Reactions to Girls and Breaking Bad: Auteur TV, White Privilege, and Gender

After the most recent episode of Girls, “Beach House,” I've started to wonder if I'm watching the show wrong. I knew that there was a lot of hate for the show, but this season more than ever I wonder if the show itself wants me to hate its characters and, by extension, only enjoy the show when other characters are criticizing the girls or they're lighting into each other, in both cases as proxies for “the audience.”

Even though with every season, and this season with every episode, I'm less sure how to respond to the show, I'll say this for it: it's a radical experiment in tone. It's common for sitcoms to feature protagonists that you love to hate, from the lowbrow Archie Bunker to the highbrow Frasier Crane and from the cast of Seinfeld to innumerable British sitcom examples. The way it works is that you know the character or characters are loathsome but you enjoy watching them out of what's basically sadism (play is the only thing that distinguishes comedy from sadism, as Northrop Frye put it): you enjoy watching them make themselves and others suffer, and often enjoy their outrageousness while they do it. This is not the same trope, by the way, as the socially incorrect character in a group comedy, who wins the audience's love, without any hate, by doing and saying things you aren't supposed to do and say, even though the creators may intend him (it's usually him) as a criticism of what they're portraying: Alex P. Keaton, Barney Stinson, and, of course, the greatest of them all, Bender on Futurama. Sheldon Cooper is this type as well, although he's not a criticism of anything but rather a representation of a popular idea of autism.

The first thing that makes Girls different is that it doesn't seem to have won any love-hate for its characters: as one can plainly see all over the internet, a vocal portion of its audience just hates them, period, as if those viewers are watching a reality TV show where they can't find any characters to root for (except the men a little, sometimes). The second thing that makes it different is that Dunham and co. then ask us to sympathize with the characters anyway in their trials with relationships, jobs, their friendships, body image, mental health, etc., making far more soap operatic (and dramatic) demands on the viewer's emotions than most sitcoms. When sitcoms go into dramatic territory they usually change their tone to do it, and become sentimental, but Girls is never sentimental, and when it goes dramatic it just goes even darker than the comedy.

I continue to basically sympathize with the main characters, Hannah and Marnie, because I can identify with them as social types, and as the show goes on it starts to seem like they are two sides of one woman (their creator presumably). Shosh and Jessa are the “zanies”: Jessa is The Bender, the straight-up sociopath who's easy to love because, being rich, she gets away with everything and doesn't call for a complicated reaction; Shosh is The Phoebe, who seems like a ditz from another dimension most of the time but has a harder edge than any other member of the group and is the only one who'll let them know what morons they are. What's interesting about Jessa is that she's not, as she so easily could be, just a portrayal of a rich bitch who takes people's lives apart because of her own boredom, emptiness, unhappiness, and immunity to consequences. The show allows her to be that but also to be occasionally wise, although as with its other resident wise character, Adam, it's hard to know where the wisdom stops and the bullshit begins.

Girls, Awkward Black Girl, and Women's Fiction

Ray, we learned last week, thought he was “too wise for grad school,” definitely an example of bullshit masquerading as wisdom. Neither wise nor sociopathic, Ray has transformed from his humble beginnings as Charlie's bitches-hating homeboy into the show's heart, and a lot of credit for that must surely go to the marvellous Alex Karpovsky, who manages to make the most assholish things his character has to say seem to come from a place of sensitivity and pain. The show's writing needs more actors like this, who can bring the sense of a whole human being to the often one-note meanness of the dialogue.

In Season 3, more than ever, it feels like the two remaining main male characters are emotional ballasts for Hannah and Marnie, now that Adam's post-Hannah tailspin is in the past. Early in the first season, Hannah fantasized out loud about wanting to have AIDS; this was a fantasy about having no responsibility, so that no one could ask or expect anything from you and could only take care of you. In the second season she had a new version of that fantasy, with Patrick Wilson as her rich and handsome caregiver. By the end of the season she was living it out in a different way by becoming very, very ill, and although Adam coming to her rescue (she shuts out Marnie and she's abandoned by Jessa) seemed, at the beginning of Season 3, like only a momentary solution after all, the fantasy continues beneath the surface. I get that Dunham wants to make the point that female friendships aren't always like Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, just like she wants to make the point that everyone doesn't have a Victoria's Secret body, but instead of counselling self-reliance as the alternative to placing destructive expectations on your friendships, she seems to counsel reliance on men (or, at least, on romantic relationships). Make no mistake, the climactic line of the big “Beach House” argument, Hannah's “I miss my boyfriend,” wasn't just a slap in Marnie's face, it was an Oedipal knife in the heart of Mama Feminism.

In my last post I talked about how the kind of privileged white girlness shown on Girls and its simultaneous celebration and critique can be traced back at least to Jane Austen's Emma, and Anne Helen Peterson LA Review of Books piece on Marnie, subtitled “Pretty Girl Privilege,” backs up my point while failing to recognize that “The Marnie” is not a type of real person but rather a trope of fiction. And it's fascinating, and a little disheartening, to see the extent to which cutting-edge women's fiction of the early 21^st century relies on tropes that were used by Austen in the early 19^th century. The Austenian core of Girls is the reason that the male love interests are more mature, older-acting (remember Adam's “Kid” nickname for Hannah) or actually older than the girls, and often take a tutelary stance towards them, which includes speaking criticism to privilege. This does not preclude sometimes siding with the “unruly” girls and finding the “grown-up” men tedious, as I suggested that you could when watching the “Dead Inside” episode. I also, however, tried to make a comparison between the men's finger-wagging attitude in that episode and Skyler's relationship with Walter in Breaking Bad, but that was a really big stretch. Fans of Breaking Bad will let you know that when women call men on their bullshit, it's “nagging” and “being a bitch,” while the hate-watchers of Girls (who can be found, for example, in the comments section of The AV Club, under the thoughtful and sensitive weekly reviews of Todd VanDerWerff) will let you know that when men criticize women, it's calling them on their bullshit.

Hannah dreams of a Mr. Darcy that looks like Patrick Wilson, but gets a sort of Heathcliff/Mr. Rochester brooding Gothic weirdo/soul mate, who, in Season 2, stalks her like Caspar Goodwood. But Marnie, who's way more of an Emma than Hannah is an Elizabeth, gets a proper Mr. Knightley in Ray. I mean, surely today Mr. Knightley would be a Classics Ph.D. drop-out-turned-coffee shop manager. And this young-ditzy-woman/older-wise-man love relationship ideal may even be conscious on the part of Dunham, who's namechecked Clueless as being among her influences.

The tropes of Austen, or perhaps one should just say women's fiction as it has been since at least the 19^th century, also seem to haunt Issa Rae's addictive web series The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl. When the show begins, the heroine, J, has two problems that most of us have experienced: she's single and she hates her job. In the first season, she's coached by her best friend to find love, which results in a whole season where she must try to choose between two men, Jay White, whom she nicknames “White Jay” for obvious reasons, and her black co-worker Fred. At the end of the first season, she realizes which man she really wants in an Elizabeth Bennet-style epiphany. But there are no real obstacles to the eventual relationship, not even J's own psychology. The who-will-she-choose suspense is generated entirely by the serial format: as befitting the microscopic storytelling of the webisode, the tropes of Awkward Black Girl are in their simplest and most basic form (the inventiveness and originality come into play with the comedy and the POV). What fascinates me is how compelling they are in that form.

George Eliot's Pretty Girls Issues

More even than Emma Woodhouse, in “Pretty Girl Privilege” Petersen is describing a Gwendolen Harleth:

There are Marnies all over the contemporary media, they just get everything that we've been conditioned to expect their looks, class, and education level meriting: outrageous success, perfect happiness.... The implicit message of these Marnies? If you work hard - if you have great hair – you will get the things to which you are entitled. The job, the boy, the body, all yours, simply through the force of your American will. You don't have to have charisma, per se, or even superlative, well, anything – you just have to let things happen.... You're a pretty, skinny, moderately intelligent girl, and every piece of media you've consumed has told you that your life would go one way.

Seriously, did Petersen have the heroine of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda in the back of her mind when she wrote this? And was she thinking of Harold Bloom's “Heroines of the Protestant Will,” a banner under which he includes Gwendolen as well as Emma and Elizabeth, when she wrote the phrase “your American will”? Eliot, who was beauty, had some deep-seated pretty girl issues that she took out on Rosamond Vincy in Middlemarch, whose vapid social climbing and overspending ruin the idealistic genius husband with whom she's grievously mismatched, and on Gwendolen, who learns, in Petersen's words about Marnie:

Only WAIT A SECOND, that's all bullshit, because American is neither a meritocracy nor a prettitocracy: it's all about connections, and no one in New York cares if you went to Oberlin and your mom has a solid upper middle class job as a real estate agent in New Jersey. Marnie spent so much of her life thinking that things would work out when she graduated that she forgot to actually become something.

To translate this into the terms of Eliot's Victorian novel: in ways that Simone de Beauvoir would understand perfectly, Gwendolen has been warped into a pathological narcissist (and neurotic) by being treated all of her life as perfect because she's, precisely, “pretty, skinny, moderately intelligent,” oh and rich, and she has been given her way in everything. She has been celebrated for who she is, immanently, without ever having to become anything, since it was never expected that she would have to be anything other than a socialite. When she learns that she's no longer rich, she at first thinks that she can support herself and her mother using one of her minor accomplishments, singing, and asks for the appraisal of an expert, who informs her that she has neither skill nor talent – a little like Marnie's YouTube video experience.

Girls is dealing with the echoes of these privileged white girl tropes from 19^th century fiction even though, as I suggested in my last post, the circumstances that created the tropes have changed. Marnie has not been brought up to think that she will never have to earn a living, but she has, more vaguely and insidiously, been brought up to think, as Petersen says, that she will be a success. Because it can be deduced from her whiteness, prettiness, skinniness, and economic privilege that she will be a success, she has never had to work hard at developing any particular skill, including singing. And now she has to face the fact – if any of the girls were able to face any facts – that she is ordinary. Yet surely it's that sense of entitlement, that indomitable, irrational sense that she is better than all of this, better than her circumstances, that makes her attractive to Ray? 

It's interesting to compare the ways in which white girls feel entitled to the ways in white guys feel entitled, and the different reactions their privilege receives. Todd VanDerWerff wrote a piece for Salon on white male privilege in Breaking Bad in which his description of Walter White's entitlement sounds a lot like Petersen's description of Marnie's:

Walt's justifications for why he should have what he wants stem almost entirely from believing that he's owed in some way, that the universe has screwed him over. Yet when the series begins, he has a pretty good life. He has a beautiful wife, a loving son, a baby on the way, and a house with a swimming pool. Maybe he doesn't like either of his jobs, but who does? And when he gets cancer, old friends who feel a debt to him offer to pay for the treatments. Yet all Walt needs is the slightest provocation to look around himself, reach out for anything within reach, and cry out, "I want that!" like a spoiled toddler. 

Since writing my last post it occurred to me that a white girl defending white girls (“We're not all upper middle class! And even those who are have problems too!”) was as hypocritical and ludicrous as the white guys who whine about the bad name they seem to have with women and non-whites. And yet although it should be the same thing, in the context of premium cable TV viewing, bizarrely, it's not, because no one is hate-watching Breaking Bad, or any other TV show, in order to seethe and rail at the examples of white male privilege on display and to wait for those moments when the women call the men on their bullshit. On the contrary, the seething and railing going on are against any criticism of the show, or not the show (because VanDerWerff thinks it's self-aware), but rather Walter White himself, by fans, as one can see in the comments on the piece. It's hysterical hero-worship of Kurt Cobain intensity – and every Cobain, or stricken king, needs a Courtney/Yoko/Skyler. The show may be self-aware, but at the mythic level it's structurally misogynous.

White male privilege, as Walter White shows, involves thinking you're owed a fortune for your super-competence, while white female privilege (as we'd call it if we weren't stuck on that quasi-reclaimed pejorative “girl”), as demonstrated by Marnie, involves thinking you're owed the perfect life for your attractive appearance. Hannah Horvath (yay for TV protagonists with same-consonant-initials!), on the other hand, does think she's potentially a genius, but of course that's just more privilege and “self-absorption.” White women also, one notes, do not, as a trope, react to not getting what they think they're owed in life with a rage rampage, presumably because until recently, women had to get what they wanted in life through a husband or lovers. In noir, the trope is that if she couldn't get what she wants through her husband, she has to use her lover to get rid of the husband for her. She can't act directly but must always act by proxy. Even Scarlett O'Hara, the most direct and action-oriented of all the privileged white girls of fiction (she even get to shoot a man to protect her household), is forced to marry her sister's beau in order to save Tara since she can't just go into business for herself.

Up to this point, most TV, like most European and American fiction, has been about white privilege. Auteur TV seems to be calling attention to this in a new way, maybe because educated people are taking it seriously enough to analyze it, and maybe because it reflects the fantasies of a mostly affluent viewership more directly and visibly/audibly (through vivid cultural discussion and colourful internet commentary) than contemporary fiction does. These fantasies at the moment revolve around the idea of a broken-down economy and the sun setting on America and the American promise: the heirs and heiresses of all the ages growing up to discover that the fortune they thought would be theirs has been lost. And yet, somehow, we only get mad at the girls for their expectations. I do understand that this hatred of “bratty” white girls is the flip side of our purely symbolic overvaluation of them, which has been critically investigated, and simultaneously promulgated, in Anglo-American literature, movies, and TV from Clarissa Harlowe to Daisy Buchanan to Melanie Daniels to Laura Palmer.

Girls is a more subtle a show than it sometimes seems, and “Beach House” was very much the answer to “One Man's Trash” from last season, this time focused on Marnie and her fantasies instead of Hannah and hers. In both cases, a beautiful house that does not belong to the Girls, whose material splendour is emotionally reassuring (like the manor houses in Austen), plays a central role in the episode. But while Hannah gets her perfect couple of days, isolated from the rest of the world and her concerns, with one perfect man entirely focused on her, and only punctures the fantasy towards the end, Marnie isn't allowed the private “healing time” that she wants to her friends, largely due to Hannah's resistance. Hannah's fantasy is to be taken care of, even to the point, in the words of Jane Bowles, where “everything is taken off your hands and you flop around like a baby.” Marnie's fantasy is to be surrounded by friends who love her, or, failing that, to convey the image of it on Instagram. Although I wouldn't go as far as Chuck Bowen, who, in a lovely review on the Slant blog, calls Marnie “the center of Girls's empathetic imagination,” there's no doubt that the episode imbues her with a certain pathos: she's a latter-day Mrs. Dalloway whose recalcitrantly real friends (in a strain of Dunham's imagination that's been with the show from the beginning) just won't get on board with her aesthetic vision of the perfect moment.

I suggested in my V. C. Andrews post that very young women who are still in the process of forming their own opinions pick up the cultural signals that tell them to devalue women and obey them with the ferocity of zealots. I hear that same voice in comments and on blog posts in which female viewers criticize the characters on Girls for their narcissism, self-absorption, selfishness, privilege, and so on and so forth. Again, I just don't see young men watching shows about young men who do not live up to the cultural ideal of what men should be in order to berate the characters for their non-compliance, although maybe that's happening in some corner of popular culture that I'm not aware of. If Marnie and Hannah are two sides of one woman, they're Superego and Id, or the woman you're supposed to be and the woman who rebels (to the point of spending an entire episode/day in a green bikini that exhibits her ample cellulite to the world) against being that woman. And here's one genuine point of connection between Breaking Bad and Girls besides all of the white privilege: they're locked in a love-hate combat as brutal as Walt and Jesse's. 

The Comedy of Truth Telling: Louis C. K.'s Louie and Simon Amstell's Grandma's House

Preface: Very seriously, if you don't like spoilers, don't read any of this blog post, which contains MAJOR SPOILERS for events old and new on all three sitcoms it discusses: Louie, Grandma's House, and Peep Show. The kind of spoilers that dwell on the profound televisual pleasure of the skillful revelation of surprises, ruining them for you in the process. So do not read on unless you've already seen these shows and want to compare reactions, or you like to read blog posts about TV shows you'll never watch, or on an impulse that you'll regret immediately after, cringing at each MAJOR SPOILER that erupts in your face.

For two comedians so drastically different, Louis C. K. and Simon Amstell have a remarkable amount in common. They both star in artistically ambitious, autobiographical sitcoms of the “comedy of humiliation/discomfort” sub-genre, playing less successful versions of themselves who are awkward, vulnerable, and have a difficult time finding love and getting laid. Both men have Jewish ancestry on the paternal side; C. K.'s parents divorced when he was ten, Amstell's when he wasn't much older; both shows are haunted by paternal absence. The strong autobiographical element in their comedy goes along with a broader concern with truth telling: Amstell became a minor celebrity in the UK by mocking celebrities, first as a presenter on Pop World, then as the host of the pop music-oriented quiz show Never Mind the Buzzcocks, while (to judge by the bits featured on the show) C. K. prides himself in his stand-up comedy on telling uncomfortable truths which often have to do with sex.

But that's where the similarities end. C. K. is an out-of-shape man in his early 40s who's obsessed with the idea that he's decrepit; Amstell is a wisp of a waif in his early 30s who's as fat-phobic as C. K. is food-addicted and who frequently remarks on the youthfulness of his own appearance. When in Season 3 of Louie, Louie confronts the idea of failure, it's as a middle-aged man whose aim, given his career in show business, has always been to become a stupendous success, and who has started to realize that it may not happen, and soon his best years will be behind him and he will have no more opportunities. When in Series 2 of Grandma's House, Simon grows more desperate after giving up his TV host job, it's as a once-precocious success who thinks his best years may already be irretrievably behind him even as he watches his peers, such as the oft-mentioned Russell Brand, take their careers to “the next level.” It's important to the comedy of both men that we believe they're too prickly, insular, hapless, and, of course, honest for mass popularity; but in truth there's no inevitability to these things. Before Forgetting Sarah Marshall, only five years ago, it might have seemed that Russell Brand was too edgy and outspoken to make it in America; and (being Russell Brand's age) I'm old enough to remember when David Letterman, then in his mid-40s, was being considered as Johnny Carson's replacement, and everyone thought he was too edgy – in his case, acerbic and facetious – for the position. Edginess and awkwardness may reduce your chances of success in entertainment, but they doesn't preclude the possibility.

One of the most obvious differences between the two men is that C. K. is heterosexual and Amstell homosexual, which in their case affects not just their sexual preferences but their stance towards masculinity. C. K. struggles with what it means to “be a man”: fear of fighting and whether that compromises his masculinity; shame over his “disgusting” fantasies about women; a mixture of shame and defiant pride over his masturbation addiction; nervous mockery and jittery tolerance of male homosexuality, accompanied by homophobic/homoerotic fantasies (e.g., the denouement of the dentist episode). Amstell, on the other hand, seems as far from wanting to approximate traditional masculinity as he's incapable of doing so, with his adolescent appearance and voice; in Grandma's House the only function that traditional masculinity serves is to be mocked as absurd in the form of Simon's mother's boyfriend, Clive, an erratic alcoholic who calls Simon “Captain” and whose blustery attempts to engage in male bonding with his amused and horrified pseudo-stepson tend to evoke pity and fear.

The Trouble with Truth Telling

An unfortunate aspect of Amstell's truth-telling persona is his nastiness towards those he deems deserving, whether celebrities or relatives; although in Grandma's House this is tempered by self-deprecation, on the one hand, and intermittent compassion towards most of the other main characters, Clive included. An unfortunate aspect of C. K.'s truth-telling is that he seems to think that he's speaking for “men” and hides behind this idea when he tells us unsavoury truths about himself, such as about his sexual thoughts and habits. The same can't be said of Amstell: when in his stand-up show, Do Nothing, he tells us about his attraction to young men who are thin and vulnerable, like himself, he's not talking about anyone else's foibles but his own, and one is astonished, as throughout the show, equally at his confessional bravery and his infinite narcissism.

This willingness to speak on behalf of “men” is no doubt a large part of the reason that C. K. has been embraced as philosopher-comedian, appealing to the same middle-aged white male demographic, confused and disoriented in a world that is no longer theirs even though it still pretty much is, for whom Walter White is a badass. C. K.'s weird, prematurely-curmudgeonly, anti-modern world stance must also have something to do with it, as well as his absolute confidence in the familiar fallacy that if he thinks something, and it's unpleasant, it must be true. The nadir of this attitude is on display in an early episode in which he asserts that lesbianism is wrong “not ethically, but geometrically,” a repetition of the stale sexist idea that “it can't be sex if there's no penis involved,” and therefore lesbianism is neither harmful nor serious. Those silly girls can do what they want to because nothing real can happen until men are involved; and if you find that offensive, it must mean it's true, and not a culturally dominant prejudice that denies the truth of another person's experience.

A World Populated by Psychopaths

In a way, Louie has more interesting things to say about 21^st century masculinity than more progressive sitcoms like Grandma's House or Jonathan Ames's on Bored to Death, which is a kind of post-masculinity buddy-comedy. Louie doesn't get the kind of firm, clear exemption from masculinity of an Amstell or Jason Schwartzman, baby-faced men whose adolescence has wondrously survived into their early 30s. He's a farting-and-masturbating “regular guy” who's nevertheless as neurotic and anxious as Woody Allen (although by Season 3 he's become almost as inarticulate as Jerry Lewis); whose “ordinary” appearance is brutally criticized throughout the series, mostly by men; and whose pathological relationship with food would appall Bridget Jones.

 

A more troubling aspect of C. K.'s comedic persona on Louie is the fact that he is almost always presented as a sane man surrounded by psychopaths, albeit a sane man with a binge-eating disorder and, quite possibly, clinical depression. That would be enough to make you a freak on most shows, but it's nothing compared to the eccentric, hysterical women he encounters in personal situations (dates, sisters, mother) and the strange men who put him and others in dangerous situations. Louie the character and Louis the writer rarely make any attempt to find out what is making these people act in the strange ways they do: why the woman who approached him for sex after the PTA wants him to buy her blueberries and spank her in bed and why the spanking makes her break down in sobs of despair; why the bus driver doesn't know where the field trip is, how to get there, or the regulations about taking buses on highways. Once these people have confirmed for Louie, once again, that the world is an insane and scary place, nothing more is needed from them. Sometimes the dynamic flips, in the episodes where Louie goes into a panic that turns out to be unjustified; then he is blindly hysterical, with the difference that we know the cause, and it's a good one. This does happen with another character in the show, once: the teenage bully who threatens to kick the shit out of Louie in front of his date, whom he then stalks to his house, where he confronts the boy's father and discovers that both of his parents are physically and verbally abusive. This of course ends up feeling a little like an after-school special, but if C. K. is so drawn to unhappy eccentrics and extreme situations, he might try a little more often, Cassavetes-style, to help us understand these characters and feel something for them. One of my favourite episodes is the one where a fellow comic that Louie's known for years, but not very well, chooses him as the person he's going to say goodbye to before committing suicide because his life is empty, facing the viewer with the question of whether this is always a stupid decision, sometimes a sensible one, or simply a personal one.

While I watched the first two seasons of Louie with half-interest and occasional detached admiration, for me Season 3 is the big pay-off, where Louie and the show together try to push beyond their boundaries. Season 3 contains not one but two inspirational plotlines, although they're only “inspirational” within the context of the show's dark universe. First, Louie finds a new woman to obsess over in the form of Parker Posey's bookstore clerk, who agrees to go on a date with him, during which she reveals herself to be a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, pushing him to try things and do things he wouldn't normally do, to make the effort to enjoy life while you can. And then the season settles into its major arc: Louie's attempt to “get in training” for taking over Letterman's job on The Late Show. Fighting his own terror of failure, which manifests itself as a horror of effort, and his settled, comfortable conviction that he's a niche comic who can't entertain the mass audience, he pulls it together in order to be a role model for his little girls and show them that if you want something, you have to try. The more layers of cynicism and self-doubt that Louie strips away, the more vulnerable he becomes, and as he allows himself to want the job and believe in himself it's hard not to root for the underdog. He isn't allowed to get what he wants, or it wouldn't be Louie, but his triumph is that he thought he could, and knows he could have.

And then in the final episode, Parker Posey briefly reappears and we learn the reason for her sudden melancholy at the end of the date episode, while she was sitting, exhilarated, on the edge of a high rise roof; and that she was not a Manic Pixie Dream (or Nightmare) Girl after all, but Milly Theale. Like the Letterman opportunity, she, too, taught Louie to be a little less afraid of life; and she's denied to him even more brutally. In Season 3 of Louie, the world is perhaps even more insane and scary than ever, but Louie has somehow found the inner resources, and outer motivation, to take some risks, and C. K. shows the real difficulties and rewards of opening yourself up to possibility despite fear and pain.

Do Not Go Gently Into the Post-Masculine Era

Something similar happened to the protagonist of Peep Show, Mark Corrigan (David Mitchell), in the initial Series 7 of Peep Show, Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain's point-of-view-cam sitcom, with voice-over access to the thoughts of Mark and deuteragonist Jeremy (Robert Webb), a couple of hopeless losers, Mark an anti-charismatic nerd and Jeremy a vaguely charismatic, irresponsible, unemployable mooch. Before I saw Louie, I thought Peep Show was the darkest sitcom I'd ever seen, with the most excruciatingly humiliating and generally horrifying situations. The first four seasons focus on Mark's seemingly hopeless obsession with his co-worker, Sophie, first leading the viewer to sympathize with and root for Mark despite his frequent ineptitude, then making us realize, with delicious dawning horror, that Mark is incapable of a functioning romantic relationship, never really wanted Sophie in the first place, and has fucked up her life by winning her over.

Armstrong and Bain then take us through the revelation of Mark's true, but involuntary, awfulness and manage to bring us around almost to sympathizing with him again as he keeps fucking up on Sophie and adding to her hatred of him. When Mark gets a crush on a new co-worker, a cute, funny nerd girl, we're relieved that it seems as though something is finally going to go right for him, and at the end of Series 7 it looked like he might be ready and able to take baby steps towards “growing up” by kicking Jez out and moving in with a completely awesome woman.

If Peep Show had ended with Series 4, it would have been a masterpiece. Series 7 doesn't add much to the proceedings, instead drawing out the question of whether Mark's “growth” will prove illusory and Dobby will turn out to be Sophie II, which no longer has the ability to surprise, or whether this time he won't screw it up, in which case Mark and Jeremy split up and the show has to end. Peep Show has gone into a soap-opera holding pattern and could go on this way for years with ever-diminishing returns. Grandma's House, on the other hand, is over too soon after only two series: proving true to his perfectionist and somewhat antagonist stance, Amstell has said that he likes to end things once they're good and while they're still liked. As for Louie – isn't he, too, going to have to get the girl and start getting his life together (if they're not equated) at some point, and won't that be the end of the show? Mark's emotional trajectory with Sophie makes perfect sense for Louie as well, but I'm not sure if C. K. hates him enough to tarnish the beauty of his wistful, delusional feelings for women he can't have. Louie's self-loathing is always on the border of self-pity, which is a frequent difference between British and American dark comedy, and which is something else that Louie has in common with Walter White. Rage, rage against the dying of the light, ageing white dudes. Or whimper, whichever. 

Curb Your Enthusiasm: TV, The State of Criticism, and the Dramatic Potency of Abusive Relationships

Remember back in 2000, when Big Brother brought reality TV to North America and everybody thought that this was the end of television drama? Or by “everybody” perhaps I mean me. But I couldn't have been more wrong. TV drama was about to undergo a renaissance, beginning with HBO and Showtime and later extending to basic cable. First came The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, then The Wire, Mad Men, and now, Breaking Bad. TV that's such a pop culture phenomenon you can't escape it; TV that's everywhere; TV that you have to watch or be profoundly exiled from the cultural loop. It's not just what everyone's watching, it's what everyone has to watch.

There is a blanket consensus among TV critics, whether writing for established, elitist magazines like The New Yorker or for pop culture websites like The AV Club and Slant, about the quality of the trendiest shows that baffles me. It's not just that there are no dissenting voices: there is nothing to temper the breathlessly laudatory terms in which these shows are praised, as if there weren't five centuries of Western literature to measure them against; as if the “showrunners” (a term recently introduced into cultural discourse) of premium cable shows invented drama roughly three decades ago.

The 1960s French intellectuals who defended the value of studio-era Hollywood cinema and their American acolytes, like Andrew Sarris, may have been guilty of taking themselves as seriously, but at least they were struggling against a cultural consensus when they argued for the art of American movies. In contrast, online TV critics are setting the cultural consensus when they praise the premium cable show du jour. And this strikes me as a shame, because I once hoped that the internet might be a place where you could find writers with a healthy scepticism towards cultural trends. But I couldn't have been more wrong about that, either: the internet has turned into a place where giddy praise of pop culture poses as pop culture criticism. And since practically no one at all is paying any attention to the traditional arts, pop culture criticism is criticism today. And it's not good enough. Pop culture deserves better criticism; it deserves more critical criticism.

In fact, however, I'm less worried about pop culture than I am about the state of criticism. A small portion of pop culture has become very smart, but criticism has dumbed way down. Not its prose, not its analysis of tropes, not its close readings – that's all as sophisticated and earnestly thorough as you can ask for. But it's dumbed down its expectations.

And Then There's Robot Chicken

One problem with regarding TV as an art form is that it offers nothing new as a medium. To cinephiles like Pauline Kael it was a repetition of cinema on a small scale, visual-kinetic storytelling with none of the power and grandeur of the big screen. Technically TV shows are serial drama, which was introduced by radio, but no one has ever seemed much excited about that novelty in either medium. Yet it gave rise to the familiar TV format, which may be summarized briefly as: a group of characters have adventures. Although most TV shows have a protagonist (the owner of the workplace where the show takes place or the business the show is about; the character whose name is in the title; the character who narrates; the normal one; the newcomer; the boss or leader or captain or mother or father, although sometimes the son if the show is after a youth audience; the one with the skill or ability or problem the show is about; in the case of some comedies, the star, even if their character isn't named after them and in the title), TV shows are much less focused on the protagonist than either the majority of novels written for adults or stage dramas. An adventure-of-the-week show can have as few as two regular cast members, the protagonist and the sidekick, and in a long-running show the sidekick can be replaced. The pure soap opera (the daytime soap) has no protagonist; it's about families and couples. Some sitcoms give it away in their title that protagonist duties are shared (Mork and Mindy, Laverne and Shirley, Will and Grace). The father is the protagonist of most family sitcoms, but sometimes a sitcom really is about the entire family, like The Simpsons. If the daughter is the protagonist, you may have a sitcom-soap hybrid, like Mama's Family.

Serial drama, it seems, is a democratic genre at both its poles, the sitcom and the soap, one made up of self-contained episodes in which at best only the romance between the leads develops, the other of ongoing dramatic developments: the sitcom is virtually always about a family (whether nuclear or metaphorical); the soap opera is always about multiple families. The affection the viewer feels for the characters, which is necessary for the sustained interest the medium demands, is built up by watching the family-like ways in which the characters interact every week. In TV's implicit epistemology, “family” is the only way in which we know how to relate to the rest of the world. This has sometimes been mistaken for a cozy worldview, but the nuclear, workplace, and friend families portrayed on TV have often been deeply dysfunctional since long before premium cable.

Adventurous TV doesn't so much challenge the established genres and sub-genres as see what can be done with them: it's a question of how dark and complex the writers can make the soap, how dark and messed-up they can make the sitcom. TV is only ever dark and complex relative to TV, not to other media (messed-up, I'm not sure about); and as for experimental, the closest you'll get to that other than half a dozen Twin Peaks episodes is the pop surrealism of some children's fantasy programming and animation. I'm thinking of British fantasy from the 60s and 70s and Henson's Muppets in the 70s (Looney Tunes shorts, being made for theatrical release, don't count); but for a contemporary examples there's the stop-motion-animated Robot Chicken, which updates the pop nihilism of MAD magazine in the 50s in ways so vulgar and deranged that Robert Warshow might have taken back his endorsement of Krazy Kat if he knew where this was going. But then, we're post-South Park, and post-internet.

“She Wouldn't Even Harm a Fly”

Breaking Bad is the first critically untouchable TV series that hasn't made me fear for the critics' sanity. It's not that I think it's notably well-written, and I wouldn't quite count myself a fan, but at least it's not just another campy soap, like Mad Men or the colossally stupid Downton Abbey. I like Breaking Bad but I don't love it; I watched the first four seasons on Netflix in a couple of weeks with half-attention, but I kept watching.

Warning: SPOILERS for up to the end of Season Four.

The show starts out with a premise combining the premises of two premium cable hit shows, Weeds and Dexter: a genteel white parent launches a career in drugs to get money for their family and must make their way in the violent but authentic world of the non-white Other; in the process developing a criminal double life under the nose of a sibling who works in law enforcement. On my Netflix home page, Dexter and Walter glower out at the viewer like the white dude badasses they are.

In no time at all, however, Breaking Bad has virtually nothing to do with drug manufacturing or dealing. Walter no sooner cooks a batch than all hell breaks loose and he spends the rest of the season struggling to survive. If the show is about anything, it's about the relationship between Walter and his “partner,” Jesse, a former high school student of Walter's. But where that relationship comes from or what it's about is, again, enigmatic.

Walter and Jesse's relationship is about the only humanly recognizable one in the series; it's certainly the only relationship that seems to have any meaning for Walter, despite his posturing about his family, whom he pursues with the tenacity of a stalker after his wife, Skylar, discovers his double life and tries to leave him. He seems to view his family as possessions, and as we'll see, he treats Jesse the same way, but at least there's passion in his grotesquely abusive and destructive relationship with his partner. His wife is viewed satirically from the outset as a spouter of platitudes, only taking on a certain dignity and interest after she goes over to the criminal side of the plot, while his son is barely characterized – moody teenager, victim, or daddy-worshipping angel as the plot demands. For his part, Walter seems incapable of relating to them except through lies and platitudes. None of these family members know each other, which makes it difficult to believe that any very valuable relationship exists between them; instead I often felt during the first two seasons that I was watching a satirical Douglas Sirk-style characterization of a middle-class family, except that the effect didn't seem altogether intentional.

For me the show kicked into gear in the third season, with the introduction of Gus, and really started to fly in the fourth season, with the establishment of a chess game between Mike and Gus on the one hand and Walter on the other, with Jesse as pawn. By this time most of the drama was going on between Walter, Jesse, Mike, Gus, and Saul, with Gus as an entertaining villain and Saul as an entertaining comical crooked lawyer. Obviously, this is a show that's all about men and their world of one-upmanship; Skylar and her sister are the only regular female cast members in the whole series, and except for Jesse, none of the men in the criminal plot seem to ever give women a thought. It's hinted that Gus's relationship with his murdered partner was homosexual, which extends Gus's function of Clare Quilty-like double for Walter to Walter's relationship with Jesse. Certainly, whenever Jesse tries to establish a heterosexual life for himself, independent of Walter, Walter attacks it – responsible for his crossing of the Moral Event Horizon at the end of the second season and again at the end of the third. In the first instance, he's just getting rid of a “Yoko,” as Saul sulkily dubs Skylar after she takes charge of her husband's money laundering (she was a bookkeeper, you see), but the second and, in dramatic terms, morally graver attack – that's got to be pure spite.

Season Four's admirably constructed, darkly comic melodrama of manipulation reminded me of the chess game between Maggie, her father Adam, and her friend and stepmother Charlotte in Henry James's The Golden Bowl, in which Maggie marries off father and friend only to discover that Charlotte is having an affair with Maggie's husband; she then has to figure out how to vanquish Charlotte and win Amerigo back, in a long and exhausting mental game in which no one may be directly confronted and in which every move Maggie makes against her rival compromises her impeccable moral credentials. Similarly, after Gus moves against Walter by using Mike to seduce Jesse away, Walter must figure out how to win Jesse back, which he does in a desperate gambit that delivered the best season finale audience anagnorisis I've seen since “Death is my gift” on Buffy, though to very different emotional effect.

Again, there's no explanation for the destructive passion that exists between Walter and Jesse. Walter is either telling Jesse he's shit or saving his life, and it's hard to understand why he does either, and impossible to understand why Jesse remains loyal to Walter: he behaves like Ariel but gets treated like Caliban by Walter the irascible chemist-magician. Their sadomasochistic relationship fills up practically the whole universe of Breaking Bad, in a grand tradition of love-hate fictional character relationships that extends from Lovelace and Clarissa to George and Martha to, oh, Sam and Diane. In a couple of striking episodes that evoke the starkness, simplicity, and claustrophobia of modernist theatre, “Four Days Out” from Season Two and the even more stylized “Fly” from Season Three, Walter and Jesse respectively spend the episodes stuck in the middle of the desert facing likely death under absurd conditions (all because Jesse forgot the key in the ignition of the RV) and trying obsessively to kill a fly in Gus's lab, which with its bulky equipment and shiny red floors looks like some circle of hell envisioned by Samuel Beckett via 1970s sci fi. I can't recall the last time a TV show was confident enough in its writing, or in writing, to offer up episodes consisting entirely or almost entirely of dialogue between the two main characters. I only wish I found the characters compelling enough to remember any of that dialogue, instead of finding them vaguely, distantly fascinating.

The Great Man and The Girl

Speaking of destructive, obsessive relationships: I was surprised by the furor, particularly in England, over the HBO-BBC TV movie The Girl, about the relationship between Tippi Hedren and Hitchcock. The British are sure protective of their cultural institutions, and in this case it's turned into cries of “How dare that little slut make up stories about a great man” vs. feminist rejoinders of “How dare you men not believe a woman who says she was sexually harassed?” Step right up and choose an archetype to irrationally defend: the victim-woman or the great man.

For my part, I heard the stories about Hitch and Hedren years ago, mainly, I think, in Camille Paglia's BFI monograph on The Birds. That's because I am actually a Hitchcock fan, and do occasionally read a book about him. Hedren's stories seemed perfectly plausible given other things known about Hitch through his own admission as well as what anyone can see: that he was repulsive in appearance and had never had sex with anyone but his homely wife, in a marriage that, by the time of The Birds, had been celibate for years.

As for why other Hitchcock blondes didn't have the same experience with him, that makes perfect sense to me as well: Hedren was nobody when Hitchcock cast her in The Birds, whereas after Psycho he'd risen to a position of unprecedented power in Hollywood. He simply couldn't have gotten away with it with any of his other leading ladies. And then, too, as a nobody with the quality of impassivity that Hitch had always valued in his blondes, Hedren was a blank slate; Hitchcock may have thought he could play Svengali (an obvious reference that The Girl makes at one point) like Scottie in Vertigo. However, since he was dealing with a real woman, not a character written for him, he was in for a rude surprise.

Believing all of this as Hitchcock (and I do happen to believe Hedren's stories, which does not, of course, mean I'm right) has had no effect whatsoever on my opinion of him as a filmmaker: I think he's a genius. If anyone finds such stories shocking in association with Hitchcock, they evidently haven't been paying a lot of attention to his best films, which are precisely about sexual obsession, voyeurism, and the physical and/or psychological torture of his blondes. Not that it follows that an artist will act out the obsessions of his art, but surely Hitchcock fans shouldn't find it surprising that a human being could act as the Hitchcock character does in The Birds.

As a movie, The Girl is not very interesting if you already know the stories: although I only caught about an hour of the movie on HBO, it adds little to what I've already read and appears to be directly dramatizing incidents recounted by Hedren or others, with loads of exposition and little attempt to interpret the material. (There's a bit of pop psychology here and there, but it's talk, again; the motivations aren't dramatized.) However, I “got” the dramatic interest the story does have even from that partial viewing: I understood that the movie was about a battle of wills between a powerless and vulnerable but strong young woman and a powerful young man, in which the woman refuses to be crushed. The value of the movie is in providing inspiration for other sexually harassed young women – or really for anyone struggling with a huge power imbalance in a relationship, to which men are hardly immune. The interviews I've now read on the internet with Hedren on the movie have confirmed that this was the intention. It pains me to think that you would have to be a woman to understand and appreciate what the movie was doing, but from the reaction of male reviewers and commenters on the internet, for whom the movie is character assassination or at least “one-sided,” it appears to be the case. A movie about Hitchcock that's not about Hitchcock? Then the title wasn't kidding.

The reaction to the movie is ultimately more interesting than the movie itself – and so are Hedren's interviews, in which she fills in more of the picture and of her perspective. She speaks, for example, of how her moral and religious upbringing gave her strength in the situation, which was not apparent from the hour or so of The Girl I watched. Ultimately, the Hedren-Hitch story is an inspiration for young women in a curiously conservative way. Hitchcock's movies with cool blonde heroines inherit the rape theme of the British novel that goes back to Clarissa, but the Hedren-Hitch relationship, as recounted by Hedren, much more closely resembles the plot of Clarissa than anything he put on film – with the difference that instead of being sexually irresistible, like the diabolical Lovelace, Hitch was the opposite. Hedren was not only physically, but also morally repulsed by his sexual attention, and no doubt Hitch bombarded her with vulgarity all the more in an effort to break down the reserve that attracted him. 

The Pleasures of Incomprehension

In the article “Child's Play,” New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum notes that despite Vince Gilligan's daring in pulling the moral carpet right out from under Walter at the end of Season Four, fans have found ways to justify Walter's reprehensible action – an action that makes him arguably worse than his supposed double, Gus, or at least every bit as bad. I'm sure this is nothing new; I'm sure the readers of Clarissa found ways to justify Lovelace's rape of the heroine. They must have, since fans (surely female readers among them, who were surely Richardson's main readership) wanted Clarissa to forgive and agree to marry Lovelace. Never mind if the writer wants to portray a character's tragic moral downfall; the reader/viewer's desire for two characters with chemistry to get together and live happily ever after, or to root for the protagonist, trumps all merely fictional crimes, no matter how great their magnitude.

Didn't Nabokov definitely prove that in Lolita? We forgive Humbert the ultimate taboo crime because he's the sole protagonist, the narrator in fact; we're stuck with his point of view; and he's charming. How much do we forgive Walter because he's positioned as “normal” and “safe”? He's a WASP, middle-class, middle-aged high school teacher and husband and father with children, and so, even though we've had more evidence of his anger management problems and seen him commit worse crimes every season, we continue to assume that he must be a good guy after all. Whereas what we learned in the paradigm-shifting Season Four finale is that we weren't on the side of good (however deeply compromised); we were simply, contingently, on a side in a war between identically vile individuals.

Like much of the best television drama of recent decades, Breaking Bad succeeds in keeping the objective stakes for the characters high, delivering dramatic gratifications unknown to stage drama since the Greeks and certainly absent from 20^th century stage drama, whether in its middle class or avant-garde manifestations. Because of our pleasure in these high objective stakes, we forgive TV drama the silliness of fantasy – plots about saving the world from evil or overthrowing psychotic drug lords. My problem with accepting Breaking Bad either as “great TV” or great drama, period, isn't so much that Walter is too awful and Jesse too passive for me to care much about them, as that I don't understand what the stakes of their relationship are. I know why Clarissa and Lovelace can't live with or without each other; I understand the fantasy and mutual disappointment that bind George and Martha. But I don't understand what Walter and Jesse need from each other, practically or psychologically, and even in TV land, “subtextual homoeroticism” can't explain everything.

It's not unlike my reaction to this year's critically-acclaimed film The Master, which was also about a warped father-son love affair between an aimless younger man and an older man who at least offers the semblance of authority, although in this case it was the younger man with anger management problems. At least, however, the reviews of The Master that I found online through Rotten Tomatoes acknowledge how tremendously strange the film is. So far I'm willing to say about Breaking Bad: it's strange, and I'm not quite sure how I feel about it. I think I might like TV criticism better if it would linger with me in incomprehension more often, rather than rushing to a verdict. It's safe to say that until you don't understand everything, you don't have an art form.