I was all ready to write a post about summer
horror and suspense shows (and I still may) but as I scan the list of unreviewed
shows, I’m struck by how many of them are about family mysteries and betrayals: how
your trusted family members may not be who you think they are, or about how unexpected
events can destabilize a family. This trend
is particularly notable considering that it comes only two months after my “knowability”
post on a deeply related trend. With
families, particularly, knowability is a ripe topic:
family is at once the most enduring and the most fraught set of
relationships many will have, and one is tethered to one’s family, in one way
or another, regardless of circumstances.
A friend of mine once explained that no matter how close he was with a
friend, there would always be things that they could do that would make him not love them
anymore…but the same was not true for his kids.
He would always love them no matter what they did. Testing that principle can make for dramatic
storytelling—so much so that sometimes it seems a cheap ploy. Especially considering its current dominance
on the screen.
I’m also struck by how many of these
shows feature a sort of Mama Bear character, a woman who is driven to protect
her family from an external danger. Much
like the no-nonsense female commander, the mama bear is a sort of
strong female character that I can often get behind, but her ubiquity comes
with the same risks as any stereotype. The
mama bear is often irrationally protective, ultimately endangering her family
and herself with rash or ruthless decisions that call female leadership skills
into question. Perhaps the power and commendability of
female leadership loom particularly large in my mind these days, but questions about female leadership of course loom
large in many other Americans’ minds right now, too, which makes these portrayals all the more
important. Pervasive images of women scheming,
lashing out, or showing compromised judgment in the name of protecting their
charges—sometimes to their charges’ doom—well, those kinds of images can make viewers
question the wisdom and judgment of the women seeking to protect them.
I don’t mean we shouldn’t have mama
bears on TV, or even scheming ones. I
humbly submit that Mags Bennett is one of the best characters ever created (and
brilliantly performed by Margo Martindale). But when a show’s fundamental theme is about
the risks of trusting one’s family and navigating the shifting sands of
familial devotion, that mama bear character needs some finesse. It’s too easy to condemn her as irresponsible
while seeing the same sorts of behavior in men as simple loyalty or leadership.
Anyway, here are a few “beware of
family” shows from the last few months.
I really liked one of them, at least...
Colony
(USA, Winter 2016. Dystopian Science
Fiction Drama)
Watched: Season
Premise: after a mysterious (presumably
alien) force occupies Los Angeles, the occupation government recruits a former
FBI agent to hunt down the resistance, while his wife covertly aids them.
Promise: This show explores big
themes through personal stories in a really effective way. Both husband and wife believe that they are
doing the best thing they can to protect their family from a tyrannical danger—the
husband by playing along and the wife by fighting. The show steadfastly and wisely refuses to
tell us who the occupying force are and what they want, leaving us to explore
the different citizens’ responses and consider what ours would be, to root for
some characters and shake our fists at others, and to ask ourselves big
questions about the relationship between freedom and comfort, risk and
principle. What would we do to preserve
our ways of life? Would we place
ourselves in danger, or let ourselves get slowly boiled like frogs?
Verdict: I enjoyed it.
Greenleaf
(OWN, new. Drama.)
Watched: pilot
Premise: Successful career woman returns to her
wealthy, influential church family in Tennessee after 20 years away and discovers
secrets and lies just beneath the surface.
Promise: This is a beautifully produced show with a
big cast and no shortage of passive-aggressive glares and soapy scandals to go
around. The stories center not only on
the usual soapy family jealousies and power machinations but also larger underlying
questions about the inner righteousness of the outwardly-righteous, and the
lengths to which they will go to prevent being exposed. It was all a bit too soapy for me—most of the
characters acted strategically rather than compassionately and jockeyed for
power in ways that I found it hard to root for any of them—but for viewers who
like the “money and power” genre, this one not only worked, but also seemed
positioned for more depth than most.
Verdict: I didn’t connect with it.
Guilt
(Freeform, new. Long-form mystery/drama.)
Watched: first three episodes
Premise: American assistant district attorney travels
to London to help her sister, who has been accused of murdering her roommate; a
twisty conspiracy emerges.
Promise: This show is right in
Freeform’s wheelhouse, which seems to be tales of young, generally competent
women getting in over their heads. I’m
not sure I can think of a single Freeform original production that can’t be boiled
down to that premise, actually. Not that
I’m complaining: It’s good to know there’s
an outlet for programming about audacious young women, even if they don’t all
land in my strike zone. Anyway, this
show has a lot to recommend it, including twisty conspiracies and a slightly-caricatured
mood that means anything can happen. It
highlights some predictable connections between privilege, and money, sex, and death,
and some less-predictable ones.
Mostly, though, this show suffers by
its comparison with the brilliant miniseries London Spy, with which it has just
enough in common to merit the comparison, but little enough in common to suffer
for it. Unlike London Spy, here there’s
no one whose emotions we can grab on to, no one we can really empathize with or
root for—not even the people who are probably good guys. Even the older sister shifts pretty quickly from
“legal protector” to “scheming mama bear.”
(And the show already had a good scheming lawyer in Billy Zane—it didn’t
need another. Perhaps I’m just
disappointed to learn that the show’s creators are both attorneys. Betrayers!)
The one storyline I find interesting—a connection with royalty that I
will not reveal for spoiler reasons—gets relatively short shrift, surrounded by
everyone else’s attempts to sway public opinion and direct the course of the
investigation. The moral, I expect, is
that image is all: in the age of social media, “whodunit” matters less than “who
looks like they dun it.” While that may
be the world we live in, I would rather spend time with the mystery than with the
public relations campaign.
Verdict: I’m wandering off, although I’m curious
enough that I may wander back for the season finale.
Animal
Kingdom (TNT, new. Crime drama.)
Watched: first episode and a half
Premise: After the death of his mother, a teenager
moves in with his grandmother, the matriarch of a crime family.
Promise: This is loosely based on a real crime family
in Australia, and it had a lot of potential.
But it didn’t hold my attention, and I think that’s because it didn’t
start from a cohesive family place. From
the start, the family is a mess, with mistrust and fractured loyalties. The matriarch is a leader of sorts, but the
rest of the family is a swirl of barely-contained man-boys who, based on the
kinds of decisions we see them making now, should have gotten caught a long
time ago. And the matriarch doesn’t have
the gravitas I want from a criminal boss either—she’s as much of an enabler as
she is a mastermind, and her theme seems to be “I raised 4 boys.” Much
of what I saw centered on how foolish the men’s macho bravado was, but that
meant having to watch a lot of foolish macho bravado.
Verdict: I got bored.
American
Gothic (CBS, new. Long-form
mystery.)
Watched: pilot
Premise: Rich Boston family discovers that they may be
connected to a famed serial killer.
Promise: This family has the array of dysfunction one
might expect from rich TV industrialists—there’s the politician, the drug addict,
the weird recluse, the icy mama-bear matriarch, and the “normal” one. It’s not the most ambitious setting, but the thriller/suspense
elements are effective and the storytelling craft is well-done and even cleverer
than it would need to be. Two things
turned me off from the show: first, it
has a self-serious air that I rebelled against.
The show seems to think it’s important television, when in fact it’s
just a nice solid mystery. Second, and
this was the bigger critique: Despite
what seems like a happy marriage, the main character (the “normal” one) decides
to hide what she learns about her family’s possible connection to the killer
from her police detective husband, who is investigating the killing. I found that decision so bizarre that I didn’t
actually want to watch the rest. That
may have been a rash decision on my part, but she is the character we’re meant
to identify with, and I instantly stopped caring about her, and hence the show.
Verdict: I’m out.
On the DVR/Still Unreviewed: Billions,
DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Underground, Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders, The
Girlfriend Experience, The Last Panthers, Houdini & Doyle, Feed the Beast,
Cleverman, BrainDead, Queen of the South, Roadies, Dead of Summer, The A Word.
