Sadder Man

Just a quickie this time, because this show, whose premiere aired just last night, fits with last the post’s theme so fully that it’s almost as if last week’s post was written in anticipation of this show.  Man trapped in his own prideful choices?  Check.  Apt Greek tragedy comparison?  Probably better here than in the shows I reviewed, although Shakespeare is more explicitly referenced.  Cosmic injustice of a society that expects men to handle problems they’re poorly equipped for?  You bet.  Man who believes he’s entitled to success?  And how. 

Blunt Talk, this week's show, is about an aging entertainer who's a hot mess, and it seems as stereotypically male as those did.  There have been plenty of aging-female-entertainer hot messes on television—Cybill, Kirstie, The Comeback (And I’m sure I’m forgetting many)—but the normative thrust of those stories is mostly that the women have delusions of professional grandeur, and would just be so much happier if they settled down and acted like normal grownup wives and mothers.  In contrast, here, it’s up to the rest of the world to live up to the man’s expectations.  I’m not saying it’s a bad show.  In fact, I like it somewhat better than last post’s Sad Men shows, but I chalk that up to acting quality and absurdity rather than overall concept. 

Blunt Talk (Starz, new.  Half-hour dramedy.)

Watched:  Pilot

Premise:  Alcoholic, selectively-naiive newsman unspools dramatically while hiding his needy sadness and masochism under a veneer of professional bravado.

Promise:  Patrick Stewart plays an alcoholic and otherwise dissolute but well-meaning newsman of the hard-hitting editorial type whose professional and personal lives are falling apart.  He has a codependent relationship with a servant/friend/military colleague and a writing staff who indulge and enable him.  It’s a very human portrayal, in a way—we see how desperately this man wants comfort and safety, but he has no idea how to obtain it, and he tries in all the wrong places.  The show’s humor derives mostly from the extent to which it embraces its own absurdity, shifting the idea of man-boy all the way to man-infant.  In this world, women’s worth is only to provide comfort---to a ridiculous extreme.  (See, e.g., (spoiler) two female colleagues who argue over who gets to “spoon” with him in a moment of particular emotional need).   I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the show’s sympathetic and warm portrayal of a trans female prostitute…but she, too, is part of the larger point.  She is still a prostitute, and although he cares for her well-being, she exists only to comfort him.

Verdict:  No less sad than the others, but more aware of its absurdity and therefore more entertaining.

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  Astronaut Wives Clup, Mr. Robot, HUMANS, Scream, Zoo, Startup U.

Sad Men

The summer catch-up starts now! ...With a few shows (with one exception) about men trapped in their own prideful choices.  I’d say they’re shows about hubris—they totally are—but unlike my conception of Greek tragedy, I don’t think these are supposed to teach us a lesson.  I think we’re supposed to like these men, to identify and sympathize with them.  There’s nuance here:  each has brought this on himself, to a large degree, but there’s also cosmic injustice at work in the background.  These men are too proud, but they’re also victims of circumstance.  The shows mostly don’t work for me, probably because I don’t find the main characters to be particularly sympathetic.  They expect the world to bend to their wills and are shocked when it doesn’t.  They act like they’re entitled to success.  They take the women around them for granted. 

Somehow these stories seem stereotypically male to me.  I don’t mean to say that there aren’t plenty of hubristic women out there.  Nor do I think I’d like these shows more if their main characters were female.  (In fact, it’d probably just make me angry rather than sad.)  It's just that the tone of these shows, for the most part, feels like the subtle indignance of privilege.  Case in point:  the show on this list with a female lead portrays her as no less proud or abrasive as the men on this list, but she acknowledges the emotional grief of tragedy, rather than blasting through it with bravado or anger.  (And the male lead in her show wants to conquer death.  So there’s that.)  

 I’m not sure what to make of all this.  But I do know that something about all this bravado makes me sad.

Ballers (HBO, new.   Half-hour drama.)

Watched: pilot

Premise:  Pro and retired football players struggle with finances, family, and the expectations of a society that lionizes them but teaches little about sustainability.

Promise:  Calls to mind Entourage, but with a mostly-Black cast and a delicate sort of poignancy its predecessor didn’t have.  I like the self-awareness—Entourage didn’t realize it was sad, and this one does—but otherwise, the show has too much in common with Entourage for me to enjoy it much.  Women are almost exclusively either sex objects or nagging Lady Macbeth types.  The core of the drama is that the men have trained for one thing—fame, excess, physical excellence—and after all-too-short a time, the world throws them into another thing entirely.  They’re ill-equipped even to know they’re making mistakes, much less to learn from those mistakes. This makes the characters sympathetic, but like many money/power shows, it’s hard to put oneself in the characters’ shoes.   Dwayne Johnson carries the show as an ex-footballer turned financial advisor, hiding his own physical and financial woes from the world; everyone else supports in cringingly-good form, and their little collective wins and losses carry the show forward. 

Verdict:  Not my cup of tea, but I think it’s probably well-made tea.

Complications (USA, new.  Drama/Thriller.)

Watched: First three episodes

Premise:  Doctor who saves a mobster’s son finds himself in ethically dubious and dangerous waters.

Promise:  The new USA Network: what’s basically the setup of Royal Pains takes a very sharp turn and instead of becoming a well-meaning rule-breaker who has to leave the hospital and become a concierge doc in the Hamptons, this show’s doctor falsifies records, stays at the hospital, and gets trapped in a web of underworld dealings.  There’s been a whole slew of rule-breaking doctor stories now (in the wake of House?) --  Royal Pains, Rush, Night Shift, Mob Doctor… and this is on the dark side of those, with a character who’s threatened and trapped by his initially good (or at least somewhat-understandable) decisions, and gets sucked into a bad-decision abyss from which there’s no returning. 

I may be angrier at this show than I should be, because as an unabashed Matt Nix fan, I feel a bit betrayed.  Nix’s previous shows, Burn Notice and The Good Guys, had a way of finding the gleeful absurdity in danger.  This show just shows the glum darkness of it.  But I think I’m probably justified in finding the show troubling, even without the Nix angle.  There’s the show’s Lady-MacBeth-style nurse, who repeatedly eggs our hero on into a series of terrible decisions, and then requires him to dig her out of the disastrous results.  And the tired and exhausting trope of the man who has to hold in all the tough emotion, swallow it down and hit things instead of acknowledging that he’s a human being with feelings. This is part of a recent pattern of male characters whose guiding motivation is the phrase “I can do everything to protect this family, just trust me” (See The Whispers; American Oddysey; now Complications).  And—and this is a weirdly popular trope this summer—the wife “has to” turn to her former affair-partner for help, in a weird combo of helplessness and disloyalty.  But the worst part is that the potagonist, who I think we’re supposed to like, doesn’t seem to have a central drive.  He’s just trapped, caught on his back foot over and over, trying to survive.  What does he want?

Verdict: Dark and disappointing.

Poldark (PBS Masterpiece, new.  Period drama.)

Watched:  first three episodes

Premise:  Like Jane Austen if Austen were written by a dude.  

Promise:  An angry young man returns to Cornwall after fighting as a redcoat in the U.S. revolution only to find that his beloved has left him for dead and become engaged to his cousin.  He proceeds to be cruel to his servants and his cousin, revive his family’s copper mines, and ultimately “save” and form a family with a poor young woman.  The young woman’s actually a great, feisty character, but I remain mystified by what she sees in Poldark—who, as far as I can tell, would be a villain in many other stories.  

Verdict:  The production’s as lovely as we’ve come to expect from Masterpiece, and the epic storytelling form is lovely too, but I don’t like enough of the characters to care about what happens.

Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll (FX, new. half-hour dramedy.)

Watched:  Pilot

Premise:  Aging has-been rocker (Denis Leary) gets the band back together with his newly-discovered daughter at the mic.

Promise:  There’s a sadness in this show much like Ballers:  these characters, too, are ill-equipped to deal with a world that isn’t giving them what they want.  This makes the aging rock man-boy characters more poignant than amusing.  Even sadder, to me, is the degree to which they feel they have the right and ability to control the sexuality of the women around them.  They’re wrong, of course, and the women know it—they use that sexuality to manipulate the men, whose desperation, horniness, and egos make them easily manipulable.  So one could see the show as one long female-competency anthem of sorts.  But it’s hard to watch because it rings so true:  men feel entitled to make decisions about women’s bodies, and they aren’t equipped to deal with situations when they can’t.   If this were a mockumentary I’d probably like it.  As it is, it has the same sort of underlying sadness as Ballers, Eastbound and Down, Hello Ladies, Bored to Death, and a number of other HBO and FX dramedies.  

Verdict:  Too sad for me.

Proof (TNT, new.  Medical(ish) procedural(ish).)

Watched: several episodes

Premise:  Funded by a tech billionaire and spurred on by her personal history, a successful doctor searches for proof of life after death.

Promise:  This show gives itself a built-in disadvantage:  it sets up a procedural-style mystery for each episode (what happens after we die?) that it shouldn’t solve.  Failure to solve the mystery is unsatisfying, but solving it would be a disappointing letdown.  So each episode ends with a sort of “maybe” answer that feels hollow and sentimental.  That inherent problem means the characters have to be extra interesting, and while they become more interesting over the season, they’re not so compelling that you can’t look away.  Much like Outlander made me wish for a series about Connie Willis’s historians, this show makes me wish for a series based on Connie Willis’s Passage.  I prefer Willis’s characters and their imperfect, scientific take on the world to this doctor who seems to melt into a sentimental mom-puddle when she’s not being brusquely “tough.”  But I appreciate the show’s attempt to make human characters who feel well-rounded.

Verdict:  Fine, but not a priority.

On the DVR/Unreviewed: Astronaut Wives Club, Mr Robot, HUMANS, Scream, Zoo, Startup U.