I Like to Watch

by Emily Nussbaum

  The Good Wife will always have an element of fantasy: Among other things, its Chicago features an unusual number of slinky lesbians in uniform, the better for the noirish investigator Kalinda to hook up with. But the series is also a model of how strict boundaries—the sort that govern sonnets—can inspire greater brilliance than absolute freedom can. In 2009, the show might have looked much like an empowerment procedural for the ladies, a Lean In fairy tale about a strong woman who would find her way. Instead, it’s revealed itself to be a sneaky condemnation of pretty much every institution under capitalism. Marriage is one of those institutions, of course. And so is television.

  CASTLES IN THE AIR

  Adventure Time

  The New Yorker, April 21, 2014

  This is one of my favorite shows. It’s also one of many brilliant animated series, including BoJack Horseman, Archer, Bob’s Burgers, and Steven Universe, that rarely get enough credit for sophisticated television-making.

  The animated series Adventure Time, now entering its sixth season on Cartoon Network, is the kind of cult phenomenon that’s hard to describe without sounding slightly nuts. It’s a postapocalyptic allegory full of dating tips for teenagers, or like World of Warcraft as recapped by Carl Jung. It can be enjoyed, at varying levels, by third-graders, art historians, and cosplay fans. It’s the type of show that’s also easy to write off as “stoner humor,” which may be why it took me a while to drop the snotty attitude, open up, and admit the truth: Adventure Time is one of the most philosophically risky and, often, emotionally affecting shows on TV. It’s beautiful and funny and stupid and smart, in about equal parts, as well as willing to explore uneasy existential questions, like what it means to go on when the story you’re in has ended.

  If that sounds pretentious, there’s a simpler way to watch the show: as a cartoon about a hero who fights villains, with fun violence, fart jokes, and a slight edge of Bushwick cool-kid hipness. When it began, in 2010, Adventure Time stuck more closely to a familiar formula, in which a good-hearted human boy named Finn and his dog, Jake, a gruff-voiced wingman type, were brought up as siblings. For no clear reason, Jake can stretch to any length and alter his body, extending his front leg to make a bridge, blowing up to mountain size, or turning himself into an armchair. Finn and Jake’s friendship has a classic nerd-and-his-id dynamic, a bit like Calvin and Hobbes, in which a wild animal encourages his friend to go on adventures and cheers him on with girls (among them, the scientist-princess Princess Bubblegum). Online summaries make it sound like a wacky romp: “Finn and Jake are assigned to watch three magical beans; two of the beans are innocent, but one of them is evil….Eventually, one of the stalks produces evil piglets, and Finn and Jake defeat the beings using a novel method that involves ice cream.”

  But, as the series progresses, a backstory emerges. The candy-tinted world we’re seeing has a terrible history: While Finn is surrounded by magical beings, virtually every other human appears to have been killed or transformed during the Mushroom War, which included, according to one unnerving voice-over, “frightful bombs poised to bathe the land in mutogenic horror.” As a baby, Finn was left on a leaf, crying and alone. The other major characters have their own origin stories. The sociopathic Ice King, who keeps trying to kidnap princesses and marry them, used to be a gentle antiquarian named Simon, a personality he lost while fighting mutants after the war, when a magic crown drove him crazy. The punk-goth vampire Marceline has a mobster dad, who rules an underworld called the Nightosphere, but she, too, wandered alone in a postwar landscape as a child. At the age of seven, she was rescued by Simon, but once he became the Ice King, he forgot he ever knew her.

  As with The Simpsons, the ensemble is enormous, allowing episodes to go off on detours and tell the stories of minor figures, such as the woozy Southern elephant named Tree Trunks; or the freaky Lemongrabs, lemon-headed maniacs who spend most of their time howling in frustration; or the friendly Korean-accented computer named BMO. In later seasons, these threads cohere into a broader cosmology; it includes an alternate time line, in which the bombs haven’t yet exploded. Finn is the only character who ages in a normal fashion: He began as a twelve-year-old, but this season he’s sixteen, and his relationships, and the show itself, have become deeper and (codedly) more sexual. There are moments when Finn’s story feels suspiciously like a compensatory fantasy, invented to disguise a trauma that can’t be faced head-on—as if it were the Mulholland Drive of children’s television.

  In interviews, Pendleton Ward, the show’s creator, has laid out some of his influences, including the role-playing game that was the leisure-time activity of my own nerdy teen years, Dungeons & Dragons. Many of the villains, like the skeletal Lich, have visual origins in the old D & D “Monster Manual”; the plots include classic quest-style puzzles—find the gems, open the portal! In the hand-drawn pastel backgrounds and the characters’ bubble eyes, there are hints of Japanese animation—Ward has cited the Hayao Miyazaki movie My Neighbor Totoro as an inspiration—but the aesthetic feels equally informed by the urbane squiggles of Felix the Cat, the jolting aggression of early Mickey Mouse cartoons, and the bratty buddy energy of series like Beavis and Butt-Head and The Ren & Stimpy Show.

  No matter how jaunty the foreground, though, with its goofy shouts of “Youth culture forever!,” the background keeps hinting at a ruined world, with missiles and abandoned technology everywhere. Bodies morph grotesquely—when Marceline’s father gets angry, he transforms from a businessman into a demon with an ass face, a vertical orifice for a mouth and a tentacle beard worthy of H. P. Lovecraft—and these ugly visions suggest both adolescent bodies and postwar mutations.

  Yet Adventure Time has a gentle heart. Even characters like the ridiculous Lumpy Space Princess, a brash Valley Girl who is voiced by Ward, have layers. “Bad Timing,” an episode from the fifth season, opens with an odd image: a large circle in the center of the screen, like a porthole. Peering into it, we can see Princess Bubblegum demonstrating her newest invention, a time machine called a “phasical sphere.” When Bubblegum places this sphere over the circle, she seems to break the fourth wall, turning the TV into a lens. Then she shouts, “Now check it out! It’s logging time.”

  What follows is a tragicomic fable in which Lumpy Space Princess, while on the rebound from a breakup, gets into her first real romance and, then, swamped by insecurity, wrecks it. As we peer at various scenes through the circle—Lumpy shrieking “You skunk! You pretty skunk!” at Bubblegum, then, later, tossing a root-beer Molotov cocktail at an imagined rival’s castle—there’s a strange flickering. In the corners of the screen are tiny creatures: two triangles fishing in a creek; a diamond doing curls with a dumbbell. These miniature dramas don’t affect the story we’re watching, yet we’re forced to glance at them, like footnotes, or a silent chorus; they suggest some larger universe of loneliness and connection. In the final scene, after Lumpy has accidentally dissolved her boyfriend in the phasical sphere, she begs Bubblegum, “If he’s gone, can you send me back, to before I met him? So I won’t have to remember this heartache?” A tiny shape hovers nearby, seeming sympathetic. Bubblegum grants the request, and blue rivers spill from Lumpy’s eyes. Just before the credits, the borders beyond the circle fade to black, and the small chorus disappears.

  Of course, this strange description may leave you cold—like any trip, Adventure Time has a definite “you had to be there” quality. It’s a dreamlike experience, and a druglike experience, and we all know how much people enjoy hearing other people describe those. (Luckily, each episode is eleven minutes long.) But that’s part of the show’s freeing quality: Childlike, nonlinear, poetic, and just outside all the categories that the world considers serious, it’s television that you can respond to fully, without needing to make a case for why.

  DEPRESSION MODERN

  The Leftovers

  The New Yorker, November 2, 2015

  One good way to get reven
ge on all the critics who panned your first show: Make them sob while watching your second.

  The second season of The Leftovers, on HBO, begins with a mostly silent eight-minute sequence, set in a prehistoric era. We hear a crackle, then see red-and-black flames and bodies sleeping around a fire; among them is a pregnant woman, who is nearly naked. She rises, stumbles from her cave, then squats and pisses beneath the moon—only to be startled by a terrifying rumble, an earthquake that buries her home. When she gives birth, we see everything: the flood of amniotic fluid, the head crowning, teeth biting the umbilical cord. For weeks, she struggles to survive, until finally she dies in agony, bitten by a snake she pulled off her child. Another woman rescues the baby, her face hovering like the moon. Only then does the camera glide down the river, to where teenage girls, wearing bikinis, are splashing and laughing in the water. We are suddenly in the present, with no idea how we got there.

  It takes serious brass to start any television season this way: The main characters don’t even show up until midway through the hour. With no captions or dialogue, and no clear link to the first season’s story, it’s a gambit that might easily veer into self-indulgence, or come off as second-rate Terrence Malick. Instead, the sequence is ravishing and poetic, sensual and philosophical, dilating the show’s vision outward like a telescope’s lens. That’s the way it so often has been with this peculiar, divisive, deeply affecting television series, Damon Lindelof’s first since Lost. Lindelof, the co-creator, and his team (which includes Tom Perrotta, the other co-creator, who wrote the novel on which the show is based; the religious scholar Reza Aslan, a consultant; and directors such as Mimi Leder) have made a show that keeps trying to dramatize the grandest philosophical notions, the deep existential mysteries—like, for example, the origins of maternal love and loss—with an unabashed and searching curiosity, giving the audience permission to react to them in equally vulnerable ways. They’re willing to risk the ridiculous in search of something profound.

  At heart, The Leftovers is about grief, an emotion that is particularly hard to dramatize, if only because it can be so burdensome and static. The show, like the novel, is set a few years after the Departure, a mysterious event in which, with no warning, 2 percent of the world’s population disappears. Celebrities go, so do babies. Some people lose their whole family, others don’t know anyone who has “departed.” The entire cast of Perfect Strangers blinks out (though, in a rare moment of hilarity, Mark Linn-Baker turns out to have faked his death). Conspiracy theories are rampant, as people lose their religion or become fundamentalists. The show’s central family, the Garveys, who live in Mapleton, New York, appears to have lost no one, yet they’re emotionally shattered. The mother, Laurie (an amazing Amy Brenneman, her features in a constant furrow of disgust), joins a cult called the Guilty Remnant, whose members dress in white, chain-smoke, and won’t speak. The Guilty Remnant stalk the bereaved, refusing to let anyone move on from the tragedy. Meanwhile, her estranged husband, Kevin (Justin Theroux), the chief of police, has flashes of violent instability; as their marriage dissolves, their teenage children drift away, confused and alarmed.

  That’s the plot, to the extent that the show has one, but the series is often as much about images (a girl locked in a refrigerator, a dog that won’t stop barking) and feelings (fury, suicidal alienation) as about events; it dives into melancholy and the underwater intensity of the grieving mind without any of the usual relief of caperlike breakthroughs. Other cable dramas, even ones about painful emotions, provide more familiar satisfactions, with stories about cops, mobsters, surgeons, spies. The Leftovers is structured more like explorations of domestic intimacy such as Friday Night Lights, but marinated in anguish and rendered surreal. The Departure itself is a simple but highly effective metaphor, suggesting multiple losses. In the real world, of course, people disappear all the time: The most ordinary death can feel bizarre and inexplicable, dividing the bereaved as often as it brings them closer. But The Leftovers also evokes, at various moments, New York after 9/11, and also Sandy Hook, Charleston, Indonesia, Haiti, and every other red-stringed pin on our pre-apocalyptic map of trauma. At its eeriest moments, the show manages to feel both intimate and world-historical: It’s a fable about a social catastrophe that is also threaded into the story of a lacerating midlife divorce.

  The first season of The Leftovers was challenging in its bleakness: A few elements (like a plot about the Garveys’ son, who becomes a soldier in a separate cult) felt contrived, while others (especially the violent clashes between the Guilty Remnant and the bereaved residents of Mapleton) were so raw that the show could feel hard to watch. But halfway through Season 1, The Leftovers spiked into greatness, with a small jewel of an episode, “Guest.” The story focused entirely on a seemingly minor character named Nora Durst (Carrie Coon), a Mapleton resident who has the frightening distinction of having lost her entire family—a husband and two young children. In one hour, we learned everything about Nora: what she does for work (collects “survivor” questionnaires for an organization searching for patterns), what she does at home (obsessively replaces cereal boxes, as if her family were still alive), and what she does for catharsis (hires a prostitute to shoot her in the chest while she’s wearing a bulletproof vest). She travels to New York for a conference, where her identity gets stripped away in bizarre fashion. But, as with that prehistoric opener, these revelations are delivered through montages, which drag, then speed up, revealing without overexplaining, grounded in Coon’s brilliantly unsentimental, largely silent performance. When the episode was over, I was weeping, which happens a lot with The Leftovers. It may be the whole point.

  * * *

  —

  The show’s first season used up the plot of Perrotta’s book, then added a final, fiery confrontation between the town and the Guilty Remnant. The second season of The Leftovers feels almost like a reboot, as we suddenly land in a new town, Miracle, Texas, and in the home of a new family, the Murphys, a couple played by Kevin Carroll and the excellent Regina King, whose daughter, Evie (Jasmin Savoy Brown), was one of the girls swimming in that river. Miracle, formerly known as Jarden, is a global anomaly: No one in the town “departed.” As a result, the area has become a kind of spiritual theme park, hawking souvenirs to pilgrims. A self-styled prophet lives on an elevated platform in the center of town. A man sacrifices a goat in the middle of a diner. Soon, Kevin Garvey and Nora Durst—who are now a couple, with an adopted baby, and are accompanied by Kevin’s teenage daughter—move next door to the Murphys. The initial three episodes keep shifting the story’s perspective: In the first one, we get the Murphys’ side of the story; then we get Kevin and Nora’s; and the third pivots to Laurie Garvey, who has left the Guilty Remnant and is running recovery meetings for former members. The fourth returns to Miracle, where Evie seems to have disappeared, a troubling sign that the town is not a safe place after all.

  When Laurie is not deprogramming cult members, she’s trying to write a memoir, and her meeting with a publisher feels like a meta-commentary on the show itself, with echoes of Lindelof speaking back to the viewers who criticized the finale of Lost, the hit ABC show that he co-created. The publisher insists on greater “clarity” in Laurie’s writing, more explanation of the rules of her old cult: why the smoking, why the silence, what does the Guilty Remnant believe? Laurie glares, spitting her answer: “They believe the world ended.” What more does he need to know? With its mystery that will never be solved, The Leftovers occasionally has a quality of repetition compulsion, as if Lindelof were working out old traumas in fresh forms. (Even that cavewoman prequel bears some resemblance to “Across the Sea,” a divisive episode of Lost.) But if it’s a therapeutic motivation, it’s one that lends the show a certain wildness. The Leftovers isn’t easy; it can be ugly and draining. But it steers straight into the spiritual skid that Lost took in its final season, then cuts a path to something original.

  Unlike so many cliff-hanging
exemplars of modern television, The Leftovers can’t be binge-watched; it needs the space between episodes for recovery. But it is part of a growing set of TV experiments that have begun to feel like a parallel track to the past decade’s celebrated dramas about masculinity and power. These ragged, meditative projects risk pretension and embrace inconsistency; unsurprisingly, they often attract small audiences. They include High Maintenance episodes like “Qasim,” in which a fanatical life-logger reveals his obsessive rituals; certain experimental episodes of Louie, which blurs the boundaries of what’s real and what’s surreal; the French zombie drama The Returned, a dreamlike poem about our desperation for our loved ones to return; the meditative Rectify, about a man released from prison; and the fantastically grim “White Bear,” an episode of Black Mirror about voyeurism and justice. These are stories that respect the incoherence of the subconscious. They are less about narrative and more about the power of the uncanny image—the symbol that reverberates but refuses to spill its secrets.