I Like to Watch

by Emily Nussbaum

SWING STATES

  The Middle

  The New Yorker, March 21, 2016

  This column was written during the 2016 primaries, when the media was talking nonstop about “economic anxiety” and Trump was still a laughingstock. It became a game on Twitter to argue about how fictional characters would vote: Would Miranda Hobbes pamphlet for Bernie? Would the gang from Always Sunny in Philadelphia go full-on MAGA? After the column was published, Patricia Heaton—a never-Trump Republican—tweeted to assure me that the Hecks would never vote for Trump. Judging from later events, I believe they did.

  Midway through the seventh season of ABC’s family sitcom The Middle, Frankie Heck (Patricia Heaton), who works as a dental hygienist, gets a new boss: Dr. Sommer Samuelson (Cheryl Hines, from Curb Your Enthusiasm), a prosperity guru with perfect teeth. “Her story is capital-A amazing,” gushes Dr. Ted Goodwin (Jack McBrayer), Frankie’s former employer, whose practice Samuelson bought. “Her parents made pottery. And now she owns the thirteenth-largest dental chain in the country!” Reluctantly, Frankie attends a corporate convention in Des Moines—“all expenses paid,” a novel concept. But once Samuelson cranks up the dance music—“Tonight is tonight! Tomorrow is tomorrow! Believing is believing!”—Frankie drops all resistance.

  “Are you tired of working yourself to death, and still not reaching your goals?” Samuelson yells, gyrating in a silver dress. “Are you tired of looking around and seeing everyone else get theirs and you not get yours?”

  “I’d like to get mine,” Frankie murmurs.

  “Do you see those people on those fancy boats and planes and think that should be me? Well, that can be you….You can earn your way into our Platinum Elite Club and be on a private jet as part of our Winner’s Circle Retreat in Costa Rica! Who’s with me?”

  For days, Frankie giddily recites buzzwords as she and her husband, Mike (Neil Flynn), a manager at a limestone quarry, enjoy the honeymoon they could never afford. Only when the bill is slipped under the door does she realize that “all expenses paid” doesn’t cover dry cleaning, champagne, and room-service ribs. In most sitcoms, this would have been just another goofy mistake. In The Middle, it felt, for a minute, like a throat-clutching moment of horror, the floor falling out from beneath Frankie and Mike’s lives.

  Finding comedy in lower-middle-class vulnerability is the gift of this long-running series, which, like Frankie herself, is a low-hype, hardworking, unflashy team player that gets way too little credit. The show debuted in 2009, the same year as Modern Family, also on ABC, which had a diverse cast—for the era—and a sleek mockumentary style. Modern Family hogged all the hype, while The Middle plugged along. In the next few years, ABC expanded its family-comedy block, which now features a set of smart and varied series, generally framed by voice-overs: There’s the well-off African American family on black-ish, whose stories are narrated by the formerly poor dad, Dre; the 1990s Taiwanese American immigrants of Fresh Off the Boat, whose narration, by the tween son Eddie, was abandoned in Season 2; the eighties middle-class Jewish family of The Goldbergs, framed by the nostalgic youngest son, Adam; and this season’s debut, The Real O’Neals, which is about divorcing Irish Catholics in Chicago, narrated by their gay teenage son, Kenny.

  Like those shows, The Middle is grounded in insights about parents and children, and it has traced, in touching and realistic ways, the paths of the three Heck kids: dorky Sue (the amazing Eden Sher), jocky Axl (Charlie McDermott), and Brick (Atticus Shaffer), a quirky kid on the spectrum. But it’s Frankie’s voice that guides us, and while at first hearing she might sound corny—like a Midwestern Christmas newsletter—her trademark is a ping of anxiety, the resentful fear that her efforts will never add up. The Hecks have had a few lucky breaks, like Axl getting a scholarship to play football. But their mortgage is underwater and they’re in crushing debt, which they’ve agreed to ignore. They shop in the Frugal Hoosier’s “Eat It Today” section. And two jobs are not enough: Frankie and Mike take extra gigs, for Christmas gifts and to contribute to a barely-there college fund for Sue. Eternally exhausted, both parents are borderline neglectful, “floating” holidays and flaking on carpools and skimping on therapy for Brick. One day, when Frankie tosses a spoon into the sink, the whole thing crashes to the floor, leaving a hole that the Hecks can’t afford to fix.

  The miracle of the show is that it’s able to make this stuff funny: That sinkhole was pure slapstick, as was their solution of washing dishes in the shower. But beneath the warmth and the jokes, the show keeps cycling back to a tense marital debate. From Frankie’s perspective, she and Mike would do better if they thought bigger, a story that she’s picked up from multiple American philosophies, from Oprah on down. After she gets fired, in Season 4, she cries, “When one door closes, another opens,” then slams into a locked glass door. Mike has no patience for such talk. To him, a job is how you make money. Sometimes you love one kid more than another. Marriage isn’t about passion, it’s about mutual toleration. Frankie argues that Mike has cut himself off from intimacy and excitement, but he sees it differently: no false hope, no disappointment! Part of the show’s nuanced appeal is how it keeps shifting as to which approach seems healthier: Mike’s wry fatalism, which can seem like depression, or Frankie’s manic, near-libertarian insistence that she is the master of her fate, which makes her fume when hard work leads nowhere.

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  —

  In Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America, she dissects the darker history of positive thinking, the cult of optimism that has, in recent decades, she writes, metastasized into “an apology for the crueler aspects of the market economy.” The Middle is a sitcom-shaped meditation on this phenomenon, but it’s not purely a critique. On the one hand, Frankie’s beliefs do make her miserable and, often, hard on her family. (Her kids’ adjectives for her: “lazy,” “angry,” “tired.”) There are echoes of early Roseanne—the creators of The Middle, Eileen Heisler and DeAnn Heline, both wrote for the show—whose pilot episode satirized the dangerous New Age babble sold to factory workers: “If your mind can conceive it, and your heart can believe it, then you can achieve it.” The affirmations Frankie clings to feel like curses when they don’t come true.

  On the other hand, there’s Frankie’s daughter, Sue, a lover of rainbows and unicorns, for whom positive thinking has been a lifesaver. At nineteen, Sue is so devoted to the website kickingitteenstyle.com that she once wrote her own version, Sue’s Tips for Sue-cess. Now that she’s at a local public college, a professor steers her away from turning in poems titled “A Recipe for Peace in the Middle East,” pushing her toward critical thinking. Fellow students upset her with the news that cops can be mean. But rose-colored glasses protected Sue from what would have been a truly ugly adolescence had she absorbed the world’s view of her: homely, mediocre, a nobody. She could have folded. Instead, she became self-reliant enough to back out of an engagement to her high-school boyfriend, a sure path to her mother’s life. Sue’s sweetness is a type of moral strength, a force of Christian decency rare for TV.

  Although Sue’s old enough to vote, we’re unlikely to see her first presidential election. Unlike the Norman Lear–inspired black-ish, The Middle has never addressed real-life politics. (Including, significantly, racial ones: it’s set in a mostly white Midwestern area, and although Axl’s best college friend, Hutch, is black, when the two are hassled by a cop Hutch’s reaction is no different from Axl’s.) But the sitcom still manages to press on a modern economic bruise, hard. After Super Tuesday, Trump voters were described in the Times as being unified by one motivation: “a deep-rooted, pervasive sense of anxiety about the state of the country, and an anger and frustration at those they felt were encroaching on their way of life.”

  On their worst days, that’s the Hecks. While the neighbors give Frankie the side-eye, she is driven crazy by a feral single mom, Rita Glossner (played with hilarious
ferocity by Brooke Shields), whose family has all the pathologies the Hecks lack: drugs, violence, absent dads. A network sitcom can skirt the tough stuff: No Heck ever uses bigoted language or talks about immigration, not even Mike’s prickly hermit of a father or his socially awkward brother. But they’re white, working-class Christians in a small town in a red state. Frankie Heck is no xenophobe, but she’s frustrated, overwhelmed, and thirsty for inspiration. Could she be drawn to a smiling orange demagogue who promised that she’d “get hers”? She might. If Frankie longs for anything in her life, it’s for someone to make America great again.

  SMOKE AND MIRRORS

  High Maintenance

  The New Yorker, January 22, 2018

  While I was working on this book, High Maintenance filmed an episode around the corner from me. I sat on a stoop and accidentally got into a shot.

  The new season of High Maintenance opens with a modern moment of dread. In an episode called “Globo,” a Brooklyn pot dealer—a character we know only as The Guy—wakes up with his girlfriend. The two are cozy and slovenly, joking about the ethics of sharing dreams. Then they check their phones. Something awful has happened: a terrorist event, perhaps, or the worst election ever, the details left vague. “I think I’m going to go to work early,” The Guy says, staring at his screen. “Yeah,” she says. “That makes sense.”

  “Globo” lasts just twenty-six minutes. And yet, somehow, in its spiky, elliptical, warmly observant way, as the camera floats without judgment from one thread to another, from bistro to crash pad to brownstone stoop—sometimes following The Guy as he delivers weed to customers, but just as often not—it manages to suggest an entire city looking for comfort. A fat man struggles to maintain his workout regimen, but each time he tries to post his progress on Facebook he sees someone grieving and deletes the draft. A woman and two bros hook up at the McCarren Hotel, a decadent bubble far from the headlines. An exhausted immigrant waiter takes a long subway ride. Each plot gets an O. Henry twist, one funny, one filthy, one sweet. It never feels contrived, because the stories seem spontaneous, as natural as a train of thought. It’s a remarkable achievement of narrative efficiency, fueled by humility.

  That’s long been the gift of this unusual series, which debuted in 2012 on Vimeo. The Web version of High Maintenance was the self-funded creation of a married couple: the grizzled, bug-eyed Ben Sinclair, who plays The Guy, and who until this show had mostly done cameos as homeless guys; and his then-wife, Katja Blichfeld, a casting director with a Rolodex full of similarly underused talents. For viewers accustomed to the rigid rules of TV formula, those early seasons felt visionary. Some episodes were just eight minutes long. Others were nearly silent, or spliced from tiny edits into montages. The series managed to be poetic without being pretentious—and although it was funny, it wasn’t quite stoner humor. The visual trumped the verbal. Every episode told a new story.

  After nineteen episodes, the series shifted to HBO. The transition was bumpy. You could see the money gleaming, heavily, on the screen. Episodes were longer; the pacing dragged. There were still several gems, particularly “Grandpa,” a joyful episode from the POV of a dog, and the lovely “Tick,” which combined two stories about eccentric parents. But the tone was uneven. Sinclair has said that, when he and Blichfeld ended things romantically, their series began to dwell on people extricating themselves from relationships. For whatever reason, a tinge of sourness—or self-loathing, or at least self-consciousness—had harshed the show’s trademark mellow.

  This new abrasiveness led to some daring experiments, like a story in which a gay man and his female friend degenerate from codependence into rank pathology. But other scenarios were clunky, and, in a few cases, shadowed by something like white guilt. The show’s early focus had been on a small slice of Brooklyn—a creative-class demographic adjacent to that of Girls, which is to say, people who use drugs without fear of the cops. Over time, the lens widened, but the results could be stagy, sometimes literally so, as in a sequence in which a crude, trash-talking black bodybuilder turns out to be a British Method actor. The frame distracted from the picture.

  In the show’s second season on HBO, airing this month, the ease is back, thank God, and the series feels, even in slighter moments, newly confident, with an increased ability to reflect a larger world in flux. Each of the five episodes sent to critics is worth watching. In one, Danielle Brooks (Taystee on Orange Is the New Black) plays an African American real-estate agent hoping to cash in on a changing Bed-Stuy. In another, two artists (John E. Peery and Candace Thompson) win a low-income-housing lottery and move into a Greenpoint co-op, only to discover that the amenities—a roof deck, a sauna—are available only to rich tenants. One screwball sequence takes place in Bushwick, where a feminist resistance group bubbles with racial anxiety, to the point that a white member sneaks off to the kitchen and, going through her Instagram contacts, begins panic-inviting women of color. Miraculously, none of these stories feel preachy—and often they kink into a joke, or a surreal image, or some other unusual narrative swerve. One episode has a snake that wriggles from one plot over into another. Two have fart jokes.

  The show has always had a native sympathy for tricksters and hustlers, and, almost by definition, it’s down to party. More recently, Sinclair and Blichfeld have shown a willingness to dwell on more uncomfortable aspects of its subject matter, too, especially in a dreamy episode in which The Guy lands in the ER, sneaking tokes when the nurses look away. The story includes a rare scene that actually qualifies as stoner humor: just two people, getting high, killing time, giggling at jokes that make sense only to them. But it somehow manages to find the High Maintenance sweet spot anyway, emphasizing the way isolation and intimacy can overlap. It doesn’t judge. But it doesn’t look away.

  * * *

  —

  In the five years since High Maintenance first aired, the anthology model has taken off, especially on streaming and cable. It lets creators mess around and frees viewers from the binge-watch. Still, the genre is not a guaranteed good time. Since 2011, Charlie Brooker has produced the digital dystopia Black Mirror, but his fourth season, on Netflix, is atypically spotty. (The “USS Callister” and “Hang the DJ” episodes work best.) Other anthologies include Electric Dreams, a Philip K. Dick adaptation on Amazon; the affably odd Room 104, by the Duplass Brothers, on HBO; and Easy, on Netflix, now in Season 2. The genre’s influence is apparent elsewhere, too: One of the three good episodes in Season 2 of Master of None was a High Maintenance rip-off (or homage, if you want to be nice).

  Of this cadre, the most interesting is Easy, because it’s terrible. By rights, the show should be a Midwestern twin of High Maintenance. It’s another portrait of a city: Chicago. The creator, Joe Swanberg, is an entrepreneurial upstart, whose specialty is mumbly domesticity. And the series uses superficially similar techniques, all glimpses and epiphanies and montages and gazes and tinkly music and improvisational dialogue, with the occasional dark comic twist. It also benefits from a remarkable cast, giving performances so strong that they elevate weak material. (Believe me, it is hard to pan a show that includes both Jane Adams, as Marc Maron’s soft-hearted feminist crony, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw.)

  Yet Easy stumbles, again and again. It’s smug where High Maintenance is humble. It’s formless where High Maintenance is graceful. It’s twee instead of funny, with a misplaced confidence that all human behavior is worth watching. When a moral theme bubbles up—a frequent occurrence for such a chill, indie show—it’s pedantic. In the worst stories, like a truly irksome doubleheader about artisanal breweries, the characters resemble the Portlandia ensemble, minus the satire. But even the best are full of passionate banality. A three-day babysitting montage is sweet, then, finally, so idyllic that it verges on propaganda for egg-freezing. A feminist writer/sex worker has some fun, gonzo sex scenes, but her story goes nowhere, making her seem less like a person than like a set of talking points in lingerie
. The standout first-season episode “Art and Life” is genuinely sexy. Over time, however, even the nudity gets old, with conventional guy-gaze voyeurism rebranded as liberatory hipness.

  On High Maintenance, by contrast, the most alarmingly graphic sex scene has a purpose: It tests the viewer and sets up a reveal. As in the short stories of Grace Paley, the plotlessness is, finally, a higher form of rigor, at once a philosophy and a misdirect. In “Derech,” one of the best new episodes, Anja, a writer for Vice, manipulates her way into a support group for former Orthodox Jews. The story feels as though it’s about exploitation—until suddenly one plot collides with another, in which glitter-caked drag queens primp for a rave. There’s a shocking, nearly violent climax in a bodega, where someone nearly dies. But there’s also time along the way for a sing-along with lyrics about the actress Elisabeth Shue. As ever on the show, these detours aren’t delays. You just don’t know where you’re going until you get there.

  WHAT TINA FEY WOULD DO FOR A SOYJOY

  The Trouble With Product Integration

  New York magazine, October 5, 2008

  I began the research for this piece assuming that most showrunners would have problems with inserting ads into their scripts—only to find they were some of the biggest cheerleaders for this economic model. It was the year of the recession; TV was already struggling to adjust to changes in advertising.

  Since I wrote this essay, the pressure to integrate has only gotten more intense, on some of the most celebrated shows on television. And as more people think of themselves as brands, it gets harder to resist.

  Dick Blasucci was worrying about the Toyota Yaris. Those days, the car was on his mind all the time.