The Best American Magazine Writing 2014

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  • • •

  Please, people, I can hear your objections from here. But first think back. Before Sex and the City, the vast majority of iconic “single girl” characters on television, from That Girl to Mary Tyler Moore and Molly Dodd, had been you-go-girl types—which is to say, actual role models. (Ally McBeal was a notable and problematic exception.) They were pioneers who offered many single women the representation they craved, and they were also, crucially, adorable to men: vulnerable and plucky and warm. However varied the layers they displayed over time, they flattered a specific pathology: the cultural requirement that women greet other women with the refrain “Oh, me, too! Me, too!”

  In contrast, Carrie and her friends—Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte—were odder birds by far, jagged, aggressive, and sometimes frightening figures, like a makeup mirror lit up in neon. They were simultaneously real and abstract, emotionally complex and philosophically stylized. Women identified with them—“I’m a Carrie!”—but then became furious when they showed flaws. And, with the exception of Charlotte (Kristin Davis), men didn’t find them likable: there were endless cruel jokes about Samantha (Kim Cattrall), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), and Carrie as sluts, man haters, or gold diggers. To me, as a single woman, it felt like a definite sign of progress: since the elemental representation of single life at the time was the comic strip “Cathy” (ack! chocolate!), better that one’s life should be viewed as glamorously threatening than as sad and lonely.

  Carrie Bradshaw herself began as a mirror for another woman: she was the avatar of the New York Observer columnist Candace Bushnell, a steely “sexual anthropologist” on the prowl for blind items. When the initial showrunner, Darren Star, and his mostly female writing staff adapted Bushnell’s columns, they transformed that icy Carrie, pouring her into the warm body of Sarah Jessica Parker. Out popped a chatterbox with a schnoz, whose advanced fashion sense was not intended to lure men into matrimony. For a half dozen episodes, Carrie was a happy, curious explorer, out companionably smoking with modelizers. If she’d stayed that way, the show might have been another Mary Tyler Moore: a playful, empowering comedy about one woman’s adventures in the big city.

  Instead, Carrie fell under the thrall of Mr. Big, the sexy, emotionally withholding forty-three-year-old financier played by Chris Noth. From then on, pleasurable as Sex and the City remained, it also felt designed to push back at its audience’s wish for identification, triggering as much anxiety as relief. It switched the romantic comedy’s primal scene, from “Me, too!” to “Am I like her?” A man practically woven out of red flags, Big wasn’t there to rescue Carrie; instead, his “great love” was a slow poisoning. She spun out, becoming anxious, obsessive, and, despite her charm, wildly self-centered—in her own words, “the frightening woman whose fear ate her sanity.” Their relationship was viewed with concern by her friends, who were not, as Martin suggests, mere “types” but portrayals of a narrow slice of wealthy white thirty-something Manhattanites: the Waspy gallerina, the liberal-feminist lawyer, the decadent power publicist.

  Although the show’s first season is its slightest, it swiftly establishes a bold mixture of moods—fizzy and sour, blunt and arch—and shifts between satirical and sincere modes of storytelling. (It’s not even especially dated: though the show has gained a reputation for over-the-top absurdity, I can tell you that these night clubs and fashion shows do exist—maybe even more so now that Manhattan has become a gated island for the wealthy.) There is already a melancholic undertow, full of foreshadowing. “What if he never calls and three weeks from now I pick up the New York Times and I read that he’s married some perfect little woman who never passes gas under his five-hundred-dollar sheets?” Carrie frets in episode 11. In a moment of clarity, she tells Miranda that, when she’s around Big, “I’m not like me. I’m, like, Together Carrie. I wear little outfits: Sexy Carrie and Casual Carrie. Sometimes I catch myself actually posing. It’s just—it’s exhausting.”

  That was the conundrum Carrie faced for the entire series: true love turned her into a fake. The season 1 neurotic Carrie didn’t stick, though. She and Big fixed things; then they broke up again, harder. He moved to Paris. She met Aidan (John Corbett), the marrying type. In season 3, the writers upped the ante, having Carrie do something overtly antiheroic: she cheated on a decent man with a bad one (Big, of course), now married to that “perfect little woman,” Natasha. They didn’t paper over the repercussions: Natasha’s humiliation and the way Carrie’s betrayal hardened Aidan, even once he took her back. During six seasons, Carrie changed, as anyone might from thirty-two to thirty-eight, and not always in positive ways. She got more honest and more responsible; she became a saner girlfriend. But she also became scarred, prissier, strikingly gun-shy—and, finally, she panicked at the question of what it would mean to be an older single woman.

  Her friends went through changes, too, often upon being confronted with their worst flaws—Charlotte’s superficiality, Miranda’s caustic tongue, Samantha’s refusal to be vulnerable. In a departure from nearly all earlier half-hour comedies, the writers fully embraced the richness of serial storytelling. In a movie we go from glare to kiss in two hours. Sex and the City was liberated from closure, turning “once upon a time” into a wry mantra, treating its characters’ struggles with a rare mixture of bluntness and compassion. It was one of the first television comedies to let its characters change in serious ways, several years before other half-hour comedies, like The Office, went and stole all the credit.

  • • •

  So why is the show so often portrayed as a set of empty, static cartoons, an embarrassment to womankind? It’s a classic misunderstanding, I think, stemming from an unexamined hierarchy: the assumption that anything stylized (or formulaic or pleasurable or funny or feminine or explicit about sex rather than about violence or made collaboratively) must be inferior. Certainly, the show’s formula was strict: usually four plots—two deep, two shallow—linked by Carrie’s voice-over. The B plots generally involved one of the non-Carrie women getting laid; these slapstick sequences were crucial to the show’s rude rhythms, interjecting energy and rupturing anything sentimental. (It’s one reason those bowdlerized reruns on E! are such a crime: with the literal and figurative fucks edited out, the show is a rom-com.)

  Most unusually, the characters themselves were symbolic. As I’ve written elsewhere—and argued, often drunkenly, at cocktail parties—the four friends operated as near-allegorical figures, pegged to contemporary debates about women’s lives, mapped along three overlapping continuums. The first was emotional: Carrie and Charlotte were romantics; Miranda and Samantha were cynics. The second was ideological: Miranda and Carrie were second-wave feminists, who believed in egalitarianism; Charlotte and Samantha were third-wave feminists, focused on exploiting the power of femininity from opposing angles. The third concerned sex itself. At first, Miranda and Charlotte were prudes while Samantha and Carrie were libertines. Unsettlingly, as the show progressed, Carrie began to glide toward caution, away from freedom, out of fear.

  Every conversation the friends had, at brunch or out shopping, amounted to a Crossfire-like debate. When Carrie sleeps with a dreamy French architect and he leaves a thousand dollars by her bed, she consults her friends. “Money is power. Sex is power,” Samantha argues. “Therefore, getting money for sex is simply an exchange of power.” “Don’t listen to the dime-store Camille Paglia,” Miranda shoots back. The most famous such conversation took place four episodes in, after Charlotte’s boyfriend asked her to have anal sex. The friends pile into a cab for a raucous debate about whether her choice is about power-exchange (Miranda) or about finding a fun new hole (Samantha). “I’m not a hole!” Charlotte protests, and they hit a pothole. “What was that?” Charlotte asks. “A preview,” Miranda and Samantha say in unison and burst out laughing.

  The show’s basic value system aligns with Carrie: romantic, second-wave, libertine. But Sex and the City’s real strength was its willingness not to stack the deck:
it let every side make a case so that complexity carried the day. When Carrie and Aidan break up, they are both right. When Miranda and Carrie argue about her move to Paris, they are both right. The show’s style could be brittle, but its substance was flexible, in a way that made the series feel peculiarly broad-ranging, covering so much ground, so fleetly, that it became easy to take it for granted.

  • • •

  Endings count in television, maybe too much. The Sopranos concluded with a black screen: it rejected easy satisfaction and pissed off its most devoted fans. (David Chase fled to the South of France.)

  Three years earlier, in 2004, Sex and the City had other pressures to contend with: while a mob film ends in murder, we all know where a romantic comedy ends. I’ll defend until my dying day the sixth-season plot in which Carrie seeks respite with a celebrity like her, the Russian artist Aleksandr (Mikhail Baryshnikov), a chilly genius she doesn’t love but who offers her a dreamlike fairy tale, the one she has always longed for: Paris, safety, money, pleasure. It felt ugly and sad in a realistic way. In one of the season’s, and the show’s, best episodes, she saw other older women settling (Candice Bergen) or falling out of windows (the hilarious Kristen Johnston, who delivered one of Sex and the City’s best monologues: “When did everybody stop smoking? When did everybody pair off? … I’m so bored I could die”). The show always had a realpolitik directness about such social pressures; as another HBO series put it recently, winter was coming.

  And then, in the final round, Sex and the City pulled its punches and let Big rescue Carrie. It honored the wishes of its heroine, and at least half of the audience, and it gave us a very memorable dress, too. But it also showed a failure of nerve, an inability of the writers to imagine or to trust themselves to portray any other kind of ending—happy or not. And I can’t help but wonder: What would the show look like without that finale? What if it were the story of a woman who lost herself in her thirties, who was changed by a poisonous, powerful love affair, and who emerged, finally, surrounded by her friends? Who would Carrie be then? It’s an interesting question, one that shouldn’t erase the show’s powerful legacy. We’ll just have to wait for another show to answer it.

  Private Practice

  Masters of Sex, a new hour-long drama on Showtime, is a fizzy, ebullient quasi-historical romp about the team of scientific pioneers who transformed American attitudes toward sex. But let’s not bury the lead: it’s also a serious turn-on.

  For many viewers, this will be reason enough to watch, and there’s no shame in that game; this is adult cable television’s bread and butter, after all. Luckily, the show has an appeal beyond solid date-night viewing. Masters of Sex is based on Thomas Maier’s lively 2009 book of the same title, which tells the story of the rise of William Masters, a renegade who aimed to study sex in the lab, using human subjects. In 1950s St. Louis, where Masters was a prominent OB-GYN, this was an idea outrageous enough that he had to keep the project secret. Then, almost by chance, Masters found his soul mate. Virginia Johnson was a low-level secretary with no college degree, but she had social skills that the doctor lacked, in addition to a spitfire sexual iconoclasm. The two became intellectual partners and, later, lovers—though few knew about that part until many years afterward. Their best-selling 1966 study blasted through medical prudery and Freudian hornswoggle, explaining the physiology of orgasms, spreading the good word about healthy sexuality, and turning them into national celebrities.

  This sounds like a romantic, upbeat story, and at times Masters of Sex does have a caper-plot element, as Johnson (Lizzy Caplan) flirts with doctors and nurses in the hospital, convincing them to “do it” for science. The sex scenes are graphic and often very funny, with classic Showtime panache, and they star people you definitely want to see having sex (or, in many cases, masturbating with sensors pasted to their skin, as the doctors murmur things like “turgidity of nipples”). In its stylish pilot, Masters of Sex initially comes off a bit like Mad Men with Benefits : fetishistic fun with a historical pedigree. But over the first six episodes, the show deepens by degrees, becoming more poignant and more surprising, too. It begins to acknowledge some of the unsettling implications of the doctor’s work and lets characters who start as entertaining cartoons gain complexity, taking the plot in new directions.

  When we first meet him, Masters (Michael Sheen) has begun his sex study without official permission: he’s been paying a skeptical prostitute to let him watch through a keyhole while he takes notes on positions and duration. His interest seems fueled by equal parts radical scientific curiosity and radical innocence. “Is that a common practice amongst prostitutes?” he asks, astonished by the revelation that his subject has faked an orgasm to speed up a customer. “It’s a common practice amongst anyone with a twat,” she replies.

  Masters is married to a lovely woman named Libby (the charming Caitlin FitzGerald), and they are struggling with infertility—he’s made her believe it’s her fault, when, in fact, he knows that he has a low sperm count. At the university hospital where he works, the doctor’s kindness to his patients coexists with a peevish, shut-down air of arrogance, the native entitlement of a big-shot doctor of his era. Then Johnson arrives, a former night-club singer, twice divorced, a single mother of two kids—a worldly woman seeking a sense of purpose. As Masters’s assistant, she handles all the administration and much of the design of the study, but her effect on him is stronger than those roles would suggest. Heterodox and bold in her manner, she’s a destabilizing force whose charisma acts like a magnet, spinning every moral compass into a panic. And yet, despite her bravado, she’s under society’s thumb, too: she needs to keep this job.

  • • •

  The show departs in several key ways from the true story, blurring chronology and conflating characters and adding in one or two questionable twists for the sake of drama. In a few cases, it makes events less strange than they were in reality: in the actual experiments, anonymous couples mated with paper bags over their heads. (Later on, Masters’s mother helpfully sewed silk masks.) These early episodes briskly sketch out a fraught fifties milieu, including the sub rosa doctor-nurse hookup scene; the lonely Masters marriage and its origins in Masters’s unhappy childhood; and Johnson’s struggles with her irresponsible ex (the hilarious Mather Zickel) and her son, who begins to hate her for neglecting him.

  Along the way, we get a sense of the ebb and flow of Masters and Johnson’s research, which began to bump up against charged social questions, like homosexuality and the then-accepted Freudian notion that vaginal climax was more “mature.” There are satisfyingly silly comic set pieces, including a flirtation between a blond nurse and a doctor who are paired for study, as well as a few on-the-nose bits reminiscent of a conventional medical drama. The dialogue isn’t always subtle, but it’s often sharp. (When a chagrined cad deflowers a virgin, he moans, “It’s like those signs you see in thrift shops. You break it, you buy it.”) A few episodes in, Allison Janney shows up to give an affecting performance as the university provost’s wife.

  For all the show’s appeal, none of this would work without Lizzy Caplan, the swizzle stick in the show’s erotic cocktail. In previous roles, Caplan has stood out as a modern girl, all defensive postures and tomboy sarcasm. On the cult TV classic Party Down, she was a jittery cater-waiter; in the underestimated dark movie comedy Bachelorette, a self-destructive hipster; in Mean Girls, a furious goth. But in Masters of Sex she’s chilled out and self-possessed, the type of woman who turns everything she says into an intelligent come-on, even when that’s not her intent. With her elegant nose and amused eyes, black-slash eyebrows and warm mouth, she’s like a pen-and-ink illo of herself. At times, the script can be a bit worshipful of the character—“that woman is magic,” one voice-over coos—but Caplan is watchable enough to override that flaw. And it’s a fascinating conception of a female superhero: her libido is a superpower, one she tries to use for good rather than evil, with mixed results.

  Since the era when
the Bada Bing girls writhed reliably, each Sunday night, in the background of Tony Soprano’s business meetings, cable television has adopted, if not an actual Madonna/whore complex, something approaching a Gallant/Goofus one. The most artistically prestigious series, such as The Wire, Breaking Bad, and even Mad Men, might include sex or nudity, but they generally do so for some plot-based reason, not as keep-’em-watching titillation. The shows that deliver more graphic scenes, often at oddly predictable twenty-minute intervals—Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, True Blood—share a slightly seamy quality, as if the boobs were contractually required product placement.

  Masters of Sex threads this needle well. Sex is its subject, after all—and the show makes the case, beneath its cinematic lacquer, that it is not something merely exciting or trivial but a deep human necessity. Deprived of intimacy and true release, people shrivel up. “Once you’ve seen Oz, who wants to go back to Kansas?” one heartbroken character asks. In this way, Masters of Sex reminded me not of a few other Showtime series, with their mood of anomie and disdain, but of Orange Is the New Black, the Netflix series that, for all its comic bounce, takes sex seriously as pleasure, power, and escape. These stories are humanistic, not cynical, and although they go in for a level of prurience, the nudity isn’t simply there to jump the needle on the viewer’s electrocardiogram. Masters of Sex may not be revolutionary TV, but it’s got something just as useful: good chemistry.

  Architect

  FINALIST—COLUMNS AND COMMENTARY

  In these three columns for Architect—the magazine of the American Institute of Architects —Witold Rybczynski examines significant building projects in Boston, Seattle, and Poundbury, England (“the town that Prince Charles built”). As the National Magazine Award judges said, “Rybczynski’s writing is engaging for both veteran architects and those who merely live and work in the buildings they design.” Born in Scotland and raised in England and Canada, Rybczynski has taught at McGill and the University of Pennsylvania; written for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Slate; and is the author of several books, including Home: A Short History of an Idea and, most recently, How Architecture Works: A Humanist’s Toolkit. “Oh, and by the way,” his website explains, “it’s pronounced Vee-told Rib-chin-ski.”