcom writer Paulie G. It’s a scripted re-creation of the terrible events of the original Comeback, but this time, from Paulie’s perspective. Naturally, Valerie ends up starring in the show, as Mallory Church, in a red wig that looks exactly like her own red hair, insisting, once again, that the character she’s playing is nothing like her.

  It’s important to note that every bit of this plot is absurdly self-referential, like a blind item of TV sitcom history. In the nineties, Kudrow starred on Friends, which inspired a lawsuit over a sexist writers’ room whose members, like those on the fictional Room and Bored, blew off steam by fantasizing about the sexual humiliation of the show’s actresses. Seeing Red is an HBO dramedy inside an HBO dramedy. Michael Patrick King was the showrunner for Sex and the City: when the self-involved Valerie spots a poster for that show in HBO’s halls, she coos that now she’ll be “one of the girls.” (She hasn’t seen “Lela Durham’s Girls,” but she’s heard good buzz.) Bravo’s Andy Cohen plays himself; Seth Rogen plays Seth Rogen, who plays Paulie in Seeing Red. When observers praise Valerie for her “real” looks and her “brave” performance, it echoes the coded praise that Kudrow received for The Comeback.

  If you’re a certain type of reader, this description may make you recoil—so “meta,” so “ironic,” so many “air quotes.” The Comeback is, it’s true, a scripted series about a reality series about a reality star making a scripted series about the time she made a reality show about a scripted series. It’s less a hall of mirrors than a kaleidoscope, with each surface reflecting a TV set. But it’s worth remembering that meta-comedy isn’t a modern innovation: I Love Lucy, the original sitcom, was a meta-comedy fueled by the contrast between Lucy Ricardo’s desperation for fame and Lucille Ball’s actual fame. In the decades since Lucy threw her first tantrum, the anger of TV writers, and their frustration at TV’s limitations, has inspired a startling proportion of TV’s best comedies. Monty Python mocked the pomposity of the BBC; All in the Family exploded Father Knows Best; 30 Rock took aim at NBC. The Dick Van Dyke Show was Carl Reiner’s attempt to exorcise the experience of working on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, and Dan Harmon’s Community is, often enough, a show about how difficult it is to make Community with Dan Harmon. At their best, such shows double as manifestos against broken systems—they’re do-overs for traumatized creatives, who, like Valerie, keep reliving the same painful story, hoping to find a better ending.

  Certainly, that’s part of what made the original Comeback so pungent: It was a denunciation of a new genre—the star-studded reality show—that fed on L.A. desperation and threatened the livelihood of writers. It was also a searing critique of the crazy-making environment for older actresses. Halfway through the first season, Valerie—whose complaints about crass gags alienated the men who wrote them—went to the writers’ room, at 2 A.M., carrying cookies, hoping to make amends. As reality cameras peeked through the blinds, she caught a glimpse of the phenomenon that the director James Burrows (who played himself) described as “The Hate Show.” The writers were miming rough sex with Valerie: One pulls an orange T-shirt over his head to simulate her hair while another bends “Valerie” over the table. The sole “girl writer” watches silently. Valerie’s response is to act as if this wasn’t happening—or, really, that if it was happening, it was no big deal. But her facial expression was cracked glass. It’s the explicit form of Aunt Sassy’s catchphrase: “I don’t need to see that.”

  In the new season, Valerie faces similar pressures, but in an entirely different context. There is no writers’ room anymore. Instead, Paulie G, who has been through rehab for heroin addiction, is a freshly anointed cable auteur, writing each episode himself, and directing, too, even though he has no experience behind the camera. Being on HBO gives Valerie, as well as her reality producer, the opportunity to get a big paycheck, plus tickets to the Golden Globes.

  But “prestige dramedy” turns out to have its own humiliations. In The Comeback’s standout sequence, Valerie films the sort of graphic sex scene that’s become a numbing cable convention. It’s a two-minute-long, mostly wide-frame shot in which Valerie, clothed as Aunt Sassy, stands flanked by two naked porn actresses, who moan orgasmically; the moment is equally hilarious and excruciating. It’s meant to paralyze the viewer, presenting a critique that doubles as the thing being critiqued. But Valerie also knows enough not to complain, and always to praise those naked girls: “So free! So beautiful, really.” Her job, she’s learned by now, is to be a good sport. Any hint of resistance might get her tagged as “difficult.”

  There are plenty of shows that this sequence echoes, but the one that immediately came to mind was Showtime’s Californication, whose recent final season was also about a womanizing addict (David Duchovny, as the novelist Hank Moody) writing for an antihero series. Like the HBO show Entourage (which debuted a year before The Comeback), Californication was a meta-comedy that featured celebrities doing playful takedowns of their images, insider references to Hollywood decadence, and female characters who were friendly bimbos and feminist sharks, the latter of whom generally stripped down to reveal their
inner bimbo. Californication became a toxic mess, reducing great actresses like Kathleen Turner to roles as one-note ballbusters. In the final season, the wonderful Mary Lynn Rajskub showed up in the mortifying guise of “girl writer” Goldie, who was whiny, allergic to everything, and obsessed with the idea that she wasn’t hot enough for the showrunner. It felt like the opposite of The Comeback: a season of television that happily fellated the corrupt system that it pretended to satirize. Only one of these shows is still on TV. Progress!

  The original Comeback may have emerged too early, before the rise of the modern comedic antiheroine. But even among that sorority, Valerie is a creature unlike any other. With her Katharine Hepburn warble and her synthetic grin, Kudrow’s Valerie is a marvel: Her performance continually veers toward cruel camp, and then shivers with vulnerability. Like Holly Golightly before her, Valerie is no phony, because she’s a real phony. From a certain angle, even her narcissism begins to seem valiant—it’s a stubborn resistance to an industry that wishes she’d disappear. If Valerie has had a lifelong staring contest with the camera, she won’t be the first to blink.

  SHEDDING HER SKIN

  The Good Wife

  The New Yorker, October 13, 2014

  I’ve written about The Good Wife a few times; in another column, I called it “The Wire for the digital divide.”

  Unlike most art forms, a network TV series is always under construction. Each week, it reacts to us reacting to it, throwing out bids for higher ratings, or shoving popular couples into the spotlight, or ejecting actors caught in scandals. When it’s a particularly thoughtful show, it also reflects the world beyond Hollywood. It’s the rough draft that doubles as the published product.

  At least, that’s what TV used to be—these days, God knows, anything goes. Netflix releases whole seasons at once, green-lighted by algorithm; that’s how we got Jenji Kohan’s Orange Is the New Black. Amazon has become a patron of indie directors, with customers voting on pilots; that’s how we got Jill Soloway’s Transparent. Vimeo and Hulu are suddenly studios; the “anthology” series is back in vogue. On pay cable, Hollywood directors who once sniffed at TV offer up their names as marquee brands. Even the definition of an episode is in flux.

  Perhaps that’s why, as I clicked “Play” on the sixth season of The Good Wife, the CBS series that is the smartest drama currently on the air, I felt a twinge of protective nostalgia. After a great season, the show didn’t even get nominated for best drama at this year’s Emmys (although the snub might be a point of pride: The Wire was never nominated for best drama). As sharp as The Good Wife is, it lacks nearly all the Golden Age credentials. The series’s showrunners, Robert and Michelle King, a married couple, don’t have a pugnacious-auteur reputation or Hollywood glamour. They’re collaborative workhorses, producing twenty-two hourlong episodes a year, more than twice as many as their peers on HBO, FX, or AMC. (True Detective had eight episodes; Fargo ten.) Their series debuts every September, on schedule—no year-and-a-half-long hiatuses for them to brood about artistic aims. And on network television there are ads, and pressure for product integration, and the expectations of a mass audience (must be clear, must be exciting, must be familiar, must be appealing), and the strict rules that are implicit in corporate culture—all of which would be difficult even if CBS didn’t keep bumping The Good Wife back by forty minutes for football.

  Six seasons in, however, I’ve become weary of evangelizing for the show. Recently, I had lunch with an entirely charming TV-maker, who was educated and intelligent about many forms of television but had never watched The Good Wife, because, he admitted with a shrug, he perceived it as being “for women.” Although he was a fantastic lunch companion, he’s dead now. In any case, here’s a primer, if you’re a newcomer: In the first season, we met Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies), the wife of state’s attorney Peter Florrick, who gave up her fledgling legal career to raise a family. When Peter was nailed for hookers and graft—Eliot Spitzer–style—Alicia became a working mother, a first-year associate at a Chicago firm called Stern, Lockhart & Gardner. She didn’t get the job because she was exceptional: An old law-school friend, Will Gardner (Josh Charles), had promoted her over stronger candidates after she strategically flirted with him—a shady origin story that emerged slowly, over years. On The Good Wife, there is no success without corruption. The higher Alicia climbs—winning the second-year slot, making partner, leaving to start a new firm—the more compromised she becomes, and the more at ease with compromise. This applies to her marriage, also: It’s too valuable an asset for either spouse to abandon, even when they separate, when he is elected governor, and when she has an affair with Will. “You’re a brand! You’re St. Alicia,” Eli Gold, her husband’s chief of staff, tells her, begging her to run for office. Yet, despite everything, Alicia, an atheist, clings to her self-image as a heroine, a moral person in a godless universe.

  That’s the big picture, but, episode by episode, the Kings have shown themselves to be unusually flexible and pragmatic TV-makers, taking risks, then backpedaling quickly when they fail, as with a repellent Fifty Shades of Grey–ish plot about the firm’s investigator, Kalinda Sharma, which was written out when the audience rebelled. The show’s structure is classical, built on the model pioneered by The X-Files: There are “case of the week” plots mixed with season-long stories, which in turn echo within the larger arc of Alicia’s transformation—into what, we don’t yet know. But The Good Wife resists formula at every step. The Kings go grand, then tiny, staccato to legato, turning network necessities into artistic virtues. Pressures that crush other TV shows inspire clever work-arounds. Take, for instance, the SVU-inflected cases that have popped up in recent seasons—plots that could turn sleazy, like lucrative clients a firm takes to bankroll pro-bono work. Instead, the Kings have found fresh angles on pulp material, blending such stories with their trademark ones about Silicon Valley and technology, often using memorable characters like the creepy wife-killer Colin Sweeney (the great Dylan Baker).

  Such broader moments also act as camouflage for the show’s strength, its sneaky long-fuse subtlety, especially a technique in which the Kings plant a story, bit by bit, then expose a pattern. One of the most striking such plots occurred in Season 3, when Peter Florrick, at that time the state’s attorney of Cook County, had a series of run-ins with black employees, none of which seemed like a big deal—only to have their firings suddenly seem, to those outside the office, to be evidence of institutional bias. The story was different from blunter TV portraits of racism: Peter didn’t think of himself as bigoted, but his enemies weren’t wrong. It was a smart take on the way that organizations can harbor racism without any individual being overtly hateful.

  * * *

  —

  Last season’s even more audacious arc was a timely satire of the NSA, Strangelovian in tone. As with the race plot, the idea had been planted in advance, in sequences that felt at first like comic side plots. When Alicia’s teenage son’s girlfriend, whose parents are Somali, weeps on his voicemail after they break up, her recurrent hang-ups are misinterpreted by the NSA as hints of potential terrorism—which gives the agency an excuse to eavesdrop on everyone linked to the Florricks. The entire fifth season was bracketed by scenes set in the NSA’s blank cubicles, not among bigwigs but among nonentities: two Rosencrantz-and-Guildensternesque geeks who, when not trading viral videos, listen in on Alicia’s calls. They get so caught up in the Florrick story line that they become, essentially, Good Wife fans. And while their spying is insidious, it isn’t some grand conspiracy, as it might be on Homeland or House of Cards. The first tap simply leads to the second, which leads to a “three-hop” ruling, which leads to absolute surveillance of all things public and private.

  Then, two-thirds of the way through last season, the Kings made a risky, potentially audience-alienating move: They killed off a central character, Will, Alicia’s former partner and seeming soul mate. The decis
ion was pragmatic: Josh Charles wanted out of the role. But instead of playing as cheap melodrama, his death reinvented the series. It destroyed the most obvious path to a happy ending. It also, daringly, broke The Good Wife’s link to a feminine TV narrative formula: the love triangle—the secret sauce for many female fans. The episodes that followed felt wild and unpredictable. Alicia spun out. She formalized her marriage as an “arrangement.” And, in a hilarious turn, she became addicted to a cable drama, a series called Darkness at Noon, a satire of the AMC series Low Winter Sun (although it suggested other ponderous dramas as well). “People just think there are black hats and white hats, but there are black hats with white linings. And white hats with black linings,” the show’s existentialist hero droned to a mutilated female corpse. “And there are hats that change back and forth between white and black. And there are striped hats.” Alicia binge-watches the cable show with glazed eyes, drinking deeply from her perpetual goblet of red wine.

  The new season begins with an alarming change of venue: Cary Agos, Alicia’s law partner, has been thrown into prison, the target of drug charges. Alicia is under pressure of a different type, manipulated by multiple forces to run for state’s attorney. (“People think you’re important enough to bribe,” Eli Gold tells her, in what might be the show’s ultimate compliment.) There’s a sudden influx of new lawyers into her firm, including an African American attorney played by Taye Diggs and several female and minority staffers, who are drawn by the promise of a diverse start-up. It’s impossible to predict a plot arc after two episodes, but all signs point to something involving Draconian drug laws, militarized cops, the prison system, and perhaps a reexamination of the racial questions the show raised, then neglected. At the center of all this is the sinister Lemond Bishop, a character who bears a resemblance to The Wire’s Stringer Bell: He’s a drug dealer with a public life as a respectable businessman. He’s also a man whose facade, like Alicia’s, falls apart when you follow the money.