On the Mad Men backlash

Fair enough: Mad Men has been on for a long time, and there was bound to be a backlash at some point. What’s interesting to me, though, is the form the backlash has taken. Over and over, people are saying: okay, we get it. The symbolism is heavy-handed. Parallel plots are too elaborately coordinated. Everything is becoming too simplistic. A recent manifestation of the backlash in the New Yorker has claimed that Don Draper is less a character than a “thesis statement.”

In other words, the show is being castigated for remaining true to its original vision and for continuing to explore the same themes it’s always focused on. And again, fair enough: people are allowed to get tired of things. Yet it seems to me that there’s always an underlying demand, an unspoken grievance motivating these complaints. “Yes, yes, we get it, we realize that Don Draper is a terrible fraud, a pure surface whose success is an indictment of the system he operates in — so can you please get back to plotlines that allow us to view him as a charismatic character with real depth?” “Yes, yes, we understand, the system is rigged so that do-nothing old white dudes continue to triumph over more talented young people and particularly women — so now that we’ve acknowledged that, can you give us a fantasy portrayal where Peggy is totally put in charage and succeeds brilliantly?” “Okay, God, we hear you, we know that the advertising milieu is so toxic that even an apparently innocent character is ultimately pulled into the self-centered scheming — but why did you have make Megan seem to be more or less a naturally good person at first and deprive us of the fantasy that everyone is always-already a backstabbing social climber?”

As Gerry Canavan said on Twitter yesterday, Mad Men, like other “high quality” shows, succeeds because its audience doesn’t understand it. They tune in for the suave Don Draper, and they resent being deprived of that fantasy — even though the entire work of the show has always, from day one, been to deprive us of that fantasy. They tune in looking for a soap opera filled with sexy people and elaborate sets (and “fan service” such as more screen time for Peggy or the triumphant return of Sal), and they resent that the show has a moral critique of the milieu it’s documenting. If you really “got it,” you’d either stop watching — or start watching the show differently. As it stands, the backlash seems to be driven by the fact that the show’s viewers simply don’t want to “get it.” And the fact of that paradoxical combination of addiction and resistence makes me wonder if Mad Men will turn out to be the most interesting and artistically successful example of the early 2000s “high quality cable drama” genre.

Midwesterners are creepy: The secret life of Girls

Girls is about a group of college friends who move to New York and, with plucky determination, do nothing but relive their college dramas. One wonders why they didn’t all decide to save some money and live in their parents’ basement for a couple years. Every time they reach outside their insular circle, it ends in disaster — either for the main characters or (especially) for their unfortunate new friends. The season finale gave away this secret when it showed the single line Hannah had typed of her book: all she had to say was about the unique bond between college girls.

The midwestern background of most of the characters is crucial. They are not exploring the city and moving into the broader cosmopolitan world — they are continually attempting to force their interactions into the framework of midwestern assumptions. For Hannah, this takes the form of seeking out and cultivating “gritty” experiences. For Marnie, this takes the form of trying to live according to midwestern values of practicality and monogamy in a setting where those values don’t often work. Marnie’s approach is often self-destructive (though one feels she is likely to destroy the life her on-and-off college boyfriend who had managed to become a successful tech entrepreneur once he got away from her), while Hannah’s is destructive of others, particularly Adam.

The subplot about Adam’s new girlfriend is particularly revealing and revolting in this regard.

Sexism and Star Trek

We still have a long way to go as a culture when it comes to sexism. Patronizing, objectifying, or otherwise stereotypical portrayals of women, for instance, abound in pop culture. And yet in my recent viewing of just a handful of original Star Trek episodes, I can’t help but think that we’ve made significant progress. A random sampling of those episodes revealed plots that crucially depended on sexist presuppositions — they would be incomprehensible if you didn’t presume that women were ultimately feeble creatures who are easily captivated by a display of male power. It’s not a character flaw of an individual woman, but the condition of woman as such.

In the episode that introduces Khan, for instance, the ship’s historian falls instantly in love with the villain and submits to his abusive behavior with little argument, agreeing to betray her crewmates. While she does rescue Capt. Kirk, she ultimately decides to go into exile with Khan. In another episode, an evil double of Kirk created by a transporter malfunction tries to rape a female crew member, a recurring character who by all accounts appears to be a normal adult woman — and later in the plot, she uses that experience as a jumping-off point for sharing her sexual attraction to him. Now I think that the latter plot would be considered far beyond the pale in contemporary culture, even for something like Family Guy. In the former case, it’s conceivable, but her behavior would have to be thoroughly explained — most likely through some type of explicit mind-control powers.

This is not to say that we’ve done enough or “arrived,” of course — it’s more to point out how deeply, incredibly fucked up things were to begin with.

Our continuing mission

In recent months, The Girlfriend and I have undertaken a task that would have warmed my heart as a 13-year-old boy: we have worked our way through nearly the entirety of Star Trek: The Next Generation. (Of course, the notion that I could undertake such a project with a woman, much less that she would be the one to suggest it, would have boggled my mind completely.) While the first season and much of the second was trying, I have to say that it holds up well as drama — so that this particular viewing project was less purely nostalgia-driven than our slog through MacGyver. I’d even be so bold as to claim that it represents an improvement over the original series, retaining some of the philosophical ambition without veering into the pretension and heavy-handedness that marred so many of the original episodes. In short, the writers still fundamentally want to explore what it means to be human, but they are also comfortable letting the show be a show.

Systems are cowards

A theme in “high-quality” television is the cowardice of politicians. They are always running scared, or at best trying to decide whose lap-dog they should be — the real power is always elsewhere. This is perhaps clearest in Deadwood or Boardwalk Empire, but the basic dynamic is there in West Wing as well, where the president of the world’s mightiest power must constantly “manage” the unruly press (as well as the military brass). On the news as well, we constantly learn of complex calculations as senators worry how their constituents will respond to their decision to vote for cloture on this appropriations bill, etc. While there is obviously a certain degree of window-dressing going on there, I think the underlying paranoia is probably authentic in most cases.

Whence this fear, this paradoxical powerlessness? I believe it stems from the fact that a political office is something you can lose and indeed the default trajectory is precisely for you to lose it automatically (the term will expire, etc.).

Early thoughts on rewatching the last season of Mad Men

I’ve only gotten a few episodes into my rewatching of last year’s season of Mad Men, but things are already coming across different to me. I’m even beginning to suspect that some of the things that made it frustrating to watch going forward — the excessive attention to Megan at the expense of Peggy, the pat “thematic” nature of each episode — were features rather than bugs.

One of the overarching themes is that generational transfer is not a clean and simple thing.

Treme as a new kind of television

Treme is far from the most entertaining show on television, and it will surely never make any top-ten lists of the all-time greats of the “high-quality cable drama” genre that defined the 2000s and is now apparently sputtering out. In some respects, though, it may be one of the most radically experimental TV dramas ever done — not on the level of content (as with something like Twin Peaks), but on the level of form. The kind of story Treme is trying to tell and the means it is using to tell it seem to me to be genuinely new, even if The Wire provides some degree of precedent.

One often hears claims that the setting “becomes like a character,” which generally means that the setting acts directly on events rather than being a more or less passive background to them. Certainly this is true of The Wire‘s Baltimore or, to use a particularly extreme film example, the bizarrely laid-out house in Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence. Most of the time, though, those settings are more or less static and claustrophobic, so that the story is fundamentally about fully-realized individuals who are forced to bang their heads repeatedly against the wall.

What the broad canvas of serial TV drama allows Treme to do is to show the impact of a fluid, evolving confluence of social forces.

It’s a jungle out there: The precarious labor of Monk

MacGyver isn’t the only questionable show The Girlfriend and I watch — we’re also getting close to the end of Monk, a Sherlock Holmes variant starring Tony Shalhoub as a detective with OCD. Those who aren’t familiar with the premise can read the exhaustive Wikipedia page, but in this post, I’d just like to highlight a few salient features.

The more we watch, the more bizarre the show becomes.

An und für sich: the TV adaptation?

I don’t want to muscle in on jms’s and Craig’s territory by posting something about TV on a Thursday, but ABC’s new show Revolution does touch on a few themes which struck me as of interest to AUFS. The show is about a post-apocalyptic future in which electricity no longer works. This is a pretty neat idea, although it falls apart at the slightest scrutiny (if “electricity” doesn’t work, how come “nervous systems” still do?); unfortunately, the show does seem to be encouraging scrutiny of the premise by making the characters’ attempt to discover how the apocalypse happened an ongoing plot thread. High concept aside, Revolution isn’t really a “good” show; its post-apocalyptic hardships are pretty off-the-shelf, as are the characters (idealistic teenagers, surly dudes with a soft heart, etc), but there are a couple of interesting things about it. One is its presentation of cities as objects of nostalgia; the main character, who was a toddler when electricity stopped working, keeps an illicit collection of post-cards of the major American cities (I’m reminded of David Simon saying he made Treme in response to people who asked him why anyone would live in the city depicted in The Wire); indeed, on one level at least, the show presents an argument against the lo-fi localism which is something of a liberal consensus.

The Lesser Evil and the Eternal Irony of the Community: Or, Cable Dramas Urge You to Vote Democrat

[Note: This post talks about plot points in a television show you might be meaning to watch!!!]

Boardwalk Empire may turn out to be the last child of the classical era of the “high-quality cable drama.” Like Mad Men, it is a descendant of The Sopranos with an eye for period authenticity. Unlike Mad Men, however, Boardwalk Empire is just coming into its own — the ending of the last season announced a new ambition and daring, and the current season seems on pace to fulfill that promise.

Nevertheless, there are limits to the creative possibilities in a “high-quality cable drama,” particularly one saddled with the genre conventions of a mafia story.