I’ve been toying lately with an idea, and I hope that by publishing the toying I will force myself to make it a reality.
I don’t watch as much TV as I used to. Maybe. It’s hard to say – I feel as though I watch less, but I am as guilty as my contemporaries of the binge watching (a term with one foot on my short list of “terms to never use because they are either meaningless or stupid”) that takes one deeply into the heart of a show, only to come up for air at the end with the sense that time has been lost and you can’t remember all that much about how. One of the things that seems to characterize the TV I have watched, however, is its disconnected disconnection.
I apologize. Disconnected disconnection is a bit cute, but I couldn’t help myself.
Disconnection is much the rage these days. The bathos of the millennials and deaths of despair in our older demographics, as well as the increasing transparency (sometimes bleeding into revelry?) around the treatments of racial, ethnic, or sexual minorities, has imbued an astounding number of shows with an apparent desire to mine the trivialities and emptiness of life, as well as its painful failures, into a fourth-wall breaking shrug. “Wow, this is hard and it sucks,” the shows seems to say, then adding “but isn’t it beautiful/engaging/tragic/funny/pointless?” as appropriate to its genre. This faux-disaffection – after all, one shouldn’t be so disaffected as to give up watching the show – can be engaging enough when it’s well done, but I find myself losing the suspension of disbelief again and again.
The lifestyles are too ridiculous.
All these beautiful people in their 20s and 30s are suffering or trying to be gritty and make it through, but I’ve started to think about where they are doing it, the clothes they are wearing, and the food they are eating; the setting in which all these are taking place seems insanely out of whack with the very tone they are trying to take. All these people that are trying to push on the ennui of life or the difficulties of trying to get by…how the hell do they afford all the trappings of success?
I’d like to – if possible – run through a list of the most popular shows on the networks and streaming platforms to see just how pricey a character’s lifestyle might be, and if the numbers behind that reality at all jive with the setting. I suspect they mostly won’t. Further, at a time when there is bountiful fist-shaking at the difficulty of upward mobility and stagnating incomes, I want to look back in time at popular shows of decades past and see if portrayals then might be better attuned to the reality of the average person. Might it be the case that Hollywood has dramatized the mood of our time in a setting that actively undermines and gives the lie to the message? Being a cantankerous soul, I hope so.
So, to make myself a to-do list, here is a list of some of the most popular shows of the past 5 years I think I should look into. I pick them based on archetypes they fulfill, being new enough that the can be considered up to date for what they attempt, and of course how much I like (or hate) the show:
- Shameless – if there’s a show that tries to show hardscrabble, it must be Shameless. It even overtly discussed gentrification. Would its numbers add up?
- Arrow/The Flash – haven’t seen them, but superheroes are certainly at peak popularity. Do those with “alter egos” live in circumstances that are less than heroic?
- Supernatural – I can’t believe this show is still on. Seriously, I remember it from when I was a kid. 15 seasons? If I remember correctly its set in a small town, so maybe it’s worth revisiting for a non-metropolitan data point.
- Quantico – Is that still airing? Unknown. I remember the splash it made when it launched. I am deeply curious to learn what the lifestyle of Priyanka Chopra on the show would be when she wasn’t looking beautiful wearing an “FBI” emblazoned baseball hat.
- Shonda Rhimes – I hate her shows, but given her cultural resonance one must be good. Maybe Scandal for its public sector focus?
- Modern Family – people loved it, worth digging into
- The Good Wife – much beloved, but I always thought the opulence was ridiculous.
- Insecure – I really like this show, but it seems to have imbibed too much of the West Coast nebulous everyone-is-doing-ok-but-also-cripplingly-anxious vibe.
Anyway, a project for later.
smq.world 