I Like to Watch
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Rhimes watches black-ish with her tween daughter. She ticked off her favorite bits: the N-word episode; the “white Greek chorus” of Dre’s office; the grandparents who are “not these saintly black parents—they’re divorced and hate each other’s guts.” She described Barris as “very kind,” “very quick-witted,” and “kind of shy.” When Rhimes, who can be shy herself, first met Barris and Larry Wilmore, they disarmed her with what Wilmore describes as an imitation of a racist Mickey Mouse, squeaking in horror at the idea of a Disney show called black-ish. She told them to keep in touch, and, unlike many creators she’d offered to help, they followed up.
Solidarity, she said, was the only way to cope with the fragility of being a Hollywood pioneer. “There’s no way to achieve any kind of voice if you’re the only,” Rhimes said. “That’s how women become the bitch and how people of color become ‘weird.’ Inclusion means more than ‘eight white guys and a person of color.’ ”
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On my last night in L.A., I joined Barris at the Soho House in West Hollywood. He was having a dinner meeting with Bashir Salahuddin and Diallo Riddle, the comedy team that created “Slow Jam the News” for Jimmy Fallon. Like Barris’s diversity hire, Dam Sonoiki, whom they knew, they had gone to Harvard. African American men on the verge of forty, they looked handsome in thick-cable sweaters. Barris slouched in ripped jeans and a sweatshirt—an outfit I’d seen him wear on the red carpet. His sneakers were always impeccable: Growing up, he’d saved his money for fancy ones, which he cleaned with a toothbrush. He now had a closet devoted to his collection. Running down his forearms were two tattoos: the word “Choices” on the right, “Decisions” on the left. His mother had told him that black people made too many decisions—selecting from socially constrained options—and not enough choices.
Riddle told me that he and Salahuddin had met Barris once before: “He gave us some advice, but we didn’t take it.” He wouldn’t clarify, so Barris filled me in: He told them that they should seek out an amenable “white guy” to work with. It would build a bridge to top executives, who were almost universally white. “That guy can be an ally,” Barris explained. “A translator.”
Salahuddin and Riddle were feeling burned: They’d spent four years developing a show called Brothers in Atlanta for HBO, which ultimately rejected it. They were looking for a “rabbi,” they said, someone who knew about network TV. What you wanted, they all agreed, was a crew, a squad—like-minded friends who could jump in to “punch up the funny.” Barris spoke longingly about the comedic collective that Judd Apatow had built, and said that he wanted to create something like it—“a contemporary, racially eclectic, gender-eclectic, experience-eclectic salon.” He listed people with whom he’d like to collaborate, including Lena Waithe, who plays the laconic black lesbian on Master of None. Isolation, Barris suggested, might have been the problem for the comedian Dave Chappelle: When his Comedy Central show fell apart, he had no community to gather around him.
We ate pomegranate ice cream, and the conversation, as it often does in L.A., veered into black-ops financial territory, such as the advantages and disadvantages of a several-year network pickup. Salahuddin was newly engaged, and they talked about marriage. Barris told them about a turning point in his life, when he was in his late twenties, clubbing. One evening, he came home drunk from Xenii, a members-only club, and found Rainbow asleep at the kitchen table. She was pregnant with their second daughter, nursing their first baby, sleeping while sitting up, her medical textbook open in front of her. He realized that he couldn’t be “that guy” anymore. It wasn’t easy for him to have a family so young, he told Salahuddin and Riddle, but it saved him: It made him ambitious.
After dinner, Barris and I headed to the bar. Before ordering drinks, he said, he wanted to do a sweep of the room—if any black people were around, he half-joked, he’d know them. In fact, when we sat down Barris was approached by Jay Ellis, an actor on Insecure, an upcoming HBO comedy created by Issa Rae. Barris also greeted Steve Levitan, the white showrunner of Modern Family, who congratulated him on “Hope.” The bar had a spectacular view: The Pacific twinkled in the distance. Barris told me that he had spent a lot of time here during the first season of black-ish. Just as his show was becoming a hit, he and Rainbow separated for six months, living apart and dating others. Larry Wilmore and Anthony Anderson also broke up with their wives during the show’s first season; only Barris and Rainbow reunited. They both felt a strong need to live up to the radiant image of their best selves, as portrayed on the show. “I think it’s part of why we wanted to have another kid,” Barris told me. “To relaunch into what’s important.”
Rubbing his close-cropped hair, he said, “I’ve fucked up so much, gotten so many second chances.” As a teenager, he had a frightening flirtation with gang life. In his twenties, when his daughters were little, he said, he wasn’t around enough. “I sold weed,” he said. “I got caught cheating.” Earlier, he told me that he wanted the show to represent the life of an imperfect couple, not idealized figures. But there’s a built-in tension to black-ish: the burden placed on black stories, and on the artists who tell them, to be not merely good but inspirational. In one of this season’s best episodes, “The Johnsons,” other parents keep calling Dre and Bow and the kids “such a beautiful family”—praise that floods Dre with fear. He and Bow grew up trying to be the Cosbys; everyone knows what happened there. “It’s just one show,” Pops says of Cosby. “That’s just it, Pops—we get so few chances!” Dre says, in voice-over, as the screen cuts to the Cosby opening credits, except that it’s the Johnsons turning those iconic dance moves. “And when we do something and we do it well, it’s special! And when we mess it up, we mess it up for everyone coming behind us. It’s like we’re carrying everybody’s dreams on our back.”
The longing to see a positive portrayal of black life feels particularly fraught as Obama leaves office, and as Trump’s openly racist rhetoric attracts followers. Although Barris’s early life was punctuated by police violence, his ugliest memory, Barris said, was something a cop told him when he was sixteen: “You know, no one will care if you die.” A network sitcom could never address anything quite so raw, he knew. Even the most topical sitcom isn’t an op-ed; it’s more like Silly Putty that’s been pressed against Page 1. But, although “Good-ish Times” had many more jokes than “Hope,” it shared a stark central insight. It found dark laughs in the dialectic of striver psychology, as the Evans family flips between two equally extreme reactions to racism and poverty. One minute, they’re fatalistic to the point of self-sabotage; the next, they’re spouting affirmations of empty hope—“Tomorrow’s gonna be a better day!” They might in fact be “rich in love.” But their lives are all decisions, no choices.
In April, Barris’s family went on a vacation that could be taken only by people at the pinnacle of success. During a visit to New York, they saw Hamilton, not once but twice. They also flew to Washington for the White House Easter Egg Roll, and were part of a VIP group who met the president and the first lady. “That’s our family,” President Obama told Barris, about black-ish.
Not everything went smoothly. After four hours at the White House, Barris, tired, insisted that they leave. Once they were outside, Kaleigh got a text from Anthony Anderson’s son: They’d just missed Beyoncé and Jay Z. Barris’s daughters were furious at their dad; tears formed in Leyah’s eyes. When he saw those tears, Barris lost it: “You just met the president!” They apologized. Barris stayed mad. But he was also inspired. “I texted Groff and said, ‘We have to use this next season.’ ”
IN PRAISE OF SEX AND VIOLENCE
TO SERVE MAN
Hannibal
The New Yorker, June 29, 2015
I still can’t believe they ran a show this outrageous and beautiful—this sick and strange and destabilizing—in a network time slot.
I stopped watching Hannibal in Season 1
, after a corpse was carved into a cello, its vocal cords splayed like strings, then “played.” I stopped watching again when Dr. Frederick Chilton, played by the redoubtable Raúl Esparza, got his guts tugged out of his abdomen, like red-sauced linguini, while he was still conscious. I stopped watching when an acupuncturist drove a needle through an eyeball, and again when a man’s leg was roasted and fed to him. Each time, the decision felt like a sane and, maybe, ethical position. Enough nihilism, enough torture, I thought. Enough serial killers glamorized as artists and geniuses.
But that righteous high never lasted. I kept sneaking back, peeking through my fingers—a glimpse here, a binge there—either numbing myself or, depending on one’s perspective, properly sensitizing myself. Gradually, my eyes adjusted to the darkness. By midway through Season 2, Hannibal felt less like a blood-soaked ordeal than like a macabre masterpiece, pure pleasure and audacity. With hints of David Cronenberg and Michael Mann, David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick, it has a formal ambition that is rare for television. It reflexively turns the ordinary into the alien and vice versa. Corpses pile onto a nightmarish totem pole; bees pour out of eye sockets; men swallow songbirds whole. Over time, patterns emerge, revealing an uneasy meditation on intimacy, the vulnerability of the human body, and the power of art—its ability to make us crave something we thought we’d find disgusting.
It’s possible, of course, that I love the show because it confirms my worst suspicions about food culture. For those who haven’t seen The Silence of the Lambs or read Thomas Harris’s novels, from which the story is adapted, the basic plot is this: Hannibal Lecter, played with waxwork hauteur by Mads Mikkelsen, is a brilliant psychiatrist who commits hideous murders. He takes “trophies” from the bodies—a liver here, a heart there—then cooks and serves them to unwitting guests. (Most episodes feature dazzling cooking montages, notorious for making viewers hungry, then making them feel guilty.) His justification is that he “eats the rude,” like David Chang, but with slightly less rigid ethical boundaries. Hannibal is quite a catch: He plays the harpsichord and the theremin, he’s a natty dresser, and he knows his Dante. By day, he’s a libertarian life coach for his patients’ Jungian shadows, often manipulating lesser serial killers into covering his tracks—in this universe, as on Dexter, serial killers are as common as daisies.
Hannibal’s opposite number—his love interest, basically—is the tetchy, delicate Will Graham. Played by the sad-eyed Hugh Dancy, Will is a criminal profiler for the FBI whose pathological empathy is far more crippling than Hannibal’s lack of the stuff. When he visits a murder scene, he enters a fugue state and becomes the killer, imagining the crime while murmuring the show’s mantra: “This is my design.” The two men circle each other seductively—best friends and homoerotic nemeses, client and therapist—each getting inside the other’s head, sometimes literally. Last season ended with Hannibal gutting Will with a kitchen knife after stroking his cheek—a moment of symbolic penetration that sent the show’s fans, self-proclaimed Fannibals, into raptures. This season, the third, Hannibal gave Will, who survived, a valentine: a man’s corpse that he had pulverized, then sculpted into the shape of a human heart and displayed in a church, like a holy relic.
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None of this is treated even mildly realistically, and yet it’s not exactly camp, either. As the show’s creator, Bryan Fuller (the wizard behind the dreamlike Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies), has suggested, Hannibal is a show that regards spectacle with a sort of worship. When Hannibal began, it mimicked the structures of network cop procedurals, but the show has long since shed that carapace, not unlike the way Hannibal shrugs off what he calls his “person suit,” the demeanor that lets him pass for normal. In a recent interview on RogerEbert.com, Fuller explained that, when he hires directors for the series, he tells them, “This is not an episode of television. This is a pretentious art film.” His willingness to risk looking outré and avant-garde (on NBC, of all places!) is part of a larger trend on television, inflecting series that range from American Horror Story to True Detective, The Leftovers, The Returned, The Strain, and The Knick. Some of these shows are better than others, but they all live and die by their devotion to that old Freudian concept of “the uncanny.” Among that company, Hannibal stands out for its ability to risk absurdity and self-seriousness, only to emerge with something gloriously strange and profound, in the realm of opera and poetry. When Will examines that heart sculpture, for instance, it folds open, ventricles falling to the floor, and then walks toward him on twisted, black, nightmare legs, transforming into a demonic elk.
And, despite the gore, there’s a disarming fairy-tale quality to the world of Hannibal, in part because the murders, with few exceptions, lack the misogynistic underpinnings of real-life serial killings, or even the snappy kink of Harris’s books. No one is raped on Hannibal, even in a fantasy; instead, the victims get repurposed as mushroom farms. When female characters get hurt—whether they’re shot or shoved out a window or, in one case, sliced finely, like garlic—there’s little gendered sadism to the act. Graphic sexual violence isn’t inevitably exploitative; sometimes it’s a welcome force for realism. But, in the arms race of suffering on television, Hannibal’s elision works as a small, idealistic promise to viewers: While anything can happen, that one thing won’t.
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Murder, on the other hand, is up for grabs—and treated with brazen disrespect. On Hannibal, corpses are fungible art supplies, like clay or oil paint, in sequences in which bodies are stitched into frescoes or twisted into grotesque displays. Skin is stretched into wings, corpses are bent into apiaries, belladonna is planted in heart cavities. It would be easy to see such choices through a cynical lens, as shock effects: Nietzsche is peachy, but sicker is quicker. It certainly makes the show a tough one to recommend to strangers. But these images coalesce into metaphors for mortality and loss. A teacup breaks and then comes back together; we see that it’s like a skull shattering, which in turn reflects a grieving man’s wish for time to go backward. Tears are stirred into martinis. A woman’s corpse is sewn into a horse’s womb, and after she’s cut out, the doctors feel a heartbeat in her torso; they slice her open and a live blackbird flies out. Symbols overlap eerily, as senses do in synesthesia: A heartbeat is a clock tick is a drumbeat. The arch dialogue has the same multiplicity, with ordinary idioms taking on sinister resonance, from “the one that got away” to “the devil you know.” “You smoked me in thyme,” one victim remarks, as he’s served a dish of himself.
In one of last season’s most spectacular scenarios, a black male corpse is discovered in the river, coated in resin. The man had escaped from an art project built by a serial killer Hannibal had never met: He’d torn himself out of a mural comprising dozens of corpses of varying skin tones—racial diversity reinterpreted as pigment, people reduced to brushstrokes. When Hannibal climbs a ladder to the top of a corn silo, he looks down and sees a pattern: From above, the curled bodies form an eye. The image suggests outrageous ideas: One eye gazing at another, God at his creation, his creation back at God, through the open pupil of the building’s roof. Hannibal calls down to the killer, “I love your work.”
The scene was so outlandish that it made me laugh out loud. It also felt like a reminder of the show’s own double consciousness about what it means to watch from a distance, to admit that we’re voyeurs who enjoy foie gras and veal. (There are moments when one suspects the show is sponsored by PETA.) For anyone who watches modern television, Hannibal may seem familiar: He’s another middle-aged male genius with a fetish for absolute control, like Don Draper and Walter White and Dr. House and Francis Underwood. Astrologically speaking, he’s a Sherlock with Lucifer rising. But, mainly, Hannibal suggests the fantasy of the uncompromising television auteur: He’s the perfectionist who cares only that every detail of his vision be realized, no matter what sacrifices that might require. This is his design.