Daddy Issues

I won’t be the first to observe that there are a lot of shows on television that center largely—if not entirely—on relationships between fathers and children.  Some are from the fathers’ standpoints, some from the children’s, some have absent fathers, some have present fathers, some have multiple fathers…but they’re all about what it means to be, or have, or not have, a father.  Don’t be fooled by the fact that some of them are about surrogate fatherhood—father figures rather than literal genetic fathers.  They’re still father stories.  In fact, there are too many for me to list, and that's not counting the ones I'm about to review.  I started making a list of shows with fatherhood as a major theme that I’ve watched and/or reviewed recently (here were my first few, in no particular order:  The Blacklist, Resurrection, Chicago PD, Brooklyn 9-9, Dads, The Crazy Ones, Warehouse 13, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, Intelligence) and then threw my hands up, realizing that I was going to spend my whole afternoon listing TV shows rather than thinking critically about them.  There are fewer about motherhood.  I can list a bunch that at least touch on motherhood as a central topic, and maybe even focus on it (Playing House, Mom, Once Upon a Time, Continuum, Major Crimes)—but the existence of counter-examples doesn’t undermine the point:  fatherhood is a trope, and a dominant one at that.  I’m guessing that’s a symptom of tv-creator demographics—more show creators, writers, and executives are men with kids than women with kids—but that’s pure speculation. 

It won’t be the least bit original for me to observe that television also has a dominant vision of fatherhood.  (There are of course many exceptions, but that’s true of all tropes.)  Fathers are protective and demanding, and often emotionally distant.  They are powerfully, even irrationally, motivated by the desire to protect and/or mold their child.  They have high standards and (unlike mothers, whose love is generally unconditional), fathers’ love is conditioned on whether those high standards are met.  Fathers’ love and pride in their child is effusive when their child meets the standards, but woe betide the child who does not live up to them.  Even the best of fathers—and here I’m thinking of Coach Taylor, arguably the best father figure in the history of television—kinda fits the mold.  Like the vision of woman as unpredictable sexual force, this one is far from new.   It’s so old it’s boring, and yet TV hasn’t given it up as a go-to father mold.

One thing that really stands out this week, as I mourn the offensive, tragic deaths in Santa Barbara and celebrate the explosion of awareness-raising that is #YesAllWomen, is how proprietary this father-narrative is.  I doubt this is a particularly new observation, but the dominant narrative of fatherhood is one of ownership.  It’s the father’s job to protect his child.  It’s the child’s job to be loyal to the father.  That strikes me as radically different from the more dominant motherhood narrative, which casts the mother as defender rather than protector, and the child’s job as love rather than loyalty.  These are subtle distinctions, perhaps, but meaningful ones, because they shift agency between parent and child.  The protection narrative is all about the parent’s decisions.  The defense narrative is all about the child’s decisions.  The loyalty narrative is hierarchical.  The love one isn’t.

In this configuration, it’s fathers, not mothers, that force their children to make the tough moral choices.  Mothers support their kids’ choices, and sublimate themselves to them.  (Or when they don’t, it’s a plot point.)  Fathers, on the other hand, have already staked out their own moral positions, and when children stray from them (whether that straying is a good idea or a bad one), it’s difficult, and they face consequences.  Often, a story of children struggling or suffering is framed as being all about the father’s (real or feared) inadequacy as a protector, guide, or role model—the "manpain” trope.  (So named because although it’s the child/woman/etc. who’s struggling, it’s the man's pain that wesee.)  And often, differences between fathers’ priorities and children’s wishes drive the story.  Even the shows with significant mother characters (and there are quite a few), end up being about the benefits and drawbacks of being claimed by a father and sharing, or rejecting, his ideals.  In Rizzoli & Isles and Intelligence, for example, the mothers are interesting characters—but it’s the fathers whose claims on their children force the toughest calls.  Or to put it differently: tv children seldom rebel against their mothers.  They seldom have to.

Why does this matter, and why am I thinking of it now?  Because it’s just one of the many ways that we teach men that their opinions and decisions are more important than women’s opinions and decisions.  If the result of a child disagreeing with its father/man is good drama, and the result of a child disagreeing with its mother/woman is…well, there’s no result, because as far as we know, the mother  never had an opinion other than the child’s to begin with—then what do we learn?

So.  Here’s a new crop of shows about—or at least prominently featuring—fathers and father figures.    And while I don’t mean this as a wholesale indictment of the shows, I regret to report:  even the good ones don’t do much to challenge the proprietary father trope.

 

Crisis (NBC, new-but-already-canceled.  Action/adventure.)

Watched:  first five episodes

Premise:  Ex-CIA agent kidnaps the children of powerful people to force those people to help him achieve an ill-defined goal.

Promise:  The premise revolved around a father who was so unbalanced and proprietary about his daughter that when he was (he thinks unjustly) separated from her, he freaked out and created the kidnapping plot that drives the show.  But let’s face it, I don’t care how terrible the government conspiracy (or whatever) is, and how bad it is for America, and how unjustly you’ve been framed, etcetera, kidnapping a bunch of kids and threatening their parents is no way to establish your worth as a father.  All it demonstrates is that you’re a possessive, unbalanced extremist.  So that was our starting point.  From there, the show never had quite had a center to find.  It simply didn’t know who its main characters were.  Was it a show about the kidnap victims?  (Sometimes.)  The parents?  (Sometimes.)  The kidnappers? (I think this was what the show thought it was, although that made the whole thing feel eerily like a con without a mark.)  The kidnapper’s conspiracy-theory motivations?  (It veered into this, but a conspiracy’s pretty boring without characters to care about.)  The law enforcement agents and their search to figure out the puzzle?  (Eventually, I think, yes.)  And in case you think I'm exaggerating:  no one even asked the kidnapper “what do you want?” until episode three.  As a result of this unclarity, the show’s emphasis was all off: it picked the least dramatic of the “dramatic moments” to show us.  It rushed through what felt like essential steps:  how did the FBI get its information?  What was it like when these parents learned that their children had been kidnapped?  Instead of giving us those, it gave us other “big reveals” that didn’t feel particularly dramatic or important, and a series of unintentionally hilarious things like the father’s ridiculously specific, meticulously hand-drawn “conspiracy notebook.”

I had been saving my review this show to include it in a post I plan to make someday about how I decide when to give a subpar show “a chance” and when to cut it off after an episode or two.  This one I chose to give a chance, despite a deeply weak pilot, partly because I knew that after the pilot, they brought in a consultant I respect a lot to try and improve the show.  And it worked:  the show did legitimately improve.  The dialogue got snappier, the core issues came into focus.  It decided, rightly I think, that its main characters were the law enforcement agents trying to prevent catastrophes.  It hinted at longer arcs that might have become interesting.  But even so, it still forewent some of the emotional beats that would have made it really impactful.  And even the cleverest doctor can’t save patient with an untreatable disease, and that was the situation here.  

Verdict:  the premise always felt like a limited series, and this series effectively limited itself.

Turn (AMC, new.  Historical costume drama.)

Watched: first three episodes

Premise: Espionage and intrigue in the American Revolutionary War.

Promise:  This show presents an original premise based on actual history—the formation of the first spy ring in America—and executes well.  The pilot takes a bit of time to start making sense, as it lays out who is who and what their priorities are, but it comes together, and by the end of the first episode we have a pretty good sense of what’s at stake and what the obstacles are.  The characters are complex, interesting, and as sympathetic as they need to be (but no more).  It’s well acted, and gorgeously filmed, and true to the ethos of its historical material, even if it fudges historical details (which it definitely does).  Three epsiodes in, it’s still not so much the story of what the spies did as how they became spies.  At first, that felt slow to me—show me the spying already!—but in retrospect, it’s exactly the pace the show needed, so we understand who these people are and why they are making such risky choices.

So why am I including this in my “fathers” post?  Partly because I didn’t want to wait any longer to post my review…but I have principled reason, as well.  Many—most, even—of our hero’s most difficult choices have to do with his relationship with his politically powerful father.  His father is an inevitably and unavoidably important force in his life, and his struggles and frustrations with his father—his need to alternately please, placate, deceive, and betray his father—are never far from his decision making process.  (Note:  I can’t remember his mother, who is presumably dead, being mentioned even once.) 

That said, I am signed up for the long haul on this one, with two provisos.  First, war is ugly and gross, and the technological constraints and fighting styles of the Revolutionary War made it particularly so.  We got a few moments of graphic violence in the pilot, and we’ve seen a few more (although less dramatic) since then.  I hope the show resists the temptation to be graphic; it can get across the violent, dangerous, disgusting nature of what was happening without showing it to us, and although the brutal consequences of the show’s intrigue aren’t exactly beside the point, they’re also not the center of the story I want to watch.  Second, the women are, so far, mostly foils and motivators for the men.  I don’t mean to imply that that isn’t true to history, or that stories about women as supporters, figuring out how to get by in a world where they had to do the enemy’s laundry, are uninteresting.  Far from it:  the women of the time had to be incredibly strong, both physically and emotionally, to carry out their responsibilities.  But at the moment, their strength isn’t on display so much as their vulnerability.  I really want to see something more substantial about the women than “please, don’t do something dangerous, your son and I need you.”  There are strong hints that at least one of the women has a lot more in her than that.  So please, show, make that happen, because everything else about you is very promising.

Verdict:  Pending the provisos, I’m in.

Penny Dreadful (Showtime, new.  Supernatural costume drama.)

Watched: First three episodes

Premise: Vampires, monsters, and mediums, oh my.  Period horror featuring characters from Victorian classics like Dr. Malcolm Murray, Dr. Victor Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, etcetera.

Promise:  After the pilot, I thought the whole thing was so vague and atmospheric that was actually a bit hard to tell how promising it was.  The pilot is essentially getting the band together (a process that continues through episode 2 and into episode 3), and it appeared that the show would mostly involve secretive people trying to understand vampirism, something that’s mostly been borne out in later episodes.  It featured a lot of “dramatic reveals” and unexplained creepy special effects, but little actual story.  In fact, the second episode wasn’t really better—we meet more characters, but aren’t given much reason to like them.  The story builds but withers, so we are left with little idea where it’s going.

Now, after three episodes, the story is still pretty thin on the ground, but it turns out to be mostly a meditation on the nature of a father’s responsibilities toward his children.  The band, it appears, has been convened by Malcolm Murray to rescue and/or cure his daughter Mina, who has been kidnapped and/or turned by vampires.  He expresses a lot of angst over his inability to protect her, and clearly feels it is his obligation to save her.  We have little sense of her opinion on the matter, as she gives onaly a few vague hints of her existence in her few ghost-like appearances.  But the really interesting fatherhood relationship isn’t Murray’s, but Frankenstein’s.  Dr. Frankenstein is quite young in this depiction (in his 20s, I’d hazard) and there’s a complicated mix of tenderness, struggle, pain, and horror in the relationship between Dr. Frankenstein and what he creates.  I won’t say much more than that to avoid spoilers, but suffice it to say that the father has a lot to learn from his creation, and vice versa.  

So I still have no idea whether the show is any good.  Perhaps it’s building.  And I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the art direction and cinematography are stunning.    But perhaps the third episode, which I found intriguing, was an anomaly.  And even if it is building, the show still has a lot of problems.  Even its best, most thought-provoking moments are interspersed among bizarre, sexualized scenes that are much “edgier” and more explicit than the plot demands, and seem designed only to be shocking.  Generally, these scenes involve victimizing women, sexualizing them, presenting them as the bearers of an eerie, sexualized power, or (often) all three.  Indeed, here as in many depictions of the Victorian era, women are all either gentry or prostitutes.  Although this show gives lip service to a reason for the choice (specifically, the industrial revolution:  a prostitute explains she’s “off to go do a job a machine can’t do, at least not yet”), it’s still an unnecessarily degrading historical inaccuracy that just keeps getting perpetuated in stories about the era.

Verdict:  I have a sort of morbid curiosity about it, but I’m not that hopeful.

 

Gang Related (Fox, new.  Law enforcement drama.)

Watched: pilot

Premise: LAPD cop with divided loyalties serves on anti-gang task force while continuing to help a gang boss.

Promise:   Yup, this show’s hero is a dirty cop.  I suppose he’s mostly well-intentioned—he owes his life to the gang boss, who has him convinced that by joining the LAPD, he’s helping the gang turn legit—but in pretty much any other show, the main character would be a bad guy.  And frankly, the gang task force’s tactics are so cruel (we pin crimes on the gang family’s wives and children to put pressure on the criminals!) it’s hard to sympathize with either side here.   This poor guy has two father figures—the gang boss and the gang task force leader, both of whom claim ill-disguised ownership of him and demand his loyalty, and both of whom use methods so abhorrent that I wonder why he doesn’t just change his name and move to Canada.  In other words, it’s all the moral greyness of Graceland, but with none of the fun.

The pilot was full of tired tropes about law enforcement, and its “grittiness” reads as brutality.   Torture is a first resort, and over the course of the pilot we see someone get his arm broken, someone get branded, someone get tased in the privates, someone get straight up tortured with a cleaver… and that doesn’t count the shootings.  Once again, basic civil rights are impediments to justice.  Civil rights here are represented by a female D.A. who is investigating the unit and also happens to be the daughter of the task force leader (no conflict of interest there!  Or, more importantly, an example of rebellion against father! Whee!).  We have a few more women:  some small-role players who serve as targets for our men’s lust or civilizing influences demanding affection; the dragon-lady leader of the Korean gang (bonus racism!); and the sole woman on the task force.  The Korean leader and the cop both seem like sadists—which I’d say was misogynistic, but actually, I am pretty sure everyone on this show is a sadist. 

Verdict:  I found it hard to get through even an hour of this.

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  The Red Road, The 100, Last Week Tonight, The Night Shift.