May 8, 2018 On Television A Gentler Reality Television By Lucas Mann A few weeks ago, my wife and I sat down to watch the reboot of Queer Eye. We were a bit skeptical. After all, the original debuted fifteen years ago, at the beginning of the reality-TV boom and also at a time when any queer representation on TV could be seen as edgy, fun, uncomplicatedly moving in the right direction. Now we’re thinking harder about the underlying messages in our popular culture, and crucially, the phrase reality TV has evolved in what it conveys—what was once novelty became a tired formula and has now become a ready-made explanation for everything that is wrong with American social and political culture. As reality-TV fans who consider ourselves to be thoughtful, politically progressive people, it’s become harder for us to like the shows we used to like. The pleasure is overridden by the angst about deriving pleasure from that. The constant manipulations, the hypersimplified worldview, the arbitrary episodic contests that end in someone’s spectacular fall from grace, the distracting appeal of gossipy intrigue—it all seems to have conspired to turn a reality-TV star into the world’s most powerful person. When Emily Nussbaum wrote in The New Yorker about how The Apprentice shaped the Trump character that played so explosively in the 2016 election, how could it not feel horrifying to be the kind of person susceptible to the characterization techniques of the genre? When Jennifer Weiner took to the New York Times to swear off The Bachelor now that the nasty distortions of reality TV were infecting actual reality, she was describing a lot of people’s inner turmoil. Read More
April 2, 2018 On Television A Reckoning with Reality (TV) By Lucas Mann Lucas Mann’s love letter to his wife—and to the jacked-up emotions of reality TV. When we were first getting into The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, the husband of one of the show’s stars, who had seemed to be a real asshole (like potentially abusive) on-screen, hanged himself. The following season, his widow was back, shocked yet resilient, weepy but still game. At the height of The Real Housewives of New Jersey (your favorite), Teresa went to jail for the mail, wire, and bank fraud that had funded the lifestyle she so proudly flaunted for the cameras. Her special return-home episode airs next month. In the middle of our Here Comes Honey Boo Boo obsession, Honey Boo Boo’s mother’s boyfriend got arrested for rape, child molestation, aggravated child molestation, and aggravated sexual assault battery against Honey Boo Boo’s sister. The show got canceled, but Honey Boo Boo did appear in a special obesity episode of The Doctors, and now her mother is on Marriage Boot Camp. After we watched the first three seasons of 19 Kids and Counting, the scandal broke about the oldest of the nineteen molesting his sisters and avoiding prosecution by being sent to some backward-ass Christian labor camp. Jim Bob, the patriarch, vowed they’d be back soon, putting complete confidence in God’s plan. I’m not really sure what to do with all this; I’m just getting a list going. The obvious question to bring up here is: Are we complicit? “We” meaning you and me but also, in that awful think-piecey way, standing in for the culture. Read More
November 17, 2017 On Television The Wholesome Yet Filthy Comedy of Trixie and Katya By Kastalia Medrano Katya Zamolodchikova and Trixie Mattel. Because we haven’t figured out how to actually solve the various things happening in our country, for now we’re relying pretty heavily on humor. Contemporary political humor has many forms, but it’s the takedowns that get far and way the most attention. This has created an odd climate in which people assume that for comedy to have any political or cultural value it has to be mean. A lot of comedians fall back on the assumption that the shortest path to funny is through picking the lowest-hanging target. But Trixie Mattel and Katya Zamolodchikova, a pair of much-beloved drag queens whose show premiered on November 15 on Viceland, have found a way of landing jokes without aiming at anything at all. They’re able to show, consistently, that being wholesome is not mutually exclusive with being absolutely fucking filthy, and that a firm grasp of one’s own brand doesn’t mean acting like an asshole. Earlier this month, I sat down to talk with them. KATYA: Yeah, I don’t, I’m not like a very good actor. TRIXIE: Me neither, bitch! I’m not good at anything! I can do, like, two voices. We do the white-girl voice… KATYA [white-girl voice]: I’m like, so excited to be here, so grateful… Read More
July 17, 2017 On Television Creek Theses By Justin Taylor New notes on Dawson’s Creek. Will it be yes or will it be sorry? Cold Open Because the dream of the nineties is still on life support in Portland (seriously, check our real-estate listings), yesterday I walked over to the independently owned brick-and-mortar music-and-video emporium near my house to buy a used copy of the Dawson’s Creek season 6 box set for $6. They had a second copy going for $8.50, which I assume meant it was in slightly better condition, but I’d decided beforehand that $6 was my price point. In fact, I’d come to this store a few times before and almost bought this particular box set, each time thinking, Am I really going to do this? And each time the answer had been no. It’s not no anymore. Dawson’s Creek premiered in January 1998, and if you want more establishing detail than that, I suggest you Google it. I was fifteen at the time, halfway through tenth grade, and so not only part of the show’s prime demographic but the same age as its main characters. Granted, I lived in semi-suburban North Miami Beach, and they lived in small-town (would it be unreasonable to say semirural? It always felt that way to me) coastal Massachusetts, though the show was filmed in North Carolina, which is sometimes more and sometimes less obvious when you’re watching, but I don’t think any of this matters, at least in the context I’m planning to discuss the show today. Read More
April 23, 2015 On Television Better Call Caravaggio By Matt Siegel Vince Gilligan borrows from the Baroque. Above left, a still from Better Call Saul; above right, Caravaggio, The Sacrifice of Isaac (detail), 1602. The eldest character in Better Call Saul isn’t Mike Ehrmantraut, Tuco’s unsuspecting abuelita, or any of the nursing-home residents shakily spooning gelatin from attorney-branded dessert cups. It’s the show’s sixteenth-century lighting scheme, which has better lines than even Bob Odenkirk himself—they’re just in the form of shadows rather than wry legalese. In fact, while Saul’s setting derives from the blue crystal “artwork” of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman, much of its symbolism draws from the black brushstrokes of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Saul’s creators, Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, have already confessed a soft spot for symbolism; they used a hot-and-cold color palette to divide the wardrobes of criminals and law-abiding citizens, with Jimmy bridging both worlds as he fights the temptation to break bad. These biblical undertones extend far past the fiery brimstone of Tuco’s shirt and the heavenly hues of “Hamlin Blue”—they go all the way back to the Baroque era of painting. Read More
October 9, 2013 On Television Death of a Salesman By Sam Sweet Once called the “friend of every insomniac in Southern California,” Cal Worthington haunted the nether regions of broadcast programming for more than sixty years. Judging by the frequency of his appearances, their consistency, and their longevity, Worthington might have been the biggest television star in the history of the West. That makes him as much a deity as anything California culture has seen in its short history. But he wasn’t an actor or a journalist or a politician. His church was a chain of car dealerships and his prophesies a series of madcap advertisements. For better or worse, everyone who lived in Southern California had to reckon with him. Worthington’s long-running series of self-produced spots never deviated from a formula. The slender cowboy—six foot four in beaver-skin Stetsons and a custom Nudie suit—always preceded his hyperactive sales pitch with a gambol through the lot of his Dodge dealership, accompanied by an escalating succession of exotic animals. Originally it was an ape, then a tiger, an elephant, a black bear, and, finally, Shamu, the killer whale from SeaWorld—each of which was invariably introduced as Cal’s dog, Spot. Not once did he appear with a canine. The banjo-propelled jingle (set to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It”) exhorted listeners to “Go see Cal, go see Cal, go see Cal,” a catchphrase that became the basis for the most infamous mondegreen in Golden State history. To this day, Pussycow remains a nostalgic code word exchanged among Californians who came of age in the era before emissions standards. Read More