I Like to Watch

by Emily Nussbaum

  Is there any other cable drama that, presented with a plot in which a middle-aged man is forced, as Philip has been this season, to seduce a beautiful, eager fifteen-year-old girl, would not make that idea hot, a fantasy for viewers to get off on, even while it allowed us to theoretically disapprove of the idea? Getting a double message like that across wouldn’t be hard: Just paint the girl as a slut or a dummy so we care a bit less. Age her up a year or two—harden her. Make the situation titillating, make it her fault, don’t make it so upsetting, make it funny, make your antihero better than all other men in the world, so that perhaps it’s actually okay for him to have sex with her; maybe those who oppose it are prudes. Or don’t let it really be happening at all; make it just a dream sequence—but, still, use images of her body, to create a nifty fetishistic JPEG. There are many ways to have your transgression and eat it, too.

  Instead, on The Americans, we see Kimberly for who she is: needy and callow, but mostly vulnerable, desperate for tenderness and attention—nobody we can simply write off as jailbait. She’s got “daddy issues,” but they’re not an excuse for Philip’s actions; in fact, they make what he’s doing worse. Naturally, Kimberly gets under Philip’s skin, so he keeps trying to put her at a distance, the way you need to in order to exploit a person. As he talks to Elizabeth about what’s happening, he’s alternately contemptuous and tender, protective and dismissive. In a spectacular episode two weeks ago, the two ended up in Kimberly’s father’s empty mansion. Standing on the balcony, stoned, she opened up to him. Her burbling speech, beautifully delivered by Julia Garner, was all skinless bravado. She talked about her dead mother’s garden, where she and her brothers used to plant vegetables. She talked about her father, who was never home, and his new socialite wife, who was also never home. Later, in the gleaming kitchen, the two of them, stoned, mixed Rocky Road and Jiffy Pop, throwing it at each other and giggling. It was a sweet evening; only our deeper knowledge made it a horror show.

  Later, when Philip went home, he seemed drained and depressed. In flashbacks, we saw what he couldn’t help thinking about: the training that both he and Elizabeth had, back in Russia, when he first learned how to pull off this kind of operation. He had been an idealistic teenager himself at the time. In those flashbacks, as he slept with strangers, his experience wasn’t portrayed as a sexy fantasy, either, but as a form of institutional abuse. He had been as vulnerable as Kimberly, as plastic as Paige, another kind of mark. Philip talked to his wife about these memories, about how he had learned to “make it real”—to fake intimacy with a stranger until it felt organic. “Do you ‘make it real’ with me?” she asked. “Sometimes,” he confessed, then pulled her close. “Not now.”

  That’s The Americans’ version of a love scene. It’s what makes this season a quiet beauty, worth the bleakness it delivers. It’s also what makes it an original show, despite sharing outlines with other action dramas. Many of the most popular antihero shows—even the great ones, like Breaking Bad and The Sopranos—are about power, about what it means to be the boss. The Americans is about loss of control. That’s what intimacy is: When you’re known, you’re in danger. To be loved, you have to be known. In the final scene of last week’s episode, Philip decides to tell Elizabeth a secret he has been keeping and, as they lie in bed, spooning, it seems likely that he’s making a terrible mistake. The more she knows, the more she has to use against him. But, like Kimberly, he can’t help it. He has to believe that it’s real.

  RIOT GIRL

  Jenji Kohan’s Hot Provocations

  The New Yorker, September 4, 2017

  Unlike Barris, Kohan was reluctant to do this profile. She’s a private person; she is also aware that she is not the world’s most diplomatic individual. Luckily, she came around—and ended up being a highly enthusiastic guide to Los Angeles during the reporting process.

  Devon Shepard met Jenji Kohan, the creator of Orange Is the New Black and Weeds, twenty-four years ago, when they were writers for the NBC sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Shepard, a former stand-up comedian, got into the business serendipitously, after he made fun of a square-acting producer at a black barbershop in Los Angeles, who then hired him. Kohan, who had recently graduated from Columbia, was a rung down from Shepard—a “baby writer,” in Hollywood lingo. But “she was fun, a whole lot of energy, a sponge,” he said. Kohan wanted to learn dominoes, the “loud and outrageous” street version, and they began playing bones in an office they shared, trading stories about growing up black in South Central and Jewish in Beverly Hills. “I made the room cool,” Shepard said. “People were like, ‘What’s going on in there?’ ”

  This was in 1993, a year after the L.A. riots, and at Fresh Prince, which starred Will Smith as a Philly street kid sent to live with rich relatives, the writers’ room was a toxic mess. The staff—which included Smith’s bodyguard and his cousin—kept crazy hours and fought nonstop. There were cruel pranks: Someone peed in a colleague’s bottle of tequila. Kohan was one of two female writers, and the only white woman. Her nickname was White Devil Jew Bitch. Shepard was one of her few allies.

  After Fresh Prince, they lost touch. In the mid-nineties, he wrote for MADtv, and she wrote for Tracey Takes On…—two wild, subversive sketch-comedy shows. Then, in 2004, Shepard’s agent handed him a script for a cable series about a pot-dealing single mother. One of the characters, a black supplier named Conrad Shepard, echoed elements of Devon Shepard’s life story: Devon had dealt weed, even while working on Fresh Prince. He loved the script, which had no writer’s name on it, and told his agent, “I gotta be on this show.” The agent asked him if he knew the creator: Jenji Kohan. Shepard said, “Do I fucking know her? If your white ass don’t put me in the room, I’m gonna choke the shit out of you.”

  Shepard wrote for Weeds for three years. Kohan was a dream boss, he said, because she was just as curious, energetic, and easily bored as she had been on Fresh Prince. “Jenji has ADD,” he said. “It was like having a class clown as your boss.” The writers played hours of online poker, and to open things up, Kohan issued weird challenges: “She would say, ‘I want you to end each scene with a curse word and then start with a curse word.’ Or ‘Have someone hold a cup, and then have a cup go through the whole episode.’ ” Shepard was used to being pigeonholed; at job interviews, he was told, “If we add a black character, we’ll call you.” To his frustration, many people thought he was responsible for the black dialogue on Weeds, but he actually wrote more scenes for the white main character, who was played by Mary-Louise Parker. Kohan wrote for all the characters, including Conrad and Heylia, another African American supplier. In Shepard’s view, empathy and talent outweighed identity. Outsiders could sometimes take bigger risks, because they were less constrained by the burdens of representation. “The person inside the party is always going to have a different perspective than a person looking in the window,” he said.

  To break up the monotony, he and Kohan playacted an imaginary TV show called Djembe, about an African man who was married to a white suburban woman. The gag eventually made it into an episode. The premise was that Djembe couldn’t speak, and so he communicated only by banging on a drum. “You would have thought we were all fucking crazy and racist,” Shepard said, cracking up at the memory. “We were just so free.”

  Shepard, who is now an executive producer of Legends of Chamberlain Heights on Comedy Central, was thrilled to witness Kohan’s breakout. He knew that she’d “gone through hell” for years after Fresh Prince. Shepard told me, “Here was Jenji’s problem. And I mean this in a good way. She’s a weirdo, and a nerd, and all these things. You can’t just put that kind of person in any fucking room. She had to be a showrunner! She had to be in charge. Anything else would put that fire out.”

  * * *

  —

  Kohan has a story that she likes to tell about Shepard. “I remember Devon coming into the writers’ room,” she said. “He yelled, �
�I can write a motherfucking Frasier! But they will never let me.’ That sticks with me so vividly.”

  We were in the backyard of the house that Weeds built, having drinks by a firepit. Kohan and her husband, Christopher Noxon, bought the estate, in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, during the show’s fourth season, four years before she created Orange Is the New Black for Netflix, establishing herself as a rarity: a two-hit auteur. Weeds was Kohan’s payoff after a dozen years of frustration, but it began as one of many scattershot pitches—desperate attempts to jump from network to cable, to “trade money for freedom,” as she saw it. Her pitch was only four words: “suburban widowed pot-dealing mom.” The series lasted eight seasons, garnering twenty Emmy nominations and two wins.

  As Weeds was ending, Orange Is the New Black, an adaptation of a memoir by a Smith-educated WASP who went to prison, became Kohan’s off-ramp. The two shows share a sensibility. As Kohan put it, “I’m fascinated by people interacting with the Other—forced to interact with people they’d never have to deal with in their day-to-day lives.” Her specialty is exploring “crossroads,” which are often found in underground economies. “Attraction or repulsion, it’s great for drama,” she said. “It’s something that interests me in my life. I want to meet all sorts of people, not to live in my bubble. And, right now, the world is just ‘Everyone back to their corners.’ ” In the Trump era, Kohan sees an urge to hunker down with one’s own, “to just put your loudspeaker up and say, ‘This is me, and this is my worldview, and I don’t want to know from yours.’ ”

  Kohan and Noxon, a freelance writer who is also what the couple calls the “domestic first responder,” bought the house from a family who’d been wiped out by Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. The place spills over with Kohan’s finds from thrift shops—she described her scavenging habit, which she developed in her teens, as “a treasure hunt, urban archeology.” She owns Berrie figurines, trivets, vintage spectacles, polyurethane grapes (“my vineyard”). The house, with its screening room and its backyard “art barn,” has something in common with Kohan’s shows, emphasizing zestful world-creation over beige tidiness. It’s also the warm family space that she had always longed for. Marriage wasn’t a goal, but she knew she wanted kids. On the kitchen wall, there were Post-its with scrawled quotes from the kids: “Sukkot Bien!”; “Don’t get sucked into Bubbie’s nonsense.” Her son Oscar, who is twelve, lay sprawled on a sofa, watching The Office. His seventeen-year-old brother, Charlie, was heading to Columbia in the fall; his fifteen-year-old sister, Eliza, was in Manhattan with Noxon for the summer, doing an internship at a theater. Kohan would join them soon and begin shooting Season 6 of Orange, in Queens.

  Kohan, who is forty-eight, grew up five miles from the Los Feliz house, on a street just inside the zoning boundary for Beverly Hills schools. Her father is Buz Kohan, who was known (at least inside their family) as the King of Variety. A TV writer from the Bronx, he moved to L.A. to write for The Carol Burnett Show, and came to occupy a Hollywood niche, working on such specials as Gene Kelly: An American in Pasadena and Night of 100 Stars. Her mother, Rhea, published two dark comic novels around 1980. Jenji’s twin brothers, Jono and David, are five years older. Although Jenji entered the industry first, David had the first hit: In 1998, he created Will & Grace with his writing partner Max Mutchnick. According to Kohan, whenever she has a speaking event, her mother always asks the same question: “How much of your success do you attribute to genetics?”

  When I visited Kohan, she had bright-pink hair that was fluffed out like a dandelion. She wore cat-eye glasses coated in glitter; her dress was navy blue and covered with tiny white swans. She’s a warm conversationalist but also a moody one, suspicious of cant, with an almost self-destructive refusal to defer to the diplomatically empty idioms of the media-trained television executive—she’d rather tell a story that makes her look bad, if it’s true or funny. She’s somehow cocky and humble at once. When people praise her neon-funky style, her reflex is to quote her mother, who told her, “If you can’t fix it, decorate it.” With little rancor, Kohan explained that her mother was sexist: She liked boys better, told Kohan that women were inherently less funny, and delivered lines like “I’ll buy you those expensive jeans when you’re thinner.” When Kohan was a teenager, Rhea dragged her to several plastic surgeons, but Kohan refused to undergo any procedures. Rhea once offered her uppers from a shoebox. When Kohan asked her how old they were, she snapped, “They’re pills, not cheese!” (Rhea denies this.)

  Kohan’s childhood had gilded streaks: Gene Kelly appears in her bat-mitzvah photographs. After she argued to a teacher that a Michael Jackson lyric could be read various ways, her father helped her get a supportive affidavit from the pop star, whom he’d met while working on a Jackson 5 special. In Kohan’s telling, she was an eccentric, perpetually unsatisfied child who became furious whenever anyone tried to shut down her right to free speech—she felt patronized by adults. She described her brothers as wild boys, “dirty and open,” who enjoyed corrupting their kid sister. The twins turned their mom’s “Hawaiian modern” home into the neighborhood party house. “They’d show Super 8 pornos on the wall,” Kohan said. “They had a band, Midnight Fantasy, and their bassist had pot.” One day, an arms dealer who lived down the street threatened to kill the bass player, who, he said, had gotten his son into drugs. Rhea told the bass player to flush his stash. At family dinners, Jenji was silent, lest she get knocked down in the brutal style of a writers’ room: David told me that whenever Jenji ventured a joke, he’d shoot back, “Is that an example of fifth-grade humor?”

  Despite Kohan’s upbringing, show business wasn’t a given. She applied for a job in a writers’ room mainly because a boyfriend told her that she couldn’t get one. “He said I had more of a chance of getting into Congress than I did of writing for TV!” she said. What followed was a dozen years of stunted ambition and Hollywood sexism. She had her “tit grabbed”; her name was taken off a script. Once, when she was pregnant and about to have a job interview, her agent advised her to wear a big shirt and eat candy, so that the showrunner would think she was just fat. After a pitch meeting for The Larry Sanders Show, her agent told her that the show’s star, Garry Shandling, wasn’t comfortable working with women. “I was fired from everything,” Kohan said. One boss let her go with “some horrible sports analogy,” like “ ‘You bring in the home run, but we need a team player every day.’ ” In 2003, CBS picked up her pilot The Stones, a sitcom about divorced parents, but studio executives didn’t trust her, she said, so they put David and his partner in charge. The show lasted six episodes and wrecked the siblings’ relationship for years.

  Kohan did end up writing for an astonishing array of network hits, among them Friends, Mad About You, and Gilmore Girls, along with HBO’s Sex and the City and a few not-great sitcoms where she had good bosses, such as Peter Tolan, who was “an asshole to the right people.” But throughout it all, she was desperate to oversee her own show and control her hours. She wrote more than fifteen pilots. She married Noxon in 1997 and gave birth to Charlie two years later, and even female-run sets, she found, were often unfriendly to parents. She wanted a career like that of her role model, the British comedian Tracey Ullman, a dazzling talent who headed a healthy room, and who was “funny and smart and civilized” but also “a good mom with a fun marriage.”

  Finally, in 2004, Showtime bought Weeds. But even that was a fight. Weeds was a dirty, strange comedy about a young widow, Nancy Botwin, who becomes a drug dealer in Agrestic, a fictional California suburb. In the aftermath of The Sopranos and The Shield, Kohan forged a breakthrough antiheroine: Nancy was a shoe-craving, manipulative MILF, whose race and class lent her entrée to sub-rosa worlds. Weeds was kinky on multiple levels, freely merging comedy and drama; it also had a racial baldness that rubbed some viewers the wrong way. Several characters were inspired by friends Kohan made while playing dominoes on the Venice boardwalk in t
he years after Fresh Prince: a cadre of older black and Latino men, including former basketball players and drug dealers. During the O.J. trial, Kohan told me, the guys on the boardwalk “would be like, ‘Motherfucker is guilty’—and then the police would walk by and they would be, ‘No justice, no peace!’ ”

  Her bosses didn’t really get Weeds: Lionsgate came on board to produce the show after Showtime bought the concept, and the executives, especially Bob Greenblatt, were uncomfortable with its twisted morality. Greenblatt sent Kohan endless script notes. “I’d write back, note by note, for pages,” she said.

  “Finally, he wrote back a short email that just said, ‘Fine, do what you want.’…And I took it as carte blanche.” There was another problem, one she learned to work around mostly by using a “talent whisperer” who still works for her: For much of the show’s run, she was barely on speaking terms with its star, Mary-Louise Parker. Once, Parker threw a script at Kohan, shouting, “My mother can’t watch this!” Kohan shot back, “I don’t write it for your mother.” (Parker could not be reached for comment.)